Whatever changed, seems to have changed about 40K years ago. Most of what we know about that we have found out over the past few decades.
It's hard to know what happened when we can't translate what they wrote, and we can't share what's been translated, because it's mostly still on paper in brick-and-stone libraries. Even today, most scholarly journals are not available online. And we destroy what they made, even though we don't mean to.
Take, for example, the cave paintings in France. Gaping at them in wonder released gases and vapors from our mouths and lungs that etched them away, washed them away.
Pompeii is being destroyed again, this time by acids in the rain.
And 40,000 years from now, your descendents will look in vain to see what you thought, because the paper, the tape, the wires, the plastics, will have all turned to dust long before then, and the buildings crumbled away. He will conclude that you were a primitive brute.
I do genealogy, and am astonished at how quickly people vanish. I've tried to find out about my grandmother, but the only things that are left to me are a few photographs, a piece or two of glassware and furniture, and some deeds and whatnot that are preserved in courthouses, and a census or two, some tax forms in archives.
To find out about her mother, there are even fewer things, and to find out about her mother, not a single thing I've been able to find even though I've been lookng for years.
We vanish when we die, except for some paper records, maybe an inscription on a stone or two that will be eaten away by the rain. You will vanish, too. |
