Showing posts with label firsties. Show all posts
Showing posts with label firsties. Show all posts

Friday, December 21, 2018

The first swimming

I wonder which came first: humans learning they can swim, or humans learning they can't swim?

By which I mean: did some random prehistoric human boldly go charging into the water (to what end? to catch a fish? to escape from something? to get to the other side?), never suspecting anything could go wrong, and end up dying?  Or did some random prehistoric human end up in the water (how? by accident? murder attempt?) fully expecting that this would be the death of them, and survive?

I'm told that you put a human baby in the water they'll swim intuitively, but older kids still need swimming lessons.

Some land animals seem to swim intuitively.  Did humans originally have that intuition?  Or did they figure it out from copying the water?

Is the fact that we can't breathe underwater instinctive, or hard-earned knowledge passed down through generations since time immemorial?

If it isn't instinctive, did it take several drownings to figure out that the reason people keep dying in the water is because they try to breathe underwater, and they should hold their breath to survive?

(Did humans ever hold their breath for any other reason before they started swimming?)

At some point, humanity (or, at least, the precursors the predominant culture in which I grew up) must have internalized and normalized the idea that humans can't swim naturally, because swimming lessons became a thing. 

Also, someone at some point came up with the idea of standardizing and naming different swimming strokes, some of which are weird. (Butterfly? WTF?)

And some other swimming strokes may well have existed but are lost to history. (And still others probably exist within other cultures and haven't reached me.)

You could also follow this same line of thought for diving.  Why did someone first think they even could do it?  Or did people never think they couldn't do it, until several people broke their necks.

Do other land animals dive?

Is figuring out how high you can safely dive from (and how deep the water needs to be) instinctive or learned? (I dove off a three metre board once - into an Olympic-sized pool, properly supervised - and it felt unsafe. It felt like a fluke that I didn't die, not like a safely reproducible thrill.)

And, again, enough people dove enough times that it became a normal thing to be able to do, a normal thing to learn in swimming lessons, normal enough that nobody even thought I was weird or reckless for wanting to try the three metre board.

I wonder if there are other, similar things related to swimming that were once (or are elsewhere) considered culturally standard, but are now lost to history (or haven't reached me).

I'm sure that sometime, somewhere, within the full scope of human history, there have been people who never once thought swimming was a possibility.

And I'm sure that some other time, somewhere else, within the full scope of human history, there have been people who never once thought that swimming was difficult.

But I do wonder which came first.

Thursday, September 06, 2018

The first cloth

Think about how you make woolen or cotton cloth.*

You get wool off a woolly animal or cotton out of a cotton plant. You card it, spin the result into thread/yarn, and then weave it into cloth.

Isn't it amazing that humanity came up with cloth at all!

Each of these steps requires specialized tools, and I can't really picture how you'd arrive at a rudimentary version before the tools exist.  Even just the idea of turning fluff into string is mindblowing, to say nothing of inventing a tool that makes it happen!  (While writing this, I've been watching youtube videos of how spinning wheels work, and I still don't understand how they work.)

The only thing that exists in nature that's remotely cloth-like is animal pelts. So someone had to come up with the idea of turning fluff into something that resembled animal pelts (as opposed to seeing them as two completely disparate things), and then they had to figure out a mechanism by which to do it!  Because they didn't have tools for as-yet-nonexistent processes just sitting around, they probably came up with rudimentary versions of carding, spinning, weaving and sewing that did not require any specialized tools!  And the results of these processes would have been useful and satisfactory enough that people kept using and refining the processes over generations until we got the old-fashioned processes and tools that are part of recorded history.

Based on what I can google, the details of how people figured this out, and all the intermediary processes and tools that were once used and subsequently obsoleted, are lost to history.  Which is a tragedy, because it's fascinating and mindblowing - possibly the most complex invention that we take completely for granted!

*Linen and silk are also types of cloth that predate recorded history.  They have comparably complex, multi-step processes, but I don't understand them as well and you can google them just as well as I can.  There are likely also other types of cloth I haven't heard of in other cultures whose histories I'm not up on.  And there may well be yet more that were tried and obsoleted prior to recorded history.


Sunday, August 19, 2018

The first shapes

Circle, square, triangle, rectangle. Shapes are an extremely basic thing taught to toddlers, alongside letters and numbers and colours and animals.

But they're also rather an artificial human construct.

I mean, some shapes do exist in nature, but most of nature is irregular in shape. Prehistoric humans could have gone a lifetime without ever seeing a triangle, so they probably didn't feel the need to name it. And if they did name it, they wouldn't feel the need to teach it to children as a basic core concept.

Shapes would probably become more common as humans started making things, and standardizing the thing they're making. Then they would need to communicate what the things should look like, so they'd need names for shapes.

Would some time have elapsed between the naming of shapes and teaching them to children as a basic concept?  On one hand, if they were a fairly new human invention, people might not feel they're a basic concept that small children need to know. On the other hand, in the past children have been closer to their parents' livelihoods, so they would likely learn the vocabulary of their parents' trades and/or the tasks of everyday living early on simply as a matter of course.

It's also interesting to think about the time between when people started making things but hadn't yet named shapes.  If you don't have a word for a shape, you're less likely to be thinking in terms of shapes. Therefore, people probably didn't see it as necessary for things to be a particular shape in the way we do today.  For example, you probably aren't going to think that the rocks around the fire need to be in a circle if you don't have a word for a circle. You probably aren't going to think your room needs to be rectangular if you don't have a word for a rectangle. Why should flatbread be round? Why should a tent be triangular? Things might have been all kinds of funny shapes simply because people didn't have the vocabulary for standard shapes!

Also, what constitutes a "standard" shape may well have varied depending on what kinds of things a particular society made. If you live in a teepee, you might have a word for triangle or cone, but not a word for rectangle or cube. If you live in an igloo, you might have a word for circle or dome, but not triangle.  The internet tells me that igloos are made of blocks of ice, but perfectly cubic blocks won't make a perfectly hemispherical dome, so maybe your concept of what constitutes a "block" or a "dome" is affected by this fact.

And then, after millennia of no shapes, and millennia of shapes being the result of what people made, we somehow transitioned into theoretical shapes - perfect circles, squares, triangles and rectangles.  Which affected the shapes of things people made, and eventually became so commonplace that they were no longer just for mathematicians and architects and engineers, but instead taught to preschoolers.

Monday, July 02, 2018

A new colour

A common thought experiment is "imagine a new colour", i.e. a colour that no one has ever seen before.

But that must have been a thing that has happened in human history.

On an individual level, there's the fact that there's a first time for every life experience, including the first time you see each colour.  If there isn't any orange within your immediate field of vision when you're born, you will one day see orange for the first time.  You probably won't realize that you're seeing a new colour, because you're experiencing all kinds of new weirdness, like eating and peeing and breathing and air and light, but the fact is you did, at some point, see orange for the first time.

But it might also have happened on a societal level. Within the full scope of human history, people have lived (and still do live) in some pretty desolate environments. In the past, where people didn't travel very long distances and didn't have access to dyes, maybe there have been societies living in the Arctic or the Sahara who went years without seeing a particular colour, because it simply wasn't present in their environment.

Then, one day, someone goes on a journey, sees a new flower, and OMG, what is that colour???

Tuesday, January 09, 2018

The first stairs and the first upstairs

Which came first, stairs or upstairs (by which I mean multi-storey buildings)?

Maybe they could make multi-storey buildings with ramps or ropes to climb? Or ladders?  (Do ladders count as stairs? They seem like a fairly complex and creative invention in and of themselves.)

Or did someone invent stairs (to where?) and then later someone else thought "Hey, if we put these in a building, we can have a room on top of another room!"

I wonder how much instruction people needed to figure out the first stairs? I wonder if their purpose was readily apparent to the uninformed onlooker? I wonder if they seemed incredibly dangerous or unnatural to some people?

Sunday, September 17, 2017

The first homophones

Homophones are words that sound the same but have different meanings.

If you think about it, it's really weird that homophones became a thing in the first place!

Yes, I know, homophones tend to enter the language from different origins.  For example, "sight" comes from Old English, and "site" comes from Latin.

But someone at some point in human history was the first person to attempt to use a homophone, and at some point (may or may not have been the first attempt) the notion stuck.

It's so weird to me that the notion stuck!  If you imagine a world where there's no such thing as a homophone, it seems like homophones would be a dealbreaker - think of the confusion if words suddenly started meaning multiple unrelated things depending on context, in a universe where words have only ever had one meaning!

But for some reason it stuck. No one said "Dude, you can't call it a "site" - that sounds exactly like "sight" and everyone will get confused! We already have perfectly good words like "place" or "location". Use one of those."   (Or they did say this and went unheeded.)  And then, as time passed, even more homophones got added. (Including, in this specific example, the word "cite".)

If it hadn't already happened, no one would ever believe that something like that could happen.

Sunday, September 18, 2016

The first chair

Every once in a while, I see an article about how sitting is apparently terrible for our health, which makes me think about why and how it came about that we sit.

Humans sleep lying down, so you can see how we would stumble upon the notion of sitting as a transition point.  Early fires would most likely be built on the ground, so you'd have to sit to tend to or use or enjoy the fire.

When you visualize people sitting around a fire, they're often sitting on rocks or logs.  And you can see why a person would rather sit on a rock or log than on the possibly-damp probably-dirty ground.

And before we had furniture of any sort (including tables), it was probably more convenient to sit on the ground to do things like make clothes or butcher animals than it would be to stand up.

But then someone thought of tables for whatever reason (maybe things were cleaner when not at ground level even if people hadn't invented cleaning yet? Maybe vermin and animals couldn't get at stuff as easily if it was up higher?)  And then someone thought of the idea that it would be more comfortable to sit when working at the table than to stand, and figured out how to build a device to make that happen.

This has me wondering what the ratio of time spent sitting vs. standing was before we had furniture.  People had to stand to hunt or to farm, although they probably sat for things like meal preparation and making tools.  Which did they perceive as the default?  Did they make chairs to use at tables so they could sit like they usually did?  Or did they originally feel that table use was standing like they usually did and then make chairs for some other reason?

Or did they first make non-table chairs (whatever the early equivalent of couches or armchairs was) and then come up with the idea of using chairs at tables (or even the idea of tables) later?

Have there ever been any cultures where people didn't sit, at all, ever?  Have there ever been any cultures where they sat but didn't use chairs?  (I have the probably-stereotypical idea absorbed from the ether that they tended not to use chairs in Japan before Western influence.)

I also wonder if there have been any cultures with different postures that had their own furniture (i.e. not sitting, standing, lying down, kneeling, anything we have a verb for in English) but are now lost to history.  Or maybe they're not lost to history, I'm just ignorant of them.

Tuesday, September 13, 2016

The first cleaning

Someone, at some point in human history, was the first person to clean.  Someone was the first person to discover that water washes dirt off (probably when a dirty person went for a swim or fell into some water, or got water on themselves in the process of drinking water), and then someone was the first person to do that intentionally.

Which means someone was also the first person to come up with the idea that having no dirt on something was superior to having dirt on it.  (It's also possible that someone came up with this idea before they figured out that water washed dirt off, so they were just thinking "Man, this situation would be way better if there was no dirt on this thing!" but couldn't do anything about it)  Possibly the situation that led to this thought was something drastic, like their food fell into a pile of woolly mammoth poo, but it's also possible that, in a world where it had never before occurred to anyone that food would be better with no poo on it, no one would perceive that as a drastic situation.

Before it occurred to anyone to bathe, everyone must have smelled. Which means that they were probably immune to the fact that everyone smelled.  So imagine the first person to bathe thoroughly enough to wash off their smell. Could they then smell everyone else?  Did they think "OMG, everyone smells!" or did they think "Man, I'm never using water to get the dirt of me again, because doing that makes everyone smell"?  Or did the dirty people think the clean person smelled?

And let's talk about soap!  Soap is made of fat and lye. Lye is made by leaching ashes. Who on earth figured that out??  And imagine trying to explain to other people that really, this will eventually make stuff cleaner!  Did they have other soap-like things before that are now lost to history because they were less effective?

When people lived outdoors or in caves, their floor was, obviously, dirt (or whatever the surrounding environment was made of - the floors of igloos might have been made of snow, for example). And then in the first human-constructed shelters, the floor would have been made of dirt as well. So someone was the first person to think of building a floor out of wood or whatever, and then someone else was probably the first person to think of cleaning the dirt off that floor!

Also, someone was the first person to think of dusting. Once indoors had been invented and material possessions that are kept indoors over long periods of time had been invented (which is a whole other thing, isn't it? The first clutter!), stuff started getting dusty. (Why doesn't stuff that's outdoors get dusty?)  Someone was the first person to realize this was a problem, and to think of wiping stuff down to remove the dust.

Friday, October 09, 2015

Hills

I recently saw a video of my 1-year-old baby cousin running up and down a small grassy hill in her local park.

It's quite evident from this video that going up and down a hill is an acquired skill.  She's very clearly working on mastering the balance and motor skills involved, and still learning the effects of gravity and momentum.  Sometimes she stops and seems overwhelmed. Sometimes she has to put her hands down, or sit down and scoot on her bum for a bit. Sometimes she has to stop and move perpendicular to the slope of the hill.  Sometimes momentum overtakes her and she falls flat on her poor little face, giggling all the while.

Watching this, I remembered that sometimes when I was a kid, walking up or, especially, down a big hill seemed far more dramatic than it does now. It felt somehow risky, as though there was a good chance that I might fall. But seeing the situation through the eyes of my baby cousin, I now realize I felt that way because my hill-climbing skills weren't as developed as they are now.

This gave me an interesting idea: what if, at some place and time in human history when people moved around far less than they do now, there was someone who had never climbed a hill?  Perhaps they grew up in the kind of place where you can watch your dog run away for three days, and simply never had cause to stray far from home.  Surely this must have happened to someone, somewhere, within the full range of human experience.

And what if someone who had never climbed a hill then had to travel far away from home and encountered a hill for the first time when they were well into adulthood?  They'd be all "OMG, what's that?  That's unnatural! The gods must be angry!"

And then when they tried to climb the hill, they'd probably get it wrong for the first few times.  Their brain wouldn't know how to bend their legs and shift the balance of their bodies, at least not perfectly.  They'd probably fall down.  It might even look impossible to them, like walking straight up a vertical cliff face looks impossible to us.  They might be standing at the top of what looks to us like a perfectly innocuous hill, getting a wave of vertigo if they look down, going "Are you sure this is safe?"

Thursday, September 17, 2015

The first jokes

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
A: To get to the other side!
That was the first joke I ever learned, when I was maybe 3 or 4 years old.  Before I learned that joke, I had never even heard of the concept of a joke. While googling to learn about its age and origin, I was surprised to discover that it is in fact an anti-joke. Expectations at the time were that the answer would be a humorous punchline, not a simple, practical statement of cause and effect.

But, just like "to get to the other side" was once novel and revolutionary, the basic riddle/joke format of asking a person a question to which you expect an answer so you can give a humorous answer instead was also once new and revolutionary.  Someone, somewhere in history, was the very first person to do it.  And someone was the very first person to think of it!  They not only wrote the joke (and it must have been a good joke for the format to persist), they also thought of the whole format.

I wonder how that very first joke went?  Since it was unprecedented, the person being told the joke probably gave a serious answer to the question, having no way of knowing that anything else might be expected.  Did they get the joke?  Did they think it was funny?  They might not have since it was so unprecedented (and they might feel a bit perplexed or made a fool of because they thought they were being asked for actual information and acted accordingly), but enough people thought it was funny that it stuck.

Q: Knock knock!
A: Who's there?
Q: Boo!
A: Boo who?
Q: Don't cry, it's only a joke!

That was the first knock-knock joke I remember ever being told, also when I was around 3 or 4 years old (probably the same day I learned about the chicken - I have fuzzy memories of a revelatory day when I learned all about jokes), and I didn't get it because I didn't know that "boo hoo" was meant to be onomatopoeia for crying.

Knock-knock jokes also require precedent to function, since they require audience participation. I don't remember being explicitly taught the script, but I must have either been taught it or seen it repeated on TV.

But someone thought of the knock-knock joke, and taught someone else the script so it would function (or, like, wrote it into a play or something).  And, somehow, it stuck!


Someone made the first pun.  Someone was the first to use sarcasm. (And, possibly, someone else was the first person to use it successfully.) Someone was the first to fake farting on the grounds that they thought it was funny.  Someone thought of and carried out the first practical joke.  (It may even have been one of our primate ancestors - I'm sure at some point a monkey has slipped on a banana peel!)  And all of these stuck, and got perpetuated.

What's even more interesting is that an unknowable number of other types of jokes that we've never heard of must have been thought of and attempted throughout human history, but they didn't stick because they weren't funny enough.

And this is still going on!  It's quite possible that right this minute, somewhere in the world, someone is thinking of and attempting an all new type of joke that no one has ever thought of before, only to fail utterly.

It's also quite possible that right this minute, somewhere in the world, someone is thinking of and attempting an all new type of joke that no one has ever thought of before, and it will succeed and spread!  Memes (in the sense of pictures with words on them that circulate on the internet) were developed within my adult life.  Those videos where people caption a Hitler movie to reflect current events started after YouTube was invented, so that's within the last 10 years (and quite possibly much more recently).  Someone might, this very minute, be inventing the next knock-knock joke, which, decades or centuries from now, will be retold by a preschooler who has just learned of the very concept of jokes.

Monday, September 07, 2015

The first beauticians

Someone, at some point in human history, was the first person to cut hair.  Maybe they didn't even cut it - maybe they they just broke it off by hand, and later had the idea of applying blades or sharp stones or whatever.

And then, someone was the first person to cut hair for aesthetic reasons (rather than just because it got in the way or "Hey, let's see what happens!").  And someone was the first person to figure out that if you cut it a certain way it will fall a certain way. Someone invented bangs.  Someone invented layers.

Someone invented braiding.  I don't know if they first did it with human hair or to make rope.  The idea of weaving strands together so they'll stay put in a single, cohesive whole had never before occurred to any human being, but someone not only thought of it, but also figured out how to do it.

Someone invented the idea of tying or clipping hair back.  It seems glaringly obvious, but someone must have been the first (even if it was just the first human being who also had their hair get in the way.)  Someone figured out the idea of a hair tie. Someone figured out the idea of a hair clip. Someone figured out a bun, and someone figured out that if you stick a stick through a bun it will stay.

Someone invented shaving. They came up with the idea of scraping the sharp thing along the skin to remove all the hair rather than cutting the hair further from the skin or pulling it out at the root.  Some came up with the paradigm-shifting idea that not having hair where hair naturally grows might be aesthetically superior to one's natural state.  Someone came up with the idea that if you apply stinky gunk to body hair and press a piece of cloth on it and pull the cloth out, the hair will come out.  Someone came up with the idea of inventing chemicals that would cause the hair to just fall out.  Someone though of zapping the hair with electricity and with lasers.

Someone was the first to think of dyeing hair.  Actually, someone was the first to think of dyeing anything. Before that, it never occurred to anyone that you could change the colour of stuff!  Or maybe they stumbled upon it by accident - fell into a vat of blueberry soup or something.

Someone invented piercings.  "So what I'm going to do is stick a sharp thing through your flesh to make a hole. Then you can put shiny things in the hole. It will be pretty!"

For that matter, someone invented jewellery. Someone was the first person to think that wearing shiny things is pretty, and everyone agreed!

Someone invented tattoos.  Someone thought of the idea of drawing something on their body permanently, and someone figured out that if you stick ink in your skin with a needle it will do just that.  Or maybe they didn't intend it to be permanent and it was all an accident! (Although that wouldn't explain why they were sticking ink-covered needles in skin in the first place.)

Friday, April 24, 2015

The first camper

I was recently thinking about the notion of the first tourist, i.e. the first person in human history to travel for recreational purposes.

It further occurred to me that someone in human history must have been the first person to go camping recreationally.

People did, of course, live in the woods and in crude shelters for much of early human history, and then for much more of human history used tents etc. when travelling or on military campaigns or as temporary shelters for various reasons, probably including in the course of travelling from Point A to Point B.

But someone was the first person to come up with the idea of travelling away from their home and whatever degree of shelter and civilization was baseline for them to a wilder, less developed place with less civilization, and spending some time there in a temporary shelter that provides less shelter and fewer amenities than usual, all for solely recreational purposes.


In the modern world, people who are into camping think spending time in nature is in some respect better than spending time in civilization.  Some simply think it's pretty and relaxing, others go so far as to consider it very nearly virtuous. Someone in human history must also have been the first person to have this attitude! For so much of human history, people were just trying to survive - and, in fact, built up whatever level of civilization they had at the time for the purpose of surviving - that it would never occur to them that less civilization and more nature would be better.  I'm sure if you put a prehistoric person in a modern-day shelter, they'd be so thrilled that temperature and wind and precipitation and darkness are rendered completely irrelevant and that they are absolutely certainly not going to get eaten by a wild animal that it wouldn't even occur to them to bemoan the fact that you can see things other than trees or that not all the stars are visible.

And then, someone was the first person to have the luxury of thinking that less shelter may have been better than more shelter.

Sunday, April 12, 2015

The first tourist

In the shower this morning, it occurred to me that some one person in human history must have been the very first tourist, by which I mean the first person to travel recreationally.

For all of human history, people have travelled to find food or to flee problems where they were living before or to trade or to warmonger or to find new unused or conquerable land or for a quest or for a religious pilgrimage.

But recreational travel wouldn't have been a thing for much of human history, because travel was difficult and too many people were too preoccupied to survive. Plus, because no one had ever done it before, it probably wouldn't have occurred to many people to do it.

And then, someone, somewhere, came up with the idea of "Hey, let's go over there for no particular purpose, just to look around!  It will be fun!"  No one in the history of the world had ever gone somewhere for no particular purpose before!  But this person did, and somehow the idea caught on.