"Foggy Bottom is a neighborhood rich in history", he boomed. "And most of the residents are completely unaware of that history."
"How far back should I go?" I asked.
"Go back to the beginning, my boy", he boomed. "Always begin at the beginning!"
"When is the beginning?" I asked.
"If you can go back any further, then you are not at the beginning", he lectured. Then he added snidely, "don't they teach you anything in those Journalism classes?"
So I decided to begin at the beginning. That was the point at which I could go back no further.
Fifteen billion years ago a singular event occurred that was, as far as we know, the beginning of everything. The universe began with a Big Bang. For four billion years hot gasses expanded with no particular design. Then, about eleven billion years ago, those gases began to cool and form galaxies, stars and ultimately planets. Nobody would have noticed this event, which was so grandiose that there are no words to describe it, except for the fact that around 5 billion years ago a planet was formed called earth. It wasn't called earth at the time. In fact, it wasn't called anything.
This planet would produce beings that, due to their unique evolutionary pattern, would come to believe that things needed to have names. It is a strange belief caused by an oversized neo cortex. Nonetheless, earth would eventually produce people who would look back at this singular event and say "Shazam!"
The people of earth believed that the Big Bang was the beginning of everything. If you ask - "what happened before the Big Bang?" - you will be greeted with amused, condescending smiles, as people acknowledge that your question does not make any sense at all. The people of earth believed that nothing that happened before the Big Bang was worth thinking about. In fact, this idea that nothing significant happened until they came along was not unique to the residents of the earth. This view was also adopted later by the Greeks, Romans, British, Americans and people in the computer field.
For another four billion years, the earth cooled. Then life began. If the fifteen billion years since the Big Bang were mapped on to a one-year calendar, life did not show up until mid morning on December 7th, a day that would live in infamy for entirely different reasons.
Early forms of life were one-celled creatures that eventually acquired enough other cells to become primitive little glob creatures in the sea or grasses on the land. People who are impatient about getting grass to grow in their back yards have no concept of what it was like to wait four billion years for the first grasses to grow on earth. But impatience did not come along until after people evolved so the physical universe was in no hurry to produce life.
Life forms became increasingly more complex over the ensuing two or three hundred million years and it looked like the fate of the earth was to be ruled by large reptiles. These reptiles would probably just have kept getting bigger, and it was unlikely that they would have ever discovered the Big Bang. But the Big Bang wasn't quite done yet. One of those pieces of rock that were formed in all the initial chaos found its way back to earth and landed in the Gulf of Mexico in the granddaddy of all splashes.
So much debris was thrown into the atmosphere that life on earth was changed forever. The large reptiles went into extinction and the ecological vacuum was filled by little rodents who survived the damage done to the planet by the large rock that fell out of the sky. That was 65 million years ago, modern in universe time, but the way distant past in human terms. On the one-year map of universe time it was ten o'clock in the morning on December 30th. The people of earth, who were totally lacking in perspective, would think that was a long time ago.
These rodents would eventually be called early mammals. The people of earth were a little sensitive about their rodent ancestry and since they were in the business of assigning names to things anyway, they felt that they should assign names that worked to their advantage. Advantage was everything to the people of earth.
Speaking of advantages, these early mammals had two evolutionary advantages. They lived in holes in the ground so they were protected from radical climate changes unlike the large reptiles that just stood there naked as a flock of jaybirds and exposed to the forces of nature. They would not have said jaybirds because jaybirds would not evolve for many millions of years hence. In fact, it is unlikely that they would have said anything because language would not evolve until many millions of years after the jaybirds. However, this much is certain - if they had language, when they witnessed the large rock that fell out of the sky, they almost certainly would have said "Shazam!"
Second, these rodents were capable of generating their own body heat. They did not depend on the sun for warmth. When the sun was blocked for decades by dust in the atmosphere this proved to be an evolutionary advantage. So the big reptiles died out and the rodents eventually became big mammals. But not all of the rodents became big mammals. Some filled other evolutionary niches.
One of those evolutionary niches was filled by primates in Africa that would eventually evolve into modern humans. Primates were really monkeys and the people of earth were also a little sensitive about their monkey ancestors. Since they were in charge of naming things, they decided to call their ancestors primates.
When modern humans are up to mischief they will not say that they are up to early ancestor business. Instead they will call it monkey business further driving a wedge between them and their origins.
Sometime around two to five million years ago, these primates began to mutate and gained some dramatic evolutionary advantages. They learned to use tools. They began to walk erect which freed their hands so that they could use those tools to kill larger prey. The protein from the larger prey led to the development of a larger brain, specifically an oversized neo cortex. The oversized neo cortex led to an ability to plan and develop language to coordinate their plans. These primates became the first species to be able to modify their programs in their software through language rather than wait for evolutionary changes to their hardware. Talk about an evolutionary advantage. Eventually, these primates developed art and culture. And the rest, as they say, is prehistory.
The people of earth, being forever sensitive about their early relatives, began to refer to these early primates as hominids, because people would say primate and think monkey. The people of earth really need to get past all this sensitivity. On the one-year map of the universe this process of hominid evolution began some time around mid morning on New Year's Eve.
Modern man appeared on the scene about one hundred and fifty thousand years ago. This is about ten minutes before midnight on December 31st on the one-year map of the universe. Modern man would take over the planet as though it was all there just for his benefit and would develop belief systems to justify that takeover. Belief systems are a mere parlor trick when you have an oversized neo cortex. This belief, of course, is like showing up at a New Year's Eve party in Times Square a few minutes before midnight and thinking that it is a surprise party for you. But, modern humans are like that.
Modern man would discover the Big Bang, and the miracle of life, and the dinosaurs and the incredible series of evolutionary dice rolls that produced his species. All of this would be absorbed in his oversized neo cortex. And in response to all this grandeur, this is all he could say - "Shazam!!"