when did man's quest begin?
Answers
Answer:
The Discoverers, by Daniel J. Boorstin, New York: Random House, 745 pp., $25.00
History is usually written in terms of the rise and fall of governments, the outcomes of battles, the ascendancy and decline of cultures. But Daniel Boorstin, the Librarian of Congress, has thrown all the conventional approaches away in his magnificent The Discoverers, which deals with the decisions of statesmen, warriors, and clerics only as they have served to twist the directions of Man, the Discoverer.
Boorstin is concerned with man's need to know what is "out there." He begins with the concept of time and its relationship to discovery. Time, Boorstin says, is "the most elusive and mysterious of the primitive dimensions of experience." When man made a living by hunting and gathering, he went to bed and got up with the sun. But agriculture created a need for calendars. When was the first frost to be expected? What about the coming of heavy rains? The Egyptians, who lived by the rhythms of the Nile River, had an early solar calendar. The Babylonians, by contrast, lived with the erratic moon.
It is here that the paradoxical nature of Boorstin's story becomes manifest. He is writing about man's effort to learn everything about the earth, its continents and seas, its buried past, and its position in the solar system and the cosmos. The telescope and the microscope are integral parts of the tale. So, too, is psychic man's effort to understand himself. But the "universal" quality of The Discoverers always gives way to the planet's division between East and West. It is symbolic that the Moslems stuck to the more erratic lunar calendar. The clock and the seven-day week were part of the Western "resort to calculation," which had less appeal to Eastern cultures. The clock itself was first used by monks to call them to prayers, but later the swing of the pendulum, which impressed Galileo, suggested a number of worldly
It probably wasn't as early as 2 million years ago—but it almost certainly occurred by 300,000 years ago. That leaves a big gap, with plenty to investigate. It's a deceptively hard question to answer.
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