Saturday, February 03, 2018

Past: Always Changing


The future is unknown, but then, so is the past.  The story keeps changing, as several revelations and studies announced this week suggest.  First there's the cosmic story, the so-called Standard Model of the universe (which basically means the theory that works mathematically as well as in terms of observations) which may have gotten shaken up by findings in one new study.

Then there's the standard but often revised story of early humans and their migrations, shaken up (perhaps) by discoveries of what appear to be sophisticated stone tools in India that could point to an earlier migration from Africa than previously known, or to a higher skill level of some known or unknown humanoid species.

Finally there's the discovery of a previously unknown but very large Mayan city obscured by trees and buried underground in the Guatamala jungle that blows away previous estimates of population and development, necessitating a whole new story for the region.  The thousands of hidden structures over a wide but interconnected area (by elevated "highways"!) include this huge pyramid, illustrated above.  We make inferences about the present and future based on what we think we know about the past.  When that changes, it all changes, at least a little.

No comments: