Ed Barnhart: belief

Transcript context

…And it’s humbling to think that entire civilizations with all the dreams, the hope, the technological innovation, the wars, the conflicts, the political tensions, all of that, the social interactions, the hierarchies, all of that, the art can be just destroyed like that and forgotten, completely lost to ancient history. I reflect upon that often as an archeologist. I think about this great country that I live in and love and all the things we’ve achieved, but we’re a baby historically speaking. We’ve been around 200 years. Heck, a lot of the cities I study in Central and South America, they had a run of 800, 1,000 years, and now they’re ruins. But we’re barely getting started in terms of historical civilizations. So humans, homo sapiens evolved, but they didn’t start civilizations right away. There was a long period of time when they did not form these complex societies. So how do we, let’s say, 300,000 years ago in Africa, actually go from there to creating civilizations?…

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