(Video link here.) Vox’s compelling little video provides a fine bit of reflection for the morning: You don’t have to read high-brow research to find signs of our evolutionary history;  you can see it in each of our bodies. Your body is a museum of natural history…(though they seemed to have missed the most wondrous evidence; see below)…

For even bigger perspective we’ve been playing with Histography, an extraordinary interactive timeline of 14 billion years of history from the Big Bang to the present day. The site draws historical events from Wikipedia and self-updates daily with new recorded events. (Video link here.)

Search a few-hundred-year period (or set the timeline to focus on just your lifetime) click on any of the dots and you’ll see an event you can read about by clicking on it. Our favorite topic: INVENTIONS. It will remind you that that is WHAT WE HUMANS DO. (Note: Histography seems to run better on Chrome than Safari, and uses a lot of your devices resources.)

histiography screenshot

Today in a random conversation with a dread-locked stranger about his amazing hair,  we suddenly realized that Vox’s video left out an essential evidence of our long ancestry: hair, such amazing self-generating material that we’ve turned into a means of expression.

Sally Schneider
Sally Schneider

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