yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Ladder to the Stars | Cosmos: Possible Worlds


less than 1m read
·Nov 11, 2024

I'm standing on the southern tip of Africa and imagining what it was like sometime in the last hundreds of thousands of years. Back then, Africa was home to all the world's Homo sapiens, all 10,000 of them. If you were an extraterrestrial on a survey mission, you might have thought we were an endangered species. Someday soon, there will be 10 billion of us.

What happened? How did we become the globe-girdling, space traveling species that we are today? Welcome to the first laboratory on Earth. We're in Blombos Cave, where the evolution of the mind made a great leap. Our ancestors were conducting chemistry experiments here with a mineral rich in iron, ocher.

They used it to decorate objects with bits of red color, but it may have also had other uses. To preserve animal hides, or as a medicine, or as a way to sharpen their tools. Or maybe as an insect repellent. And they engraved the ocher with symbols, something completely new on the planet Earth.

Art. Not to be eaten, not to provide shelter, but to symbolize something. Or just to be. Looks a little bit like a ladder or double helix. Whatever it was supposed to be, it's the earliest remnant we have of human culture. We had found a way to leave behind something distinctly human.

A means to communicate, however enigmatically, to you and me 100,000 years away. A great power was discovered here in Blombos Cave.

More Articles

View All
The ideal gas law (PV = nRT) | Intermolecular forces and properties | AP Chemistry | Khan Academy
In this video, we’re going to talk about ideal gases and how we can describe what’s going on with them. So the first question you might be wondering is, what is an ideal gas? It really is a bit of a theoretical construct that helps us describe a lot of wh…
Veritasium & Team Record Gold Invade London
Hey YouTube! I have a really important announcement to make. It’s not that you’re going to shave your beard, is it? No, it is way bigger than that! Roll sound! I’m here at the Olympic cauldron in Vancouver. As you know, I’ve been traveling for a long tim…
10 Misleading Money Facts
Everyone loves some good money advice, right? But most of it is either misleading, vague, or not correlated to the real world. So, here’s our picks of the most misleading money advice out there. Welcome to a Lux! First up, “investing will make you rich.”…
Tracy Young Speaks at Female Founders Conference 2015
Hi everyone! It’s an honor to be here today. My name is Tracy Young. I’m one of the co-founders of PlanGrid. So, I need your help picturing 2010. I’m a construction engineer, new graduate with a construction management degree, and I’m on my first constru…
See Whales, the Northern Lights, and Norway’s Pristine Beauty | Short Film Showcase
Refused to actually take a pin and rotate that pin on a piece of cotton around the position of Trump, sir. Then you’re closer to the North Pole than you are. Though the landscape of northern Norway is pristine and beautiful, it’s probably one of my favor…
Worked example: Continuity at a point | Limits and continuity | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy
We have the graph of y is equal to g of x right over here. What I want to do is check which of these statements are actually true and then check them off. Like always, I encourage you to pause the video and see if you can work through this on your own. L…