Beginnings : adventurers in Science.

1 660 000 years ago; somewhere in the Old World.

The flash came again. Huddled at the rear of the small cavern, Zargh flinched! Somewhere over there, how far he could not tell, a portion of the pitch black vista had turned dark green. The Outside still existed!

Another flash came, stronger, that, as Zargh noticed while waiting for the crashing sound to come, had left a trace, ruddy dancing wisps straight out ahead of the cave’s mouth. Fire? And then the noise landed.

Zargh lost the fire, could not see it anymore but he was sure he had seen it. That dreadful noise, those flashes and that fire got Zargh busy with thoughts.

Since the winds and water kept falling …

since fire was possible … through the noise and flashes and dark … even while the big and small stones of light of day and night had died …

If the Light stones and the days and the nights came back, as he now thought they would, Zargh would call the rest Forces!

The first scientist was born, sketching the first cosmogony …

20 or 18 000 years ago; in what is now Siberia.

As his tribeswoman writhe in pain, Arqhz scanned the forest’s underbush to find the culprit. Below the pine, Amanita Muscaria, that he called the “bad red mushroom”, tried its unconscious best to look inconspicuous. But Arqhz had seen that mushroom before. The tribeswoman was on her way to the land of the Ancestors.

When the tribeswoman recovered the next day, instead of dying as usual, he knew there was  a secret. That a warrior would live, maybe … but a frail woman … one that had borne a mere single young? Then she told him of the visions, the loathsome things she had dreamt of. Arqhz did his best to quell the fears in her, as usual. He told her of the spirits that sometimes escaped the land of the Ancestors and roamed freely, invading the minds of the tribespeople.

As he did so though, he wondered. He had found the leftover pieces of the mushroom … Was that the secret? Could plants that kill also provoke the visions? Should he try it himself?

Some plants were good and some bad, some fed, some healed and some killed but what if it was not the plant itself but parts of it? The red did not kill. Other red mushrooms were fine to eat. Maybe the white speckles did but then some white mushrooms were fine to eat too. Yes, he’d have to try.

Three days later, away from the tribe, Arqhz would eat the parts of the “bad red mushroom” as his helper watched over him … expecting the visions and, hopefully, to survive! If he did, he would call the secret of parts in the whole a Principle! The chaman would experiment! The first priest / philosopher would become the first doctor.

Technology that we now routinely think we could not do without was still a few millenium away.

Still, the human adventure in knowledge had truly begun.

Tay.