It seems there are an awful lot of dates sprinkled throughout the following texts. Contrary to what we may have thought about memorizing them when we were in school, dates are extremely important. They not only establish a chronology, but also mark the ends and the beginnings of crucial times in our lives in a linear way. Oddly enough they also have a circular way of coming around, often in a very different context than when first presented. If there is any doubt, consider the dates: December 7, 1941 and September 11, 2001.

It should be obvious that the dates of prehistoric and ancient times merely denote the limited accurate knowledge and imperfect memories of those who record them. Lets hope that at least these below are reasonable approximations.

Bear with me here. I have some very important points to make, but as you will see, I go about it in a long roundabout way.

Now, let's go really far back in the Geologic Time Chart.

Archeozoic Era - The Lower Precambrian Periods. Lasted 650,000,000 years and produced Unicellular Forms of Life.

Proterozoic Era - Upper Precambian Period. Also lasted 650,000,000 years and produced primitive Multi-cellular Forms of Life.

Paleozoic Era - It had six periods:

Cambrian lasted 70,000,000 years and Ordovician lasted 85,000,000 years. They produced Invertebrates. Silurian lasted 40,000,000 years and Devonian lasted 50,000,000 years and produced Fishes. Carboniferous lasted 85,000,000 years and Permian lasted 25,000,000 years. These produced Amphibians.

Mesozoic Era - It had three periods:

Triassic - Lasted 35,000,000 years. Jurassic - Lasted 35,000,000 years. Does this ring any bells? Cretaceous - Lasted 65,000,000 years.

The Mesozoic Era produced reptiles, including dinosaurs.

Cenozoic Era - It had seven periods:

Paleocene - Lasted 5,000,000 years. Eocene - Lasted 20,000,000 years. Oligocene - Lasted 16,000,000 years. Miocene - Lasted 12,000,000 years. Pliocene - Lasted 6,000,000 years. Pleistocene - 1,000,000 years. Recent - 10,000 years.

The Cenozoic Era produced first mammals and then man. Paleontologists have found evidence of early man all over the world but so far the earliest and most famous is "Peiping Man" or "Peking Man" in China, who may have lived during the early Pleistocene Period.(I am being a stickler here with correct spelling, facts and figures. Especially if you decide to double check for verification of any of it to see if I am making it all up!)

"Peking Man" is designated as "Sinanthropus" and flourished during the Middle Pleistocene Period. Even the Geological Periods are broken down into Early, Middle and Late.

Add up all these years and that's a pretty long time. (Incidentally, I had to plow through an awful lot of material to boil this down to the above chart.)

So we are now back to cave man days, The Hunters and Gatherers. The Hunter had to go out and get the game to feed his family. Starting out with no weapons, that was very dangerous work! Unless they wanted a steady diet of snared rabbits. He was smart enough to figure out how to make a few weapons out of sticks, clubs, stones and bones. Catching some small game was OK but it didn't go far feeding the family. So he had to figure out how and where to get bigger game. To take on a mastodon with only a spear was pretty risky business.

Still if he could bring one down, there was meat for a long time. If he could just figure out a way to keep it from spoiling! No refrigerator. In cold climates, no problem. Freeze it outside. Besides the hide made for warm clothing and bone for weapons and tools. Pretty smart fellow, huh! He was a real hero when he brought home a big chunk of mastodon meat. But he had to be big and strong and fast to out-run a mastodon and bring it down. Testosterone made him bigger, stronger and faster than the female. He had to be.

The female, she was principally the Gatherer. In the absence of the Hunter, when he was out hunting the mastodon, she could gather nuts and berries to add a little variety to the diet. She couldn't very well chase down a mastodon if she were pregnant or if she had a baby and/or toddler with her. So she minded the kids and tidied up the cave. Estrogen better suited her for her role.

It all had to do with perpetuation of the species. The female gave birth to the babies and cared for them. The male impregnated the female and then fed and protected all of them from predators. However, back in the Hunter/Gatherer days, neither had a clue that the male participated at all in the procreative process. Sex was a natural drive that brought on copulation at any old time. After all the human female's reproductive cycle is much more subtle than the estrus cycles of other animals. As a result, early societies were matrilineal. The Seneca tribe of the American Indians still traces its genealogy through the mother. For sure, a mother always knows a child is hers.

It was a different story with the father. The thought processes probably took a very long time, but once they made the connection that the male contributed to procreation, societies did an about face into paternalism. It could be a little iffy as to who the father was! Ego set in to insure without a doubt that a child was indeed that of a specific father. So cultures went from maternalistic to paternalistic; from protective to domination and ultimately subjugation of the female. The male was and is still bigger and stronger than the female and thus physically able to enforce his will. The cultural aspects then became political and thus self-perpetuating.

Meanwhile back in the cave, with an abundant supply of meat, the Hunter could sit around the fire in the cave at his leisure, drink beer and brag about his hunting exploits. He could help the Gatherer do the heavy lifting of moving the stone furniture around the cave. She wanted to make the home more cozy and pretty, so he decorated the walls of the cave with pictures of his hunting adventures, first with charcoal from the fire and then used his hunting weapons to carve pictures. Sounds like an idyllic arrangement doesn't it.

Unless...

A mastodon gored or trampled the Hunter. The Gatherer had to get by as best she could with nuts and berries unless she had learned how to hunt small game from the Hunter's techniques. She would have been no match for a mastodon with the kids along with her. She couldn't leave them alone in the cave. A saber-toothed tiger could come along, which was a threat to all of them. She had to have some testosterone, provided for her in a round about way by the adrenal glands sitting on top of her kidneys in case she had to protect her kids and herself from predators. Next to the instinct for survival and self-preservation, the maternal instinct is the strongest, possibly even stronger in the Gatherer. She will fight to the death to protect her young. Just try messing with a female grizzly bear if her cubs are around!

The male has some estrogen also, sort of, from his adrenals in a round about way. It helps make him more tender and gentle when he doesn't have to be out running off all that testosterone energy chasing a mastodon. Also the adrenals supply both sexes with adrenaline to release extra spurts of energy when an occasion calls for it.

The Hunter later finds out that other Hunter's have found and taken his stash of frozen mastodon. Who's he gonna call? The cops? No. No cell phone. He tracks down the other Hunters and they have a big fight over the meat. The Hunter claims it is his meat. The other Hunters claim finders' keepers. When the fight is over, if there are any Hunters left, they decide among themselves, that it might be easier and less dangerous if a group of them go after one mastodon together and then divvy up the meat.

It works.

Pretty soon they have killed off all the mastodon in their area and have to go farther and farther away from their caves to find more mastodons. They find in their wandering that there are rivers and oceans. Fish are in there. Fish are good to eat and don't contain as much cholesterol. Bigger fish that will feed more people are out in the deeper water. The by now buddy-buddy Hunters figure a way to build a boat to get to those big fish.

The moral of this story is: If you find that you have an adversary, learn all you can about him. Get to know him. You may find that he has some admirable qualities that could be cultivated into a mutually advantageous friendship. If not, and he remains an antigonist, then you know better than to under or over-estimate his capabilities. And... if either you or your enemy throws down the gauntlet, neither should be surprised if and when it is picked up.

Meanwhile, back in the cave, the Gatherer and the Kids may be near starvation. Infant mortality from malnutrition and disease is very high. Few babies make it through their first year. The Gatherer goes out of the cave at night and wonders when or if the Hunter will come back with food. She looks up at the moon and stars. They seem to be the only unchanging constants in her world. The concept of immortality and the beginnings of spirituality. She hopes and that turns into prayer that somewhere, someone will protect her Hunter and bring him safely back home. She likes him as well as the mastodon meat.

Some of the Hunters come back with meat. Some of them don't. The Gatherers and children of the Hunters that didn't make it back have to go live in the caves of the Hunters who did. This is not such a bad idea after all. Gatherers died like flies from childbirth because of inadequate prenatal and postnatal care. Then who would take care of the Cave Kids? To insure the perpetuation of the species, polygamy was not such a bad idea. Although pretty soon the cat fights and multiple-hissi-fits between the Gatherers in the cave reach a fevered pitch. The Hunter decides that maybe polygamy wasn't such a good idea after all and goes back to monogamy. It took him a few zillion years to figure that out. Some Hunters still haven't. Still, once again things are humming along nicely.

Until....

The Hunters, only a few of them come back. They have had a bad hunting trip, what with goring, trampling mastodon, saber toothed tigers, other marauding Hunters and what have you. They find most of the caves empty. Disease or predators have carried off the Gatherers and children. Natural disasters took their toll also. Probably an earthquake was the only thing that could wipe out a cave.

Life expectancy in those times was short. A human was very old if he or she made it to age thirty. That's why sexual maturation takes place at puberty, around ten - twelve years of age. In some parts of the world, earlier, some later. That's when testosterone from the testes in the males and estrogen and progesterone in the female's ovaries really takes off.

In despair and anguish, the Hunter goes out and looks at the sky, the sun, the moon and the stars and asks himself, "Why?" After all the figuring out and planning, what went wrong? He just doesn't understand it. There must be some supreme intelligence somewhere that knows. Enter spirituality again. If he can get a god or gods on his side, life will just have to get better.

Monotheism is the belief in one God. Among many other religions, the Judeo-Christian traditions call him God. The early Hebrews, YHWH (the Tetragammaton - the name of God) and Yahweh. Moslems, Yaveh/Allah. Zoroastrians, Ormuzd.

He is good, omnipotent and, of course, male.

But......

If He were all those things, how come sometimes disaster still struck? First of all, you don't want to do anything to make him mad! He could punish you in innumerable ways. Also maybe there is a bad God in competition with the good God. Enter Satan. Maybe there were lesser gods that had dominion over specific aspects, still subordinate to the one God. Polytheism. This way you could have female gods too.

The primary God of the Egyptians was Ra, the Sun God, also called Amon or Amon-Ra in different regions of the country. For a short time one king professed the monotheism of the one god, Aton, but later Egypt reverted to the old polytheism. The Greeks, Romans and Teutonic people went with polytheism. Zeus, Jupiter and Odin or Wotan. Same God, different names. The Indian Hindus call their principal God, Siva (Shiva) or Mahadeva (Great God), with subservient gods. The body of religious Hindu literature written in Sanskrit is contained in the Veda.

Many societies have professed Henotheism, that is, acknowledging one supreme god while inferring the possibility of other gods.

I have always thought it was interesting that myths and superstitions are someone else's religion. If it is not your religion, then it is pagan, heathen, gentile or infidel. I, for one, would not presume to put words into the mouth of any deity nor ascribe human motives to those of Divinity. That's anthropomorphism.

Reincarnation is the doctrine that we will come back again to earth in our next lives in either a higher or lower form depending on how good or bad we have been in this life. We could come back rich, beautiful or handsome and/or talented. Or we could come back as low as an insect or maybe even an inanimate object. I am reminded of a poem from long ago:

"I wish I wus a little rock,

A'sitting on a hill.

I wouldn't do a single thing,

But keep a sittin' still.

I wouldn't eat, I wouldn't sleep,

I wouldn't even wash.

I wouldn't do a single thing,

But rest myself, by gosh!"

Occasionally, I imagine, most people feel that the poem expresses a good idea from time to time!

All societies, separated by time and distance come up with what Carl Jung called "Archetypes". Jung was a disciple of Sigmund Freud. The Archetypes are Deities, Heroes and Heroines and legends about their adventures. It is human nature to do this. They all follow a similar pattern, just different names, times, places and languages.

Spirituality is no doubt innate. The origins of religion are a whole different aspect of that spirituality and are generally regarded as unanswerable in the quest for the unknowable. We mortals don't like to admit that there are any such things as "unknowables" so we come up with answers, whether they have any validity or not. The Byzantine historian, Procopius wrote, "...each of us seeks comfort for his ignorance."₁

It has been postulated that, since every human being experiences dreams during sleep, early people believed dreams were communications between the living and the dead. Don't we all occasionally see and converse with people in our dreams that we know are far away not only in time and distance but some are even dead? The memory of these dreams can be frightening upon waking! So we try to figure out a way to make sense of that phenomenon. It usually evolves into concepts about immortality and the supernatural.

There have always been a host of stories abounding about the meaning of dreams and the interpretation of them. Ancient Egypt had a highly developed civilization with a sophisticated culture. Still, their approach to the meaning of dreams seems quite primitive to us. The kings were of course all powerful with absolute authority and therefore their knowledge was beyond question. Some kings, wanting to send an instant message to their gods and not satisfied to go through the usual channels, used this method: The king called in a slave, gave him the message verbally and then promptly had him killed. Thus, the message was transmitted directly and more rapidly.

Since the kings were in communication with the gods, a link that the ordinary people did not have, it was only a short step for royalty to proclaim itself divine too. They were after all as omnipotent as the gods were, (the kings thought.) Kings, emperors and rulers around the world soon took on their self-proclaimed lofty positions of gods. An unfortunate contradiction was that these "gods" had the bad luck of sooner or later dying just like the ordinary people did. No problem. Their bodies were mummified in lengthy procedures and entombed with a retinue of wives, armies, servants and all the comforts of home they would need in the afterlife.

Of course, there were plenty of "unbelievers" who promptly raided the tombs and made off with all the valuables. So it escalated into the tombs becoming more massive and impregnable. Many of the kings began building their tombs soon after their coronations, trying to out-do the previous kings in grandeur. Over time the expense of these massive operations began to get out of hand. The successor-to-be-king saw what was going on and decided that pictures of the entourage on the walls of the tomb would do just as well in the after life as the real things. Much to the dismay of the tomb-raiders. It took centuries and many dynasties however to make this transition.

A version of this practice, called sutee, was continued well into the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries in Hindu India. A favorite wife of the important man voluntarily mounted the funeral pyre of her husband and was burned alive. If the husband was important and rich enough to have multiple wives, they were "invited" to participate also. Obviously, "till death do us part" was not sufficient." If the man had to go, well, his wife/wives had to go with him.

Isn't it ironic that a religion and culture that has always had reverence for all forms of life, will not step on insects, considers cows sacred and refused to wear sandals made of leather; can condone burning widowed wives alive on their husband's funeral pyre?

When we were in China, along the Yangtze River there were adorable little Red Pagodas perched up on the hillsides. They were similar to gazebos, precursors perhaps? These were little houses built for the "River Devils". If the Devils had a place to live, they wouldn't bother the people or boats on the river. This was a precaution in order to ward off storms too. It was reasoned that when the "River Devils" were cozy at home in their pagodas, they wouldn't be out up to mischief such as causing the boats to hit rocks, capsize or other calamities. The Pagodas had been there for centuries and were still working!

Incidentally, have you ever noticed that the corners of the eaves of Chinese buildings curve upward in a graceful sweep? Well, there is a reason for that! Evil spirits can only travel in straight lines so they are deflected away from the building by that architectural feature.

There is a story I heard when I was a kid about Cave People. They had learned to domesticate wolves into dogs to help protect the cave when the Hunter wasn't there. Therefore, they couldn't eat them. But they could domesticate wild boar into pigs to keep in the cave to eat. One time something happened in the cave while the family was away and a fire broke out. The pigs were burned up in the fire. The Hunter came in and grabbed the leg of a pig to drag it out of the fire and possibly save it. It burned his fingers.

Instinctively, he stuck his fingers in his month and, son-of-a-gun, it was pretty tasty! That's how they found out that cooked meat tasted better than raw meat. Also cooked meat would preserve over a longer periods of time better than raw meat. Serendipity------ an apparent aptitude for making fortunate discoveries accidentally. The Cave People did that a lot! It took them long enough, though, to go from a cooked pig in a cave fire to a microwaves oven! No doubt, it took them a long time to figure out that they didn't have to burn down everything in the cave in order to have roast pork.

OK. The Cave Kids reach puberty. The boy is ready to go off with the Hunters. The girl, she was old enough for some other Hunter to come hit her over the head with a club and drag her off by the hair to his cave and set up housekeeping. Some courtship!

Now I'll jump ahead umpteen gazillion years to modern times. By the time our kids reach puberty and raging hormones are at a peak, they are prepared, physically, to go out and do everything on their own just like their ancestral Cave Kids did. We Gatherer mothers have hissi-fits! The Hunter fathers do not approve. They growl. The kids are supposed to stay in school and behave themselves for another ten years or so. However, physiology tells the kids they are ready - like, now! This sets the stage for some dandy conflicts between the Hunter, Gatherer and Cave Kids.

The Gatherer doesn't want her boys going out, hunting and doing anything dangerous - ever! The Hunter doesn't want any boy or other Hunter messing with his daughters - ever!

Here in Hawaii not too long ago there was a huge flap going on in the legislature to raise the age of sexual consent for girls all the way up to 16 from 15. Guess who the principal agitators against it were? A bunch of Hunters. They claimed that 15 year-old girls (not their own daughters, of course) dressed and acted so provocatively that the Hunters couldn't tell the difference and couldn't help themselves. The Gatherers were unanimously in favor of the change, however.

I think that boys are shortchanged somewhat in school, especially in elementary grades because most of the teachers are women. That's fine for the girls up to a point, but it doesn't give the boys role models to emulate. Many women teachers and even mothers sometimes don't have a clue that little boys have a daily ration of physical energy that just has to come out - every day - one way or another. Channeled constructively, that energy is good. If not, it goes into mischief. When they have a daily phys.ed. work-out, they are more willing to behave better when it is time to sit still, study and learn.

This is something that is hard for some female teacher and even mothers to understand sometimes. They were little girls and do not know what it feels like to be a little boy. Remember the old saying, "What are little girls made of? Sugar and spice and everything nice. What are little boys made of? Snips and snails and puppy dog tails." Not very flattering to little boys is it? Subconsciously, that attitude on the part of women is relayed to the little boys.

Conversely, little girls have no men to relate to on a daily basis as they are growing up except their fathers, possibly brothers and male relatives. They too grow up in a world of women that does not prepare them for the real world of men and women living and working together. An extremely important wave of the future would be when teaching at the elementary level would become more attractive to men. Both boys and girls need that influence at an early age.

First, it would have to be much more economically advantageous than it is today. There is also a cultural bias toward male elementary school teachers. Why? For the same reasons that there is toward male nurses. Probably every since the Cave Days, teaching and nursing have been seen as women's work. It is silly. Just because it has always been so, doesn't mean that there is any reason why it should continue to be so. An equal balance of men and women teachers would be the ideal school environment.

The level of education for teachers is a BA or BS at the very least plus preferably a Master's Degree and/or advanced degrees. What is the level of education for a CEO? An MBA.

When teaching becomes more attractive, culturally and economically, at the elementary level to men, society at large will benefit. That's not likely to happen in our lifetime. Cultural change is extremely slow. For now, the difference has to be made up for at home.

The wiring of the adolescent brain is still immature in development as far as judgment goes in both boys and girls. Even though their brains are influenced differently by hormones, boys and girls ultimately wind up being on a par with each other intellectually. History bears this out with the Gatherers who became leaders of their countries. Some of them are: English Queens, Elizabeth I and Victoria; Empress Maria Theresa of Austria and the Holy Roman Empire. There were quite a few Russian Empresses; Anna, two Elizabeths and of course, Catherine the Great. Queen Lilliokalani in Hawaii. Indira Ghandi and Golda Maier did all right in India and Israel as well as Margaret Thatcher in Britain. Some but not all of them came into power because of heredity as most of their male counterparts did.

The women could be just as effective as any of the men in administration and in some cases just as formidable and ruthless. There was some evidence of complicity in the assassination of her husband by Catherine the Great so she could claim the throne for herself!

But that's another history lesson. Also a hereditary disease traced back to England's Queen Victoria changed the course of Russian history and as a result, world history!

Just look how long it took language to go from growls and hissi-fits to e mail. For instance, take the evolution of names. Way back there was a name Chlodwig that became Ludwig, then Clovis and wound up Louis. It is the same name! Clovis was the founder of France that ultimately became Louis, the name of eighteen French kings. That may sound weird, but consider this: Henry in English; Henri in French; Enrique in Spanish and Heinrich in German. Same name, different spelling and pronunciations.

Some of the major classifications of languages are Indo-European, Semitic, Sino-Tibetan, Bantu languages, etc., as outlined in Appendix A.

There are roughly 6,500, that's six thousand, five hundred! languages spoken in the world today. It is remarkable that we communicate and understand each other as well as we do!

Look how long it took to go from caves to huts, to tents, to wigwams, wickiups, soddies, houses, apartments, castles and palaces.

When we were in Beijing we went to the Emperor's Palace. There are 9,999 rooms in the palace. There was a religious reason for being one room shy of 10,000. We didn't see them all! I guess you need a really big cave if you are the Emperor and have proclaimed yourself a divinity. If a person spent one day in each room, he would be 27+ years old before he finished.

Then there is mastodon meat, barter, trade, money, paychecks, pensions, stocks, bonds and dividends. Consider the mastodon meat paychecks of celebrities, movie stars, sports figures and CEOs. How much mastodon meat can any one person eat?

Locomotion: legs, travois', wheelbarrows, horse drawn wagons, and carts; boats, bicycles, motorcycles, cars, trains, busses, ships, planes and rockets. Beats walking!

Religions: Alphabetically; Atheism, Brahmanism, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, Shintoism, Sikhism, Taoism, Zen and Zoroastrianism, to name a few. There is a vast difference between organized religion and faith and spirituality. Regrettably, I can't say I know a great deal about most of them.

We didn't know until we went to China that Confucius was an agnostic. He said if we can't figure a way to get along together here and now on the earth, how could we expect to understand what the afterlife is all about. It has been postulated that if there were no such thing as death, there would be no such thing as organized religion.

However, Judaism, Christianity and Islamic religions all have the same founder more or less. Abraham is the great (to the nth power)-grandfather of them all for heaven's sake! Talk about your sibling rivalry!!!

Weapons: Hands and fists, sticks, clubs; knives and spears; bows and arrows; guns, cannon, artillery, bombs and missiles.

War: Old Hunters send young Hunters off to die.

This is one old Gatherer who doesn't like war one bit! It's dangerous!