What was the most significant Event in the History of Man?

Wow, first thread here. I would say that it's the moon landing. Landing on a different surface, 33 million miles away proves that man can do just about anything.


coffee. where the hell did we go thats 33,000,000 miles away ,what did we do? I never heard about it!

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

the moon averages about 250,000 miles away

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

I think i'll go with the receeding of the last ice age.
Fire was great but a place to live and thrive is greater.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

remember though, an ice age doesn't mean the entire planet is frozen. Just that the amount of habitable area is significantly reduced. In other words even during the harshest part of every ice age there were still places to live and thrive, otherwise any complex life-forms would have been totally wiped out the first time it happened.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

I remember buffys,
I was trying to be succinct, some of my posts have gotten a bit long.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

I guess my point was this. Since fire is probably one of the reasons we survived ice ages in the first place, it sort of has to be more important overall than the end of the most recent ice age.

 

That's a valid point.

Fire,hunting skills, stone weapons,fishing, animal husbandry,proto-language,proto-religion all enabled humans to survive in the ice ace.
Of these, I agree, Fire is paramount.
I bet we would be amazed at attending a proto-religious ceremony... Earth, fire, sky, water, fish,birds, spirits, ancestors, fertility,virility...The original raw manifestations of human Deification, cool.

Ice age human population was 100,000 (I've seen lower and higher estimates) to secure the species from extinction, provide a heathy diverse gene pool, survive catastrophic weather, flood, poor hunting, predators etc.

But with the recession of the ice, a population explosion occured. Suddenly, after 10-50,000 years of hanging on by our collective determination.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

BANG! We begin to multiply.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

Eons of Unparallelled growth. We rapidly reach a million.
Our genepool allows for evolutionary mutations.
Eons of exploration. Multiplying..... 5 million our adaptations make us the rulers of the species. Familys form tribes and languages and religions.
Eons of community...Multiplying.....50 million our Ethnic destinctions crystallize from geographic adaptations.
Ethnic tribes form clans with common languages and similar customs.
Eons of learning....Multiplying...250 million our exchange of ideas and trial and error allow us to grasp agriculture. This allows population density so the clans form nations, and they begin to specialize and build. and civilization begins.

If the glaciers do not receed, we stay fire using nomadic/fishermen with a tenuous grasp on existence. No place to multiply. No history at all.
Humans would have been doomed.
And our niche would have undoubtably been taken over by the spotted pygmie cave lions

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

Greetings and Felicitations,

I would go with the ability to pass on knowledge to future generations. It all probably started with oral traditions but when it started doesn't matter. What matters is that humans learned to pass on knowledge so that each generation did not have to recreate everything from scratch.
All other major accomplishments hinge on this ability. Fire, wheel, tools are all useless if the knowledge to use and create them is not passed on. The development of written language simply made it easier and more accurate.

This would be the event that I imagine made all the difference.

Sincerely Yours,
C. David Neely

 

I've changed my mind,
It's Sliced Bread.

 

ok, you want to talk about the really important stuff I see. Sliced bread is an impressive accomplishment to be sure but NOTHING comes close to the brilliance of spam... (SP)iced h(AM), it's frigg'n meat in a can! and the opener is built in!

god damn brilliant.

 

Well, I'd say: 1- invention of the wheel.
2- written words.
3- computers.
4- venturing into outer space.

 

When male man realised/was told his contribution to the miracle of pro-creation.

Prior to this, women were worshipped as magical creatures who alone gave birth to new humans, and inheritance was through the female line as fatherhood was not known so not considered important. Society was agricultural and peaceful and Goddess worshipping.

Males were jealous of female magic. Then once they realised that they were equally important in this magic, they decided to control and dominate women and take all the power and respect for themselves. Women's sexuality was strictly controlled so men could be sure of the paternity of their children for property reasons.

Along comes the worship of male Gods, war, Judaism, Christianity and Islam etc etc.

My fervent wish is for this century to herald equality and happiness between men and women and peace on earth...

 

The flood 5000 years ago...

 

Interesting thread. Fire and speech are good candidates, although I often wonder if they are discoveries or rather in fact _instinctive_ behaviors.

My vote for the most important has to go to the invention of Calculus by Newton and Liebnitz. This probably falls into the catagory of inevitable discovery but the profound leap it represented in the ability to use math to understand and analyze the physical world make it unique.

 

Actually all other non-human animals are instinctly and naturally afraid of fire.
Except for domestic animals who are used to it of course.

 

Actually it has happened once, a very long, long time ago. All life that survived was some minor organisms below the ice where it was thinnest. If my memory serves me right that happened some ~600 000 000 years ago.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2000/snowballearth.shtml
I saw the program and to my mind the evidence is enough.

 

Humans have been around for a long time, and have been the master species of the planet for a few thousand years. It seems to me rather historically myopic to look for a “most significant event” in the last few hundred years. Even going back to the Roman Empire, we are touching on historical events that only affected a quarter of the Earth’s population.

So my sympathies are with those advocating the control of fire and the development of language. But I have a problem with fire. Were we human when we learned to control fire? I think that the hominids that tamed fire could not be described as modern human beings – biologically indistinguishable from ourselves. As for language, its development may have been more of a “process” than an “event”.

I think that Xerxes’ question does have a best answer – and it reflects the urban environment of most of us that it has not been suggested yet. I would go for the invention of the plough – and most specifically, I would suggest that the first harnessing of an ox to a plough was the most significant event in the history of Man.

 

The shift from nomadic or partly nomadic hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists perhaps, but it was a gradual process almost certainly. Hunter-getherers are semi-agricultural in that they destroy plants they don't like and encourage and scatter the seeds of plants they do. There's also the question of when animals were domesticated- there's arguments about that too. A friend thinks it all went wrong because we invented the wheel before we invented contraceptives.

 

If you are British you were no doubt thinking of Jeremy Clarkson when you wrote that.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

I think the most significant even in the history of man is the creaton of the atom bomb, as it lead to many changes in world politics.

 

If you think that politics is all that there is in the world, then yes.