Let’s face it. Even in this age of individuals digitally capturing and sharing the minutiae of daily life, we simply can’t capture and hold all of history in order to replay it later. Even a video camera only records what’s within range of its lens. If you are facing the lens, it’s not picking up your back. Sure, you could put multiple video cameras in a room in hopes of recording everything happening in that…
I recently watched the PBS NOVA documentary “Dawn of Humanity” on Netflix. This almost 2-hour exploration of anthropologists excavating a cache of bones deep in a South African cave was riveting. The bones turned out to be from a previously-unknown species of hominid. Because the cache held the bones of so many individuals, the paleoanthropologists studying the cave surmised it was an intentional burial site. The documentary features Dr. Lee Berger, the lead paleoanthropologist for the…