Human History 1,500,000 years BC. Africa. Some time around lunchtime. A Homo Erectus male sits out on the savannah, chipping away at a stone with another stone, making a primitive axe. For him, life is looking good and getting better every day. These tools make hunting and preparing meals much easier, and, although he was sceptical at first, the new fire stuff is great for keeping the large, dangerous animals away. The future is looking very bright indeed. He catches the eye of his pretty young mate, wearing the new furs he'd got her, and smiles contendedly... but distracted from his work, he accidentally strikes his thumb with the flint. It was thus that the first words ever were spoken by man (woman having learnt how to gossip a long time prior to this): "Aaagh! Oh fecking, feck, feck!" It was from these inauspicious beginnings that civilization was born, and would later flourish. Like Natural History, Human History is a rich source of inspiration for sci-fi writers. Indeed, for any writer. Social experiments, dramatic events, colourful characters, violence, sauciness... and of course, lots of 'what if' moments. For example, did you know that the Ancient Greeks invented the Steam Engine? Well, now you do. It was invented by a man named Heron of Alexandria, who is also credited with inventing the first vending machine. The people at the time however saw his steam engine, or Aeolipile, as just an interesting novelty. It didn't occur to them that maybe they could build something similar, but much larger, and put it on tracks (which had been invented years earlier). And so, what if an industrial revolution had happened over 2000 years ago? Would we have colonised the solar system by now? Who knows. History also teaches us, again, not to take things we have for granted. For example, as HG Wells noted in his novel 'The War of the Worlds', South American civilizations such as the Aztecs and Incas never used the wheel (they knew about it, but they had no pack animals for carts so the invention never really took off like it did elsewhere). So this section is devoted to some of the great stories that make up human history.
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