Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

19
No Such Thing as a Dumb Question
So we keep asking, over and over,
Until a handful of earth
Stops our mouths—
But is that an answer?
Heinrich Heine,
'Lazarus' (1854)
In East Africa, in the records of the rocks dating back to about
two million years ago, you can find a sequence of worked tools
that our ancestors designed and executed. Their lives depended
on making and using these tools. This was, of course, Early Stone
Age technology. Over time, specially fashioned stones were used
for stabbing, chipping, flaking, cutting, carving. Although there
are many ways of making stone tools, what is remarkable is that in
a given site for enormous periods of time the tools were made in
the same way - which means that there must have been educational
institutions hundreds of thousands of years ago, even if it
was mainly an apprenticeship system. While it's easy to exaggerate
the similarities, it's also easy to imagine the equivalent of
professors and students in loincloths, laboratory courses, examinations,
failing grades, graduation ceremonies and postgraduate
education.
When the training is unchanged for immense periods of time,
traditions are passed on intact to the next generation. But when
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