Forensic History Parent Page

 

 

 

How did the world come to be as it is now? 

We seem to be in an extremely crazy situation.  The world is divided into roughly 200 individual units that we were raised to call ‘countries.’  Each of these countries claims that a certain part of the planet essentially belongs to it; the countries take wealth from their people and use it to build the most horrific weapons imaginable and use them to make sure that these claims are respected. 

How did the world come to work this way?

Did some group of super-intelligent people sit down when the human race first evolved to discuss the different ways humans could organize our existence?  Did they determine this was the best one?  Do you think that the smartest of all these people said something like, ‘I think the human race would be better off if we divided the land into various sovereign entities that fight each other to determine which of them will be the classified as the ‘owner’ of each part of the world where humans live?’  Do you think that the others were in awe of this person’s brilliance, to come up with a system so obviously good, and voted unanimously to set up the world this way? 

Or, perhaps, might this system have come to exist by some other process?  Might it have evolved over time, as humans evolved?  Might it have started with some sort of territorial instincts certain people inherited from their distant evolutionary ancestors that were then institutionalized into formal structures, perhaps through a process that no one really intended and wasn’t planned in any way?

Might we possibly have the ability to figure out how, why, when, and where the key structures of our world first came to exist?  Might we then be able to figure out how these structures evolved from their simple starting form to the incredibly powerful institutions that shape human events and are clearly pushing us toward our own extinction at a fantastic rate? 

Perhaps, if we knew how we got where we are now, we may use this information to understand how the world might be working now if our ancient ancestors had made slightly different decisions.  Perhaps there are many paths that we could have taken through time and, if we understood how we got onto the path we are on, we would be able to use this information to help us understand if this is the path we—the members of the human race and inhabitants of planet earth—want to be on.  If this path does NOT take us where we want to go, perhaps we could use our understanding of the past to figure out what could be the right path if we wanted something else. 

We may use an understanding of certain key aspects of history to help us move toward a better future.  For example, there are certain very important tools that humans have built over our history that we might be able to use to our advantage if we understood them better.  If we knew how we developed them, when we developed them, why we developed them and put them to their current use, we may be able to see that we can use them for other purposes.  Many people I talk to are very depressed about the current world situation.  They think we are headed for extinction and there isn’t anything we can do about it.  Perhaps, if we had information about important matters from our past, we would realize that we actually have much greater capabilities than we appear to have when we look at them with a limited perspective.  Perhaps we aren’t in as bad of a situation as we appear to be in.  Perhaps we are actually in a very good situation; if we only had the right information and knew what had to be done, we might be able to make truly momentous changes that will put the entire human race on a path to a better future. 

What events happened in the past that caused the world to work as it does now?  

We absolutely need to know this.

But this information doesn’t seem available. 

Conventional history books don’t seem to discuss it.  These books overwhelm us with details of past events that are essentially useless and do nothing to help us move toward a better world.  What good does it do us to know the names given to individual wars in an endless sequence of wars that is so long and dense that no one could ever memorize it all, even if they spent the rest of their lives doing this?  What good does it do us to memorize the names and dates of key battles, the names of generals and descriptions of tactics, the dates and names of key peace treaties?  What good does it do us to memorize a list of names of people called ‘presidents’ of certain countries, together with biographies of each and details about the wars and other important events they presided over?   

Children are force-fed this information over a period of more than a decade, with test after test to make sure that they can regurgitate it upon request.  They are told they are learning ‘history’ and, after they pass the test, they are told they understand history.

But have they really learned anything important?  Do they understand the big picture, the way the key institutions of the world (including countries and corporations) came to be a part of the human condition and then evolved into their current form? 

How did we get here in this world? 

How did the world itself come to exist?

How and when did life appear?  What are the steps in evolution that led eventually to humans?  What, exactly, is a human and what are the forces that led to the development of the characteristics that we consider to be ‘human?’

How did humans live when we first evolved?

Did we immediately separate ourselves from other people with imaginary lines called ‘borders’ and start fighting over the locations of the borders?  In other words, is this system the only system humans have ever had?  Or did we start with something else?  If we had something else, how did this other type of society work?  Did it have any advantages that the systems now in place don’t have?  Can we learn anything by studying the way people lived before the systems now in place came to exist?  What sort of factors caused people to make the changes that ultimately led to the world working as it does now?

Once the systems based on countries came to exist, how did they evolve over time?  How and why did they create the institutions called ‘corporations?’  How did the corporations evolve to the point where they became capable of manipulating governments to grant them rights to destroy the world around us?  (Without an immense legal system backed by police and military forces, corporations would not be able to do the truly horrible things they do now.  People protest the activities of corporations every day; the corporate leaders take advantage of laws that protect them from the unrest and protests.  The laws require the governments to bring in their militaries to remove the protestors and they do this, even if they have to kill the protesters to accomplish this.  How, when, and why did this system come to work this way?)  

This book is about the big-picture items of history.  It deals with the forces and factors that caused the key structures and institutions of our world to come to exist and to evolve into their current form.  It is designed to present information in a clear and understandable manner that is objective and designed only to enlighten people about key events of the past so that they may understand how we can build a better world in the future.

 

A New Way to Analyze History

We actually have a lot of objective scientific information that we can use to basically reconstruct the key events of the past that made the world work as it now works.  The great majority of the tools we can use for this are brand new, so new, in fact, that we are only beginning to understand the extremely important information they are able to give us. 

For example, just a few decades ago, there were no such things as ‘gene sequencers.’  Even a decade ago, the sequencers could only process tiny snippets of DNA and we knew nothing about the functions of individual genes.  Now, gene sequencers are available for prices low enough to put them into high schools. 

Students can sequence their own DNA in high school.

They can then sequence DNA from fossil remains.  They can determine the exact coding differences between themselves and people around the world, to see where their ancestors came from.  They can then look up the codes of neanderthals and denisovans (early proto humans; these are links in the chain from apes to humans) to determine how they, personally, differ from the proto-humans and which mixes of proto-humans they have in their own DNA.  They can keep going back this way through their own ancestors and trace their heritage.  They don’t have to take anyone’s word for it:  they can take a sample of their own DNA and then one for their pet dog or cat, and determine how closely related they are to their pets. 

 

 

MRI scanners are brand-new tools that help us understand how the human brain works.  College students can have access to these machines.  They can study the places in their own brains where various thoughts reside.  Using real-time magnetic images, they can track single neural discharges and map each tiny bit of electrical activity to the various parts of the mind that are affected when they think certain thoughts.  They can chart and map the brain components responsible for speech, for understanding words, for solving puzzles, for facial recognition, and for sexual desire. 

Using this information, people can study the brain differences between different animals, including our evolutionary ancestors, to work out the various steps in evolution (something that wasn’t even accepted as a fact when I went to school, and was illegal for science teachers to let students know about only a short time before that).  We can study the differences in brain components of various animals to determine how the key processes of evolution work and the specific mental characteristics that give advantages to beings with these characteristics. 

We now have tools to answer questions that, for most of history, people believed would never and could never be understood.  People thought that we would never know how and when the world came to exist, how and when life came to this world, how and when humans came to this world, and what, exactly, made humans unique in the animal kingdom.  Now, we can collect data in objective ways, apply scientific tests to the data, and work out the answers to all of these questions. 

We can also sort through a lot of nonsense to find out what really happened when we have differing accounts of history from different sources to pull from.  When we get to very recent history, we will see that the organizations we were raised to call ‘governments of countries’ run school systems, and these organizations have certain needs that they can only meet by distorting history. 

 

 

We will see that standard histories all suffer from bias that is so pervasive that it prevents us from figuring out what really happened.  In many cases, standard histories taught in school are pure fiction, and in many others, they are purposely distorted to make children think that historical figures acted in entirely the opposite way as objective evidence shows they acted. 

We have new research tools that allow us to put together information from many sources to recreate past events in the same basic way that forensic criminologists put together evidence to recreate crimes.  Different people have different interests and want others to see events from a certain perspective, generally one that makes them seem like the good guys and the other side seem like the bad guys.  But it is possible to gather large amounts of evidence from various different sources and put together a mental picture of the event that allows us to almost watch it happen in our minds, as if we are watching a movie about it.  We don’t have to rely on opinions about these events; we can know what happened. 

 

New Sources of Information

Language used to be an insurmountable barrier to information transfers.  Whatever your language is, the great bulk of the people of the world couldn’t read it and couldn’t speak or understand it a century ago.  They had other languages.  Most of the documents that were written were personal letters, journals, and other records that were not published at all and were not available to more than a tiny number of people.  Even information that was published would only normally be available to a tiny percentage of the human population, because only a tiny percentage of the population read any specific language (meaning the great bulk of published information was in a form they couldn’t understand). 

Now, new documents are created in digital forms that can be transferred anywhere in the world in a microsecond.  Computers can translate these documents into any language you like, and you can have real-time conversations with people on the other side of the world who speak languages that aren’t even in the same language family as your own.  People are going into private and public libraries, warehouses, archives, and any place documents are kept, photographing the documents and feeding them into computers to be digitized and archived.  Now, if you want to know what is relevant to a certain situation, and you have a few unique words to identify the situation, you can type them into search engines and get lists of documents that are relevant, with references that explain where the documents are kept and verify the authenticity, all in a fraction of a second.

For the past few thousand years, enormous volumes of records of many kinds have been created.  Without computers, researchers really have a hard time finding relevant information.  It is all there.  But it is buried in libraries and warehouses that contain millions of bits of totally irrelevant material. 

The internet provides a very powerful tool that people can use to provide objective proof that we, as individuals, can access and verify for ourselves, without having to rely on third parties who may have biases, prejudices, or agendas.  If you suspect something may have happened that the teachers, writers of history books, and other self- proclaimed experts say did not happen, you can type in some information that you think people would have put into records or documents about that event, if it had happened the way you suspected. 

If it did happen, you have a very good chance of getting some proof.  Since the people who feed the records into the scanners don’t actually read them first, and computers digitize and translate them, it is quite possible that you will be the first one in centuries to read personal letters, diaries, lecture notes, and other documents that were written by people who were actually at key events in history and were able to explain them from a perspective that no professional historian could duplicate. 

Once you have documents that describe the event, you can go through the details of that document to find other search terms that will bring up additional documents and additional proof of the same events.  You can keep going and eventually create an extremely detailed picture of an event that conventional history books don’t discuss at all and which governments and other official sources may claim did not even happen. 

The countries that win wars write the history of those wars.  They naturally want to include things that make the winners (themselves) look good and exclude anything that makes them look bad.  We will see that a lot of the events that are not flattering to the side that won various wars, and are therefore not in the history books, are critical events; we can’t really understand how the world got to be as it is today without this information. 

Now, we can not only get this information, we can analyze it from various perspectives, and we can corroborate it from so many different sources that the people who want to claim it never happened will eventually have to back down and admit that it really did happen. 

 

Why Does This Matter?

Why do we care about history?

If we only think of history books as decorations on shelves, we don’t care; it doesn’t matter what the words say as long as the bindings are pretty and create the impression of intelligence for those who own the books. 

But if we want to learn from history, the existing situation is very dangerous. 

If we want to use history as a tool to help us solve very real problems, we absolutely need objective information.  We need to know what really happened.  The nonsense presented in politicized histories isn’t going to help us understand anything important about our world. 

This book presents a new kind of history.  It focuses on how the important institutions and structures that shape the destiny of the world and the human race came to exist and gained the powers that they have in our world today.  It is basically a reconstruction of the important events that led to these structures based on forensic analysis. 

This book is an attempt to help you see the achievements of the human race from a new perspective.  You will see that the human race is an incredibly capable group of beings.  You will also see that the limited histories we were raised with distort our perception of these abilities and make us appear to be less capable than we really are. 

You will see that human history is actually much, much longer than the conventional histories claim.  (In order to make it appear that a certain race and culture is responsible for everything, history has to start at the point that race and culture first gained dominance, and then somehow convince people that there was no history before that.)  You will see that our actual history is far richer and more varied than the conventional histories claim.  True human beings—people who may not have had the appropriate skin color or belief system to be included in histories written by the groups that ultimately conquered, but are clearly members of the genus ‘homo sapiens’ with all of the associated capabilities—have done much, much more than we have been led to believe. 

We have accomplished more. 

This means we are capable of more.

I believe that we can use history as a tool to help us understand the present and the future.  If we understand how we got where we are now, we will understand exactly where ‘where we are now’ happens to be.  We will understand what we have to work with to make the world a better place. 

That is what this book is about.