Such interesting comments and questions. Booktv continues on cspan2, television for serious readers. The invention of yesterday. The invention of yesterday a 50,000year history of human culture you got me at the title. Even if you are not a history buff, in the scary unprecedented times it is incumbent on all of us to look back to see where we have been and how we have got here and hopefully some perspective of where we are going. This 6year investment produced a global history of the human journey which takes us from the stone age to the virtual age. Tamim ansary poses the history of the world is a story we. Telling one another and since there is no single circle of storytellers there must be many world histories. This dramatic journey asks us in all the narratives form a single big story of our planet and it is what it might be. This explores links and Ripple Effect that stitched the fabric of history. There is a lot of pivotal moment. Is anybody finished reading it . Just came out. You dont count. All right. It is like columbuss discovery of america sparked the rise of corporations and banks andrew the entire world into one great global drama. Tamim ansary writes the story of an afghan american san franciscobased author draws nicely on his experiences of life in a different world of islam and the secular west to help readers understand the outcomes of overlapping narratives. He examines the role of interconnections and development of everything from boardgames to belief systems, science and multinational corporations. A wellwritten and valuable take on the diverse narrative that helped shape Human History. Of course we know him from other things, right . You have read his other books, you are a good crowd. Preceding this publication there have been five other books, road trips, games without rules, the history of afghanistan. A history of the world through islamic eyes and a work of fiction the widows husband, historical fiction that takes place in 1840 and kabul and west of kabul and east of new york his memoir published in the wake of the 9 11 crisis and chronicles a bicultural life. He has also written i was surprised about this 6 book series for children, so in your free time i dont know what you are doing but being here tonight is really a joy and lets put our hands together for this amazing man. [applause] i have two mikes here. Is this the way it goes now. Cspan, im not going to go which is which, i will do the best i can. So anyway i did write childrens books and although i have been working on this book i say for 6 years i remember maybe the origins go back a little further. When might presently 36yearold daughter was about 8, you do the math. I dont know how long ago that was. At that time i normally wrote childrens books but told a lot of childrens stories, made them up on the spot and i had the idea then that i am going to write a childrens history of the world. I told her i have this idea to write a history of the world and she wrinkled her brow and said didnt they already write that one . So now i want to say not only did they write that one but even though i have written one here myself i myself actually wrote another one earlier so it is really true i have been thinking about this for a long time, but the way i have been thinking about it i think i can trigger off from this, for the past 6 years i have been working on this, people run into me and say what are you working on . It is a history of the world, no, really, what are you working on . I go now, really, and it doesnt improve matters when i say it is a history of the world from the big bang to right now and a common response then is it must be 40,000 pages long. But that is the whole point. That is why there was this childrens history of the world that i started out with. The whole point, this book is shorter than the history of afghanistan that i wrote. That is not only, that doesnt only reflect the fact that afghanistan is more complicated than the entire world but also goes right to the point because if youre going to undertake the history of the world from the big bang to right now, clearly youre going to leave some stuff out. So what do you leave out and what do you leave in and why do you take something out and why do you leave something in. There has to be some principle of inclusion and exclusion. I am going to suggest for me the principle is that you are including everything that tells the story and youre going to leave out stuff that gets in the way of seeing the story. So the question is where do you find the through line for a story of Human History . I will leave the big bang alone for right now because i am thinking of humanity. And so around the time that i first started seriously thinking of writing this book i went back to afghanistan in 2011 and when i grew up, afghanistan was a synonym for the word remote either said remotes or use that afghanistan. They had the same meaning but in the air coming towards couple i understood i am not heading towards remote, that is not happening now. I landed in kabul, the rex of former soviet tanks, big indications of american presence, buildings, cars everywhere and feels like paris or new york, different flavor, grungy year but one of those world cities so i thought okay, maybe remote isnt in kabul, you have to leave the city to find what used to be here. With some people, we got in a car and drove eight or ten hours and got to the Central Highlands of afghanistan were those buddhas used to be that the taliban and bombed out of existence and there was nothing, what is there now are some buddha shaped holes in the mountain but there is a town there, somewhat substantial town so my friend said no, we are not stopping here. Theres a place further down the valley, the valley of the dragon. We will go there so we drove along, drove along and somewhere in this desert i look up and i see a white line on a little bit village clinging to the hillside. At that time kind of run out of red, following the tracks of earlier vehicles and going up to this Little Village we dont see much, maybe some tracks but that feels like maybe this is remote so i am saying what is this little glistening white light. I ask for binoculars and what i see up there is a satellite dish and im like how do they what do they do with the satellite dish, operate a television, how do they operate a television, theres no electrical lines. How do they get solar panels, they have a motorcycle, how do they pay for this . A lot of times it is opium being grown here and opium is kind of as good a currency as gold because infinitely something visible so you can pay for smart things, a little bit of opium and it doesnt dk, you can store it so it is there next year. What happens with the opium . That goes to is pakistan, turkmenistan, is processed into more refined versions of the drug, then it goes across turkey and albania into europe and some comes to san francisco. So im like okay. So there is a network that connects me to san francisco, this Little Village in the valley but i say what could they possibly be watching on that thing. Theres lots of programming coming out of kabul, the most popular show right then was afghan star. Some of you probably know what afghan star but how many dont . Afghan star, singers all over afghanistan compete and send out to a playoff championship sort of thing and finally one person is by cell phone vote of the audience chosen the winner of the year and that is the afghan star, obviously cloned off of American Idol which was itself cloned off of british popeye. British pop idol afghan star, American Idol and at that same time i am just browsing, reading information and finding at that time, that year i was told 80 of the childrens toys sold to kids for that year were made in china and china, one of its products was inexpensive motorcycles made just for the market that im looking at in that valley. At that point i thought back and said all right 50,000 years ago, didnt put a date on it that way back before the four villages and cities and all that stuff, the human animal on the planet existed as small bands of relatives basically, and were not much bigger than 180, 200 people. They lived in open spots, world around, forged and hunted and probably knew other bands of relatives in their areas where they nomadic we migrated but they didnt have any idea of the thousands of other bands of humans that were on the planet. If that is the beginning, lets start there. This is where we ended up, the planet is one tangled spaghetti of human lives were anything that happens to any human or that any human does anyplace might have Ripple Effects to go out and has an effect on somebody else anywhere else on the planet and on that planet there is no place left that is unaltered by our presence. That is maybe the trajectory. We could take that as a trajectory or a through line. That is when i started writing this book. In the course of thinking about it and exploring it and thinking about how this everincreasing interconnectedness took place what i gradually dawned on me, that it is obvious but i will say it anyhow, the interconnectedness did not just evenly spread out, not like we are living in a still pool of water with and little ripples, thats not how it is. The human world consists not of still waters but lots of whirlpools and each whirlpool is some group of people talking to each other but not that much to somebody else and in the end i thought okay, theres three things at play here. Everybody lives in some environment and everything they do has something to do with how they get what they need out of that environment whatever it be and repel whatever it is out there that might hurt them and as humans always from the time we were able to say okay, this is a human species, we did it by making and improving tools so those of the two things, environment and tools but there is one other thing and it is the third part of the whole story. Let me just some of you started reading this so i dont know if i should read the beginning here but i will go ahead and read a little passage from chapter 1. One day in the fall of 1940, french teenagers were roaming the woods near their home in Southwestern France searching for a legendary buried treasure they had heard about when their dog robot scurried into a depression formed by uprooted tree and began plying at something. The teenagers rushed over hoping, but no, it wasnt a mold treasure chest, it was only a small dark opening in the ground. They did what teenagers do, what i might have done myself at that age, they squeezed through the opening to see where it went. They had flashlights with them which was a good thing because the whole went down a long way before opening at last into a cavernous room and there, flashing their lights around, they saw on the walls and even on the ceiling 15 or 20 feet above their wonder struck eyes, bigger than life paintings of buffalo and deer and other animals rendered gracefully and realistically in black and red and yellow. They had found one of the worlds most spectacular galleries of paleolithic art. The skullcap in. Spectacular but not unique. Cave paintings like this have been found all over the world since 1868 and are still being found in hundreds of sites from spain to libya to indonesia. In many cases the paintings in a given cave were made over the course of thousands of years, people were coming there to paint generation after generation but the oldest of them were made 40,000 years ago and the odd thing is those earliest paintings were already quite sophisticated and then i go through some examples but the thing is it isnt like you have crude beginnings of doodling and thousands of years later people have learned how to make a kind of vaguely animal shape, now. We were not that much distinguishable from neanderthal from other bipedal primates that we shared the planet with and suddenly humans took an uptick and that raises the question, what happened . What caused that . Something happened 4050,000 years ago. What was it . My proposal is we came into true language. And true language is not the ability to make words that mean something. My cat raul knows 10 or 15 words. There is one word he knows which means food and he says it and gets food and cocoa the gorilla using sign language actually knew 1000 words or somewhere in that range so cocoa could say things like ice cream and crows can make up new words for things that appear in their environment, they can make up a word that among the crows they now mean that particular basket that came and heard one of us, farmer brown and words like that i just pointing. Not at a significant level are not different from pointing. What i am talking about when i say true language is vocabulary embedded in grammar and symbol. What i mean is words can stop referring directly to things in the world and start having relationship with other words and let me just say a little about that. So the meaning of many words is not their relationship to something in the physical world but their relationship to other words. Developing language meant we could start using words as if they were the object named, words could separate from things and have an existence of their own. Once that happened a whole world of words could form parallel to the world of things, two language users could enter that world and interact within it as if it were the world itself. Picture two guys talking. One says lets meet for lunch tomorrow at that taco place, the other says i am game, what time, about noon . Nothing in their physical setting corresponds to any of the words these guys have spoken. Tomorrow, lunch, noon, what do they. 2 . Nothing. Those are not even the most distinctively linguistic of their utterances. Consider left,s, that, on or about, those words dont point to anything anywhere. They exist only in the linguistic universe they share with tomorrow at lunch and noon. When we acquired true language we graduated beyond merely making sounds the triggered our buddies to run or fight or salivate. We elevated our game to make sounds but conjured up in our fellow humans imagination a simulacrum of the whole world. When two guys talk about getting tacos tomorrow at noon they are not only interacting in the world they are each imagining, they are imagining the same world. If they werent, they wouldnt both show up at the same place and time tomorrow. That is the truly incredible thing. Imagining the same world. And i will drive at home by saying here we are, 40 or 50 people, we are not experiencing the material physical world directly. We are experiencing of a model we created together and think is the same world. And in the course of human cultures developing you can trace how for example people who lived on the nile river, because of the way the nile is, this wonderful waterway protected from all other things, the Sahara Desert is that way. Another desert that way, big cataracts and waterfalls that way so 600 miles of a river that feeds the soil all along it and that river is a current that steadily moved north and over that river is a breeze that constantly blows south so anyplace along that river if you have a boat and put it in the water you are going north and if you put the sale up youre going south no wonder all along that river emerges a monolithic and sort of margin a civilization. I will not go into it but you go to mesopotamia it is a different kind of river and once again people are there because they can grow crops but their culture is different. There idea of the world is tuned into the environment in which they are living, read the book, you will see it is a different kind of river so in various environments there are worldviews building up and when i speak of worldviews, to a large extent, what i am talking about is when people are talking more to one another than they are to others out there who ever they may be, their stories recirculate and reinforce and weep together until they not only have a narrative but a sort of metanarrative, but a story of the world they feel themselves to be living in and situate themselves within and thus the history of the world to me, one of the things you can see happening and therefore one way in which you can construct a single whole story out of it is by looking at the way these imaginary worlds, i will call them that, worlds that are collectively constructed communally inhabited but experienced as individual, these Little Things start someplace that is groups expand the world expanded at some point they run into and expanding worldview from some other place and those overlap and then things happen. Not necessarily fighting. When you have people occupying different worldviews and become aware there is somebody else over there and have another way of thinking about the world, one thing that happens is curiosity. I wonder what is going on over there. Keep the fire warm. Im going to talk to those guys. They speak a different language, i cant talk to them. There is that thing that happens. Or sometimes two groups trade and form a relationship that way or sometimes one group wants what the other group has and then there might be some fighting. If you look at the history of the world you see this constant expansion, i dont want to call them bubbles, more like clouds of ideas that are coherent internally and have a structure is growing overlap and sometimes clash and sometimes interweave and become one bigger narrative. I would say these narratives even when they interweave the ghosts of them stay in the bigger narratives that form. It doesnt matter if someone is living on the nile river or the mississippi, location doesnt matter anymore. These narratives can be anywhere in the world and are all overlapping at the same time and what we are negotiating is how to figure out the big story. I will add one more thing before i maybe i wont add one more thing. I will say this. A narrative we share with other people is how we are a coordinated group that is able to cope with the environment which consists of the unknown bitterness of it all. The narrative is a social self. A social self implies a social other. There is a self and theres always other. Self and others not necessarily warfare, self and others a condition of humanity. If there is a sense that theres not going to be enough, resources are thin, someone has to be excluded from the dinner table. That is when it becomes more the case that people stop looking around and saying who am i not going to share with and i think these narratives are to put it another way, culture, the significance of it is how people sort when the violence might be coming because of resources or the other possibility, the violence might be coming because the narrative we are living in is growing incoherence. It doesnt explain what is going on anymore and now people are at a loss how to construct an identity living in not a coherent constellation of ideas but in a chaotic cloud of ideas and at that point, you might see people posturing into smaller constellations so it makes sense, so it can be somebody they know inside that cloud and that is another thing we are doing here. When i have been prese