This is Don's "Whom We Might Be" Story

This page shares some of the key events that have occurred for me since my childhood years ( please view? ) and a look at many things that were "before" me…
      Also view my "future thoughts" page, as well as my personal profile for my info? Enjoy!

At my 1st release of this page in 2016, I had lived for more than 60 years—using the Gregorian Calendar ( vs. an ancient sundial ), I calculated this period to be around 346,000 wide-awake hours, thinking about many, many things…

The time frame coincidentally also ran over the intersection of two Millennia: the 1,000's & the 2,000's and with some luck ( & some medical help! ), I do hope to live on into the 2080's ;)

It was also *extremely* good luck that my life didn't begin several hundred years earlier, shared below in my story!

My paternal familial surname of Shave evolved over hundreds of years from the Northern Germanic tribal names such as "Schave;" no-one of that name is ( yet! ) in my tree data…

Similar spellings of "Stave" / "Shade" / "Shane" / "Shake" / "Shack" / "Shaver" / "Schave" / "Shive" / “Shaw” / "Shadel" & others were sourced by me in the Oxford Dictionary of British Family Names © 2016, Oxford University Press
( the most comprehensive research resource that I have found to date! ) that contains more than 45,000 surnames

While it's not a direct path, my Germanic ancestors are also Celtic… Their origin does remain a mystery—scholars believe that they originated in the steppes beyond the Caspian Sea, 1st in the areas of central Europe that are east of the river Rhine in the seventh century BC, and inhabiting much of NE France & SW Germany by 500 BC. They then crossed the Alps & expanded into the Balkans in northern Italy around the 3rd century BC; from there they later reached the British Isles, occupying most of western Europe, creating the Druids. While there are unproven theories about the Celts & Druids building Stonehenge, they arrived there many millennia after it's creation

So… looking "outside of myself” for a moment, the bazillions & bazillions of atoms ( that are around 1078 & 1082 )
    ( view the standard definition for the tiny 1078th numbers here? )
in our observable universe are sized at ~10-8cm, which has allowed us humans to evolve…

Aside from the fact that our Universe today ( since it’s creation 13.77 billion years ago ) was actually made from the bazillions of combinations of just 3 hyper-tiny sub-microscopic particles ( an electron with two quarks, one up & one down ), we all come from Ancient Stardust—a scientific theory that I strongly believe to be true!

I do continue to search for new active clues about the start of our human existence, as well as its' probable end…
    1 ) Assuming that a “Big Bang” was an actual fact ( which I do ), what caused the occurrence of the Singularity
          event 13.77 billion years ago? More on this below…

    2 ) Why did we not begin evolving until quite some time after the extremely nasty Hadean Eon period?

    3 ) How ( and from where? ) did the early Earth actually get its bazillions of gallons of water?

    4) What *actually* caused life to begin on Earth, with microscopic bugs arriving from space perhaps ½ a billion
          years after it’s creation ( & after the arrival of water! ), and at around 538.8 million years ago, the formation
          of the Cambrian period sea creatures?

    5 ) It does seem that “We Were Once Worms”—why?

    6 ) How might our Universe End, & when?

Theories abound for my such hard-to-answer thoughts ( and for others! ) & are frequently in my mind!

Our Homo Sapiens species came into existence around 313,600 years ago, after evolving from those very, very small mammalian animals on our Earth… These tiny ancestors first appeared in the Late Permian age ( around 260 million years ago ) from a furry, warm-blooded reptile, a “Cynodont,” surviving the Permian–Triassic Extinction Event that was 251 million years ago; view more info here & watch Sean B. Carroll's YouTube informative session?

Our ancestors were dominated for many millions of years by the reptiles of that time, Dinosaurs ( who had peaked during the Jurassic period; see note 8a? ) and were freed up with the catastrophic arrival of a 6-mile-wide asteroid, allowing them to grow larger & becoming us perhaps 7 million years ago…

About 65 million years ago, at the boundary between the Cretaceous era ( the last geological period of the Mesozoic ) and the Tertiary era, a huge asteroid came rushing out of space at the enormous velocity of about
56 **thousand** miles per hour ( 25km per second ), impacting the Earth at the tip of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, penetrating the Earth's crust down to a depth of several kilometers. This vaporized the ocean, completely melting & shattering the entire Yucatan Peninsula—its rock was composed of carbonate and sulphate, creating a deep crater ( now named “Chicxulub” ) some 200km in diameter

Over a very short period of time ( just a few minutes ) several hundred billion tons of CO2, SO2 and water vapor were released by the vaporized target rock & injected high into the Earths Exosphere… An abrupt & global perturbation of the entire Earth’s System followed: the climate became unstable, the fine dust suspended in the atmosphere blocked sunlight for many decades, decreasing & stopping photosynthesis

This ecological catastrophe is believed to have caused the famous Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) boundary mass extinction, which saw the demise of the dinosaurs ( see note 8b? ) and destroyed more than 50% of the Earths fauna and flora both on land & in the oceans

The significance of the actual timing of this event was a simply amazing coincidence… had the asteroid hit just a few minutes before, it would have crashed into the Atlantic Ocean ( vs. into the Yucatan ) or a few minutes later it would have hit the Pacific Ocean—either of these would **not** have completely forced the darkening of the skies for decades, as the rocks that it actually hit and blasted into the Exosphere were limited to perhaps 13% of the entire Earth… We wouldn't even exist at all, and those Dinosaurs might well be ruling the Earth today!

Moving on to an historical report, advising that ~117 billion of our ancestors have all departed from their lives…

Humans lived during the 10,000-year Holocene epoch which is sadly starting to crash…

Click the matrix to expand it?

About 8 billion people are living on our planet today; see more info in note 1?

The key factors that drive our future growth are Population, Prosperity & Climate change. We can also anticipate that there will be 9.8—10.4 billion people from the next 2-3 generations, with most of the coming increases around Africa & Asia where many difficulties will exist around water availability & other future complexities…

Returning from "looking outside," I am now going to use a conceptual human tree that shares that our branch took root about 12- or 13-million years ago, where an African Great-ape ( see a visual matrix below? ) became our “GGG-Grandmother” ( with many, many GG's! ) whom I shall name as "Ms. Yiayiá," from the Greeks…
    As a brief aside, while this idea can only ever be "a theory" until science advances further, discovering more in the future,
        I happen to personally support this concept very deeply!
    My views here are from the logical assessment of what the "very top of our tree" would have actually looked like, a set of threads from
        Charles Darwin's concepts about the evolution of humans & an improved view of all life from Richard Dawkins; details are shared below

Ms. Yiayiá ( who will sadly remain unknowable, other than with my speculative assessment ) is imagined here
as the “Concestor 1” in Richard Dawkins' book "The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life" ( note 3b )

She was a "Common Mother" of the Australopithecus group, who birthed two daughters without any kind of “religious” marriage, or rings for her fingers, nor any baptisms for her children…
    Such religious references, thoughts & comments throughout are *exclusively* my opinion

One of her many daughters ( whom I've named as "Baba" ) became the 1st Mother of today's Chimpanzee's and another daughter ( whom I've named as "Gigi" ) became the 1st Mother of Us, through the Homo Sapiens species…

Gigi's offspring then evolved, branching & spreading out from what has been established as their original home in the Great Rift Valley of East Africa ( with other possible locations ) across the world ( note 2 ) where our Homo Sapiens ancestral branch actually started out as long ago as 313,600 years…

A detailed view of human prehistory is viewable here and another here; also watch this PBS report for an African perspective? Interestingly enough, mitochondrial DNA ( thru our mothers, see note 2c ) can be traced back to the start of our tree branch & possibly further. A map of our evolution is attached to my online profile here ( scroll down to view the image in the "Story" event? ), showing who we once were, & where we once lived…

Many other threads surrounding the descending familial tree line of Ms. Yiayiá are caught below in my timeline

The geologic ancestors of Ms. Yiayiá are another fascinating story… Richard Dawkins ( note 3a ) wrote one of the best books I've ever read, sharing the idea that we are descended from many, many "Concestors" which he defines ( on p.7 of his book ) as:
      "[…] in a backward chronology, the ancestors of any set of species must eventually meet at a particular
      Geologic moment… the last common ancestor that they all share, what I shall call their 'Concestor' […]"
making his book a very worthy tale!!

Some key points of the "evolution of us" are
      a) our 4 fingers/thumb on each hand ( with which I typed out this story! ) from the fins of a fish,
      b) a pair of eyeballs ( with which you're currently reading this! ),
      c) our gut which evolved from worms, 550 million years ago &
      d) how we became 2-legged upright walkers

We normally think very little of these things ( unless hammering on a nail & missing [ ouch ! ] or catching some dust with one of our eyes ), yet these are each *extremely* early developments, far, far before "Concestor 1"…

Tiny worms ( the size of a grain of rice ) lived as Dawkins' “Concestor 26” on the seafloors about 555 million years ago consuming organic matter and evolving to become our digestive tract:
      A mouth ( to chew up stuff );
      The throat, where we swallow our food ( and coincidentally where we breathe & speak! );
      A tube that carries food down to our stomach, where the digestion is done;
      Another tube continues on down ( and around ) from our stomach, absorbing the digested food;
      As it reaches the end of that tube, it is passed out as poop, possible as food for other creatures…

With the Cambrian explosion about 540 million years ago, fish & other creatures developed fins & eyes a very, very long time before they left the ocean to come ashore about 375 million years ago…

A scientific publication in Feb, 2024 shared that our distant cousins ( sea lampreys ) use a very similar genetic toolkit to build our hindbrains… view the article here? Many details are embedded, but the Hox genes, which orchestrate the structuring & subdividing of our brains also regulate this process in the sea lamprey—quite a find!

Looking further back into the ancient history of all life on Earth, the idea of "Last Universal Common Ancestor" LUCA was first used in the 1990s to propose a theory of universal common descent through an evolutionary process, shared by Charles Darwin's 1859 “On the Origin of Species” book… while there's zero evidence of this ( not preservable ) it does seem to be the root!

My thought ( above ) on how we as a species learned to walk upright ( note 3d ) on two legs vs. our 4-legged ancestral apes is from that skull of a small 10-million-year-old ape ( named "Rudapithecus Hungaricus" ) that had been found & documented in 1985; a more recent complete skeleton was also found near an old mining town in Rudabánya, Hungary, Central Europe, which is known for its picturesque turquoise-blue quarry water. The find shared the pelvic structure, a rare skeletal event, that led to more & better insight into the ancestors of African apes and humans which had been assessed as walking on two legs 6 or 7 million years ago ( note 3e )

These threads ( and many other attributes ) are shared in an interesting documentary video, "Your Inner Fish" by one of the PBS stations in the US of A on April 9, 2014 ( note 3c ), which shares the idea that we evolved from that little fish that climbed up out of the water as well as in Jeff Lewis' evolution thoughts…

While this "story of us" began an enormously long time ago ( by our human standards ), many of the ancient activities & events have been understood and validated by our today's scientists & their predecessors… the intervening years ( prior to the arrival of Dawkins' "Concestor 1," above ) are filled with simply incredible things:

as well as many, many others…

Today's knowledge of our Universe ( note 4a ) suggests that a "Big Bang" ( aka a Singularity, note 4b ) created all of the initial basic matter 13.77 billion years ago A model of the expanding universe opening up from the viewer's left, facing the viewer in a 3/4 pose. ( click to view full-size )… The image visually represents the Evolution of our Universe—the far left depicts the earliest moment that can be probed, when a period of "inflation" produced a burst of exponential growth in the Universe; size is depicted by the vertical extent of the grid in this graphic

For the next several billion years, expansion gradually slowed down ( all matter pulled on itself via gravity ) but the expansion began to speed up again as the repulsive effects of dark energy have come to dominate the expansion. The afterglow light in the image was emitted about 375,000 years after the inflation ended and has traversed the Universe largely unimpeded since then; the conditions of earlier times are imprinted on this light—it also forms a backlight for later developments

Although this can only be an estimate ( with nothing but scientific guesses! ) it may all simply evaporate with the expansion of normal & dark matter at the very end of time!

Our star, the Sun, lives on the Orion Arm of our Milky Way galaxy & self-ignited ( note 5 ) about 4.6 billion years ago, subsequently creating our planet and others…

The Earth, which, with all of it's water after cooling ~3.8 billion years ago allowed our ancient life forms ( note 6 ) to begin about 3.5 billion years ago… The stromatolites on the ocean coasts started to increase the oxygen back then ( view the WiKi page & the Biospheres chart? ) allowing life to begin on land when enough oxygen was generated for creatures to come out of the sea as ozone had arrived ~600 million years ago, protecting life from harmful wavelengths of UV radiation. There has been damage to the layer by human use of CFCs for refrigerators, air conditioners, and aerosol sprays, corrected today

Our evolution into the Homo Sapiens species ( note 9 ) started with the beginnings of our improved brains ~2.3 million years ago… as our ancient ancestors Homo Habilis began appearing ( as Australopithecines faded away, living alongside them in Africa ) they increased their brains' capacity… click ( twice ) on any species shown here for details?

Our Cerebral Cortex had already been expanding for quite some time but the arrival of “Broca's area” was the key to better communication, improving human speech from "grunt-grunt-grunt" to "Hey, get me that beer?" ( yes, they likely had something like Mead back then! ) as well as pretty much everything that existed for them

A little further back in time, an ancient tiny Australopithecine skeleton from 3+million years ago was discovered in the Great Rift Valley of East Africa and was named as “Lucy” ( note 12a ); she is tagged here as a great-great-…grandchild of Gigi—also, see the older find, above? In November of 1974, anthropologist Donald Johanson had caught a glint of a white fossilized bone out of the corner of his eye at Hadar, Ethiopia, recognizing it as this hominin, becoming famous; Richard & Mary Leakey have also done significant work in this region

Ongoing research into “whom we might have been” recently found a connection of our Homo Sapiens species into our historical beginnings that is far, far earlier than all had thought! The earliest confirmed footprints are now dated back to around 313,600 years ago, published November 10th, 2022
[quote] after collecting samples from the various levels [in the dig], & another two [taken] later to compare the first results, the age of the fossil remains was established & points to the Middle Pleistocene, a crucial moment between different climatic stages: between a warm period, MIS 9 ( 360,000-300,000 years ago ), in transition to MIS 8 ( 300,000-240,000 years ago ), in which a major glaciation took place. The age is thus specified at 295,800 years, with a margin of error of 17,800 years, according to the data collected from the four samples of sedimentary levels in the cliffs of El Asperillo where the site was found, initially 87 footprints, which now has a record of more than 300 footprints, of which 10% are considered well-preserved […]

Previously, a research-based discovery of our ( then ) earliest ancestors had pushed the date back by 60,000 years from what was then thought as 195,000 years ago ( 233k+/-22k years ); this work was done in the Omo Kibish Formation, where stratigraphic descriptions & sampling were carried out during two field seasons in 2017 & 2018

A recent discovery of another ancestral branch, preliminarily named as “Homo naledi” ( another view ) was a group
that lived in South Africa between 335,000 and 241,000 years ago at the same time as early Homo Sapiens; an excellent Origins website is provided for these & other African ancestors by the team at the WI University! The remains of 15 individuals were found in the Dinaledi Chamber of the Rising Star Cave system in South Africa, making it one of the largest single fossil hominid caches known… Their remains appear to show that they may have held burial beliefs; a Netflix documentary review does shares some critical info as science has not yet settled the issue…

The people known as "The Neanderthals," ( pronounced "NeanderTals" ) were 1st discovered in 1856 in a valley of that name near Düsseldorf, Germany… see note 12b and also the info for The Denisovans?

They evolved from a common ancestor to us about ½ a million years ago, perhaps the Homo heidelbergensis, the Homo antecessor or even another ancient species—research continues as of this writing. They did live in Europe since around 400,000 years ago, with no apparent religious tokens or perspectives; they were a highly-thoughtful race of people, with far larger brains than ours.

While they were still around ~40,000 years ago ( there is fossil evidence ), their final extinction may have arrived near to that time; no-one really knows why or how, just that they are gone, possibly killed of disease or as they cross-bred with us…

The multiple threads of "who was related to whom" ( or Biblically, “who begat whom” ) during the distant past years continue to be highly debated, with no apparent prayers or religious events occurring for any of them…
A related thought is the almost-disastrous human species event that occurred about 75,000 years ago: a super-volcano ( note 10 ) in present-day Lake Toba ( which is in Sumatra, Indonesia ) blew itself to smithereens, bringing the active pool of human-mating pairs down to less than 1,000 couples… we were almost completely wiped out!

The people that became "us" evolved from those cave-dwellers, breaking stones into tools & moving away from the Rift Valley ( perhaps 1.5 million years ago ), where the use & control of fire to cook their hunted meats all started…

A thread of our ancient artworks was the discovery of a pair of 2-inch rock slivers by Christopher Henshilwood's team in the Blombos caves ( 180 miles east of Cape Town, Africa ) in 1999/2000. The 2 red-ochre stones each have etched symbolic patterns & are from 77,000 years ago, currently reported by archaeologists as the oldest works of art in the world. The rock art is twice as old as the Stone Age cave paintings ( see below? ), clearly demonstrating that humans living at this time possessed modern patterns of thought

Another is the cave paintings, a part of the ancient works of art ( notes 11 & 12c ), found in Southern France & in other places ( with no actual religious specificity, although they are clearly cultural in nature ) that date back roughly 40,000 years ago ( scientific analysis of the art ); they were often "signed" by stenciling the hand of the author, exactly like yours & mine! One of these males ( another great-great-…-grandchild of Gigi's ) was one of our individual GGG-Grandfathers, perhaps 2,500 generations back

Another fascinating cultural discovery was the earliest known representation of the hand-held-sized female “Venus figurines” around 29,000 years ago—most commonly found in a) the Gravettian area of the French Upper Périgordian, b) the Czech Pavlovian, & c) the West Russian Kostenkian. The figurines each include a downturned head with no face, thin arms which end at ( or cross over at ) the breasts, voluminous breasts & buttocks, a prominent abdomen ( interpreted as pregnancy ), tiny & bent legs, and pegged ( or unnaturally short ) feet. They vary in proportion, and it is still debated if this is due to material choice or if they were intentional design choices; it is suggested that the Venuses from Eastern European have an emphasis on breasts & stomach, whereas the Western European ones emphasize hips & thighs

The people described above spread out from Africa across Europe ( & around the planet ) during the Stone Age:
   > Evolving from cave-dwelling hunters to a life of wandering gatherers
   > Knapping flint rocks & obsidian for skinning their catches and kills—the earliest ones
         ( see additional reported views here and here? )
       were found in a 2011 dig in Kenya, Africa, and are aged to about 3.3 million years ago;
       they were used for cutting & grinding antlers & bones into sharp tools to sew and assist with our lives
   > Managing our fires
   > Poking those saber-tooth tigers and cave bears ( and their ilk ) in the eye…
They did survive, becoming us…

During the Upper Paleolithic around 30,000 years ago, the “Last Glacial Maximum” occurred, allowing the glaciers to start shrinking to free up our existence, rock-painting traditions began in Bhimbetka, India ( which presently is the densest-known concentration of rock art ) where about 800 rock shelters contained paintings & the earliest ovens were found—our civilization began

Our survival of the Quaternary Ice Ages ( 2.5 million years ago ) was simply the key to our roots…

The prior Ice Age ( of many ) ended around 18,000 years ago, bringing the start of the Neolithic Age to us about 12,000 years ago & creating the first “Agricultural Revolution" ( note 13a ). This was where today's world of farming & animal husbandry ( with no apparent plan or guidance, especially not from some "Supreme Being" guidance ) began about 11,500 years ago in the "Fertile Crescent" ( note 13b ), an ancient region between the Tigris & Euphrates rivers in Iraq and in parts of Kuwait, Syria & Turkey

Cultural ideas ( Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism & other religious entities ) begin to appear in this part of the world. The Christianic concept of a "Fertile Crescent" is one of the first threads to appear in the chapter of Genesis, the 1st of the 80 chapters in King James' bible ( see the WiKi page? ), created in 1604 from an earlier version in the 1500’s and in others today: "God had planted a Garden in the East, in Eden"…

Biblical history is unavoidably odd… it's surrounded by 450 earlier English translations, most of which ( IMHO ) were actually created by handfuls of priests who, in candle-lit basements selected certain scrolls from the hundreds of ancient scrolls, ignoring others such as The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, a critical untold story!!

Near to what was Eden is a religious place that is named "Göbekli Tepe" ( note 13c ) with circles of massive T-shaped stone pillars, which are today the world's oldest known megaliths; they are scientifically dated to 11,300 years ago. Stonehenge ( close to where I was born ) was built around 5,000 years ago, and there are nearby Mesolithic astronomical sites that date back to 10,000 years ago. A written collection of Hindu religious texts & hymns also began in India around 2,800 years ago

Today, a third of all of the world's people ( ~3+ billion ) are Christian ( note 13d ), especially those that live in & around Rome, Italy—view a discussion of the origins of the Biblical 10 Commandments ( note 13e ); a quarter are Islamic, “submission to the will of God”; 16% are Atheists ( where I am counted ) and 15% follow Hinduism… many other smaller groups fill the remaining 10% or so

Moving on from my historical religiosity, our species grew & spread across the world through the Neolithic Ages

The last ice-age ended with the Younger Dryas around 11,700 years ago, where the mile-high ice started to melt into the oceans, deepening them & making coastlines around the world move back onto land; people at that time lived in small groups, fishing for food at the beaches and had to move inland

This continued for several thousand years until the ancient Sumerian people of Mesopotamia ( another view ) started to appear around 4,500 BC, building cities—they are also considered to be the world's 1st actual civilization… With several forms of religion ( yet with no apparent guidance from an actually physical religious-entity despite many Biblical reports ) they also built cities, created a written language, made sophisticated art, and are known for advancements in agriculture, astronomy, law, mathematics, and architecture

Today, the place is located in the countries of Iraq, Kuwait, & Syria

A YouTube podcast “The Sumerians - Fall of the First Cities” by Paul Cooper ( who has many podcasts ) is worth 2+hours!

The Bronze Age began ~5,000 years ago with our ancestors melting copper & tin together ( note 14 )
These people also found a better way ( with no apparent religious guidance ) to move their crops & such around more easily: using the wheel ( note 14d )… this facilitated the arrival of so many of our things!

They spent several wheel-less millennia before this as they farmed… the earliest wheels were cut-down trees that the builders of Stonehenge ( above? ) and of the Egyptian Pyramids were each used for “rolling” the huge stones

The Bronze Age ended in 1,200BC ( quite precisely 3,225 years ago as of this 2025 writing ), transitioning to the Iron age from an onslaught of drought, famines, earthquakes & volcanoes ( note 14b ), allowing the Iron Age to begin…

Our ancestral blacksmiths went on to learn how to crank up their furnaces, small chimneys made of clay ( using charcoal and pumping air into the fire ) to smelt Iron & Steel ( note 15 ), facilitating the slaughter of people across the world by our armored leaders & the like who walked, marched and rode huge war-horses wielding their swords

Many large battles were also fought with these weapons in England after 490AD; see another view?

Today's transportation on trains, boats, planes, cars, our bicycles & pushing our kids around in their perambulators would not exist without the discoveries of the wheel & of Iron/Steel, nor would our skyscrapers, bridges, those rocket ships & space-based places and other monumental structures that are also part of our future exist at all

Coming forwards a little, an incredibly important invention for the human race occurred in the late 4th millennium BC, around 5,500 years ago: Sumerian writing ( note 16 ) appeared

They made historical and sales records, pieces of literature ( both in the form of poetic epics and stories ) as well as prayers and laws; created with triangular or wedge-shaped reeds onto moist 3+inch clay tablets which were dried and saved; see the WiKi page for details and watch this interesting YouTube video

Thoughts became more permanent than with stories told around our fireplaces, and we also wouldn't be typing out stories like this one, nor planning how to best design & deploy our recent journeys to the Moon without writing!!

The fabulous & famous Roman Empire began around 2,750 years ago, lasting until their downfall in 480AD

The Roman troops ( each of whom were highly skilled in many areas ) were organized into one of the many Roman Legions that plundered, raped and captured people as slaves as the Empire expanded across Europe. I do believe that I may have an ancestral DNA connection back to a Roman ( with several pages of data ), “Magnus Maximus Clemens Macsen ap Wledig, of the Western Roman Empire” whom I had found in my tree research; his details are also here on a WiKi page. As well as the Roman link, I am also very likely to be from one of the many children of Genghis Khan… each of which are ( as yet! ) unproved but very possible!

The Romans built Rome, Constantinople & other cities, creating hundreds of long, straight and permanent Roman stone roads ( some of which can still be seen & are in use ), totaling around 250,000 miles, as well as the 73-mile-long Hadrian's Wall ( just to the south of the English border with Scotland ) which was built "to keep the Northern barbarians away"

Roman builders determined how to use aqueducts to bring fresh water from the mountains to their villas, to bathe & to drink, and how to make slaves do all of the work that was needed for the rich & beautiful senate leaders

The Roman Empire also caused a massive religious event that changed the world for us 2,000+years ago, where their political slaughter of "Jesus of Bethlehem" by the governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, created the start of the Christian religious faith. The story has him hung on a cross ( for unproven crimes against the state ) with a “crown of thorns” and a Roman sword “thrust into his side” at the top of the Golgotha ( Calvary ) hill, which is outside of the city walls of Jerusalem to die publicly & painfully to send a message of their power…

While this event may perhaps be a somewhat arguable “fact,” it's enthusiastically supported around the world by today's Christian believers for His ( apparent ) Resurrection on our annual Easter Sunday… The annual celebration of His birth ( that was perhaps 30 years earlier ) on what today is known as our Christmas Day is also a part of today's King James' bible, where the event is actively reported in the Biblical Chapters of Matthew, Mark, Luke & John, each slightly different

Moving away from religion again & back to my ancestral data, perhaps the most remarkable discovery in my Family Tree research was a direct ancestral link to my 27th paternal Great-Grandfather, William I ( born in October, 1024 in Beauclerc, northern France; see note 17 ). He was known as the Duke of Normandy, later becoming the 1st Norman King of England by using his sword & his large army in the Battle of Hastings…

The battle was on Senlac Hill just seven miles NW of Hastings, Sussex in England on Saturday, October 14th in 1066; it was captured later in the Bayeux Tapestry. King Harold II of England ( the last Anglo-Saxon King ) was killed by Williams' Norman forces at the end of the bloody, all-day battle, shot in the eye with an arrow, according to legend; his forces were also destroyed

As a related note, another direct ancestral link to me was found: my 50th paternal Great-Grandfather, Dag DagsSon; a detailed historical linkage ( extracted from my family tree ) is shared by the PDF

For both of these, there's actual genetic history here, making me ( theoretically ) a battle-capable warrior!

Some of the direct ancestors in my tree data did live in England during both the artistic period of the English Renaissance from the late 15th century & before the working man's Industrial Revolution that began 200+years before my birth. They were farmers in Dorset, 150 miles south of Birmingham… that city became the 3rd largest in the country at that time. None of them were apparently inventors, nor were they apparently famous!

A more famous fellow ( who sadly has not yet been ascertained as one of my direct ancestors ) is James Clerk Maxwell ( note 18 ) who was the Scottish scientist that discovered electromagnetic radiation in 1862, the theory that brought together electricity, magnetism & light as manifestations of the same phenomenon… an interesting coincidence is that this came to light just 100 years before 1962, my 7th birthday!

Another extremely interesting Norwegian chap ( also sadly is not my ancestor & is amazingly un-famous! ) Victor Moritz Goldschmidt was the mineralogist in the early 1900's who became the founder of modern geochemistry & crystal chemistry. He was also the developer of the invaluable Classification of Elements, which provides the basis for modern research on the geochemical distribution of the elements, and his subsequent compilation of data on cosmic abundances was the key to later theories on element synthesis in stars & supernovae. His work drives almost every aspect of today's technical, mechanical & industrial world

These two ( and many others scientists, both famous & less-so ) brought us the era of modern physics, laying the foundation for such delights as Einstein's special relativity theory and Dirac & Schrödinger's view of quantum mechanics, each of which are essential in today's world of computing & coding, as well as all those trains/boats/planes/cars & our bicycles that are described above

Considering the many things I've captured so far, “Time” is the single thing ( note 19a ) that flows from the past to today in my story. Two contrasting viewpoints on time share that ( 1 ) time is "a part of the fundamental structure of the universe" ( my CLS "tick-tock" clocks ) and ( 2 ) that time ( space-time, perhaps? ) differs in that "time is neither an event nor a thing, and is thus not itself measurable, nor can it be traveled"

Temporal measurement has preoccupied scientists & technologists since centuries past, making it the prime motivator of navigation, astronomy & the like. Periodic events & any periodic motions serve as standards for units of time; examples include the motion of the Sun across the sky ( from East to West, anywhere on the Earth aside from being near to the poles ), the phases of our Moon ( which were used by the Babylonians to create our 7-day week—scroll down to "Ivar Kristvik" ), the swing of a pendulum, the beat of a heart, etc

Today's computers are continually shrinking & are presently nearing the physical limit of using Picoseconds
( 1 trillionth of a second ) in their processing. Today's international standard unit of our time is that 1 second is defined by measuring the electronic transition frequency of cesium atoms, pretty precisely!

To close, although I've experienced some agonizing & extremely bad days during my life, I am blessed with:
   my parents ( now R.I.P. ) who each helped start up my life & my paternal grandparents;
   my extensive learning from a dozen years at school, several more in the British Army & 30+years of working;
   my 1998 brain tumor, which still remains good (!) and my sad Army incident;
   my brothers & my many friends ( past, present & R.I.P. ) around the world whom each bring me great memories;
   my invaluable sons, Stu who happily married Jill in October, 2008 & Alex, who I sadly lost in 2002, as well as
   my beloved wife & her family—her 2 children & their spouses have these 4 grandkids…
   I was renamed in November, 2014 as "Grampy Don" by my grandson, Max … *such* a delight!!

*EACH* of these things have brought me to where I am today, an aging & quite contented grandfather,
   living happily in the Southern United States!

One final note for the end of Ms. Gigi's very, very long family branch of my tree: I've caught & tracked a number of things about myself, along with some future threads as well as my Bio page… Enjoy!

You can also visit my dynamic tree or my Ancestry tree, both of which hold virtual duplicates of my current local tree data…   Note: Ancestry requires you to sign in; eMail me if you need help?

Feel free to share your thoughts, comments or criticisms etc via eMail? Cheers!

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Created with RootsMagic Genealogy Software in April, 2016 & last updated in March, 2026
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