Excerpt

In the middle of the twentieth century, our understanding of the past underwent a quiet revolution whose full implications have yet to be integrated into modern historical scholarship. At the heart of the revolution were new chronometric techniques, new ways of dating past events. For the first time, these techniques allowed the construction of reliable chronologies extending back before the first written documents, before even the appearance of the first humans, back to the early days of our planet and even to the birth of the Universe as a whole. This expanded timeline provided the foundation for the “Single Historical Continuum” of my title. This chapter describes the chronometric revolution and the creation of a single historical continuum. It then discusses some of the implications of these changes for our understanding of “history.” I am a historian by training, so that, despite an enduring amateur interest in the sciences, my account of the chronometric revolution reflects the somewhat intuitive pattern-seeking methodologies of my discipline, rather than the often more rigorous, and more mathematical methods of the natural sciences. I will argue that the chronometric revolution requires a fundamental rethinking of what we understand by “history.”

History Before the Chronometric Revolution

Historical scholarship has traditionally been confined to the study of human societies. There were many reasons for this bias. One that is often ignored is the technical fact that until very recently the only way to reliably date past events or objects was by using written documents generated by our human ancestors. Though often taken for granted by historians, good timelines are fundamental to historical scholarship because without them events cannot be ranked chronologically, and there can be no serious discussion of sequence or causality. History fades into myth. So the use of written records to create reliable timelines was fundamental to historical scholarship. Yet it also limited what historians could study, for it meant that good timelines were available only for the history of literate human societies. The result? History as a serious scholarly discipline came to mean human history rather than the study of the past as a whole.

Reliance on written records set chronological as well as topical limits. “History cannot discuss the origin of society,” wrote Ranke in the 1860s, “for the art of writing, which is the basis of historical knowledge, is a comparatively late invention. . . . The province of History is limited by the means at her command, and the historian would be over-bold who should venture to unveil the mystery of the primeval world, the relation of mankind to God and nature.” When pushed to their limits, written records could take scholars back, at most, 5,000 years, for that was when writing first appeared. Beyond this chronological barrier, there could be no serious history. Of course, lack of chronological evidence did not prevent speculation. Christian tradition argued on the basis of biblical genealogies that God had created the earth about 6,000 years ago. Some traditions imagined even older Universes. But none of these chronologies could claim the objectivity, the precision, or the fixity of those based on written records.

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