I was thinking a while back about the entirety of human history. Not to say all of the events in it, but the history itself. Suddenly it struck me that though things like the Civil War seemed to be a while ago, they really were not long ago at all. When my parents were kids they remember that there were still veterans around from the war. Weird, but still.
I started to think that if you took the oldest person alive today, and went back to their birth, and took the oldest person at that time at went likewise back, we are very close to periods that seem absurdly far away. For example we are only twenty or so people from the time of Christ. Perhaps forty people lay between us and the time of the construction of the great pyramids in Egypt. Only around 100 people can link our time to the dawn of civilization itself. That’s not many at all. By the time we die, some of us will have lives approximately one percent of all of civilized history.
This kind of freaks me out.
The oldest person in the world has died at 116. The new oldest person is also 116.
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I am so tripped out. Totally messin’ with my dome.
There is an interesting alternate way of looking at this. Please type in How many ancestors? Rich Holmes. The search list will show the short article to click on. I will most likely be the No. 2 listing.
There’s actually a Wikipedia article on last surviving veterans. It looks like less than 10 Civil War vets lived to see the 1950s. Amazingly, four Revolutionary War veterans lived to see the Civil War. So, yeah, at least on paper, there could be alive today a Baby Boomer who knew a Civil War veteran who knew a Revolutionary War veteran who served under General Washing-TON. Amazing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Surviving_Veteran
when i was a kid, i knew a woman in our neighborhood who was collecting veterans benefits from the government because her husband had died from complications of yellow fever he contracted during the spanish-american war. turns out she was 16 years old and he was 41 when they married in the 1920′s.
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