Geek Soap Box

I am always amazed by the incredible array of information about the history of humanity that scientists, archaeologists, and other highly trained professionals are able to pull from simple artifacts and treasures long ago buried by the sands of time.  Learning about where we came from is so integral to the knowledge of who we are and where we are going on this crazy roller-coaster of a planet ride through the universe.

That being said, what if its all wrong?  What if all of the hard work, the speculation, the inferences, the piecing together of clues, was all a bunch of bunk?

While riding the train back and forth to/from our nation’s capital the past two days, I could not help but notice how many office parks scatter the landscape of this great country, and also how many of them are adorned with all sorts of decorative modern-art statuary.  Now, while this certainly seems to be the norm, I think I speak for most everyone when I say that nobody aside from perchance the originating artist really gives a damn about those ridiculous pieces of twisted metal and/or painted concrete.  Urban art is prolific, but is it truly representative of any sort of historical or cultural significance?  Isn’t it just a form of blight?

See where I’m going with this?

What if all of the “stuff” we dig out of the earth on every expedition is just the old-school counterpart to modern-day office sculpture?  What if it all was just some crap that the tribe reject did in his spare time, and all of the other hunter/gathers or later more-refined City-State residents laughed and mocked his work?  Wouldn’t be some sort of amazing meta-irony if, thousands of years later, those cultures are now recorded in the annals of history based upon those very crappy works of art they once rebuked because our experts believe them to be “representative samples?”  Maybe even Stonehenge or the Easter Island heads were once the focus of a civic group looking to end prehistoric blight!

How would we ever even know?