The History of Our Place in the Universe

Dan Allosso

We’re all aware that one of the major changes precipitating the European Enlightenment was the realization that the Earth was not the center of the universe.  Through a series of discoveries, often fiercely opposed by protectors of the status quo, western cultures slowly embraced the idea that the universe is much bigger than we had previously believed.  But perhaps we ought to consider how recent many of these discoveries were, and how new information is coming to light almost daily that promises to remake our worldview all over again.

The shape of our Galaxy as deduced from star
counts by William Herschel; the solar system
was assumed near center, as first published
in the Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society in 1785.

To review some of the milestones on this journey of discovery, Renaissance astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus published his heliocentric theory, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, in 1543.  Copernicus replaced the Earth with the Sun as center of the solar system, but the universe was still a smallish place, extending only to Saturn, which had been known since prehistoric times.  The next planet, Uranus, was discovered by William Herschel in 1781, while his countrymen were fighting to retain their thirteen rebel colonies.  Neptune was discovered in 1846, based on mathematical predictions made by Urbain Le Verrier to explain observed perturbations in the Uranian orbit (this was also a dramatic confirmation of Newton’s theories of gravity).  But again, although our gaze had widened to include the solar system and the Milky Way, a background of more distant stars which had once been thought to all inhabit a single “sphere,” the universe was still pretty small and we were at its center.

Lascaux, Staffordshire, and the Serendipity of History

Heather Cox Richardson

On September 12, 1940, a dog named Robot ran away in southwestern France. Robot’s owner, the teenaged Marcel Ravidat, along with three of his buddies—Jacques Marsal, Georges Agnel, and Simon Coencas—set out to find him. They found not only the straying dog, but also 900 other animals, all painted on the walls and ceilings of a complex of caves near the village of Montignac.

These dramatic paintings of more than 2000 images in total—including abstract figures, animals, and one human figure—make up the Lascaux cave paintings. They are estimated to be more than 17,000 years old. They are the world’s most famous collection of Paleolithic art.

Extensive tourism to the site changed the environment of the caves and encouraged the growth of fungus and mold, forcing authorities to close the caves to protect them. But anyone interested can take an on-line tour of the caves at: http://www.lascaux.culture.fr/. One can only imagine the awe, and perhaps the growing fear, of the boys as they saw the giant horses, ibexes, and bison from thousands of years before thundering across the ceilings of the caves.

The serendipity of the discovery of the Lascaux caves reminds me of the 2009 discovery of the Staffordshire Hoard the largest collection of Anglo-Saxon gold ever found. In that case, Terry Herbert decided to try out his metal detector in a farm field close to his home. When it started to beep, he turned up not old beer cans, but more than 3,500 items of gold and silver, inset with precious stones, made in the 6th to 8th centuries C.E.

The treasures of Lascaux can help us to understand the first expressions of human culture, and those of Staffordshire the culture of Anglo-Saxon artistry and warfare. For a historian, though, their discovery also represents the extraordinary excitement of discovering something new and unexpected in the world around us.