…and this is a 
The new geo-historical curriculum
Category: Humor
Posted on: January 1, 2007 12:39 PM, by PZ Myers
We've got conflicting chronologies: a young earth history that is virtually all relatively recent human history, and a scientifically accurate one that encompasses 4.5 billion years of geological and biological change. How to reconcile them? Well, if we just divide everything in geology and biology by about a million and splice it together with modern history, we get this vastly entertaining timeline. Here's a sample:
- A.D. 1066: William the Conqueror invades England by walking through northern France.
- A.D. 1215: Mega Fauna force King John to sign Magna Carta
- A.D. 1304: Plate armor introduced ; Velociraptor hunted to extinction.
- A.D. 1324 T.Rex becomes most popular Mongol Barbecue item after Golden Horde discovers gunpowder.
- A.D. 1384: Dante describes Medieval Warm period in Inferno, his account of a field trip to the core-mantle boundary.
- A.D. 1444: Flowering plants appear; War of the Roses commences.
- A.D. 1484: Leonardo da Vinci designs Archaeopteryx.
- A.D. 1492: Panama's rise from sea thwarts Columbus's discovery of Japan.
- A.D. 1522: Sneak asteroid attack by Hernan Cortez smashes Aztec Empire
My namesake is also in it, and there are some interesting echoes in there.
- A.D. 70: Paul, formerly Saul the Tarsier, develops opposable thumb and writes Epistle to the Cephalopods.
But of course! That's the first thing he would do.
It all makes so much sense—and think of the money the schools could save by combining earth science and history into one class!
Comments
That just made my rather bleak and depressing day (Back to work after a long holiday break). Now I will be chuckling all day, thanks.
Posted by: DuWayne | January 1, 2007 12:51 PM
An occassional zinger in there:
"* 1704 B.C.: Charshumash the Hittite bitten by first vertebrate; lawyers emerge from slime."
Posted by: Karl | January 1, 2007 1:14 PM
"Ezekiel see de pterodactyl 'way up in de middle ob de air.'" *Snigger* I always hated that hymn.
Come to think of it, why hasn't the Discovery Institute brought up the issue of how history is taught from a materialist/naturalist standpoint? The way history is taught today, one would think that economic, geographic, military, and political forces drove historical change, when in fact they can only cause microchanges within existing worldviews, not macrochanges from one paradigm (say, Victorian creationism) to another (say, Darwin's theory of evolution via natural selection). I say, it's time to give credit for the ToE where credit is due--to Jesus!
(Yeah, that'll go over well at the Disco-very Institute, but it isn't any more crazy than anything else they come up with.)
Posted by: Kristine | January 1, 2007 1:22 PM
These are great! Thanks PZ!
* A.D. 1444: Flowering plants appear; War of the Roses commences.
* A.D. 1588: Spanish Armada frustrated by continuing absence of English Channel.
* A.D. 1636: Earliest primates appear; Harvard founded.
* A.D. 1835: Charles Darwin devoured while attemping to measure the bill of the Galapagos giant finch
Posted by: Name: | January 1, 2007 2:01 PM
OT - zebrafish development new paper:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/12/061221073431.htm
Posted by: coturnix | January 1, 2007 2:16 PM
A.D. 70: Paul, formerly Saul the Tarsier, develops opposable thumb and writes Epistle to the Cephalopods.
AD 2007: I am about to discover how an iBook G4 copes with a mouthful of chardonnay spat out laughing at that.
Posted by: Peter McGrath | January 1, 2007 4:32 PM
Not new. Scroll to the third post at this site. And while you are at it, read the first one, too.
Posted by: David Marjanović | January 1, 2007 5:40 PM
Good fun, especially since I'm already slightly delirious from fever. (Yes, apparently I managed to kiss one girl too many again this year-end. Or perhaps the wrong girl. Whatever.)
They didn't get that far where I live, here they are plasmodial slime molds. Testable prediction: "the feeding stage takes the form of a giant amoeba" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slime_mold ).
Posted by: Torbjörn Larsson | January 1, 2007 5:45 PM
BTW, both PZ's and David's linked sites claim to have posted copyrighted material. Is this what is called "poetic license" or "deriving under influence"?
Posted by: Torbjörn Larsson | January 1, 2007 5:54 PM
Not New Indeed? , David, I am in fact the author of your "the third post at this site. " cite, which link contains is an uncredited repost of the Beta of the newer and hopefully better edition I posted on Adamant today. Whoever copied it ignored the copyright on the short version I published in Earth , and cut off my thanks to Caesare Emilliani for launching the Y6K meme at the 1996 AGU meeting
Russell Seitz
Posted by: Russell Seitz | January 1, 2007 6:04 PM
My personal favorite is
* A.D. 1754: Gibbons evolve and write The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
but the whole thing is very funny. Some of the juxtapositions between historical events and the superimposed geological or palaeontological events are just great.
(If you don't get that joke: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a real book written by the human historian Edward Gibbon, who isn't any more closely related to the ape genus of a similar name than any other human is.)
Posted by: Chris | January 1, 2007 6:17 PM
Thank you for the explanation.
The copyright at the site I mentioned is a routine disclaimer that applies to the DML posts; I never thought that Brian Grant guy was the actual author of the list he had copied without attribution. If you dislike that situation, contact Jeff Poling... I have no idea if the e-mail address mentioned here still works (I won't repeat it here because he already complains about spam).
As an aside, I do like "cover their shame with asbestos waders" better than "invent asbestos". :-}
Posted by: David Marjanović | January 1, 2007 7:25 PM
But are not asbestos waders evidence of a designer ? It is a manifest sign of almighty Hermes , or possibly the vulcanolgist's boutique at Holland & Holland.
Posted by: Russell Seitz | January 1, 2007 8:43 PM
Posted by: quork | January 1, 2007 9:20 PM
Posted by: quork | January 1, 2007 9:23 PM
This is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. I'm forwarding it to all my friends.
In exchange, I offer the following video:
someone's vacation video of a Hawaiian octopus. Best watched with sound on to get the benefit of the camerawoman's accent.
Loook, et's un octopos!: new catchphrase?
(Incidentally, searching for this video I found some truly disturbing octopus snuff films on Youtube. Did you know people eat live octopuses? And moreover, film it?)
Posted by: octopod | January 2, 2007 2:20 AM
The only problem with this parody is that it is rather less ridiculous than the ideas it is parodying. Which doesn't make it any less funny for a geo-nerd like me, of course :-)
Posted by: gengar | January 2, 2007 11:31 AM
Some of this humour reminds me of that contained in the Boomer Bible. (Has anyone else here read that?)
Posted by: Keith Douglas | January 3, 2007 1:06 PM
A.D. 1384: Dante describes Medieval Warm period in Inferno, his account of a field trip to the core-mantle boundary.
Actually, Dante wrote "The Inferno" sometime between 1308 and 1313, and died in 1321. Had he lived to 1384, he would have made it to the ripe old age of 119 million years. Pretty impressive!
Posted by: Jane E. Valentine | January 5, 2007 4:02 PM