Who Ate The First Oyster? The Extraordinary People Behind The Greatest Firsts In History
Nils began his career as marketing director for a major book publisher. He has since edited the authors’ manuscripts for more than 20 published books, written more than 200 book reviews, served as publisher of several million-plus circulation national magazines, created the official yearbooks for teams in Major League Baseball, the National Football League, National Basketball Association and National Hockey League, and “retired” as president of a successful telecommunications company.
Among the hundreds of books I have reviewed for this column over the years were a dozen or so selected just because they have been on offbeat, quirky subjects with—as in this month’s case—titles that instantly grabbed my attention. And they often share the feature of not having to be read from first page to last in proper sequence. Instead, as is true of the book reviewed here, you can turn to any chapter, spend about 15 minutes in absolute fascination … and then turn to another chapter anywhere else in the book when you have time.
One thing is certain: You will learn a great deal about the history of mankind from these 17 chapters, each averaging about a dozen pages, that cover a period from three million years ago to 1,000 years ago. Author Cody Cassidy’s impressive research for this book includes conversations with the world’s leading archeologists, scientists and scholars, and he combines these with his own delightfully light writing style.
Among the chapter headings whose answers the author seeks to resolve, in addition to the one in the book’s title, are:
• Who Invented Inventions?
• Who Invented Clothing?
• Who Performed the First Surgery?
• Who Was the Murderer in the First Murder Mystery?
• Who Told the First Joke We Know?
• Who Discovered Soap?
• Who Drank the First Beer?
• Who Painted the World’s First Masterpiece?
… and eight more.
To be fair, the author does not claim to identify the specific individual responsible for accomplishing any of these achievements. But I found that of no importance because the treasure trove of information one learns in the description of each event—as he sets the context of that period in human history—is so thoroughly convincing that the man or woman he names as the answer to that chapter’s question becomes a satisfactory stand-in.
The following very brief excerpt from the chapter, “Who Invented Inventions?” offers just a taste of what you will find in these pages. For lack of space here I am including only a few sentences from a text that covers five pages in the book—missing text is indicated by ellipses … but my purpose is to demonstrate the wealth of information and wonderful writing style that awaits you in this book:
“Who was the first inventor?
“I’ll call her Ma, because she was a young mother who, like all inventors, had a problem.
“Ma was born approximately 3 million years ago and belonged to an ancient ancestor species of ours called Australopithecus. She was born in Africa, perhaps Eastern Africa, where archeologists have discovered a concentration of australopithecine fossils, including the famous ‘Lucy’ found in 1974. Three million years ago is approximately halfway from the time our species first split from the chimpanzee and bonobo line to the modern day … Ma represents a middle ground between Homo sapiens and chimpanzees.
“She stood almost four feet tall, weighed a lithe sixty-five pounds, and other than on her hairless face she was covered in thick dark fur. Ma ate more meat than a modern chimp does, but she scavenged it rather than killed it. Ma supplemented her meals with roots, tubers, nuts and fruits. In many respects, a modern observer might mistake her for a remarkably well-balanced, walking chimp, save for her peculiar, dexterous and inventive use of rocks. To aid her work scavenging carcasses, Ma sharpened stones to cut into bones for marrow, which allowed her to eat meat scavengers couldn’t access.
“Ma was a clever ape, but to many of Africa’s big cats she was still lunch …
“Ma’s raw diet meant she would have had to spend nearly her entire day gathering food and eating it while dodging eagles and panthers, clambering up and down trees, and roaming across open ground looking for carcasses and fruit.
“All of which would have become far more difficult when, in her early teens, Ma gave birth to a noisy, helpless, immobile infant.
“Homo sapiens infants are an evolutionary curiosity. Most mammalian babies are born ready to walk, trot, or at least hold on to their moms. The reason is blindingly obvious: Every day a baby spends unable to keep up is life threatening for both mother and child. A capuchin monkey’s baby can grip its mother’s fur almost immediately, while the bigger-brained chimpanzee’s mother has to carry her newborn, but only for its first two months. Homo sapiens babies, on the other hand, spend more than a year in almost complete helplessness, unable to walk, crawl, or even support their own body weight. While this would seem an evolutionary disaster, it is the downside to what is perhaps our greatest strength: oversize brains. Our extended weakened state is partially explained by the time required to develop trillions of synaptic connections within our brain. In all primates, an evolutionary trade-off occurs between larger brains and infant mortality, and each species has arrived at its own equilibrium …
“The switch to bipedalism (walking upright) nearly 3 million years ago would have placed mothers and their newborn in a dangerous position … upright walking requires narrow hips, which would have narrowed the birth canal and necessitated smaller-headed babies. But instead of hominin heads shrinking, and hominin babies becoming more capable, the exact opposite occurred. Head size increased and babies became even weaker …
“The evolutionary explanation for the paradox is that hominin mothers like Ma birthed their babies earlier in their gestation. Essentially, Ma’s baby was born two or three months premature, before its head could outgrow the exit … If Homo sapiens birthed babies at the same development stage as chimpanzees, pregnancy would last twenty months.”
In order for her species to survive, this mother would have to find a way to get food for herself and her helpless baby without leaving the child vulnerable to predators. How she solves it with the” world’s first invention” is just one example of the author’s combination of creative curiosity, intense research, convincing logic and compelling narrative that easily forgives the impossibility of pinpointing the actual specific individuals over millions and thousands of years whose names would answer the questions asked in the chapters’ titles. An extraordinarily informative and entertaining book.
