The third of my guest blogs on 49 Writers, No Moose in June —
I’ve stopped worrying about it, though. Here’s why. I’ve read a lot of history, and somewhere along the line I came to believe that we just aren’t all that different from our ancestors.
Take Eratosthenes. He’s the guy who figured out in 300 BC not only that the earth was round, he also calculated its diameter. Yes, that would be 1,900 years before the Catholic Church put Galileo under house arrest for saying the same thing. All Eratosthenes had were his eyes, his feet and a stick, but he could still do the math.
There’s a quote I like from Robert Heinlein’s Lazarus Long, as follows:
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics
is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman
who has learned to wear shoes, bathe,
and not make messes in the house.
In my historical novel, my characters are going to spend some time working on a gothic cathedral. I’ve been to Chartres twice myself. Took ‘em 66 years to build it, starting in 1210, and it hasn’t fallen down yet. That was 800 years ago, centuries before rivet guns. But they could still do the math.
But they will be fully human.