In Hyde's recent Over/Under series of interview posts, David left the question "If you could be transported back in history to a period of time, when would it be and why?" for the next participant, who happened to be Elena Rossi. She gave a great answer, and then David and Hyde answered the same question too on their blogs, so I thought I'd chime in with my two cents as well.
If I could be transported back in history to a period of time, when would it be and why?
If I had a time machine, this thing would get a lot of use, because there are so many historic periods I'd want to visit; I'd go see Elvis live on stage, and the Beatles. I'd visit Germany before it was bombed to pieces during the second world war. I'd go back 2000 years and visit ancient Rome, and the region I grew up in, when it was under Roman rule. Then go back another 2000 years and see the Egyptian pyramids when they were still shiny and new. Woolly Mammoths were also still alive 4000 years ago, so I'd go and see them, too. And why not travel back a full 100 million years to see some dinosaurs?
But here's what I would really love to do.
I'd love to go back maybe 5 million years, to a time when humans were still pretty much apes living in trees. And then jump forward in time in increments of two or three hundred thousand years, and watch the evolution of humans take shape.
We know a lot about our evolution from the fossil record, but a lot of it is still unknown. When did we shed our fur? When did we start walking upright? When did we first start to use language? What did the different human species that once existed look like, and how do they compare to us? When did humans first arrive in Europe? When did different skin, hair and eye colours evolve?
All these are questions that we have a somewhat decent understanding of, but I think it would be really interesting to witness all this in person and not just see reconstructions of what humans might have looked like 2 million years ago in a museum.
There was also a brief period, around 40.000 years ago, when modern humans and Neanderthals lived in Europe at the same time. I find that endlessly fascinating. Could you tell them apart? If you saw a group of humans then, would you have been able to definitively say which species you were looking at? I once read that while Neanderthals looked different than humans, they probably didn't look any more different than modern human ethnicities look different from each other anyway. So chances are, both groups would look both strange and familiar at the same time.
That's what I would love to do. Take a tour through the evolution of humanity, to see where we came from, how we got to where (and what) we are today and to see our closest relatives who aren't around anymore. I think that would keep me busy for a long time to come.
It's probably for the best though that I don't have a time machine, because in every time period other than the modern age, meaning the last two or three hundred years, I would very likely be dead within days, if not hours after arriving, because I have absolutely zero survival skills. I would either be taken out by wildlife (stomped on by a Mammoth, eaten by a T-Rex) or be identified as a stranger by the local population and processed accordingly (thrown to the lions in the Coliseum, clubbed to death by a gang of Neanderthals) or I would simply catch some weird disease or parasite (if I made the mistake of eating or drinking something there) that my immune system had no idea what to do with and wither away.
But one can dream.