The History of Mankind: And Stories about Some Other People

By Tommie Shelby

Readers’ Comments

Never was so much condensed into so little by so few. Just one; Louis.

—Winston Churchill

Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn…about this book.

—Clark Gable

Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you…with books like these.

—Jesus Christ

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, in the wrong direction by reading this book.

—Lao Tzu

If at once you don’t succeed, try, try, try, try again; but not by writing another one of these books.

—Thomas H. Palmer

Humor is a funny thing. But not in this case. I want my money back.

—Jack Benny

I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse. If he refuses, make him read this book.

—Don Vito Corleone

This book made me laugh out loud, annoying my wife, my dog, mice in the walls, and others in my mausoleum.

—King Tut

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662450167

Book preview

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The History of Mankind

And Stories about Some Other People

Louis Kaplan

Copyright © 2021 Louis Kaplan

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2021

ISBN 978-1-6624-5015-0 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-5016-7 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

The History of Mankind

America’s Worst President

I Am an Atheist. Please Do Not Tell God.

Famous Women I Have Known

Running a Mexican Hotel, without Getting the Runs

Autobiographical Eulogies

The Last Chapter: Eighty-Five Is the New Eighty-Four

To Yolande,

without whose lovingly constructive criticism,

I would be totally uncriticized

If you hated my first book, Europe: The Historical, Hysterical History, this book will make you seethe.

This is the second in the series Learn and Laugh. More to come.

The History of Mankind

If the history of the earth was stretched to the top of the Empire State Building and a postage stamp were placed on top, the width of the postage stamp would represent the comparative time of life on earth.

That’s why this story is a quick read.

It is estimated that there are three million physicists in the world. All of them, except one, subscribe to the concept that energy, time, and space happened at once with the big bang theory.

The one exception, Irving says, The Big Bang was preceded by dinner and a movie.

Let there be light, said Thomas Edison, plagiarizing God.

The light was shimmering over a Paleozoic swamp 500,000,000 years ago (give or take, a few million years), when a slimy blob came out of the water and onto the land. No. It was not Donald Trump.

It was a mature conodont saying, Hey, air really is what it’s cracked up to be. It just needs some carbon emissions to give it that sriracha hot chili taste.

Everything went sweet and sour after that. Conodonts went extinct by the year 251, 500, 025 BCE—a terrible year for them and a very bad year for grapes. Conodonts gave up gills for lungs and, before going extinct, left a legacy of breathing things that ultimately evolved into apelike creatures, wandering around Africa on no more than two legs.

The evolution of getting to two-leg walking took only 240,000,000 years. It was a very good deal because it required less energy, which meant more oxygen to build a bigger and better brain, easier sightings of animals to hunt and eat, and faster running from animals that wanted to hunt and eat you. Easier, as well, to get away from the breath of two-legged friends after a brontosaurus cookout. This brought us up to about five million years ago. Larry King said he had liver spots older than that.

Four million years ago, fire was discovered. But cooking with it didn’t start until 500,000 years ago. We all thank General Electric and the Instant Pot.

Two and a half million years ago, the two-legged things expanded to Asia, making some stone tools. The first tool had a sharp edge. Perfect for opening the head of some other two-legged types, most likely from Brooklyn. This all led to the Old Stone Age, commonly called the Paleolithic era by scientists and fat people on the Paleo diet.

During this period, people ran around naked with sharp sticks to kill and eat animals, who were also naked. This era started about three to two million years ago. Some of that DNA is in us all, which is why we still eat naked animals.

Homo erectus, the superstars of that period, had the good sense to eradicate their not-as-smart Neanderthal competitors, and while the Neanderthals went extinct and could not pass on their DNA, guess who could? Right, Homo erectus.

Two million years ago, they started to produce us. Homo erectus means man erect. Great. We are all descendants of an erect homo (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, says Jerry Sienfeld).

Toward the end of that time, the Lion-Man of the Hohlenstein-Stadel cave was discovered in Germany. This amazing prehistoric sculpture is the uncontested example of figurative art having been created about 40,000 years ago from mammoth ivory with a flint stone knife. This lion figure with a man’s head indicates humans could start getting people to believe in things that were not real; gods, theories, myths, and untrue but unifying concepts like I’ll make America Great again. It is displayed in the Museum of Ulm, Germany, and every Peugeot that hits the road.

Next came the Neolithic era, referred to as the New Stone Age. Much newer stones. Today’s stoners will stare at the shiny ones for hours. The fact that we are Homo sapiens makes the term Homo sapiens an oxymoron because Homo means man and sapien means wise.

Zipping along about three million years, we get to about 8,000 BCE and the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution in the Fertile Crescent. The geography of the Fertile Crescent was Western Asia and the Nile Valley and Nile Delta of northeast Africa. It spans today’s Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and Egypt. Since they all come from the same soil and all love hummus,