Explaining the beginning.

In the beginning there was light, and there was darkness, an emptiness, a void incomprehensible to humans today.  The vacuum was absolute, and terrifying.

"Man, you should have seen the one that got away."

And man saw the birth of the first "fishing story," with illustration. 

Nobody really wanted to dispute the stories, they were all playing the same game.  Certainly nobody really wanted to go out and try to hunt anything down, there were things out there ready to hunt, kill and eat them.

Then one day, one of them said.  "Hey, I'm going to go get a cup of coffee, anybody want one?"  They all placed their order, and after drinking a few sips of the delicious goodness, the sweet nectar of the gods, the delightful, caffeinated, dark liquid, they went out and killed some stuff.  And they thought, "hey, this ain't so bad, maybe next time we will add a shot of milk, and some sugar."  

Soon, they were building city states, developing systems of hand writing, spoken communication, and mathematics.   Followed quickly by the invention of the telephone, railroad automobile, jet plane, and drip brew coffee maker, with auto stop (or as my old boss, Kathleen called it, "the gotta have a cup feature").  The single most important device in history, and probably the future.

For the sake of brevity I have left out a few steps, but we will cover those in a later lesson.

Every morning, when I pour myself that first cup of delicious, life affirming, magnificent coffee, I say a silent prayer of thanks that the dinosaurs didn't think of it first.