Cody Cassidy - Who Ate the First Oyster?: The Extraordinary People Behind the Greatest Firsts in History

He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.

JONATHAN SWIFT

In 1991, the victim in the worlds most interesting murder case was found 10,500 feet above sea level in the tztal Alps in northeastern Italy, 15 feet from the Austrian border. Dubbed tzi, the man had been shot with an arrow in the back nearly 5,300 years ago, and his body has since become the most carefully studied corpse in human history. In the fall of 2017 I decided to visit the murder scene. Though this was my first criminal investigation, I began as I presumed any good homicide detective would: I retraced the victims last steps.

Remarkably, even though the murder occurred nearly one thousand years before the construction of the Great Pyramid, this retracing is actually possible. Thanks to scientists identifying layers of pollen from the victims digestive system as well as their sources, we now have an accounting of tzis final twelve hours far more accurate than any bloodhound could provide.

tzis last hike took place in what is now a piece of northern Italy, sliced off from Austria after World War I, though when I visited, it seemed unclear whether anyone had ever told the people who live there. The architecture, the food, the culture, the signs, and even the greetings were so comprehensively Austrian I checked a map to make sure I hadnt crossed the border.

I began my trek early in the morning, and it soon became clear that tzi must have been in fine shape on the day he died. The tztal Alps do not rise slowly like the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains I was used to. Instead, they rocket out of river valleys at such steep angles even the gentler path tzi chose was crisscrossed in sharply angled switchbacks that rose into the snow and fog.

Investigators have established that tzi died shortly after enjoying a leisurely lunch at the top, which suggests he was a far better meteorologist than I. Snow had begun to fall and dense fog blanketed the pass when I arrived at the peak, and as I contemplated the tricky traverse to his final resting place, I spotted a few mountaineersthe first I had seen all daystrapping into crampons. We didnt share many words in common, but after a few gestures toward my tennis shoes we did share an understanding that if I continued I was at some risk of making tzis final resting place my own. Less than a quarter mile from the site of the murder, and six thousand miles from home, I decided, in this case, that interviews with archaeologists who had investigated the scene would have to suffice.

The aborted trip to the murder site was a part of an expansive, three-year-long project to produce this book. It began as an inquest into humankinds greatest firsts but quickly expanded to include profiles of the individuals responsible. The more I learned about prehistoric discoveries, the more I wanted to know the people who made them. Yet most reconstructions of the prehistoric ignore the existence of individuality entirely, and speak of peoples rather than people.

So I set out to find remarkable people from our deep history. I interviewed more than one hundred experts, read dozens of books and hundreds of research papers. I ordered obsidian off the internet and tried to shave my face with it. I visited the site of humankinds first great piece of art. I started a fire with flint and pyrite. I fired a replica of an ancient bow. I spoiled gruel to brew beer. And I quite nearly joined tzi in his final resting place.

In the end, I identified seventeen ancient individuals who lived before or without writing. These are people who scholars know existed and whose extraordinary or fateful acts are the foundation of modern life. Then I asked everyone from archaeologists to engineers, geneticists to lawyers, and astrologists to brewmasters who these anonymous individuals might have been, what they were thinking, where they were born, what they spoke (if they spoke!), what they wore, what they believed, where they lived, how they died, how they made their discovery, and most important, why it mattered.

But this gradation is the illusion of our perspective. It neglects the way technology and even evolution have always occurred: in fits and starts, with individuals at the forefront. Rolling logs do not inevitably transition into wagons. Instead, someone invented the wheel and axleregarded by many scholars as the greatest mechanical invention of all timeand someone fired the first bow and arrowprobably the most successful weapon system the world has ever seen. Thanks to the imperfect reach of written history, weve lost their names, but a name is a detail, and modern science now provides far more revealing details about the geniuses of the prehistoric.

But like most stereotypes, this one collapses under even the briefest interrogation. The so-called cavemenwho for the most part didnt even live in cavesrequired a far wider knowledge base than those of us living in the era of mass food production and job specialization. Their survival depended upon an encyclopedic understanding of their environment. They each had to find, gather, hunt, kill, and craft virtually everything they ate, lived in, or used. They had to know which plants killed you, which ones saved you, which ones grew in what seasons and where. They had to know the seasonal migration patterns of their prey. According to the scholars I spoke with theres no evidence geniuses were any less common in ancient history than today, and at least some evidence that they were more so.