One Step From Earth

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THE HISTORY OF TRANSPORTATION is the history of mankind. This may sound like too broad a statement, but it is certainly more accurate than the accepted history as measured by wars, rulers, and politics.

In the beginning there was walking, and mankind walked around the world. On foot, generation after generation, homo sapiens spread out from his homeland, usually considered to be in central Africa, and crossed the land bridges to the other continents. Later, after sailing craft had been perfected, isolated places like the Pacific islands were settled — but the foot came first. Nor was it — nor is it — an inferior form of transportation by any test. The Roman roads were used by chariots and carts, but were built primarily to enable the foot soldiers to reach their objectives quickly and easily, sometimes at the other end of the continent.

The parallels can be easily drawn. When only the tiny minority traveled, society was fixed at a simple agrarian level. The life of the seventeenth-century European peasant differed very little from the life of the eleventh-century European peasant. Stuck in the mud. Destined to be born and to live and die in the same place.

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