Francis Foster

That wasn't news.

That was information, speculation, rumor.

Just a little aside, also I think scientists misunderstand these cave drawings, these wonderful animals, some of which are extinct and we have no evidence of other than the drawing on the wall of Lascaux in France or various different Spanish caves.

But during the ice age, you're spending a lot of days indoors.

If I go to any, in the wintertime in the northern hemisphere, any person's home that has children, and I go into the child's room, what's on the walls?

Animals, pictures of animals, right?

So isn't it possible that they weren't necessarily leaving a record for us, which they had no idea about?

but to entertain their children during the long Ice Age.

So entertainment is older than news.

We knew that already.

So this goes on for a while.

City-states form, and governments began issuing decrees.

They make announcements from palace walls, and we have records of these from the Sumerians and the Babylonians and cities of Ur and Lagash.

And some of these records are very old, 40,000, 35,000 BC.

But again, that's not news.

That is the people in charge telling you what they're doing, and maybe not even why, or what your orders are.

News sort of starts to begin, proto-news emerges, I contend, in ancient Rome with the Acta Diurna, which you can translate as the daily acts or the public acts.

And this isn't yet news, but it's very close, because it is presented to the general public.

We don't have any copies of these.

These have all vanished.