Fiat Lux

Now....people probably have heard of Mao, and the educated know that Qin Shi Huang wasn't that pleasant of a ruler....but I wonder how many have heard of this Zhang Xianzhong fellow? Here's a link about him:

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/105565/Zhang-Xianzhong

While the First Emperor and Mao killed many people, Zhang is responsible for taking a city 400,000 strong and reducing it to 20 people. Yes, 20 people. He's as good an addition to the Forgotten Evils series as others I'm going to post, so....

yeah.

For today, and this will be the first of a long series of implausibilities in history, building on the grandest levels to the most recent, is Homo sapiens. 

Humanity, began as a scattered group of H. rhodesiensis that began to breed together, and from that emerged the specific constellation of skeletal traits that we associate with mankind today. For the first part of the origins of Man, it was a divided species, split between East and Southern African populations, very nearly splitting into two races. This scattered group of tribes remained that way until as recently in most parts of the world as 10,000 years ago. Yet, in merely 10,000 out of the 13 billion years of the Universe's history, the scattered tribesmen from regions ranging to Britain to Tierra del Fuego and Australia, started to develop innovations such as organized religion and ultimately the civilization in parts of the world associated with the West today, with a sum total of 6.7 billion members of this species. Not to mention, displacing the aboriginal beings like this, the Neanderthals, the Erectus tribes, and the hobbits. Remember that Erectus had lived in Asia for well up to a million years at the time of the arrival of the first bands of H. sapiens but is now extinct, one of the many species that became that way upon the new arrival of the African ape. The hobbits were the next-youngest species, having emerged by around 500,000 years ago, and surviving into 13,000 years ago. Last of the archaics to emerge were the Eurasian Neanderthals, scattered across Western Europe and Siberia and the Russian steppes and the Middle East. But even the Neanderthals were over 200,000 years old, whereas humankind was some 50,000 years younger. That one particular species...

and all others like it gone.

From tribesmen numbering less than a million...

to six billion armed with incredibly dangerous weapons of destruction in some parts of the world, in others the traditional sticks and stones still prevail.

Needless to say, this qualifies as a WANK.

This will be the first of a series dating from 150,000 ya to the 21st Century, detailing the numerous WANKS of history.