Tutorial 2c
Perspectives from Scientific Disciplines:
Astronomy, Geology, Paleontology, and Anthropology

  World Historians, like crime scene investigators and lawyers, use a variety of tools to understand an event in time. Taking the point-of-view and individual motives underlying a crime, (tutorial 2a) and understanding the frame-of-reference of various cultures (tutorial 2b) involved are complimentary analytic tools; and so is the ability to take different perspectives of time to identify different patterns of action or chain-of-events. Changing the scale and scope of your perspective of time will often reveal completely different factors you can use to build a case about a particular event or issue in history. The following three reading/writing/response exercises should help you to begin to build your collection of lenses from which to view and analyze history. The readings are the first set in a come from a popular world history reader edited by Kevin Reilly called Worlds of History (link opens to the book information on amazon.com).

1) Astronomy, a excerpt from Carl Sagan's Dragons of Eden

2) Geology/Paleontology, a New York Times article by John Noble Willford

3) Anthropology, an excerpt from Mary Kilbourne Matossian's article "From Hominids to Human Beings"

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