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Two hundred thousand years ago, in a land none of us would recognise, the first modern humans emerged and began to roam the planet Earth, leaving behind hauntingly beautiful cave paintings tens of thousands of years old. Paintings we still do not understand. Sadly they shed no clear light on the lives of our oldest ancestors - we do not know how they really lived, what they truly believed, or if they were even trying to tell us something with their paintings - deemed by most experts to be nothing more than abstract art. Perhaps one day we will find a key to decipher their paintings, but until then, their distant lives continue to remain a shadowy mystery to us, their descendants.
As the ages passed, the land changed and man changed with it. He adapted to his environment, settled on it and tamed it, he grew crops and kept livestock. He built towns and cities, roads and irrigation systems, he crafted tools and jewellry. He developed his language and methods of communication until suddenly around 6,000 years ago in the ancient Mesopotamian kingdoms of Sumer, he breathed life into his long forgotten world. For the first time in his history, he had begun to keep detailed records on clay tablets. Although this ancient language was first discovered by a European in the 1400's its strange cuneiform markings remained a tantalising enigma until 1837 when it was finally deciphered using the Rosetta Stone as the key to cracking its code. The cuneiform language of ancient man was so distant from us that we first needed to decipher the hieroglyphic language of Ancient Egypt to be able to read it - and without the Rosetta Stone neither of these challenges would ever have been overcome.
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Thousands of years and many empires after man began to keep records, in 1903, a mere 108 years ago, the Wright brothers flew the first powered aircraft. Then, only a few days ago, a massive one-ton rover named Curiosity was launched on an eight and a half month journey to Mars, its mission to find out if there has ever been life on a planet 556 million kilometers away from us, the distance Curiosity needs to travel to reach Mars.
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