8 September

It’s fascinating to me to see how little societies change over time socially and culturally, despite looking entirely different because of the technologies of a given time. For example the obsessive focus of life in medieval times was the ownership of land, and your position in social status hierarchies, including the lineage of your family. Today home/land ownership is the centrepiece of life in places like Australia, worth trillions of dollars. At the same time interest in genealogy, tracing the family line, has exploded, with it now being the second largest hobby in places like the US, after gardening. And the second most popular type of website, after pornography.