31 May

Civilisations last 336 years on average. Australian Aborigines were left out of this graphic - their civilisation lasted 100,000 years. (They would have gone right off the edge of the graph, by about a metre and a half.) My feeling is reconciliation will come when we understand that staggering achievement. The most sophisticated culture in all human history, by a country mile. Going to the moon is piss weak compared to having a civilisation last 100,000 years - seriously nothing. While we treat them as primitives or wallow only in symbolic 'recognition', we won't understand them. We've only really just begun to scratch at the surface of understanding them, it's all still to do.