Opening paragraphs................................

      Before human accomplishment could begin, we had first of all to become human.  It took a long time.  Bipedality came first, somewhere in the vicinity of five million years ago.  After bipedality, about two and a half million years passed before the animal that walked on two legs learned to make crude tools.  The taming of fire required another one and a half million years.
      Even then, after those unimaginably long spans of time, the creature was still Homo erectus, of formidable talents compared to other animal but still not yet recognizably human.  With his beetled visage and lumbering gait, Homo erectus did lot look human.  More to the point, he did not think like a human.  Homo erectus had a cranial capacity averaging only two-thirds of ours, and his mind was inhumanly slow.
      The animal that the paleo-anthropologists call Homo sapiens and that we identify as human appeared about 200,000 years ago.  It is sometime after this point that human accomplishment begins.  But when?  Shall we mark the beginning at the moment when a human first spoke a word?  Drew an image?  Sang a song?  Choosing a precise moment is, of course, as subjective as trying to specify exactly when human being stopped being Homo erectus and started being Homo sapiens.  But if one were forced to mark the dawn of human accomplishment, the year -8000 has much to recommend it.
-Charles Murray,  Human Accomplishment:  The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Science, 800 B.C to 1950