Name: A Million Years In A Day
Rating: 3.8 (31 reviews)
Author: Greg Jenner

What’s in it for me? Discover how your daily habits are rooted in human history.

For millennia, humans’ basic habits have remained unchanged: we get out of bed in the morning, go to the toilet and wash our bodies. Then we grab some food for breakfast, choose our clothes for the day and start communicating with our loved ones and friends. Later in the day, we prepare food and eat and drink together. When the day is over, we brush our teeth, set an alarm and get into bed again.

In these blinks, you’ll be guided through a day like any other to learn the surprising cultural history of our day-to-day routines, and the many seemingly insignificant actions that can be traced back to our early ancestors.

You’ll also learn

why Kellogg’s can be considered a lucky mistake;
why there’s reason to believe that dog was always man’s best friend; and
why refusing a dinner could have had grave consequences in the Babylonian Bronze Age.

Timekeeping and the toilet date back as far as the Stone Age.

It’s 9:30 on a Sunday morning and your alarm clock rouses you from your sleep. You’d rather snooze a little longer but your clock gives off another annoying buzz, and you reluctantly get out of bed.

Today, clocks certainly govern the pulse of our lives; but the act of keeping time is actually something that dates back all the way to the Stone Age.

In fact, the world’s oldest calendar is 30,000 years old. It was found in Le Placard in the Dordogne region and is made out of eagle bone. Along its surface are scratched a series of notches that chart the waxing of the moon, from new to full.

This relatively crude timekeeping is nothing compared to what the ancient Egyptians developed. With their sundials, they could use the shadow of a rod to indicate the approximate hour. And at night, they could track and chart the movement of the Decan stars that appear over the eastern horizon just before dawn, and move from east to west by one degree each day. This allowed the Egyptians to determine the day of the week as well as an approximate hour of the night.

But returning to our morning routine: it’s 9:45 a.m., and having dragged ourselves out of the bed, we make a morning trip to the toilet. But how old are toilets after all?

Toilets date as far back as the Stone Age, too – just not toilets as we might imagine them.

Stone Age urban sanitation wasn’t especially sophisticated. In Çatalhöyük in Turkey, archaeologists have found evidence that, 9,500 years ago, sanitation basically meant piling human waste in a courtyard. But about 4,500 years ago, advanced sanitation systems appeared in the cities of the Harappan societies, in modern-day Pakistan. They had sewers, wiping material, water to flush and even a seat.

Now that we’ve finished our toilet stop, it’s time to have breakfast. Next, we’ll move into the kitchen and consider the history of breakfast.

Our breakfast ingredients have a long-standing history, but our morning hygiene has changed a lot over time.

It’s now approaching 10 a.m. and you’re probably getting a little hungry. Time for breakfast! But what are you in the mood for? Cereal, bread, or maybe a full English breakfast with ham, beans, potato and egg?

While your choose you favorite ingredients, you might spare a thought for their long and important history.

Eating together and drinking alcohol have been widespread customs throughout history.

It’s your friend’s thirtieth birthday, so it’s only natural to begin with a glass of champagne – which, by the way, was first produced in 1693 by a Benedictine monk by the name of Dom Pierre Perignon. But by now everyone’s stomach is rumbling, so you sit down to eat dinner together.

Eating together has been a widespread custom all throughout history. In the Stone Age, the community gathered around the fireplace, the hub of energy that warmed bodies and cooked the shared meat. And during the Bronze Age in Mesopotamia, the Babylonians made dinner into a vitally important ritual: instead of signing a contract, business partners would eat together, sharing salt and wine as symbols of their newfound partnership.

The story of dental care begins in the Stone Age, and the alarm clock may also be an ancient invention.

Today’s beauty standards push us to buy toothpaste offering an endless list of cleaning and whitening capabilities. But our teeth have always been susceptible to wear and tear, so dental care is far from a modern idea.

In fact, there is considerable evidence of Stone-Age dentistry.

Key ideas in A Million Years In A Day

What is A Million Years In A Day about?

It’s easy to assume that our daily rituals are merely recent traditions that have taken shape in recent generations. In reality, a surprising amount of basic habits can be traced all the way back to the Stone Age. Greg Jenner’s A Million Years In A Day (2015) depicts a typical modern Sunday, from brushing one’s teeth to reading the newspaper, and reveals the long and hefty history behind our everyday lives.