I think sometimes I qualify as an anthropologist.  Some sit in rooms reading books piecing skulls, wrist bones and vertebrae together, and some expose themselves to the ongoing history of the world.  My work as a barman.

Humanity, this to me is obvious, was born with the ability of words and all the gift of communication with language.  It just happened.  It happened instantly, when people became people.  Strange as it might seem.  It's just a talent we have, and we healthily participate in it.  And from the beginning, there was lots of talk.  There was lots of being human.  There was community, there was openness, there were good things. There was talk of health and the sharing of food, to the extent that there was posturing and early forms of commercials, or at least, and better, the documentary, the story.

From the construction of history and politics we know, lots of stuff would have been immediately going on.  Tribal strife, empire's thrust, the confusions of the blending of the various breeds of humanity.  Vercingetorix being dragged through the Roman streets.  Racism, perhaps.  And yet, as any barman knows, all of that easily transcended with any neighborhood discussion, people put together.  The reestablishment of the basic understanding that we are all, quite remarkably, and amazingly, human, with all the gifts.

We deal, we follow, we cope with, we examine the crazy flower of history's doings, the ceaseless flow, one moment, one character, one group, one event ceaselessly flowing on, met by another.  Lincoln's moment, a big one, perhaps an ultimate one the becomes superseded, becoming the assassin's moment of history and the sorrow of the nation.