A Million Years in a Day: A Curious History of Daily Life

How your daily habits are rooted in human history

Greg Jenner has worked as a media consultant for major channels like the BBC, History USA and ITV, verifying the accuracy of historical dramas and documentaries.

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. A Million Years In A Day 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. It traces 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.

Some facts I noted:

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

Our breakfast ingredients have a long-standing history, but our morning hygiene has changed a lot over time. Breakfast cereal was born in 1894, when Will Kellogg was boiling wheat in an attempt to create a substitute for bread. But bread is a much older invention. Between 10,000 and 2000 BC, during the Neolithic era, humans were already baking primitive forms of bread. While not as old as bread, the earliest proof of egg farming dates back to about 1400 BC in Egypt. Unlike the history of your breakfast, human hygiene has a far more complicated evolution.

Back in antiquity, the Greeks and Romans took pride in their hygiene, exemplified by their public baths where everyone was welcome. But in seventeenth-century Europe, the ancient appreciation for hygiene suffered an unfortunate demise.

An easy and entertaining read. Worthy of a few hours of your time.