why do we need to study the past?

To be human is to be curious, questioning, and inquisitive. We know that our ancient ancestors stared at the night sky with wonder, that they experienced fear as the sun disappeared during solar eclipses and joy at its return, that they witnessed the cycles of births and deaths, seasons and years, and that for all of these events they sought explanation and meaning. The search for and discovery of explanations and meaning contributed to the development of culture—that shared body of acquired knowledge that humans live by and pass on to each successive generation. Human curiosity and ingenuity have allowed cultures to evolve and flourish in almost every environmental niche on the earth.

Though people today understand much more than our ancestors did about the earth and the heavens, some old questions remain unanswered while new discoveries have yielded new questions. As long as humans exist we will ponder the mysteries around us and seek to acquire the knowledge and understanding necessary to satisfy our needs and solve our problems.

This thirst for knowledge reaches into the past, even when one is focused on solving contemporary problems. The search for solutions often requires an understanding of how problems developed or how our elders might have approached analogous problems in the past. We study both our collective pasts and our individual pasts to gain a better understanding of who we are today and where we are going in the future. Lessons learned from the past can influence—hopefully for the better—the social, political, and environmental actions we take today.

By studying the past we learn how and why people lived as they did throughout the world and the changes and causes of such changes, that occurred within these cultures. We study the past to acquire a broader and richer understanding of our world today and our place in it.