I recently learned about the Antikythera mechanism. It’s a clockwork computer that the ancient Greeks used to calculate when there would be a solar eclipse, where planets and stars would be located in the rotating night sky, and when to hold the Olympic Games. It was found in the remains of an ancient shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera. If you’d like to see an interesting video about the mechanism, I liked this one.The mechanism is very small, rather like the size of a shoe box and was actually inscribed with instructions on how to use it. Historians believe this means that whoever created the mechanism gave it to someone else for their personal use. So really, the Antikythera mechanism was the first personal computer.

Items like this mechanism drive home the fact that all our modern gizmos and gadgets are in fact descendants of older machines and older minds. Humans have been solving problems with math and mechanisms for thousands of years.

Similarly, humans have been telling stories for millennia. The basic plot of one person falling in love with another goes back to the roots of human kind.

Because we’re human. Marriage was not always associated with love as that was a socio-political contract in some cases, but love survived and flourished through all the ages of man.

It sits at the center of who we are as human beings. Certainly we are tool makers, mechanism makers, but we’re also emotional, social animals. We didn’t invent love anymore than we invented computers for the first time in the 1950s. Bisexuality didn’t magically appear the year Alfred Kinsey’s research showed that human sexuality was not a binary but a sliding scale. Love has literally existed between beings regardless of gender since the dawn of man. We are wondrous, complex creatures that think and love and have done so since the beginning of our existence on this planet.