December 19, 2023
QUOTE
For three million years we were hunter-gatherers, and it was through the evolutionary pressures of that way of life that a brain so adaptable and so creative eventually emerged. Today we stand with the brains of hunter-gatherers in our heads, looking out on a modern world made comfortable for some by the fruits of human inventiveness, and made miserable for others by the scandal of deprivation in the midst of plenty.
--Richard Leakey
BIRTHDAYS
1899 – Martin Luther King Sr., Pastor, missionary, and activist
1906 – Leonid Brezhnev, Ukrainian-Russian marshal, engineer, and politician, 4th Head of State of the Soviet Union
1914 – Mel Shaw, Animator and screenwriter
1920 – Little Jimmy Dickens, Singer-songwriter and guitarist
1944 – Richard Leakey, Kenyan paleontologist and politician
IN MEMORY
1819 – Thomas Fremantle, English admiral and politician
1915 – Alois Alzheimer, German psychiatrist and neuropathologist
1997 – Masaru Ibuka, Japanese businessman, co-founded Sony
1997 – Jimmy Rogers, Singer-songwriter and guitarist
1998 – Mel Fisher, Treasure hunter
IN ON THIS DAY
1154 – Henry II of England is crowned at Westminster Abbey.
1606 – The ships Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery depart England carrying settlers who founded, at Jamestown, Virginia, the first of the thirteen colonies that became the United States.
1777 – American Revolutionary War: George Washington’s Continental Army goes into winter quarters at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.
1924 – The last Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost is sold in London, England.
1972 – Apollo program: The last crewed lunar flight, Apollo 17, carrying Eugene Cernan, Ronald Evans, and Harrison Schmitt, returns to Earth.