"Cast your light on the wall. Animals leap out at you: reindeer, horses, bulls, even thick-maned lions and curved-tusked mammoths. They charge, they run, they leap. Some are surrounded by arrows or spears. Sometimes a hunter has placed his handprint among them. You are deep in a cave in the mountains, it is the Ice Age, and you could be anywhere across southern Europe, from Spain deep into Russia."
"Only one people in the known world remained beyond the power of the Persian king. These were the Greeks, who lived at the far end of civilization, west of the Persian territory. The Greeks had never had an empire. Cyrus would barely have thought of them when he proclaimed that his empire stretched to the end of the world. Still, the Greeks were a proud and stubborn people. Some of them chose to defy the king of all the world."
"Some years after the Polos went to China, a Moroccan scholar named Ibn Batuta made his pilgrimage to Mecca. Then he travelled on, visiting Muslim kingdoms in east Africa,along the coast of the Indian Ocean.
Later he went to India, which was then ruled by Muslim emperors, sailed to the islands of Southeast Asia, and carried on to China. After returning home to Morocco, Ibn Batuta journeyed south across the Sahara desert deep into Africa. As he travelled, he wrote detailed accounts of the people he met and the routes he took."
"One night in 1893, a young lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi was thrown off a train in the British colony of South Africa. The white settlers of South Africa did not like sharing their train compartments with non-Europeans. Gandhi spent the night shivering in a cold railroad station, and what he decided there changed the world."
"In 1968, the first humans ever to leave our planet broke out of their orbit around earth and headed to the moon, in a space capsule that would carry them behind it, past its mysterious “dark side” and back home. Because that test run went so well, more astronauts headed into space in July 1969. One of them, a quiet American named Neil Armstrong, became the first human to walk on the moon. “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,” he said."
