Review: Who Ate the First Oyster?

A weekend non-fiction fun read as a break from heavy theological reading: Because Pastors need a break also!  Haven’t done one of these in a while!

Cody Cassidy.  Who Ate the First Oyster?. New York, NY: Penguin Books, May 5th 2020. 240 pp.

4 out of 5

Purchase: Amazon

Who ate the first oyster?  Who discovered Hawaii?  (And how?) And who painted the world’s first masterpiece?  These questions and others are answered in this book.  Written in an accessible manner the answers that author Cody Cassidy gave are informative, fascinating and interesting with the reasoning he gives of why scientists, historians and other experts come to the conclusion they arrived at.  If you like asking questions and learning people’s attempt to answer those questions then this book is for you.

There are seventeen chapters for seventeen questions that are raised.  I found each one of them interesting.  For instance there is a chapter on who was the first person with the first case of small pox.  While we don’t know exactly the individual nevertheless one can narrow it down to the region in North Africa and Egypt with humans trying to domesticate cows and camels.  This chapter not only answer the question about who likely had the first small pox but the author also talk about how serious the disease of small pox and also the disease’ significant impact.  For instance George Washington immunizing his troops had a significant military impact.  The chapter also talk about how small pox destroys those infected and also the effort to end small pox.  Many chapters take a similar direction of stating the original context of how something came about and also its significance and why we believe things happened the way the author described it.

I appreciate the book’s discussion of timing of when all these “firsts” happened in history and the author’s intent to give us a better understanding of when these things happened by comparing when something happened in relations to all of history as a twenty four hours time and what time something happened.  For example if all of human history was a day then the discovery of soap would have taken place 22 minutes before mid-night.  This gives a better picture than just saying 4500 years ago.  In that light readers will appreciate how recent many of these events taken place such as who rode the first horse, who invented the wheel, etc.  While for some readers will question the evolutionary worldview in timing things nevertheless we all can see how “recent” many of these developments takes place.

There were too many things I learned from this book.  For instance I learned that the discovery of Hawaii is very improbable as being accidental; yet how did people first discovered and settled on it?  The book mentioned that people from other islands must have traveled towards the direction of Hawaii based upon bird migration.  I also thought it was interesting that the book discussed who shot the first arrow and the origin of the arrow might have begun first as children’s toys; we see children and even young apes and monkeys love toys that shoots things into the air.  The book discussion about the first masterpiece is also astounding.  The author talked about a cave in Europe discovered with massive art work and how examining it has lead experts to believe it was created by master artists.  Knowing what we know about artists that many who are master artists were in their forties this suggests those who created the oldest discovered masterpiece must have been also in their forties and also the possibility that art was taken very seriously and there might have been training for artists.  The discussion about the first person eating oyster is equally mesmerizing.  The author argues very likely it was a woman who was involved with gathering food (while the men hunt).  He also argues that contrary to the stereotypes people in the past must have been very smart to notice a correlation of low tide and the moon’s movement; and with the low tide these early gatherers went to collect shell fish for meals.

Overall I recommend this book; it’s a mental break from heavy reading for me while also stimulating my mind in other ways.