This is the house where Isaac Newton was born, and where, as a young man, he began the work that changed how humanity understands the universe. Newton was one of the greatest scientists who ever lived. He discovered the laws of gravity and motion, explaining why the planets orbit the Sun and why objects fall to the ground. He invented a whole new branch of mathematics, calculus. He worked out that white light is made of all the colors of the rainbow. His ideas became the foundation of modern physics, and they held for more than two hundred years, until Einstein built on them in the twentieth century. Nearly everything about how we understand motion, force, and the sky above us starts with this man, and this man started here, in a small farmhouse in the English countryside.
Yesterday we spent the afternoon in the university departmental museums, the Sedgwick, the Archaeology and Anthropology, and the Zoology. Today we came back for the other half of Cambridge: the colleges themselves, the churches, the Fitzwilliam Museum, and the river Cam. The weather was fine, which suited a day spent mostly on foot and outdoors.
The thing that makes Cambridge different from most universities is how it is put together, and it helps to know that the structure has changed over time. For the first six hundred years, the colleges were the university. There was no central organization to speak of. Each college was a self-contained world: it housed its students, fed them, and taught them, one fellow sitting with two or three students in a room, working through the material face to face. The university itself was little more than an examining body that set the tests and awarded the degrees. All the real teaching happened inside the colleges.
That changed in the nineteenth century, when the sciences outgrew what any single college could provide. A chemistry laboratory, a physics workshop, a medical school, these needed space and equipment no college dining hall could hold. So the central university expanded. It built lecture theatres and laboratories, hired its own teaching staff, and organized them into departments and faculties grouped under six broad schools: Arts and Humanities, Biological Sciences, Clinical Medicine, Humanities and Social Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Technology. Today there are over 150 departments. The newer universities that grew up in the same period were built on this department model from the start. Cambridge kept both systems running side by side.
So today a student at Cambridge belongs to two things at once. A department is where you study your subject, attend lectures, and do your research, the way any modern university works. A college is where you live, eat, socialize, and still receive that old form of small-group teaching, now called a supervision, typically two or three students with a tutor, still considered one of the best teaching methods in the world. There are 31 colleges, each self-governing, each with its own land, buildings, income, and rules. Some are old and very rich: Trinity, founded by Henry VIII, is wealthier than many small countries. Some are recent and modest: Robinson was founded in 1977. They range from Peterhouse, the oldest, founded in 1284, to colleges that did not exist when the people who teach in them were born. Twenty-nine of the thirty-one admit undergraduates.
When you walk through Cambridge and see the grand gatehouses and courts and chapels, you are looking at the colleges, not the university. The university has no single campus. Its departments are scattered through the city, in lecture halls and laboratories that sit among and between the colleges. The colleges are the physical face of Cambridge, and it is the colleges you visit.
Cambridge is a small city, around 150,000 people, on the River Cam about fifty miles north of London. People have lived on the spot since the Bronze Age, and it was a trading center under the Romans and the Vikings. But its name has meant one thing for eight hundred years: The University.
One of the museums we visited told the story of how that began. In 1209, in Oxford, a woman was killed. The town authorities could not seize the scholar thought responsible, so they arrested two or three of his associates and hanged them. Many of Oxford scholars left soon after. Some walked east, to the edge of the fens, to a prosperous little trading town called Cambridge. That flight is the founding of Cambridge. No charter, no founder, no ceremony. The university began as a group of academics with nowhere else to go, and it grew, over eight centuries, into the fourth-oldest surviving university in the world. The rivalry between the two places, still played out every year in the boat race, goes back to that killing.
The oldest of the thirty-one colleges, Peterhouse, was founded in 1284. Medieval courts and chapels stand next to Victorian museums and plain modern laboratories, all in the same few streets. King’s College Chapel, begun in 1446, is one of the finest buildings in Britain. A short walk away are the ordinary-looking labs where the electron, the nucleus of the atom, and the structure of DNA were worked out. The place holds its centuries side by side.
Cambridge has long been one of the addresses where the modern understanding of the world was built. Newton was at Trinity, and his notebooks are still in the library there. Darwin studied here and sent the specimens from his voyage back to his Cambridge teachers. Maxwell built the Cavendish Laboratory, Thomson found the electron in it, and Rutherford split the atom. Crick and Watson found the shape of DNA. Stephen Hawking was a fellow at Gonville and Caius for fifty-two years. The people connected to the university have won well over a hundred Nobel Prizes. For a small city, it has done a great deal of the world’s thinking.
In our travels we visit many museums and sites, and some are full of anthropology: old bones, stone tools, a reconstructed skull, a single famous fossil. The information is usually there, and often well explained. The trouble is time. There is more than you can absorb in one visit, and reading a panel once, on your feet in a gallery, is not the same as keeping it. And not keeping it just carries the problem to the next site and museum and your learning never progresses.
The same gap opens on a larger scale. You arrive somewhere and learn who lives there now, and often, if the museum is good, who came before them too. What you rarely get is how it all connects: how the same people also settled other regions, where they had come from before they arrived here, how this one place fits into a single, much larger story of movement. A place is not just its present, and not just its own local past. It is one point on a chain of arrivals that stretches across whole continents and back tens of thousands of years. That chain, followed all the way, is what we mean by peopling.
That is why we make these primers. Not to become experts, but to build the broad view once, in our own words, and carry it with us. Then the next display, and the next place, makes sense, and when a museum leaves us with a gap we can read the piece we need on the spot and go back to enjoying it. When a site teaches us something new, that is the signal to come back and improve the primer. This one, and others to follow, is our attempt to fill that gap with what we have learned. Our focus is the migration itself, the journey and its branches, not the wider study of humankind. The two are tied together, so we lean on that wider study where we must, but only as far as the journey needs. If we find we need to understand a piece more deeply, we may make a separate primer for it. Our primer post are different. They are not static. They are dynamic. We update them constantly. That is why we don’t broadcast them. But you can find them in our Never Stop Learning Section on the menu.
For North America we have already told this peopling story, up to just before Europeans arrived, in our Never Stop Learning video series (Peopling of the Americas and Pre-History of US and Canada Native Americans). The named tribes living there at that point, the ones who enter written history when the Europeans come, are a separate and later layer.
We will most likely cover them as written posts. From here on all of this work will be posts, not videos. Life on the road has taken away the time that films need, and the posts let us keep going.
Our first stop in England was Sutton Hoo, a low ridge of grassy burial mounds above the River Deben in Suffolk, a few miles from the coast. Edith Pretty owned this land and wondered what lay under the mounds she could see from her house, so she paid for a dig. Basil Brown was the self-taught local man she brought in to do it, and in 1939 he cut into the largest mound and found the imprint of a ninety-foot ship, with the richest early medieval Anglo-Saxon grave ever found in Britain inside it. What they uncovered changed what we know about the people who lived here fourteen hundred years ago.
Hamburg is a city that has been rebuilt twice within living memory. A fire in May 1842 destroyed roughly a third of the old city center, and bombing in 1943 destroyed much of it again. We spent a full day inside and around the Speicherstadt, the largest warehouse district in the world built on a single set of wooden piles, moving between five stops. Each one explains a different piece of how the city came to look the way it does now.
Hamburg holds a great deal more than these five stops we visited. The Hamburger Kunsthalle covers eight centuries of painting across three connected buildings on the city’s Kunstmeile. A short walk from it, the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, founded in 1877, holds four thousand years of design across European, East Asian, and Islamic collections. The Museum of Hamburg History, open since 1922, keeps its own scale model of the historic port. None of these fit into this visit. Our Schengen days are limited, and a ferry to the UK out of the Schengen area was already booked, so this day was what the schedule allowed. Hamburg’s other museums stay on the list for a later trip back.
We left the Vikar campground this morning and drove for Gjógv, a village at the far northeast tip of the island of Eysturoy. Eysturoy is the second-largest of the Faroe islands and one of the most rugged, a place of steep peaks and two long fjords that nearly cut it in two. Slættaratindur, the highest mountain in the country at about two thousand nine hundred feet, stands on this island, and you feel the height of the land the whole way across.
We left the campground near the ferry this morning and drove west, out of Tórshavn and toward the island of Vágar. The sky was still low and grey, so we made a plan for the day around the weather. We would drive straight to the far end first, to the places that hold up even under cloud, and save the ones that need clear light for the afternoon, in the hope it would lift.
We leave Iceland tomorrow. We came off the ferry on the twelfth of June, sixty two days ago.
Sixty two days is a long time to spend in one single country, and we saw a great deal of it. As a reference, the average tourist stay in Iceland during the peak summer months is around 10 days. We did not see all of it but we saw a lot of it. Iceland is about forty thousand square miles, the size of Kentucky, and it holds countless number of waterfalls, and canyons, calderas, tuyas, lava fields, ice caps, fjords, small towns, historical places and black beaches. A few easily accessed by the ring road but the vast majority only reachable by 4WD dirt roads and the most remote ones located deep in the highlands and only accessed by F roads or even smaller tracks. That is not enough time to reach them all. There were things we did not do. We never made it to Mælifell for instance, the green cone on the black sand near Mýrdalsjökull that next to Askja on our list. We leave it for another time when we can come back and concentrate exclusively on the highlands remote areas.
