This is a question a put to my mates ages ago and have only just remembered it

Which do you think came first history or geography??

I think geography came first because without georaphy there would be no history for eg: if theThames wasnt there London would be there

But if the continents hadnt of moved apart neither London or the Thames would be there.

People Help Me And Debate!!!

:D

Surely they are holding hands and skipping along, TOGETHER?

How can either come first?

yeh but one must of come first.

why arnt they the same thing???

Well for history we need 'time' to exist, and for geography we need 'space' to exist.
So we could rephrase the question to :
'Which came first: time or space?'

Isn't this the type of question Stephen Hawking spends all day trying to answer?

I guess there is no right or wrong answer and that should any answer be forthcoming would be dependent on the persons beliefs and perception of the origin of the universe.

42

Nomme

Well as a matter of fact neither had to have come first

They are part of the same discipline although they both cover things the other doesnt too.

History can be social history for instance, or history of ideas, just as much as "a list of things that happened in the past, and in the right order."

Geography can be about geomorphology (which is I suspect what you are referring to, the physical creation of the landmass etc) or about the weather and how it is created and how it works (meteorology) (spelling?) or about population studies etc.

If what you are saying is "Once upon a time a glacier formed and pushed its way down a bit of land mass, creating the seven hills that Sheffield stands on" then that is obviously history and geography at the same time.

They came together

How unlike the life of our own dear Queen

i sort of agree Belle but then why are they not the same thing?

and if the glacier did form was that history or geography? because there must have been something there before it (history) which caused they glacier to form (geography)?

what if i ask the question which one affects the other the most? does history effect geography more than geography effects history???

Fletch

In some sense they ARE the same thing

I studied them together for instance under a general heading of "humanities"

What came before the glacier, as well as history, was some temperature changes and weather extremes to help create them, which is geography again of course.

I am tempted to point you back at Nomme and say "42" sagely, but these are the kind of thoughts that feed you and stretch you, so I should encourage you to keep going.

History, or rather time, which isnt necessarily the same thing, has a big effect on Geography in that most land forms, rivers, mountains, rocks etc have taken literally ages to come to be at the stage we currently find them. You will know that sand was once a rock that got bashed up by the sea etc, and you will know that it didnt all happen during an afternoon.

Geography has a massive effect on History in that it took much longer for instance for man to traverse the globe or find new places to live because of the vast expanses of water in the way and because of terrible dry deserts. The geography of Snowdonia protected the Welsh against invasion most of the time, the geography of the north atlantic sunk an ocean liner...

The answer is probably that you may choose the answer for yourself. As long as you argue it well, it will be fine.

In actual fact it isnt a question with a right or wrong answer.

i dont understand the 42 bit????

Sorry Fletch

I was taking too much for granted

42 is the answer to life, the meaning of the universe and everything

"The answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything, as given by the supercomputer Deep Thought to a group of mice in Douglas Adams's comic science fiction series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is "42". According to the Guide, mice are 3-dimensional profiles of a pan-dimensional, hyper-intelligent race of beings. They built Deep Thought, the second greatest computer of all time and space, to tell them the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything. After seven and a half million years the computer divulges the answer: 42.


"Forty-two!" yelled Loonquawl. "Is that all you've got to show for seven and a half million years' work?"
"I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is."
The computer informs the researchers that it will build them a second and greater computer, incorporating living beings as part of its computational matrix, to tell them what the question is. That computer was called Earth and was so big that it was often mistaken for a planet. The question was lost minutes before it was to be outputted, due to the Vogons' demolition of the Earth, supposedly to build a hyperspace bypass. (Later in the series, it is revealed that the Vogons had been hired to destroy the Earth by a consortium of philosophers and psychiatrists who feared for their jobs should the meaning of life become common knowledge.)

There is a link here with some proposed questions, to which 42 might reasonably be the answer, incidentally

http://www.flwyd.dhs.org/contests/mol.html

oh you were getting it from that ok i understand now. ive just started reading it
im in new thread mode now hehe

There is only a history to something if there is somome/thing to be conciously aware of a past of something, surely. No recognition, no history.

But there would be ordered arrangement with or without intelligent life to qualify it, we just call it geography.

Venger, you are way too smart for Fletch and me

Way too smart

We thought we were doing well dealing with the mice!!

Originally posted by venger
There is only a history to something if there is somome/thing to be conciously aware of a past of something, surely. No recognition, no history.

But there would be ordered arrangement with or without intelligent life to qualify it, we just call it geography.

Similarly, there is only a geography to something if there is someone/thing to be consciously aware of its existence. Someone/thing to differentiate between, for instance, a mountain and a river. A nomenclature for geographic features otherwise they are all one. No cognition, no geography.

But there would be ordered arrangement of time with or without intelligent life to qualify it, we just call it history.

Wow what a qulaity thread! I reckon that it's the definition that's wrong. Everything has a history, since it began, whatever it is, but what we refer to as history is actually a record of human achievement, certainly as far as schooling is concerned. Geography would have been around before humans (as pointed out by venger) so it must have come first. You can still have the history of a geological/geographical event, but it wouldn't be history on our terms.

Or jut 42. Whichever you want!

Wow what a qulaity thread!

Thanx

Originally posted by Agent Dan
Everything has a history, since it began, whatever it is, but what we refer to as history is actually a record of human achievement, certainly as far as schooling is concerned. [/B]

But nobody wrote about the splitting of the continents and thats history. same with the dinosaurs. and neither are Geography, but its Geographys fault that history did that, so does that mean geography effects history or does history effect geography???

Fletch

Originally posted by Fletch
But nobody wrote about the splitting of the continents and thats history. same with the dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs were pre-history, weren't they? In other words, history hadn't started then. However, Dinosaurs moved around, so on there terms, Geography existed. Hence Geography came first.

Now...chicken or egg? :D

I think that trying to play two badly defined areas of study of the world (philosophy) off against one another is pointless

Geography and history are not things - they are both simply facets of the human endeavour to understand the world

Geography is an academic subject that has a history, as does History the subject (What's the history of history called? I know)

But the geography of the world (i.e all its geographic features and processes) does not have a history, it has a chronology or time line, which is different.

Either way, you're looking at either Histo-Geography or Geo-History.

They are both very different tough.

Geography exists, we are surrounded by it.

History will never exist.

Although geography has a history :wow:

Did someone say 42 Agent Dan ?

True Venger
but parts of history are made by geography like where london was first placed there. and parts of geography are dependent on history like

erm i cant think of one at the min can anyone else???

I can see myself walking into a dead-end here.

Originally posted by Phanerothyme

Either way, you're looking at either Histo-Geography or Geo-History.

and am gonna let this one lie...

there are to many clever and too many simple people on this forum

This is the most ridiculous thread I have ever read.

History and geography are not "things" but areas of human thought and study. Any "which came first" argument can only be answered by discovering which of thses areas was first contemplated by humankind. And I imagine that homo sapiens was initially concerned with where things were...

Originally posted by Jack Yerbody
This is the most ridiculous thread I have ever read.

Thanx