Walking is supposed to one of the first key skills humans learn. My mom tells me it took forever for me to learn to walk. My three older brothers kept knocking me down. But I did eventually master it.

Those brothers became more useful to me in that other human skill: reading and writing. I got some help with the letters and that became one of my favorite things to do.

I know writing is something that it seems like almost everyone can do, but making something to share is a little different. I’m trying to get better and write at a higher level. I am glad, dear reader, that you are reading what I’m writing.

To be precise, though, people have not always been able to write. Prehistorically, things weren’t written down. Even after writing was invented, humans didn’t write everything down. The stories that were captured and preserved until the present day are like a time machine.

What were people like back then? How did they see the world and what was important to them?

I have a set of journals…no, diaries… from when I was a teenager. Who was this person who wrote so faithfully? It’s a dim and faded record of who I once was. A frozen record of what I used to be.

My writing pinned me to a card like a specimen bug—a piece of my history.

I just finished reading a book from 1298: The Travels of Marco Polo

That’s a piece of history from a long time ago. Still—I thought I would know what people in the thirteen hundreds thought was important. This book is so famous, I figured it would be full of the sort of stories I would expect from the middle ages.

I was wrong. It surprised me to find what he thought was important. He was far more practical that I would have expected.

What was even more interesting is how the readers of this book loved it. I am impressed with the readers of 700 years ago. This book was passed on from reader to reader, translated so often that there aren’t any original copies left.

All of Europe was very interested in what was over the horizon. Not just the crazy stories, but the how and the what. We have the record in this book.

And then we have the record—the history—of what came after. Columbus read the story of the spices and had to get some ships over there.

Marco Polo had the adventure, and he needed someone to help him write it down. He found a writing partner in prison. Rustichello de Pisa is the one that wrote it all down and made this book that captured so many people’s attention. And kept it.