How many of you have a tattoo – even one that only your lover sees because it’s normally covered by your clothes?  Chances are most of the young guys who read this because skin decoration is back in vogue.  A tattoo is a fashion must these days.

It was found in 1996 that tattooing was the sixth fastest growing retail market in the USA. 10% of teenagers had them despite it being illegal in 18 different states and within a year one new tattoo business parlor was opening every day somewhere in the country. Kids feel like the trailblazers of olden times but they are way off beam.

People have been doing it in one form or another for over 5,000 years.  An Ice Age man – 5,300 years old – was found in Austria and he had tattoos on his knee and back.  The Egyptians are known to have practiced it between 4000 and 2000 BC, by which time it had spread across southern Asia into China and Japan.

It was Captain Cook who introduced it into Europe in 1771, having seen the Tahitians doing it, but he was also a bit behind the times in some respects.  The ancient Egyptian art was well known to early Celts, Picts and Gauls in Scotland, while Saxons, danes and Norsemen covered their bodies in tribal symbols.

What you need to remember though is that these were real he-men because they underwent some terrible pain to get their tattoos.  South sea islanders used sharpened combs of bone or shell – tapped into the skin repeatedly with a wooden mallet using pigments of soot mixed with fat.

This intensely painful method held sway until the 1890’s when American Samuel O’Reilly invented the electric tattoo machine. What had previously taken many agonizing days could now be done in minutes and he was soon earning himself $100 a day.  There was still pain but nothing like what had gone before it.

Modern machines are much more user friendly – pumping needles into the skin 3000 times a minute and applying ink to the ‘Dermis’, the permanent skin layer that lies  below your outer one – which tends to flake off at the rate of 1million cells every 40 minutes.  Dermis cells stay with you for life.

Arms and hands are the most popular places to get a tattoo though shoulder blades are a big hit with the girls.  Some organizations like the Japanese Mafia – the Yakuza – and the Hell’s Angels have members who all wear symbolic tattoos on their bodies.

30 or so customers are enjoying free meals for life at the Casa Sanchez Mexican restaurant in San Francisco because they let themselves be decorated with the company logo.  The outcry when Mattell announced the imminent release of a tattooed Barbie was hilarious.  Kids want tattoos anyway because their favorite pop and sport stars have them.

Modern methods mean that nothing is impossible for a good tattoo artist so you can be as adventurous as you like.  It may be good to know that laser surgery is pretty effective at removing them painlessly these days but tattoos are high fashion now.  The boss might, on seeing yours be inclined to ask enviously where you got it done, instead of berating you for it.  He may really envy your artful skin.  How things have changed.       

If we could go back in time and relive a period of our prehistoric ancestors who lived about 1,000,000 years ago, how different would it be ? One thing we do know for sure, it would have been a lot more of a labor intensive type of living compared to our predominantly leisure life we are accustomed to today. A study of ancient history tells us that it was at about this time that fire made its entrance into the simple life of man, at least having the ability to initiate the start of a fire from scratch. Before this period they had to wait for nature to do it for them, such as from lightning or other natural combustion. Soon thereafter and probably by accident, the art of at least partial heating of their meats and possibly fruits and vegetables occurred, probably because it made the food easier to chew, especially for the young children, though history cannot verify this occurrence, but it certainly did happen at some time period after fire was born. Anthropologists have found artifacts of bone remains from early man that show that many in their middle ages did suffer from various forms of arthritic conditions, which some medical professionals today believe is at least partially due to the lower enzyme content derived from the heating or cooking of foods.

Early human diet was also comprised probably of fruits, roots, nuts and vegetables that they found growing wild. Man, at that time did not possess the art of agriculture, therefore they had to be content with what was found growing in the wild. Virtually all protein sources came from meat, though nuts did supply their share. Agriculture and its great lifesaving benefits are supposed to have arrived on the scene in our history at approximately 10,000 BCE. Some experts believe that large scale agriculture took place at about 5,000 BCE.

This period issued a tremendous increase in the nutritional level of the local farmers and inhabitants who had over time obtained the knowledge of growing their own garden born foods. Because the soils were virgin, containing the highest levels of nutrients to support plant growth, there was very little lacking in the foods from the harvest.

What Was The Difference In Their Food ?

First and foremost, the foods that were served had not been processed as we know them today. Daily existence was very simple. The lands where they roamed were unpolluted, totally virgin and were never walked upon by any other human. The water was virtually totally pure and flourished with high mineral content. The water alone could give partial nourishment to the local inhabitants. Those early times were probably as close to the "Garden of Eden" as one could desire.