Pre-scientific societies are, by force of circumstance, driven to find an explanation of the natural world, human psychology, and the measuring of time by turning creating metaphors from the world they know and see around them every day (for example, the ancient Greeks, knowing nothing of sound waves, formulated the myth of Echo to explain the phenomenon that still carries her name).

The concept of the end of one world giving way to another may also be a deeply instilled characteristic of the human mind - looking back on history, we have divided periods neatly into endings and new beginnings. In surveying the twentieth century, the close of each world war is seen to clearly delineate the end of a period of dark, violent chaos and the beginning of an new era of hope and positivity, and yet future historians may well come to refer to it as the Second Hundred Years' War, recognizing that the conflict that sundered Europe in the summer of 1914 did not finally close until 1989-90 with the collapse of the Soviet Union - or, indeed, given the present heightened animosity between Russia and the US, has still to end. Instead of the first of three separate conflicts broken by intervals of a less than robust peace, World War One can be recognized as merely the first act of a twentieth century war, the prelude to World War Two, which in turn produced the Cold War and a still-contested bi- or even tri-polar world.

I enjoy hearing interpretations of history. Ty

Would like to know more about the ending of the first world and what that really means.