September 12 in History: Caves, Canines and Surprising Discoveries

On September twelfth, 1940, a dog named Robot fell down a hole in the French countryside. That small accident led his teenage owner, Marcel Ravidat, and three friends to discover a cave system whose walls were covered with over six hundred paintings of animals, symbols, and human figures that were seventeen THOUSAND years old. Speaking of discovery, in our last episode, we talked about Henry Hudson beginning his adventure up that famous river on September eleventh, 1609. Well, today is the day he really gets into it, sailing past the island of Manhattan and pushing north into the wilderness that would one day bear his name. One day a stumble, the next a voyage — history is just a series of doors, isn't it?

And all you have to do is be willing to see what's on the other side. Let's stay with that dog, Robot, and those teenagers for a moment. Because the discovery of the Lascaux caves is one of my absolute favorite moments in all of history. It is pure, unadulterated wonder. Imagine being eighteen years old, scrambling down a narrow shaft with a makeshift lamp, your heart pounding in your chest. And then the light catches it. A bull. A horse. A herd of stags, so alive they seem to be thundering across the rock in the flickering light. You're not just looking at a picture. You are looking across seventeen millennia. You are the first human being to see this art since the person who painted it put down their brush of moss or hair.

The boys, of course, became local heroes. They set up a little guard post, charged a few francs for entry. They understood, instinctively, that they had found something sacred. And when the experts came, they confirmed it. This wasn't just some old graffiti. This was a masterpiece. A Sistine Chapel of the Paleolithic. The colors — made from ground-up minerals — were still vibrant. The sense of movement, the understanding of animal anatomy... it was breathtaking. It completely rewrote our understanding of our so-called "primitive" ancestors. These weren't grunting cavemen. These were artists. They had a culture, a spiritual life, a sense of beauty that reaches across an unimaginable gulf of time and speaks to us directly.

That's the magic! That's the delight of it! A teenager and his dog stumble, and suddenly our entire human family gets a little bit bigger, a little bit older, and a whole lot more profound. Now, from the deepest past to a moment that shaped the modern world in a much quieter, but no less profound, way. On this day in 1848, Switzerland adopted a federal constitution. Okay, I know, I can feel you thinking, "a constitution? Is that really as exciting as prehistoric cave art?" And my answer is... YES! Absolutely, yes! Because what happened in Switzerland on this day was a miracle of political engineering. For centuries, Switzerland had been a loose, messy confederation of cantons that were constantly squabbling, sometimes fighting actual civil wars.

They were a tangle of different languages, different religions — Catholic and Protestant — and different local interests. After a brief, decisive civil war in 1847, they had a choice. They could split apart, or they could find a new way to live together. And they chose together. They looked across the ocean to a young, messy, but promising country called the United States, and they borrowed its big idea: federalism. They wrote a constitution that created a strong central government for things like defense and trade, but left a huge amount of power in the hands of the local cantons for things like education and culture. It was a genius compromise.

It allowed the German-speaking Swiss and the French-speaking Swiss and the Italian-speaking Swiss to all feel... well, Swiss, without giving up their unique identities. It created the modern nation of Switzerland, one of the most stable, prosperous, and peaceful countries on Earth. It was a triumph of reason, of compromise, of boring, wonderful, effective governance. And in a world that is so often torn apart by division, the story of Switzerland on September twelfth is a delightful reminder that sometimes, the most revolutionary act is simply agreeing on a good set of rules. Of course, history is also made by singular individuals who break all the rules.

On this day in 1913, Jesse Owens was born in Oakville, Alabama. The grandson of a slave, the son of a sharecropper. And one of the greatest athletes who ever lived. We all know the story, or we think we do. The 1936 Berlin Olympics. Hitler's "master race" Olympics, designed to showcase Aryan superiority. And into this poisonous spectacle walks Jesse Owens, who proceeds to win four gold medals. In the one hundred meter dash. The two hundred meter dash. The long jump. And the four-by-one hundred meter relay. It's one of the most stunning athletic achievements of all time, and a monumental rebuke to the racist ideology of the Nazis. But the part of the story I find truly delightful...

the part that gets me every time... is what happened during the long jump competition. Owens had fouled on his first two attempts. He was one jump away from being eliminated. He was tense, he was pressing. And then a German athlete, a tall, blue-eyed, blond man named Luz Long — the very image of the Aryan ideal — walked over to him. Long suggested that Owens should make a mark a few inches behind the board and jump from there, to be safe. Owens took the advice. He qualified on his next jump. And then he went on to win the gold medal, breaking the Olympic record. The first person to congratulate him? Luz Long. They walked arm-in-arm around the stadium, in front of Adolf Hitler.

Owens would later say, "It took a lot of courage for him to befriend me in front of Hitler... You can melt down all the medals and cups I have, and they wouldn't be a plating on the twenty-four-karat friendship I felt for Luz Long at that moment." Luz Long was killed in action in World War Two, fighting for the German army. But in that one moment, on that one day, two men from opposite sides of a brewing global catastrophe refused to be enemies. They chose sportsmanship. They chose humanity. And that... that is a victory that shines even brighter than gold. That same energy — of challenging an oppressive system, of asserting one's humanity — has a much darker echo on this day.

On September twelfth, 1977, the South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko died in a prison cell in Pretoria, alone. He was thirty years old. The official cause of death was a hunger strike. It was a lie. He had been arrested, interrogated, beaten, and chained for twenty days. He suffered a massive brain hemorrhage. The police then loaded him, naked and unconscious, into the back of a Land Rover and drove him seven hundred miles to a prison hospital. He was dead on arrival. Steve Biko was the founder of the Black Consciousness Movement. His message was simple, and powerful: that black people in South Africa had to first decolonize their own minds.

To shed the feelings of inferiority that centuries of oppression had ingrained in them. He wrote, "The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed." His work was about psychological liberation as the first step toward political liberation. And the apartheid regime was TERRIFIED of him. Not because he led an army, but because he had an idea. An idea that was spreading like fire. They could ban him, they could arrest him, they could beat him. But they couldn't kill the idea. In fact, his death did the opposite. It exposed the brutality and the lies of the apartheid system to the entire world. It became a rallying cry.

Peter Gabriel wrote a song about him. Donald Woods, a journalist who had befriended him, wrote a book that became the movie "Cry Freedom." The death of Steve Biko was a tragedy. But his life, and the unstoppable power of his ideas, is a source of defiant joy. A reminder that you can kill a revolutionary, but you can't kill a revolution. So where does all this leave us? We have art from the dawn of humanity, the birth of a nation, an athlete defying a dictator, and an activist whose death sparked a revolution. It’s a lot for one day. But there's one more story I want to tell you. It’s the one that, for me, ties it all together. On September twelfth, 490 BC, a small army of Athenians stood on a coastal plain called Marathon, facing a Persian invasion force that was maybe twice its size, maybe more.

The Persians were the undisputed superpower of the ancient world. They had conquered everything from India to Egypt. And now they had come for Greece. For Athens. The cradle of this new, strange idea called "demokratia" — rule by the people. Everything... and I mean EVERYTHING... was on the line. If Athens fell, this experiment in democracy would be crushed in its infancy. The world we inherited — a world shaped by Greek philosophy, art, science, and politics — might never have existed. The Athenians were terrified. They sent a runner, Pheidippides, to Sparta to beg for help. The Spartans said they'd come, but only after the full moon, for religious reasons.

The Athenians were on their own. And so they did something insane. They attacked. They ran, screaming, across the plain, crashing into the Persian lines. The Persian cavalry, their most dangerous weapon, was... somewhere else. Maybe being loaded back onto ships, maybe watering the horses. We don't know for sure. But it wasn't there. And the Athenian hoplites, with their heavy armor and their long spears, just tore through the lightly armed Persian infantry. It was a stunning, shocking, world-altering victory. The Persians fled to their ships, and Athens was saved. Democracy was saved. The legend says that same runner, Pheidippides, then ran the twenty-six miles back to Athens, gasped out the word "Nike!" — Victory!

— and dropped dead. It's probably not true, but who cares? It's a perfect story. Looking back, what was that moment? It was the moment an idea survived its first great stress test. It was proof that a small group of free citizens, fighting for their homes, could defeat the army of a tyrant. It was the beginning of the West, not as a place on a map, but as a political project. And it all happened on September twelfth. So you have the discovery of our deepest, most mysterious past in the Lascaux caves. And you have the defense of our most foundational political idea at Marathon. But the day isn't done. Because on this same day, in 1962, President John F.

Kennedy stood up at Rice University and said, "We choose to go to the moon in this decade." It was an audacious, almost absurd promise. We barely knew how to get into orbit, let alone to another world. But it was a promise that looked forward, that set a goal so difficult it would force us to be our best selves. The discovery of where we came from, and the declaration of where we are going. That’s the beautiful tension of this date. It reminds us that our story is written in the deepest caves and in the furthest stars.