EO - While English professor Fuller sees humanity's improvement as inevitable and manifest, Curator of Archaeology and Director of Science for the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Brian Redmond, is a bit more cautious and measured.

Brian Redmond - In the general sense, I don't believe that civilization has an intended arrow - I don't believe there's a progressive nature to it. I think that's just how we perceive it. Talk to any culture at any one time, they probably think this is the best of times and it could never get much better than this. If you look at different aspects of culture, things do improve. There is a tendency toward greater complexity: in civilizations things get more complex, whether it's religious organization, or political organization, government formation, and of course technology. There is a trend to be more and more complex.

But does that mean things are better? I don't think necessarily. You don't have to worry about the wolves coming to your door tonight and carrying your children off, or having enough to eat tomorrow, because we provide for ourselves in that way. But I think that there are other concerns that are there and other stresses that we deal with that never existed before, and in that sense we are probably not better off than people 100 years ago in terms of our lives. And there is still warfare, but the wars are worse and more consequential.

EO - Dr. Redmond, where and when would you like to live if you had a choice?

BR - I probably wouldn't be happy in any other time if I went back with the knowledge of today's time because you know what you're missing, what you don't have. I would like to go back and visit different time periods: I'd love to go back to the Cuyahoga Valley in 1500 AD and see what was going on. I think, of course, it would be great to see some of the classical civilizations of the Mediterranean world: Greece and Rome, or the Middle East - watch them construct the pyramids and how did they do that. it would be fun to go back to East Africa 3 million years ago and see an early human. Wouldn't that be neat to go and see what your distant ancestors look like? Maybe you would say, "Hmm, that doesn't look like me at all."