* In 2009 archeologists from the University of Zaragoza revealed what they declared was the world’s earliest map – a stone tablet found in a cave in Abauntz in northern Spain. Engravings on the stone, which dates from around 14,000 BC and measures around seven by five inches, seem to depict mountains, rivers and areas for foraging and hunting. ‘We can say with certainty that it is a sketch, a map of the surrounding area,’ said Pilar Utrilla, who led the research team. ‘Whoever made it sought to capture in stone the flow of the watercourses, the mountains outside the cave and the animals found in the area.’

* Such a primitive form of brain mapping would inevitably prove useful to those with a bent for racial purity and social cleansing; a sympathetic physician could suggest superiority with a bigger frontal or temporal lobe, the grim reality in the Third Reich and the earliest conflict between the Hutus and the Tutsis.