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FMH Background and History 1 Farther up the coast in what is now Washington, Th underbird and Whale had a terrible fi ght, making the mountains shake and uprooting the trees, said the Quileute and the Hoh people they said the ocean rose up and covered the whole land. Farther north still, on Vancouver Island, dwarfs who lived in a mountain invited a person to dance around their drum the person accidentally kicked the drum and got earthquake-foot, said the Nuu- chah-nulth people, and after that every step he took caused an earthquake. (Finkbeiner 2015) For as long as humans have existed on Earth, they have tried to understand the world around them and changes that take place in the world. Th e earliest humans, for example, were interested in question such as the following: How do people become ill? How does a woman become pregnant? What causes someone to die? Lacking any other way to answer those questions, early humans created answers that seemed to make sense to them. For example, many early tribes decided that illness was caused when an unfriendly enemy cast spells on a person. Th e person would survive only if he or she could have that spell removed. (Some ancient beliefs, it should be noted, survive in the mod- ern world.) Th e ruins of Pompeii, Italy, with a view of Mount Vesuvius, a once deadly volcano. (Frenta/Dreamstime.com) 3