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Paper The oldest known "drawings" on walls in caves, among others in Altamira near Santander in northern Spain discovered in 1902 by a believer, are still complete riddles for us. They are ' somewhere ' between 50,000 and 10,000 years before Christ put down. These in burrows and holes discovered scriptures, are seen by some as the last convulsion of a hoogbeschaafde culture; Others think that it is simply drawings of a less impressive nature, of some primitive people. The story wants the aforementioned high civilization to ever emerge in Atlantis and with the flood has gone down. The significance of these particular drawings is still not very clear to us. Hunting and other images of animals could be used very well for magical, cultural or religious purposes. The people scratched or signed on walls in caves in France, Norway and Spain. Even the development of the techniques used cannot be dated with certainty. It is thought of about 4,000 BC. But in the light of the date, that is not possible at all. It is probable that this way of describing the high civilized peoples came to fruition before they developed the cuneiform. One used first stones and later clay tablets, in order to transfer a message into the cuneiform. That must have been somewhere between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. In the country what we would call Iraq today. In the then China one used for this purpose then also all wood parts. The weight of the deeds that the emperor had read daily was more than eighty kilograms. You see we shoot through history and with it the time. They also endorsed the assertion that "nothing is thinner and breeder than water, but that everything that is hard is properly affected by water; The weak that the strong overcomes "... a true Chinese truth. But that aside. In the same period, the ancient Greeks also used wooden panels sprinkled with fine sand and gave the image (writings or images) a prize. Similarly, the mathematical and techie Archimedes have also recorded his formulas when the Romans in the year 212 occupy his hometown. The Romans themselves used in the year 500 BC before Christ had been sprinkled tables (the famous twelve tables with laws) to convey their message. Such tables were always and largely available when the Senate met. In this technique, a Granger or metallic object scratched a text or image in the preprocessed tables. This technique would certainly have taken a big flight if no other and better recordable substance had been discovered: papyrus. But later on. First we have to talk about parchment: made from dried skins of especially young sheep and goats. Sources show that in circa 300 BC in the small-Asian (now Turkish) town of Pergamon there was a decent production. In Alexandria (on the other side of the Mediterranean), in 202 BC even a library was decorated with mere parchment roles. It proved ideal for storing written texts and would remain the most popular ' medium ' until long after the invention of the printing art. Papyrus was roughly used between 3,000 BC and 1,000 A.D. and still applies as one of the showpieces of Egypt in particular, where, at the Nile, lies the cradle of this material. The pharaohs have this plant, which endures and has a lot of water, consciously planted for this purpose. The upper part gold as a delicacy and the sometimes called an arm thick strain was used for different purposes. So, among other things, complete ships were built, but it was also the carrier for groceries, which we would call paper today. The papyrus was cut thinly and evenly in strips that cross were placed over each other. Then a hammer session followed, with the fibres crushed, to allow the final result to dry in the spacious sun. The sticky juice from the plant itself kept the strips together. One saved the dried papyrus in coils; Also today that is still usual. But there is now an alternative: paper. This is made since the Year 105 after Christ and in our country only still hand in the open air museum and at the middle Mill in Loenen, where one works with a steam engine and water power from Wellen with pure water from the depths of the Veluwe land. The origin of paper, however, is attributed to a place far from our bed: China, already used for the first paper mainly a mix of water with mashed berries fibers, ground bark of the mulberry tree and Out rope. The resulting brain brought the old Chinese to a sieve. Shaking made sure that one and another were well interlocked and the watery part of the knitting was under the sieve. After that, the leaf was gently taken down and laid to dry, roughly as it is now with handmade paper. Paper made a victory over the continent relatively quickly. First the homeland, Korea and Japan were done. And when the expansive Arabs discovered that under the prisoners of war they were also paper-makers, the advance of the paper was unstoppable. The Arabs let the work of several great writers put on the Chinese invention and addressed various libraries. The caliph of Cairo possessed at a good time 150,000 books on paper. That was at the end of the year 1,000. Most Western European monasteries had at that time at best 150 parchment rolls... In fact, it is up to us to thank the new and advancing Moslem faith that it has finally come to our own. Partly through the South of Spain (in the eleventh century in Játiva) and partly also through the current Italy (in 176 in Fabriano) The invention was further spread across our continent. But it would take until the sixteenth century before it was also produced in our parts. It is particularly important that modern paper production is still in place in this way: a mixture of pulp and water is placed on one or between two arrows, dried and rolled, and cut to smaller rolls or sheets. There are today's machines, which per hour produce a production equal to the speed allowed on the motorway. And that on a width of sometimes ten meters or more. The latter can be seen as evidence of the fact that the paper industry has grown into a truly high-tech process industry. With a lot less ' romance ', but all the more contemporary ' challenges '. Thus it is an energy-intensive industry with the most important raw material: wood. That is what we are doing right now. There is an increasing demand for wood as biofuel. That, and Russian export levies, leads to additional costs on timber procurement. Energy intensive also means; Sensitive to higher oil prices. Because that leads to rising energy and chemicals prices (chemistry partly determines the print and printing properties of paper). and old paper (with us still an important raw material for newspaper paper) is becoming more expensive by growing demand from China (where they make packaging). At present, the centre of gravity of the industry of Europe and North America shifts to Asia (again China) and Latin America (due to the rapidly growing attractively priced eucalyptus trees). But there is also good news: the ' carbon footprint ' is very good compared to other industries: In the meantime approximately 60% of biofuels (wood and timber waste) are used for own energy generation.