This was one of the first significant observations I made upon my arrival last month. During my seven hours on the train traveling from Cambridge to St Andrews in Scotland, I noticed in addition to the rolling green hills, small towns and villages we passed, there were an incredible number of graveyards, expansive enough to be easily visible from the moving train.

Naturally, when a nation has such a longer history of Western civilization than our own does, there are bound to be more people who have lived and died there, and more tombstones to mark the passage of time.

So I have been thinking rather a lot, during my visits around the U.K. this summer about the people who lived here before. Their lives, I assumed, must have been radically different from my own, their experiences strange and foreign not just because of geographical differences, but those of time.

These thoughts were foremost in my mind during my recent weekend stay in Bath. I stood on the steps of the house in which Jane Austen stayed during her time there two centuries ago and thought about how much had changed.

My somewhat startling conclusion: not much.

I will be taking two classes on Jane Austen at the University of Cambridge next month, and I have been reading each of her novels consecutively in preparation. Something that continued to strike me during this process was how similar these stories and their characters are to experiences I’ve heard about and people I’ve known.

That’s why they make such popular movies — we still relate to Austen’s heroines and their dramatic conflicts.

So why should I, or anyone, have expected otherwise? Why do we think the past so different from the present?

I think much of it has to do with the way our world looks and operates now. With a new iPod and smartphone model out every few months, the turnover of technology — especially communication technology — has increased to a very rapid pace. Something two years old is now considered totally obsolete.

Can you imagine what you’d think if you saw somebody toting around a clunky 1990s cell phone?

Looking back further, it’s easy to separate ourselves from people of the past based on the changes that have taken place since then. Few today can really conceptualize an America in which slavery is accepted, or a tribal society where human sacrifice is not only promoted, but considered an honor. Anybody who lived during these times, we might think, must be very different from ourselves.

Coming face to face with evidence to the contrary can be unsettling rather than comforting. It certainly was for me, at first.

Before Jane Austen ever traveled to Bath, the Romans popularized the area by constructing a massive temple around the hot spring that bursts through the ground there. They honored their goddess of the sun and made sacrifices to gain her favor, as well as bathing in the hot baths which were believed to have healing powers.

A museum at the Roman Baths describes these oddities in detail, but there also are links that make the Romans’ far outdated behavior seem much more closely connected to us than one would like to imagine.

For instance, wealthy Roman women were very proud of their hair, and often would wear hair extensions — given to them off the heads of their slaves — to assist in creating their ornate hairstyles.

Sound familiar?

In addition to seeking a renewal of health, Roman citizens also traveled to the temple because of its proximity to the goddess, whom they would ask for favors. Archaeologists have recovered thin metal plates with writing on them that had been thrown into the spring — messages to the goddess.

These messages contained pleas such as, “Whoever has stolen my two silver coins, let them pay for it in blood,” and “Please strike dead the man who has taken my favorite cloak.”

There were angry complaints, written on small plates with room for about 140 characters or so. I see a lot of this type of thing today, two millennia later.

So what I’ve come to realize is this: human nature and much of human behavior does not change. When we laugh at or condemn the practices of people who came before us, it helps to remember that they were not so different.

The same goes for people we encounter today. Across cultures and continents, we are all the same. This lesson, of course, is one we all know quite well, but as I’ve discovered in myself, there’s a difference between “knowing” something, and actually understanding and acting on it. Hopefully we can all gain a deeper awareness of our own prejudices and thus seek to overcome them.

Craig Pearson is a guest columnist at The State News and a biochemistry junior. Reach him at pears53@msu.edu.