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November 5 - December 21, 2019
None of the ways that humans interact with fire—carrying burning torches from one place to another, blowing on hot embers to light kindling, roasting meat and vegetable foods, feeding a campfire with fresh firewood, and holding the arms and legs out over a fire to warm them—would be possible if we had retained the long hairy fur that covers the bodies of all other primate species.
humans sweat more readily and more profusely than any other
primate.
parsimony
Paleolithic era
technology of agriculture
permanent settlements
transportation and communication
precision machinery
digital technology—which
Between twelve thousand and four thousand years ago,
agriculture first began in the Middle East roughly eleven thousand years ago,
the “Fertile Crescent.”
The earliest evidence of agriculture appeared between eleven and eight thousand years ago, with the domestication of wheat, barley, flax, peas,
lentils, cattle, goats, sheep, and pigs in the Fertile
Cres...
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“Natufians”—most
as soon as people began to live in one place, the pursuit of material wealth assumed an importance that it had never had before.
More than one hundred million people were killed in warfare during the twentieth century alone—at least four times as many people as were living on Earth when the first urban civilizations arose.
Although we rarely seem to think about it any more, the risk of thermonuclear annihilation is the most immediate threat to intelligent life in the history of our species.
The construction of the nuclear doomsday machine—and its continued maintenance and development since the mid-twentieth century—is surely one of the most astounding acts of collective insanity in the history of the human species.
By the year 2014, the Pacific Trash Vortex had become larger than the continental United States.
Białowieża Forest,
between Poland and Belarus.
The second most immediate threat to intelligent life, after the risk of thermonuclear war, is the risk of massive environmental destruction and life form extinction.
approximately thirty thousand life forms are becoming extinct every year,
The metamorphoses in human life and society wrought by weapons, fire, clothing, shelter,
symbolic communication, agriculture, urban civilization, precision machinery, and information technology have propelled us into a new and unique relationship with the biosphere that originally gave us life.
