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January 22 - January 27, 2024
Then the world began to change with the emergence of cyanobacteria—blue-green algae that use the sun’s rays to power photosynthesis. This made cyanobacteria much more effective at generating energy, giving them a huge evolutionary advantage. Their numbers boomed. Over a period of several hundred million years, they pumped vast amounts of oxygen—a by-product of photosynthesis—into the oceans and atmosphere. This Great Oxygenation Event transformed the planet.[15]
Cyanobacteria in the oceans still contribute to the oxygen in the atmosphere.
does pollution effect cyanobacteria?
retrovirus infections allowed our distant ancestors to acquire the capacity to perform functions that are fundamental to human existence.
function that human ancestors acquired from retroviruses is the ability to give birth.
it was almost identical to those used by retroviruses to produce the proteins that attach to cells they are infecting without triggering an immune response.[24] The scientists concluded that a crucial function of the placenta didn’t emerge gradually as a result of evolution by natural selection but was suddenly acquired when a retrovirus inserted its DNA into our ancestor’s genome. If one of our distant ancestors hadn’t been infected by a virus hundreds of millions of years ago, humans would reproduce by laying eggs.
There is now growing evidence that the gut microbiome has an important impact on the human brain.
It has raised hopes that fecal transplants from people with healthy microbiomes will one day provide a more effective treatment for depression than Prozac or therapy.
The main alternative to the Great Men theory of history is what Lucien Febvre, the French historian, referred to in the early 1930s as “histoire vue d’en bas et non d’en haut,” or “history from below and not from above.”[35] This approach focuses on the masses of ordinary men and women, often fighting against exploitation and oppression. In this view, it is the cumulative impact of all their struggles that drives progressive social, political and economic transformations. E.
There is both archeological and genetic evidence that we coexisted in Africa with a variety of other species of humans.[4]
Neanderthals were also taller, heavier, stronger and had slightly bigger brains than Homo sapiens. Their fair skin helped them absorb sunlight—which is crucial for making vitamin D—and their large, frequently blue eyes enabled them to see in the dark European winter.
A plethora of recent discoveries point to the fact that Homo sapiens weren’t, in fact, smarter than other species of human.
Another Shanidar skeleton belonged to a male who may have been in his mid-forties when he died around 45,000 years ago. The man had suffered from severe disabilities for much of his life: he was blind in one eye as a result of a crushing blow to his head at a young age; his right arm was withered, and had possibly been amputated; he had fractured a metatarsal on his right foot, which had healed; and he was profoundly deaf.[40] This find is astonishing because it suggests that the band of Neanderthals living in Shanidar were willing and able to look after a very vulnerable member of their
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After they reproduced, Homo sapiens retained certain Neanderthal gene variants which helped them to survive as they migrated northward. Geneticists call this “adaptive introgression”—and it is the closest that humans can get to the process of horizontal gene transfer, which allows different species of bacteria to exchange DNA in order to adjust to new environmental challenges.
As a result, infectious diseases created an “invisible barrier”: it was impossible for Homo sapiens to migrate out of Africa because sooner or later they would encounter Neanderthals and their pathogens and get ill, and the same was true when Neanderthals pushed southward.[60]
Neanderthals gave Homo sapiens a “poison” by exposing them to a novel pathogen, but also the “antidote” in the form of introgressed gene variants that confer resistance to the pathogen.[61] As a result, many of the Neanderthal gene variants that remain in our genome relate specifically to our immune response.[62]
Denisovan gene variants account for much of the remarkable physical diversity of modern humans, allowing them to live in a variety of extreme habitats. Tibetans carry a Denisovan gene mutation that affects red blood cells, making it possible to live comfortably on a 13,000-feet- or 4,000-meter-high plateau where the air contains 40 percent less oxygen than at sea level.[67] Another gene variant that increases the size of the spleen is carried by the Sama-Bajau, nomadic people who live on flotillas of houseboats in the seas off the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia.[68] The spleen stores
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do the women of jeju have this or too soon in evolutionary time frame?
As a result, Homo sapiens would have developed resistance to Neanderthal viruses and bacteria before Neanderthals became tolerant to Homo sapiens’ pathogens.[76]
As a result, almost everywhere that humans adopted settled agriculture, early farmers were less healthy than hunter-gatherers.
that the adoption of settled agriculture, coupled with population growth and increased trade, created a golden age for viruses, microbes and other animals. Many of the infectious diseases that afflict contemporary humans are caused by Neolithic pathogens.[29] Hepatitis B has been circulating
The Anopheles gambiae mosquito, which transmits the most lethal form of falciparum malaria, cannot breed in very shaded water. They wouldn’t have been able to reproduce in the dense tropical rainforests that covered much of the region, so the emergence of slash-and-burn agriculture was a boon for both the mosquitoes and the plasmodium that causes malaria.
most adaptations—where a favorable new gene mutation quickly spreads throughout the population—occurred in the last 6,000 to 13,000 years, which roughly corresponds to the period when humans took up settled agriculture.[39] In
As it turns out, the first Briton looked about as far as one can imagine from the stereotype of a fair-haired, pale-skinned “English Rose.” He had dark skin, curly black locks and blue-green eyes.[43]
The fact that dark-skinned hunter-gatherers were able to live in the British Isles indicates that they could get sufficient vitamin D from other sources: their diet was extremely rich in fish and meat. It was only after the Neolithic Revolution, when early farmers survived on a much less nutritious diet, that lighter skin conferred a survival advantage.[44]
One and a half millennia after they were last used, Rome’s communal toilets look impressive—even if the lack of privacy might seem strange. Back then, though, you would have been well advised to stay away. These weren’t flush toilets that neatly whisked away human waste. In the summer especially, the smell would have been almost unbearable. Gases such as hydrogen sulfide or methane built up in the sewers and, when ignited by the heat or a naked flame, blasted fire and human waste out of the seat openings.[*3] Tersoria, the shared sponges on sticks that the Romans used to wipe their bottoms,
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Although endemic pathogens killed large numbers of Romans, they also had a surprising benefit: diarrheal disease and malaria created what amounted to a protective force field around the imperial capital. Anyone who had survived until adulthood would have acquired immunity but people who came from outside, including those who wanted to conquer the city, were at high risk of getting sick or dying if they stayed too long.
Christians would have been able to reduce mortality by up to two-thirds just with basic nursing, such as providing food and water.[48] The fact that so many more Christians survived, and that Christians managed to save pagans abandoned by their families, would have provided the best recruitment material any religion could ask for: miracles.
one makes lasagne with layers of pasta and cheese.”[15]
wow early mention of lasagna
The introduction of regulations such as quarantine and cordons sanitaires in late-medieval societies had significance well beyond public health, because they extended state power into areas of human life that had not previously been subject to political authority.
Michel Foucault saw the shift in the focus of states from controlling territory to governing people’s bodies as a key feature of the modern world.[35]
Luther’s tracts were accompanied by crude, satirical woodcut images, so that in an age of low literacy his ideas reached as wide an audience as possible.[58]
existential questioning triggered by the Black Death didn’t just lead to the rise of Protestantism but also paved the way for the emergence of secularism.
Similarly, merchants formed companies that lobbied lords, princes and kings for charters that gave them special trading privileges and therefore restricted competition.
Consequently, the lords tried to squeeze more out of their serfs in a desperate effort to maintain their livelihoods.[72] At the same time, peasants were keen to take advantage of the shortage of workers and glut of cultivatable land to demand better conditions.
It was only in England that the post–Black Death conflict between the lords and peasants resulted in the demise of feudalism and the transition to capitalism.
conspicuous consumption of the newly affluent commoners.
how did commoners now become newly affluent
land was now so plentiful and agricultural labor so scarce that it was impossible to hold back the tides of social and economic change. Desperate, the lords eventually stopped cooperating with one another and instead began competing for peasants. Serfs
why did land become more plentiful?
In this new economic environment, only those free peasants who abandoned their risk-averse subsistence approach and adopted profit-maximizing behavior could afford to rent land. The vast majority of them didn’t keep up with these changes and over the next couple of centuries became landless.
why if costs are stablizied?
But the growing disposable income of the English public also had impacts much farther afield. Rising demand for raw cotton, as well as sugar, tobacco, and other commodities contributed to European colonial expansion and the emergence of the Atlantic slave trade.
In a letter to the king, Charles V, Cortés described with amazement how Tenochtitlan’s buildings, pottery, jewelry, clothes, shoes, food, markets and barber shops were either similar to or of better quality than those in Spain.[6]
Horses were, he suggests, the late-medieval equivalent of jeeps and Sherman tanks. We should not, however, exaggerate their importance. The Spanish had a very small number—initially sixteen in Cortés’ invasion and sixty-eight in Pizarro’s—and these would have provided little or no benefit in the most decisive of the conquistadors’ campaigns, such as the three-month siege of Tenochtitlan in 1521 or against the guerrilla tactics used in the 1536 Inca rebellion.
Diamond’s emphasis on guns and steel over germs was an argument formulated in the 1990s, before the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan reminded us just how ineffective military technology can be in the face of determined local resistance.[*2]
desire to become fabulously wealthy.[*3]
gold is so arbitrary? why did we decide it holds so much value? bc it is shiny? not the hardest metal
“Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal.” Without the help of Old World pathogens, early efforts to colonize the American mainland foundered.
did germs have an effect on conquering of hawaiian islands?
Herzogian allegory
In reality, the conquistadors fought alongside several rebellious tributary states, who made up about 99.5 percent of the forces arrayed against the Mexica.[20] But these allies were eventually hit by the smallpox epidemic too.
Spanish culture wasn’t adopted wholesale, however. Many of the conquistadors were young male fortune seekers who traveled alone. They settled down with women from the Mexica and Inca nobility—those who had survived the epidemics—and created a new hybrid, mestizo society that drew from both indigenous and European cultures.[35]
In Asterix and the Normans, for example, one of the latter admits to killing twenty-four of his enemies because he wanted “to give a set of skulls to a friend for a wedding present…only he wasn’t too pleased…everyone else had the same idea.”
The epidemic that devastated the indigenous population in the years before 1620 benefited the colonists in another important way: by unsettling the power balance between rival Native American communities in the region.
They brought with them institutions that encouraged the emergence of capitalism, most notably a legal system that placed a strong emphasis on property rights and checks against abuse of government power. The North American colonists were better off than back home because of the absence of a powerful landed aristocracy—many of whom had controlled their vast estates since the Norman invasion of England in 1066.
Innate immunity provides nowhere near full protection.[72]
