Julia > Recent Status Updates

Patriarchal genes: most ambitious, aggressive and competitive men. ... Women who spent too much time fighting for power did not leave any of those powerful genes for future generations

If there is any truth in this stereotypes, then women should have made excellent politicians and empire builders, leaving the dirty work on the battlefields to testerone charged but simple minded machos. Popular myths notwithstanding, this rarely happened in the real world. It’s not at all clear why not

Women‘s rights:
Ancient Greece: no indep.legal status, no education, no business/philosophy/court/politics participation

Independence
Coups
Nigeria
Botswana
Rwanda
SA

Belgian Congo
Patrice Lumumba

WWII
The Atlantic Charter
Independence of (white) SA
Kenya

Education
Independence movements emergence coinciding with the growth of Soviet Union
Education of Tutsi vs Hutu

Rwanda and Burundi

Rwanda and Burundi

The Anglo-Boer War
WWI

German colonies
Namibia: Herero and Nama, their rebellions and extermination
German East Africa: The Maji-Maji rebellion (people of the Matumbi Hills, prophet Kinkilitili)

The Bible decrees that ‚if a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed, and seizes her and lies with her, and they are found, then the man who lay with her shall give to the father of the young woman 50 shekels of silver, and she shall be his life’ (Deuteronomy 22:28-9). The ancient Hebrews considered this a reasonable arrangement.

“Since the biological distinctions between different groups of Homo sapiens are, in fact, negligible, biology can’t explain the intricacies of Indian society or American racial dynamics. We can only understand those phenomena by studying the events, circumstances, and power relations that transforms figments of imagination into cruel – and very real - social structures.”

“Between 3000 BC 2500 BC more and more signs were added to this Sumerian system, gradually transforming it into a full script that we today call cuneiform”

...The Sumarians thereby released their social order from the limitations of human brain, opening the way for the appearance of cities, kingdoms and class. The data processing system invented by the Samarian’s is called “writing”

“Between the years 3500 BC and 3000 BC, some unknown Sumarian geniuses invented the system for storing and processing information outside of their brains, one that was custom built to handle large amounts of mathematical data.

...For thousands of years after the Agricultural revolution, human social networks remained relatively small and simple”
— Sounds like a very weak causal relation

...For thousands of years after the Agricultural revolution, human social networks remained relatively small and simple”
— Sounds like a very weak causal relation

“This mental limitation [inability to memorize, recall and handle large volumes of numbers] severely constrained the size and complexity of human collectives. When the amount of people and property in a particular society crossed a critical threshold, it became necessary to store and process large amounts of mathematical data. Since the human brain could not do it, the system collapsed....

“This mental limitation [inability to memorize, recall and handle large volumes of numbers] severely constrained the size and complexity of human collectives. When the amount of people and property in a particular society crossed a critical threshold, it became necessary to store and process large amounts of mathematical data. Since the human brain could not do it, the system collapsed....

“The imagined order shapes out desires”
“Tourism ... sells experience”
“Like the elite of ancient Egypt, most people in most cultures dedicate their lives to building pyramids. ... Fee question the myths that cause us to desire the pyramid in the first place”

The ‚thin white line‘ of colonial authority
Why did the Africans allowed continent-wide submission to colonial rule to happen?

Artificial African borders, e.g. the border between Tanzania and Kenya, Senegal and Gambia, Benin and Nigeria
Germany’s colonies

Lewanika, King of the Lozi (Zambezi)
George Westbeech
Coronation of Edward VII

The food surpluses produced by peasants, coupled with new transportation technology, eventually enabled more and more people to cram together first into large villages, then into towns, and finally into cities, all of them joined together by new kingdoms and commercial networks

Domesticating animals

Domesticating animals

Population growth

Population growth

The agricultural revolution was history’s biggest fraud. [...]
The culprit were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa