Julia > Recent Status Updates

The agricultural revolution (9500-8500 BC, south-eastern Turkey, western Iran and the Levant)

The first wave of Sapiens colonization was one of the biggest and swiftest ecological disasters to befall the animal kingdom

The settlers of Australia, or more correctly, it’s conquerors, didn’t just adapt, they transformed the Australian ecosystem beyond recognition.

The journey of the first humans to Australia is one of the most important events in history, at least as important as Columbus’ journey to America or the Apollo II expedition to the moon. It was the first time any human had managed to leave the Afro-Asian ecological system – indeed, the first time any terrestrial mammal all had managed to cross from Afro-Asia to Australia.

A “curtain of silence shrouds tens of thousands of years of history”: we don’t know much about gatherer’ culture

The hunter-gatherer life: shorter working week, less household chores, more time to socialize, healthier (more varied diet, less infectious diseases).
But: child mortality, more dependent on society.

A ‘gorging gene’ theory (gorge on high-calotype food); an ‘ancient commune’ theory (collective fatherhood)

The power of gossip

Why the success of Homo Sapiens (as compared to other humans)? “The most likely answer is the very thing that makes the debate possible: Homo sapiens conquered the world thanks to above all its unique language”

“By 150,000 years ago, East Africa was populated by Sapiens that looked just like us. If one of them turned up in the modern morgue, the local pathologist would notice nothing peculiar”

Why a massive brain? We don’t know

“The earth of a hundred millennia ago was walked by at least 6 different species of man”

Leopold II
David Livingstone
Verney Lovett Cameron
Henry Morton Stanley
Congo Free State
The Berlin West Africa conference 1884
Invention of pneumatic tyres (Congo’s rubber)

Kimberley
Witwatersrand (1885)

Kimberley

Slave Trade via Delagoa Bay and its consequences
The Afrikaners
Diamonds in Kimberley

The Mfecane: ‘scattering’ set in motion by Shaka, the Xulu leader, in the early 1820s

SA history: Cape Town, the English, Frontier Wars

“...Do I lower myself by living with the people I draw? Do I lower myself when I go into the houses of laborers and poor people, and when I receive them in my studio? I think my profession requires it. Is that what you call ruining myself?”

“...Do I lower myself by living with the people I draw? Do I lower myself when I go into the houses of laborers and poor people, and when I receive them in my studio? I think my profession requires it. Is that what you call ruining myself?”

“...When I wear a fine coat, the working people I want to sketch are afraid of me and distrust me. The purpose of my drawing is to make people see things worth observing and which not everyone knows. If I sometimes have to sacrifice social manners to get my work done, am I not justified?...”

“...When I wear a fine coat, the working people I want to sketch are afraid of me and distrust me. The purpose of my drawing is to make people see things worth observing and which not everyone knows. If I sometimes have to sacrifice social manners to get my work done, am I not justified?...”

„Only the professional models would pose naked in The Hague. This exasperated Vincent; the bodies he wanted to draw were those of old men and women, bodies that had tone and character.“

„If only he could make a living, the very simplest living out of his work. He asked for nothing more. He could be independent. He would not have to be a burden on anyone. And best of all there would be no hurry; he could let himself feel his way slowly and surely toward maturity and the expression he was seeking.“

Firearms
Slavery abolition aftermath
Climate influence on historical developments

The Atlantic slave trade
John Newton
Cowrie shells

Portuguese consolidating their position in East Africa
Father Francisco Álvares’s notes on his travel around Ethiopia in 1520-1526
Locusts

Ethiopia
Vasco da Gama 1497, opening the sea route to India and the East