Tag: preistoria
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Ken Livingstone
Livingstone has consistently rejected being defined under any particular ideological current of socialism. Recognising this, in 2000, the former Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock asserted that Livingstone could only be defined as a “Kennist”. Livingstone’s understanding of politics arises from his studies of animal behaviour and anthropology; rejecting the idea that the human species is…
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Fluttuazioni
We tend to think that the farther back we go in history, the dirtier and less hygienic people were, and so the higher the level of infectious disease. This is broadly true if we restrict ourselves to the last 1,000 years of Western civilization. However, if we consider the broader sweep of human history, the…
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L’equivoco
The agricultural life, often referred to as “pastoral” or “rural”, seems a natural world to modern-day city dwellers and suburbanites. A weekend drive in the country is a time for relaxing and “going back to nature.” Yet farming is not na- ture, but rather the largest alteration of Earth’s surface from its natural state that…
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Una catastrofe annuale artificiale
Agriculture is a recent human experiment. For most of human history, we lived by gathering or killing a broad variety of nature’s offerings. Why humans might have traded this approach for the complexities of agriculture is an interesting and long-debated question, especially because the skeletal evidence clearly indicates that early farmers were more poorly nourished,…
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Il peggior sbaglio nella storia della razza umana
Anche se ormai risalente a più di vent’anni fa, l’articolo “The worst mistake in the history of the human race”, pubblicato nel maggio 1987 su Discover, rimane molto interessante, e col senno di poi propedeutico alle opere principali dell’autore Jared Diamond, ovvero “Armi, acciaio e malattie” e “Collasso”. Dato che in Rete, a quanto pare,…