This is Jonas Salk, inventor of the first polio vaccine, ending the childhood disease that had killed or crippled so many Americans — especially children — in the mid-20th century. But Salk was important for other reasons. His approach to designing the vaccine was innovative, using a denatured version of the virus rather than
History crosses the discipline of Political Science in the figure of John Rawls (1921-2002), arguably the most important American political philosopher of the 20th century. His book, _A Theory of Justice_, has ideas about how to structure society which have been of immeasurable importance far outside the towers of academia, ideas worth knowing about.
The Veil of Ignorance Read More »
Non-verbal communication is a scholarly subject usually studied by academics looking at modern human behavior. Physical gestures of course existed in past times too, but often there is little written evidence — whole catalogues of affective conversations that would have been instantly recognizable to anyone are closed off to historians, because they were so rarely
Communication Through Portraiture Read More »
Many of us have had need to wrap presents in the last few weeks, but maybe only some of us waited until early this morning on December 25 to start wrapping their children’s gifts. (Yours truly, ahem). The discipline of intentionally folding paper into different shapes is known as origami because this practiced flourished
We take for granted the ways we exchange greetings, but these ways are laden with hidden meanings that tell a lot about the culture they develop in. And when greetings change, something about the culture changes too. This is the Chinese character for “li,” an ancient concept developed in some of the oldest Confucian
Here are four different species of finches from the Galapagos Islands. Although they look similar, their differences include their beaks — each one takes advantage of a different type of seed. Natural selection shaped the trajectory of these birds’ appearance, and one of the scientists who first figured out how this worked passed away yesterday
Edward Osborne Wilson Read More »
One of the eeriest Medieval practices was the ceremonial burial of the anchorite, or the “Servicium Recludendi” as one litany calls it. Imagine being in the head-space of an anchorite, in which you were so concerned about devoting your life to prayer and abjuration of this world that you willingly entombed yourself in a prayer
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The root system you see here isn’t just part of the plant: it’s joined by fungi, making it a mycorrhiza — a symbiosis of plant and fungi. Most plants rely on mycorrhizae — the fungi elements give the roots better access to precious nutrients like phosphorous and water, and the plant bits give the fungus
Mycorrhiza: Symbiosis of Plant and Fungi Read More »
TIL that 30 million years ago a species of mound-building termites evolved with next-level techniques that we humans could learn from in order to deal with our environmental challenges. These are the Macrotermes, and what makes them particularly special is the very ancient relationship they co-created with the fungus Termitomyces. Neither survives without the
Termites and Mushrooms: A Quid Pro Quo Read More »
This is a mid-19th century North American painting entitled _Indian Women Playing the Game of Plum Stones_, and testifies to the ubiquitous practice of dice gambling that American Indian women played in pre-colonial times. As evidence summarized by Warren DeBoer suggests, gambling was a pastime that American Indian women seemed to have enjoyed across
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In their momentous book — _The Dawn of Everything_ (it’s got the entire field of history all a-tizzy right now) authors David Graeber and David Wengrow argue that the Enlightenment ideas of freedom, equality, and tolerance didn’t arise out of the minds of European political philosophers as much as from Native North American Indian intellectuals.
The Origins of Enlightenment Read More »
Here you see an illustration showing the happy and regal-looking figure of an Inca princess named Zilia. Captured from her homeland and torn from her fiancé, Zilia was rescued by a French captain and taken to Europe, where she was exposed to a culture that imagined itself enlightened, but which Zilia found repressive. Zilia
“Letters of a Peruvian Woman” Read More »
This unusual garment is called a “Bishop’s Mantle,” because of its similarity to the robes worn by such clergymen, but if you look closely, you’ll see it’s made up of linked chains — and is actually armor. In fact, it probably was only dubbed a “Bishop’s Mantle” by 19th-century antiquarians, and we might think
To the northwest of the Fertile Crescent of ancient Mesopotamia, in the southeast of modern Turkey, lie the ruins of one of the most important archaeological sites in human history: the stone monuments of Göbekli Tepe. Only discovered in the 1990s (earlier archaeologists has thought the remains medieval), Göbekli Tepe sprawls over twenty acres
This is a story about a ghost story — the legend of Big Liz of Greenbrier swamp. The tale dates to the American Civil War, when, according to a retelling by S.E. Schlosser, a young but powerfully strong woman — her huge arms could carry two sows at once — was suspected of being
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I know this rock doesn’t look like much, but it’s actually really cool. It’s an Ancient Roman _pomerium_ stone, unearthed this past July of 2021, and is only the eleventh to be found. The pomerium was a religious boundary marker for the city of Rome, and inside its borders certain activities were completely taboo.
Yesterday I wrote a post about a religious boundary line from Ancient Rome — one that was powerful enough to halt even state-sponsored violence within its borders. And today, here is another: this time, from the Medieval cathedral of Durham, England. This is the original “Sanctuary Knocker,” cast in bronze in 1155. As _The
The Durham Sanctuary Knocker Read More »
This skeleton is a photo montage of a very decorated burial. The man was between 35-45 years old when he died, but his remains date back to about 34,000 years ago — one of the earliest human interments in the historical record. This man’s grave, found in the region of Sunghir, Russia, reflects a vastly
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Here you see La Posada, constructed in 1929 in Winslow Arizona — the last of the Fred Harvey Hotels still in operation. The Fred Harvey Company’s restaurants and hotels shaped the architectural landscape and culture of the American Southwest — packaging the American Indian, Spanish Mission Revival, and US cowboy culture for middle-class tourism. And
I love how scientific technologies are helping us understand the earliest millennia of human history ever better. This drawing, for instance, features an artistic re-creation of skull fragments dated in 2017 that have helped to overturn our understanding of human evolution. Basic questions, such as “how long have Homo Sapiens been around?” And “where
Appearances of Homo Sapiens Read More »
