Origins of Agriculture
gregladen | March 2, 2015OK, I admit the title of this post is possibly a bit extreme but I could not resist the symmetry. Here, I refer to both ends of civilization, the start and the finish.
I'd like to talk about a recent review published in Science, titled "Systems integration for global sustainability" written by my colleague Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute together with Jiangou Liu, Harold Mooney, Vanessa Hull, Steven Davis, Joane Gaskell, Thomas Hertel, Jane Lubchenco, Karent Seto, Claire Kremen and Shuxin Li. But I want to put this paper in a broader perspective, dipping into my training as an…
gregladen | September 21, 2009This is yet another in a series of posts on falsehoods. To refresh your memory, a falsehood is a belief held by a number of people that is in some way incorrect. That incorrectness may be blatant, it may be subtle, it may be conditional, it may be simple, it may be complex. But, the unraveling of the falshoodosity of the belief is a learning experience, if it is accomplished in a thoughtful manner and without too much sophistry. In order for a falsehood to "work" as a learning opportunity it is important to define the statement in terms of the thoughts the falsehood invokes in the target…
gregladen | July 13, 2008It has become axiomatic that the use of adornment by humans is some sort of symbolic act, and thus is linked to the human symbolic and linguistic mind. The human symbolic and linguistic mind is the trait that we axiomatically believe to be the derived human feature ... the cladistic apomorphy that makes us human (as opposed to other-ape). Therefore, the use of adornment is seen by early 21st century archaeologists as evidence of modern human behavior.
Some artifacts from early archaeological sties might be adornment, or they might be 'art' (or at least "arty") and they might be related to…