Category Archives: Civilisation

This series of posts began with a look at differing values, using as examples the sacrifices made to the gods by the indigenous Muisca and the ancient Greeks. The Muisca, who lived high in the Andes, in what is now … Continue reading →

So, having covered aspects of early humans from their value systems and rituals, through language, writing and art, to their domestication and domination of nature, this week we are looking at death. I wasn’t sure where to even begin when … Continue reading →

The point of this ‘God spaketh, but why?’ series is to think about how the dominant story of humans controlling nature came to be and how we might change that story to one more likely to persist into a viable … Continue reading →

The last post ended with the idea that early human art was an attempt to communicate with the spirits of the land. Being a bit of an atheist, I tend to view ‘spirits’ and ‘gods’ as similar entities. But the … Continue reading →

In an earlier post, I referred to human population bottlenecks. These are periods during which a population (of any species) reduces in size dramatically, due to environmental events such as earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, or droughts. There is more to bottlenecks … Continue reading →

In the last post, I ended by wondering why humans started to write. What did writing allow that oral storytelling didn’t? One thing springs to mind, well two actually—consistency (reliability or uniformity; the quality of being consistent) and constancy (the … Continue reading →

In the last post, I ended by suggesting that with self-awareness and an understanding of one’s own mortality, must come an understanding that what we eat was also alive once, before we killed it. At some point, some of us … Continue reading →