out of africa

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Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past by David Reich

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Pääbo’s own 1997 work strengthened the evidence for a purely African origin by showing that Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA fell far outside all modern human variation.19 I too came into the Neanderthal genome project with a strong bias against the possibility of Neanderthal interbreeding with modern humans. My Ph.D. supervisor, David Goldstein, was a student of Luca Cavalli-Sforza, who had made a fully out-of-Africa model a centerpiece of his models of human evolution, and I was steeped in this paradigm. The genetic data I knew about supported the out-of-Africa picture so consistently that from my perspective the strictest possible version of the out-of-Africa hypothesis, in which there was no interbreeding between the ancestors of present-day humans and Neanderthals, seemed like a good bet. Coming from this background, we were deeply suspicious of the evidence we were finding for interbreeding with Neanderthals, and so we applied a particularly stringent series of tests in order to find some problem with our evidence.

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Foley, “Multiple Dispersals and Modern Human Origins,” Evolutionary Anthropology 3 (1994): 48–60. 13. H. Reyes-Centeno et al., “Testing Modern Human Out-of-Africa Dispersal Models and Implications for Modern Human Origins,” Journal of Human Evolution 87 (2015): 95–106. 14. H. S. Groucutt et al., “Rethinking the Dispersal of Homo sapiens Out of Africa,” Evolutionary Anthropology 24 (2015): 149–64. 15. R. Grün et al., “U-series and ESR Analyses of Bones and Teeth Relating to the Human Burials from Skhul,” Journal of Human Evolution 49 (2005): 316–34. 16. S. J. Armitage et al., “The Southern Route ‘Out of Africa’: Evidence for an Early Expansion of Modern Humans into Arabia,” Science 331 (2011): 453–56; M.

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Multiregionalism soon encountered its antithesis, the out-of-Africa theory. In this theory, modern humans did not evolve in each location in the world separately from local archaic forms. Instead, modern humans everywhere derive from a relatively recent migration from Africa and the Near East beginning around fifty thousand years ago. The recent date of “Mitochondrial Eve” compared with the deep divergence of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA provided some of the best evidence for this theory. In opposition to the multiregional hypothesis, the out-of-Africa theory emphasizes the recent origin of the differences among present-day human populations, relative to the multimillion-year time depth of the human skeletal record.

The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality by Oded Galor

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All humans on Planet Earth today are descended from this one African woman.[13] The widely accepted ‘Out of Africa’ hypothesis suggests that the current population of anatomically modern humans across the globe descends predominantly from a more significant migration of Homo sapiens from Africa as early as 60,000–90,000 years ago.[14] Humanity flocked to Asia via two routes: the northern via the Nile Delta and the Sinai Peninsula to the eastern Mediterranean region known as the Levant, and the southern one via the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait at the mouth of the Red Sea into the Arabian Peninsula (Fig. 3).[15] The first modern humans reached South East Asia more than 70,000 years ago,[16] Australia 47,000–65,000 years ago,[17] and Europe nearly 45,000 years ago.[18] They settled Beringia approximately 25,000 years ago, crossing the land bridge over the Bering Strait during several periods of the Pleistocene Ice Age, and entered deeper into the Americas 14,000–23,000 years ago.[19] These waves of migrations out of Africa contributed to the size and the diversity of the human population across Planet Earth. As prehistoric humans settled new ecological niches, they enjoyed access to new grounds for hunting and gathering and started to multiply more rapidly. Meanwhile, their adaptation to diverse new environments led to greater human and technological diversity, fostering the spread and cross-pollination of innovations, and leading to further population growth. Figure 3. The Migration of Homo sapiens out of Africa The estimated migration routes of Homo sapiens and their approximate years before the present.

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Thus, as long as the parrots migrate from each parental island more rapidly than the pace of potential mutations on the island, the further away the parrots migrate (sequentially) from the original island, the less diverse their population will be. Human migration out of Africa followed a comparable pattern. An initial group left Africa and settled in fertile regions nearby, carrying only a subset of the diversity that existed in their parental African population. Once the initial migratory group had grown to the extent that its new environment could no longer support any additional expansion, a less diverse subgroup departed in search of other virgin territory and settled in habitats further away. During this human dispersal out of Africa and the peopling of the continents, this process repeated itself: as populations grew, new subgroups containing only some of the diversity in their parental colony left again in a quest for greener pastures.

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Armed with this powerful measure of the overall diversity of each population, we can at last explore whether the exodus out of Africa that occurred tens of thousands of years ago, and its impact on human diversity, might have had an astoundingly long-lasting effect on current living standards across the globe. Diversity and Prosperity Living conditions in the course of history have indeed been influenced significantly by levels of diversity and therefore by the migration of Homo sapiens out of Africa.[15] Migratory distances of the ancestral populations of each country, or ethnic group, from the cradle of humankind in East Africa have generated a persistent ‘hump-shaped’ influence on development outcomes, reflecting a fundamental trade-off between the beneficial and the detrimental effects of diversity on productivity at the societal level.

The Next Great Migration by Sonia Shah

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But already paleogeneticists such as Sweden’s Svante Pääbo and Harvard’s David Reich, among others, have revealed a backstory of ancient migrations that is far more complex than what Cavalli-Sforza and others extrapolated from modern-day DNA. The Out of Africa journey had been cast as a dispersal into vast empty spaces. But when our ancestors walked out of Africa, new data from ancient DNA revealed, they moved into lands where other peoples already lived. These now-extinct archaic humans had beaten us there, having migrated out of Africa themselves some 1.8 million years ago. When our ancestors encountered them, they did what migrants do everywhere: they had babies with the locals, a process of mixing that allowed bits of their DNA to enter ours.

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After centuries of allegiance to sedentist myths, commentators viewed the notion of a mass migration out of Africa with suspicion.20 Critics complained that Wilson and his colleagues “simply didn’t have the training” to untangle the complexities of the human past. “African migrants” could never have successfully colonized the entire planet, the paleoanthropologists Alan G. Thorne and Milford Wolpoff wrote in a 1992 Scientific American article. Research by scientists such as the population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza supported the migratory history suggested by Mitochondrial Eve. Cavalli-Sforza called that ancient exodus the “Recent Out of Africa” migration. He, among others, incorporated the new DNA evidence21 with the way skulls had changed, how pathogens, languages, and cultures had evolved, and a raft of other archaeological evidence to prove that we had indeed migrated out of Africa just hundreds of thousands of years ago.

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He, among others, incorporated the new DNA evidence21 with the way skulls had changed, how pathogens, languages, and cultures had evolved, and a raft of other archaeological evidence to prove that we had indeed migrated out of Africa just hundreds of thousands of years ago. Cavalli-Sforza’s work forced the fact of our recently shared African origins into mainstream acceptance. But his theory left other central planks of the sedentist paradigm intact. The premodern migrations he described occurred under exceptional and short-lived circumstances. The way Cavalli-Sforza imagined it, the journey out of Africa had been a dispersal into empty land, motivated by the allure of unoccupied territory. Our earliest ancestors evolved in Africa in a world of vast, unpopulated spaces, “new, pristine environment[s],” and “virgin territory.”

A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford

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The oldest true Neanderthal bones we’ve found are 300,000 years old, and we’ve not discovered any younger than 30,000. That is a reasonable longevity for a human species. Homo erectus, an earlier upright ape, spread all over the world from an exodus out of Africa that began 1.9 million years ago. But the Neanderthals still clocked up a longer innings than we have so far. We anatomically modern humans are generally thought to have evolved in eastern Africa around 200,000 years ago, and emerged out of Africa in our own exodus sometime in the last 100,000 years. This number inches up every few years, as more specimens are found. A discovery in October 2015, from the Fuyan cave in the Daoxian region in southern China, dug up forty-seven modern teeth at least 80,000 years old, and it’s not unreasonable to presume that the owners of those teeth took some tens of thousands of years to get that far east from the motherland.

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The full gamut of suggestions has been made over the years, from their being the direct ancestors of modern Europeans, to their existence on a completely different bough of the evolutionary tree, who left no extant descendants. The last common ancestor of us and them is thought to have existed around 600,000 years before today. The migration of Homo sapiens out of Africa. Anatomically modern humans began their tenure on Earth in eastern Africa, around 200,000 years ago. They had begun to trickle out of Africa at least 100,000 years ago. They met Neanderthals in Europe, and other human species en route, and according to our DNA, bred with many of them. Svante Pääbo’s digging within Neanderthal 1’s arm bone was the first step in answering this.

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But what DNA analysis revealed more categorically than anything else was that we had sex with them, repeatedly, probably as soon as these two peoples met, and every time afterwards. So what happened? Humans are both horny and mobile. The language we use feels deceptive in these terms, at least in the timescales we’re referring to. When we say humans migrated out of Africa, as our ancestors surely did, it sounds a little like they packed their bags, upped sticks and headed north to the Promised Land. The whole basis of current thinking about the origin of us is referred to as the Out of Africa hypothesis, defined by our migration away from the first site of anatomically modern humans. The timescales are not really known precisely, other than to say that they were over thousands of years.

Lonely Planet Kenya by Lonely Planet

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After her first marriage broke down, she began a love affair with the British playboy Denys Finch Hatton, who subsequently died in a plane crash during one of his frequent flying visits to Tsavo National Park. After the farm came close to bankruptcy, Blixen returned to Denmark, where she began her famous memoir Out of Africa. The book is one of the definitive tales of European endeavour in Africa, but Blixen was passed over for the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature in favour of Ernest Hemingway. She died from malnutrition at her family estate in Denmark in 1962. In 1985 Out of Africa was made into a movie starring Meryl Streep, Robert Redford and one of the retired trains from Nairobi’s Railway Museum. The final production was terrific from a Hollywood perspective, but it left out enough of the colonial history to irk historians and Kenyan nationalists alike.

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The park's main gate was forced to move back up the hill during the 2014 floods. Budget Tips Stay outside the park and you'll pay far less for accommodation, and won't risk needing a permit for longer than 24 hours. Pega Tours offers cheap vehicle hire with guides for those without vehicles. 1Sights Out of Africa LookoutVIEWPOINT ( GOOGLE MAP ) To get the best view that takes in much of the park, head up to the rocky Out of Africa Lookout. Less frequented by tour groups than the lower Baboon Cliff, the incline is steeper but it offers sweeping views out over the lake and fond memories for fans of the film – parts of the movie were filmed in the park, with some shots taken from here.

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With no cars around, the best way to get to know this graceful town is by wandering its backstreets, admiring the grand old Swahili doors, peeking into hidden courtyards bursting with unexpected colours, slipping into an easy chair and sipping on a fruit juice, and accepting all invitations to stop and shoot the breeze. Do all this and the backstreets of Lamu will become a place you’ll dream of forever. NIGEL PAVITT / GETTY IMAGES © Top Experiences Lake Nakuru National Park This world-class national park with strong echoes of Out of Africa is dominated by one of the Rift Valley’s most beautiful lakes. The waters are lined on one side by an abrupt escarpment and the shoreline is at times given colour and texture by massed birdlife. But Lake Nakuru is also a wildlife haven for land-borne mammals, home as it is to tree-climbing lions, leopards, the highly endangered Rothschild’s giraffes, zebras, buffaloes, various primate species and some of Kenya’s most easily spotted rhinos.

Straight on Till Morning: The Life of Beryl Markham by Mary S. Lovell

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Make once more my heart thy home. 28 Isak Dinesen: The Life of Karen Blixen, Judith Thurman, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982. 29 ibid. 30 Interview with Mrs Doreen Bathurst Norman, Jersey, May 1986. 31 Out of Africa, Karen Blixen, Penguin, 1984. 32 Mrs Doreen Bathurst Norman in telephone conversation, October 1986. 33 Interview with Mrs Doreen Bathurst Norman, Jersey, May 1986. 34 Isak Dinesen: The Life of Karen Blixen, Judith Thurman, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982. 35 ibid. 36 The Times, 21 September 1936. 37 Out of Africa, Karen Blixen, Penguin, 1984. 38 ibid. 39 ibid. 40 Interview with Beryl Markham, Nairobi, April 1986; and transcript of interviews with Beryl by film crew of the documentary World without Walls, Kenya, 1984. 41 ibid. 42 The Times, 21 September 1936. 43 Hunters’ Tracks: Great Men – Great Hunters, J.A.

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But some memories I have kept for myself as everyone must. And because she understands this I have tried to help her, as she – in her own way – has helped me. Beryl Markham Nairobi, 3 April 1986 INTRODUCTION In 1985 my ex-husband, Cliff Lovell, flew his De Havilland Gipsy Moth airplane during the making of the movie Out of Africa. When he returned home at Christmas after three months of filming in Kenya, I asked him to tell me all about it. Instead of stories about Meryl Streep and Robert Redford (which is what I wanted to hear), he began telling me about an elderly woman who had been brought onto the set to see the Moth.

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He told me that she now lived a retired life in Kenya, but that as a pioneer aviatrix she had been a bush pilot, had made many record-breaking flights, and was the first woman to fly the Atlantic ‘the hard way’ – east to west against the prevailing winds. She had also been a friend of Karen Blixen and Denys Finch Hatton, whose relationship was the basis for the Out of Africa movie, and she had been a leading racehorse trainer. To my knowledge I had never heard the name Beryl Markham, but I recall that I was aware of a frisson of recognition – almost amounting to déjà vu – and to this day I cannot explain it. As Cliff finished telling me about her he said, ‘Someone ought to write a book about her,’ and there it was again, an inexplicable prickle of the hairs on the back of my neck.

The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution by Richard Dawkins

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'Out of Africa' is unfortunate because everybody agrees that our ancestors are from Africa if you go back far enough. 'Separate Origins' is also not an ideal name because, again if you go back far enough, the separation must disappear on any theory. The disagreement concerns the date when we came out of Africa. It might be better to call the two theories 'Young Out of Africa' (YOOA) and 'Old Out of Africa' (OOOA). This has the added advantage of emphasising the continuum between them. If today's non-Africans all stem from a single recent emigration from that continent, we would expect modern gene distributions to demonstrate a recent, Africa-centred, small-population 'bottleneck'.

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Coalescent gene trees have helped resolve a long-standing debate over human origins. The 'Out of Africa' theory holds that all surviving peoples outside Africa are descended from a single exodus around a hundred thousand years ago, more or less. At the other extreme are the 'Separate Origins' theorists or 'Multiregionalists', who believe that the races still living in, say, Asia, Australia and Europe are anciently divided, separately descended from regional populations of the earlier species, Homo erectus. Both names are misleading. 'Out of Africa' is unfortunate because everybody agrees that our ancestors are from Africa if you go back far enough.

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This is, in effect, what the evolutionary biologist Alan Templeton did, and he came up with his engagingly titled theory 'Out of Africa Again and Again'. Templeton used a type of coalescence theory, similar to that in our haemophilia discussion, but he did it for lots of separate genes instead of just one. This enabled him to reconstruct the history and geography of genes over the whole world and over hundreds of thousands of years. At the moment, I favour Templeton's 'Out of Africa Again and Again' theory, because he seems to me to use all the available information in a way that maximises its power to generate inferences; and because he bent over backwards, at every step of his work, to guard against overreaching the evidence.

Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History by Lewis Dartnell

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One recent controversial study, for example, argues that an unidentified hominin species reached California during the preceding ice age, 130,000 years ago.50 What does seem likely, however, is that the exodus of modern humans out of Africa around 60,000 years ago, which gave rise to all people around the world today, was not the first. Fossilised remains in caves in Israel and stone tools found in the Arabian Peninsula51 suggest earlier migrations around 100,000 years ago, but these apparently reached a dead end and didn’t go on to populate the rest of the world.52 It’s almost as if early sparks of humanity blew out of Africa but didn’t catch. § The Neanderthals weren’t the only species to have been apparently greatly affected by modern humans appearing in their environment.

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Overall, of the fifteen hominin species we know of, twelve first appeared during these three variable phases.32 What’s more, the development and spread of the different stages of tool technologies that we discussed earlier–Oldowan, Acheulean, Mousterian–also correspond with the eccentricity periods of extreme climate variability.33 And not only did the variable periods determine our evolution, they are also thought to have been the force driving several hominin species to migrate out of their birthplace and into Eurasia. We’ll explore in detail in the next chapter how our species Homo sapiens were able to disperse around the entire globe, but the conditions propelling hominins out of Africa in the first place again lie with the climate fluctuations in the Great Rift. During each wet phase the filling of the large amplifier lakes and the extra availability of water and food would cause a population boom, while at the same time limiting the amount of space available for habitation along the tree-lined rift shoulders.

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Moister conditions would also have allowed hominin migrants to move north along the Nile tributaries and across the greener corridors of the Sinai Peninsula and Levant region to spill into Eurasia.34 Homo erectus left Africa during the variable climate phase around 1.8 years ago, eventually spreading as far as China. In Europe, H. erectus evolved into the Neanderthals, while the H. erectus population that remained in East Africa eventually gave rise to anatomically modern humans 300,000–200,000 years ago. Our own species dispersed out of Africa around 60,000 years ago, as we’ll see in the next chapter. We encountered the descendants of previous waves of hominin migrants–Neanderthals and Denisovans–as we moved through Europe and Asia. But both of these had died out by around 40,000 years ago, and only anatomically modern humans remained.

Africa: A Biography of the Continent by John Reader

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By AD 200 numbers are said to have risen to 20 million – of whom more than half lived in North Africa and the Nile valley (and thus would have been part of the Roman Empire population in AD 14), leaving a sub-Saharan population of under 10 million.4 By AD 1500 the population of the continent is estimated to have been 47 million and in a state of ‘stable biological equilibrium’, with population size fulfilling the potential of the environments that people occupied.5 Meanwhile, the out-of-Africa population had risen to just over 300 million. A massive disparity is evident. While the out-of-Africa population grew from just hundreds to 200 million in 100,000 years, and rose to just over 300 million by AD 1500, the African population increased from 1 million to no more than 20 million in 100,000 years, and rose to only 47 million by AD 1500.

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At an early but unrecorded date, some representatives of the species took the human line out of Africa for the first time. Their fossil remains have been found in Europe, Java and China; the oldest dates from 1.8 million years ago (Java); 8 the youngest (200,000 years old) comes from China. Homo erectus is a prime candidate for the immediate ancestry of the Neanderthals, Homo neanderthalensis, who populated Europe from about 120,000 years ago; if this is true, then the Homo erectus line persisted out of Africa until about 30,000 years ago, when the Neandertals became extinct. Homo erectus individuals were significantly bigger than their antecedents and contemporary cousins.

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By AD 200 numbers are said to have risen to 20 million, of whom more than half lived in North Africa and the Nile valley (and thus would have been part of the Roman Empire population in AD 14), leaving a sub-Saharan population of under 10 million.2 By AD 1500 the population of the continent is estimated to have been 47 million and in a state of ‘stable biological equilibrium’, with population growth fulfilling the potential of the environments that people occupied.3 Meanwhile, the out-of-Africa population of the world had risen to just over 300 million by AD 1500. A massive disparity in population growth rates is evident. While the out-of-Africa population soared from just hundreds to 200 million in 100,000 years, and rose to just over 300 million in the next 1,500 years, the African population increased from 1 million to no more than 20 million 100,000 years later, and to only 47 million in AD 1500.

How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks by Robin Dunbar, Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar

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With its body newly designed for long-distance walking, Homo erectus set off to conquer the world, breaking out of Africa for the first time around a million years ago, and very rapidly colonising the farthest corners of main- [Page 129] land Asia. For a long time, nothing much of interest happened, and there was little to differentiate between the Afro-European populations and those in eastern Asia. But in the millennia that followed, the Asian populations went their own way, cut off from their African cousins. Around half a million years ago, some of the African populations began to undergo rapid change, mainly involving a dramatic increase in brain size and another exodus out of Africa into Europe.

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We still bear the scars of that evolutionary history today. Some of those scars – like our particular skin colour – are relicts of a surprisingly recent evolutionary history and date only to within the last few tens of thousands of years. Most of these are recent genetic mutations triggered by the great migrations out of Africa that resulted in modern humans peopling the whole planet. Others, however, are older, dating back to earlier species in the lineage that led to modern humans. One of these is the fact that, unlike all other primates, we give birth to very premature babies – one of the consequences of which seems to have been the need to persuade males to get involved in the business of child-rearing in a way that is very rare among mammals.

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There were many blind alleys that led nowhere in the end, even though some of them prospered for many hundreds of thousands of years before going extinct – the many australopithecines (the apemen that diversified into more than a dozen different species between six and two million years ago), the early Homo erectus species that migrated out of Africa and colonised Asia as far east as modern Beijing, the iconic Neanderthals of Europe. There were, equally, many moments when the fragile lineage that eventually gave rise to us teetered on the brink of extinction. The genetic evidence now indicates that all modern humans are descended from as few as five thousand breeding women who lived around two hundred thousand years ago in Africa.

The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee

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The “youngest” humans, in contrast, are the indigenous North Americans who left Europe, and crossed into the Seward peninsula in Alaska through the icy cleft of the Bering Strait, some fifteen to thirty thousand years ago. This theory of human origin and migration, corroborated by fossil specimens, geological data, tools from archaeological digs, and linguistic patterns, has overwhelmingly been accepted by most human geneticists. It is called the Out of Africa theory, or the Recent Out of Africa model (the recent reflecting the surprisingly modern evolution of modern humans, and its acronym, ROAM, a loving memento to an ancient peripatetic urge that seems to rise directly out of our genomes). The third important conclusion of these studies requires some conceptual background.

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It is called the Out of Africa theory: For the origin of humans in Southern Africa, see Brenna M. Henn et al., “Hunter-gatherer genomic diversity suggests a southern African origin for modern humans,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, no. 13 (2011): 5154–62. Also see Brenna M. Henn, L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, and Marcus W. Feldman, “The great human expansion,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 44 (2012): 17758–64. “Sexual intercourse began”: Philip Larkin, “Annus Mirabilis,” High Windows. “In terms of modern humans”: Christopher Stringer, “Rethinking ‘out of Africa,’ ” editorial, Edge, November 12, 2011, http://edge.org/conversation/rethinking-out-of-africa.

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What is certain is that every perilous ocean-crossing left hardly any survivors—perhaps as few as six hundred men and women. Europeans, Asians, Australians, and Americans are the descendants of these drastic bottlenecks, and this corkscrew of history too has left its signature in our genomes. In a genetic sense, nearly all of us who emerged out of Africa, gasping for land and air, are even more closely yoked than previously imagined. We were on the same boat, brother. What does this tell us about race and genes? A great deal. First, it reminds us that the racial categorization of humans is an inherently limited proposition. Wallace Sayre, the political scientist, liked to quip that academic disputes are often the most vicious because the stakes are so overwhelmingly low.

Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time by Michael Shermer

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Today we may view him as an unusual blending of ethnic backgrounds, but a thousand years from now all humans may look like this, and historians will look back upon this brief period of racial segregation as a tiny blip on the screen of the human career spanning hundreds of thousands of years. If the "Out of Africa" theory holds true, then it appears a single race migrated out of Africa (probably "black") that then branched out into geographically isolated populations and races with unique features to each, and finally merged back into a single race with the onset of global exploration and colonization beginning in the late fifteenth century.

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Further, the abduction experience itself is often a memory reconstructed through "regression hypnosis," which makes external validation even more difficult. Yet historical events can be tested. External validation is possible. For example, classicist Mary Lefkowitz has written a thoughtful reply to Afrocentric claims that Western civilization, philosophy, science, art, literature, and so on came out of Africa, not Greece and Rome. Her book, Not Out of Africa, raised storms across America, and she was accused of being everything from racist to politically incorrect. Lefkowitz wrote her book after attending a lecture given in February 1993 at Wellesley College (where she teaches) by Dr. Yosef A. A. ben-Jochannan, a noted extreme Afrocentrist.

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For another thing, how far back does one go in history? Native Americans are really Asians, if you go back more than twenty or thirty thousand years to before they crossed the Bering land bridge between Asia and America. And Asians, several hundred thousand years ago probably came out of Africa, so we should really replace "Native American" with "African-Asian-Native American." Finally, if the Out of Africa (single racial origin) theory holds true, then all modern humans are from Africa. (Cavalli-Sforza now thinks this may have been as recently as seventy thousand years ago.) Even if that theory gives way to the Candelabra (multiple racial origins) theory, ultimately all hominids came from Africa, and therefore everyone in America should simply check the box next to "African-American."

Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class by Charles Murray

23andMe, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, Cass Sunstein, correlation coefficient, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark triade / dark tetrad, domesticated silver fox, double helix, Drosophila, emotional labour, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, feminist movement, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, meritocracy, meta-analysis, nudge theory, out of africa, p-value, phenotype, public intellectual, publication bias, quantitative hedge fund, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, school vouchers, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, twin studies, universal basic income, working-age population

How the Earth Was Peopled This body of theoretical work became especially relevant as paleontologists and then geneticists found compelling evidence for what is known as the Out-of-Africa explanation of human expansion. It started out simple. It is now exceedingly complex and becoming more so. Around 6 million years ago, the first hominins diverged from chimpanzees, becoming fully bipedal sometime more than 4 million years ago.8 Homo habilis, who was bipedal and apparently used stone tools, appeared about 2.5 million years ago. About 2 million years ago came our likely direct ancestor, Homo erectus. Hominins first expanded out of Africa around 1.8 to 2.1 million years ago and eventually spread throughout Eurasia.9 LABELS FOR OUR ANCESTORS Hominins: Refers to all branches of the human family, modern and extinct.

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Anatomically modern humans: This term, abbreviated AMH in the technical literature, refers to archaic Homo sapiens who had globular brain cases and other physiological traits of Homo sapiens but did not leave behind substantial evidence of cultural accouterments (art, burials, ornament, musical instruments).11 Until the late 1980s, three theories competed to explain where and how Homo erectus became Homo sapiens.12 The oldest of these was Franz Weidenreich’s multiregional hypothesis, dating back to the 1940s, arguing that evolution from Homo erectus to anatomically modern humans happened contemporaneously throughout Africa and Eurasia but with continual gene flow across regions during the process.13 In the early 1960s, Carleton Coon countered with the “candelabra hypothesis,” arguing that anatomically modern humans had evolved along separate lines in Africa, Europe, and Asia.14 The third theory was the Out-of-Africa hypothesis. It emerged in the 1980s as paleontologists realized that the oldest fossil remains of anatomically modern humans were always being found in eastern Africa, not in Europe or Asia. Genetics entered the debate in 1987 when geneticist Rebecca Cann used mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited solely from the mother, to argue that all of today’s humans are descended from a single female who lived sometime between 99,000 and 148,000 years ago.15 A year later, paleontologists Christopher Stringer and Peter Andrews combined the genetic evidence with the growing paleontological record to make the case that anatomically modern humans had evolved exclusively within Africa and only thereafter expanded to the rest of the world.[16] By the end of the 1980s, the circumstantial evidence for the Out-of-Africa model had won over a majority of the scientists working on the problem, but definitive evidence required more detailed access to the genome.

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Genetics entered the debate in 1987 when geneticist Rebecca Cann used mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited solely from the mother, to argue that all of today’s humans are descended from a single female who lived sometime between 99,000 and 148,000 years ago.15 A year later, paleontologists Christopher Stringer and Peter Andrews combined the genetic evidence with the growing paleontological record to make the case that anatomically modern humans had evolved exclusively within Africa and only thereafter expanded to the rest of the world.[16] By the end of the 1980s, the circumstantial evidence for the Out-of-Africa model had won over a majority of the scientists working on the problem, but definitive evidence required more detailed access to the genome. In 1991, population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza of Stanford University initiated the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP). Geneticists around the world had been collecting blood samples and other data from different populations.

Why the West Rules--For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris

addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Doomsday Clock, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, global village, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, market bubble, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, out of africa, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pink-collar, place-making, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, upwardly mobile, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery

Instead of dying out so often, bands of modern humans grew big enough and numerous enough to stay in regular contact, pooling their genes and know-how. Change became cumulative and the behavior of Homo sapiens diverged rapidly from that of other ape-men. And once that happened, the days of biological distinctions between East and West were numbered. OUT OF AFRICA—AGAIN Figure 1.3. The unity of mankind restored: the spread of fully modern humans out of Africa between roughly 60,000 and 12,000 years ago. The numbers show how many years ago humans arrived in each part of the world and the coastlines represent those of the late Ice Age, around 20,000 years ago. Climate change is rarely simple, and while Homo sapiens’ homelands in eastern and southern Africa were getting wetter seventy thousand years ago, North Africa was drying out.

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(Reproduced from the Illustrated London News volume 12, April 1, 1848, p. 222) Figure I.2. The British ship Nemesis in action on the Yangzi River, 1842. (National Maritime Museum. Copyright © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London) Figure 1.1. Locations mentioned in Chapter 1 Figure 1.2. The Movius Line Figure 1.3. The spread of modern humans out of Africa, 60,000–14,000 years ago Figure 1.4. The Altamira cave paintings. (Kenneth Garrett/National Geographic Image Collection) Figure 1.5. Finds of cave paintings and portable art in Europe Figure 1.6. The Hohle Fels “Venus” figurine. (Copyright © University of Tübingen, photo by H. Jensen) Figure 2.1.

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Instead, Eastern sites produced rougher tools much like the pre-Acheulean finds associated with Homo habilis in Africa. If the so-called Movius Line (Figure 1.2) really does mark the beginning of separate Eastern and Western ways of life, it could also provide an astonishingly long-term lock-in theory—one holding that almost as soon as ape-men moved out of Africa, they divided between Western/technologically advanced/Acheulean hand ax cultures in Africa and southwest Asia and Eastern/technologically less advanced/flake-and-chopper cultures in East Asia. No wonder the West rules today, we might conclude: it has led the world technologically for a million and a half years.

The New Nomads: How the Migration Revolution Is Making the World a Better Place by Felix Marquardt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, digital nomad, Donald Trump, George Floyd, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joi Ito, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, Les Trente Glorieuses, out of africa, phenotype, place-making, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sustainable-tourism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Yogi Berra, young professional

We don’t simply migrate to escape crises, but for all kinds of other reasons besides. The urge to migrate, to quest, to go on a journey, is deep-seated – ancestral, essential and instinctive. If we had no instinct to migrate, the entire human species would still be in Africa. We may even have died out. This instinct led Homo erectus and other early humans out of Africa in successive waves some 1.9 million years ago. Our closer ancestors with bigger brains followed a similar path and populated every continent save Antarctica from 70,000 BC onwards. Even leaving out our distant forbears, 98 per cent of our time on earth as anatomically modern humans has been spent as slowly migrating small groups of hunting and gathering nomads.

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Ultimately, it is about finding our Heimat; the place we all long for deep inside. The Hebrew term Teshuva (תשובה), which means repentance or salvation, has as its root shuv, to turn or return. By extension, it also means ‘to come home’. The title of this book is a tribute to the continuum between migrants, old and new, from our earliest pioneering ancestors who walked out of Africa, to today’s young people who are bravely migrating to, away from, and within every continent on the planet. But I am also deeply interested in nomadism as a way of living. Pre-agricultural nomads were both highly mobile and deeply rooted to a place. We have spent the vast majority of our time on earth as nomadic hunters and gatherers, working in small groups of less than one hundred individuals.

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Aaron (ranch mechanic, Montana) 3, 4, 5, 7–8, 14, 166, 234 Abkhazia 175–7, 178 Achour, Mouloud 124, 125 Afghanistan 3, 9, 10, 84, 140 Africa 20–1, 44, 53, 83–4, 96–7, 220 African American immigrants in 63, 67–8, 114–15 China, African immigrants in 130–9 climate change and 90, 217 emigration to 83–5, 93–9, 100, 102, 107, 114–15, 119, 122, 229, 236 entrepreneurship in 75–90 Europe, African migrant journeys to 9, 122, 148–50, 152, 157, 160, 238 Europe, African refugees in 9, 148–57, 158, 161, 167, 229, 236, 238 France, African immigrants in 38, 52, 115, 124 gerontocracy in 126–7 ‘out of Africa’ migration of early humans 9, 18, 69 racism in 7, 115 US, African immigrants in 1–8, 12, 13–14, 21–2, 47, 59, 68, 133, 206, 218, 224, 232–4, 233, 234, 235, 238, 241 African American 44, 111–15 agricultural revolution 222, 227, 228 air travel 73, 198, 214, 216–18 Allt, Nicky 59–63, 68, 220, 229 Al Sarajj, Mustafa 179–82 American Civil War (1861–5) 1 American dream 20, 35, 72, 73, 81, 196, 211, 234 American Exceptionalism 28, 35 American Family Radio 3 Amore Gelato 143–4 Andreotti, Vanessa 238 Aneesa (entrepreneur) 75–6, 79, 80, 81, 82 anywheres (self-perceived as mobile, educated and progressive) and somewheres (more grounded and ‘real’, conservatives rooted in the place of their birth) divide 41, 223, 234, 236 Anzisha Prize 99 Apothéose (group of rappers) 45–6, 48 Arabo-centrism 24–5 Asquith, James 195 asylum seekers 152, 158, 161, 167 see also refugees Atsoko 84–5 Attali, Jacques 188, 195 Augustine of Hippo: The City of God 20–1 Australia 1, 47, 72, 73, 96, 161, 162, 178 emigration to London from 102–7 migration to 72–3, 102–4, 126, 140 Austria 24, 26, 36, 41, 42, 47, 62 banlieue, Paris 51, 55, 115 ‘Barrez-vous!’

The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention by Simon Baron-Cohen

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, bioinformatics, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, David Attenborough, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, Greta Thunberg, intentional community, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jim Simons, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, neurotypical, out of africa, pattern recognition, phenotype, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, theory of mind, twin studies, zero-sum game

We’ll look at the genetic evidence later, but suffice it to say that polygenic traits (traits involving many genes, each having a small effect) typically evolve gradually, not abruptly.21 Taking the wider time window of around 100,000 years ago for the cognitive revolution, it is interesting to speculate on the influence of the cognitive revolution on the two major dispersals by humans out of Africa—one 108,000 years ago, when they went to the Levant and coexisted with the Neanderthals, and the other 50,000 years ago that led to humans replacing the Neanderthals by 40,000 years ago.22 Humans ended up in what today we call Australia by 40,000 years ago and in what today we call North America by 16,000 years ago. Were these dispersals out of Africa and across the world caused by the cognitive revolution as humans began to be able to invent new complex tools (like boats) and complex ways of understanding the natural world (like reading the stars) to navigate continents?

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The first barbecues would have been our ancestors’ cooking what they caught. Aside from cooking, fire most obviously provided our ancestors with light, enabling them to live in caves and see in the dark, as well as to scare away lions and other predators. And it enabled our ancestors to stay warm in colder environments as they moved out of Africa. Later, the domestication of fire would lead to a suite of other things, like baking clay to create ceramic objects, heat-treating stones to create stronger tools, and clearing forests for planting. But these last functions of fire would not have been relevant to Homo erectus, because there is no evidence that they engaged in any of them.

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There is some debate about whether Homo habilis was the first hominid to use tools, as Australopithecus garhi, who lived 2.6 million years ago, has been found with some stone tools, and this would have been 100,000 to 200,000 years earlier than Homo habilis. See S. Oppenheimer (2004), The real Eve: Modern man’s journey out of Africa (New York: Carroll and Graf). For a useful online resource from Oppenheimer’s research group, including a discussion on whether any of the other gracile Australopithecines used stone tools, see Bradshaw Foundation, www.bradshawfoundation.com. 3. The main change in the tool-making of Homo erectus was that they made their axes symmetrically; working on both sides, they produced a tool that allowed for more uses, such as slicing.

Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, built by the lowest bidder, butterfly effect, California gold rush, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Hyperloop, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, operation paperclip, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, phenotype, private spaceflight, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, technological singularity, telepresence, telerobotics, the medium is the message, the scientific method, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, wikimedia commons, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

To be an emissary of Earth in the late twenty-first century. To be in a small group chosen for a unique experiment. The experiment was designed by sober scientists and engineers but it had the trappings of madness. We were human seedlings, charged with taking root in a new world. 1 Dreaming of Beyond _______________________ Out of Africa When we were just one million strong, did we dream about what lay beyond? Two hundred thousand years ago, anatomically modern humans first emerged in Northeast Africa.1 The cradle of our creation was the place now known as Ethiopia. Over the next hundred thousand years, these humans spread across Africa.

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Those artifacts speak of a rugged, doughty species that ceremonially buried their dead, hunted with sharpened flints made into spears and arrows, and daubed paint on cave walls to record the iconography of their lives. Their evocative images, which must have seemed kinetic in the flickering glow of an oil lamp or a fire, speak to us across the millennia of their fears and dreams. Modern genetic techniques have allowed us to reconstruct their journey out of Africa—an epic migration as audacious as our first steps into space many millennia later. Life on Earth is united by a single genetic code. A four-letter alphabet of base pairs encodes the unique function and form of every organism. The four bases—A for adenine, C for cytosine, G for guanine, and T for thymine—form the rungs of the twisted ladder that is DNA.

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The route from the Horn of Africa to the Arabian Peninsula was probably across the Bab el-Mandeb strait. Today that strait is one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes; at that time, after the last ice age had lowered sea levels, it was merely a narrow, shallow channel. The tribe that ventured out of Africa may have been only a few thousand strong. It was not a single expedition but a series of small clans of loosely related family members leaving over a period of centuries. They prospered as they dispersed, starting settlements in Central Asia and then in Europe. By 50,000 years ago, they had spread to southern China and Australia.

Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism by Elizabeth Becker

airport security, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, BRICs, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, computer age, corporate governance, Costa Concordia, Deng Xiaoping, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, global village, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, Masdar, Murano, Venice glass, open borders, out of africa, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, statistical model, sustainable-tourism, the market place, union organizing, urban renewal, wage slave, young professional, éminence grise

., 363–64 Nippon Television of Japan, 39 Nissan Shipping Building, 325 Noble Radiance, A (Leon), 85 nonprofits, cruise ship industry and, 165 Normandy, France, 51 Norodom Sihamoni, King of Cambodia, 112 North Luangwa Park, 223 Norway, 162–63 Zambian aid from, 224–25 Nouvel, Jean, 191 nuclear power, 195 Nuseibeh, Sari, 28 Obama, Barack, 134, 244, 271–72, 348, 387, 388 in 2012 election, 364–65, 366–67 and 2016 Olympics bid, 361–62 U.S. tourism industry and, 360–65 Obama, Michelle, 361 Obama administration, National Travel and Tourism strategy of, 365–66 oceans, pollution of, 20, 34, 156–63, 196–97 Oduber, Daniel, 258 Ofer, Sammy, 134 Olympic National Park, 383–84 Olympics: of 1992 (Barcelona), 350 of 1996 (Atlanta), 350, 351 of 2008 (Beijing), 163, 293–94, 322, 323, 333 of 2010 (Vancouver), 163, 293 of 2016 (Rio de Janeiro), 273, 276, 362 U.S. travel restrictions and, 361–62 Oman, 172 Ondaatje, Michael, 282 Oppenheimer, Nicky, 240 Oppenheimer, Strilli, 240 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 16, 348–49 Organization of American States, 251 Orlando, Fla., 370 Orly airport, 171 Orset, Christophe, 73–74 Osa Peninsula, 258–60 Ottoman Empire, 182 Out of Africa (Dinesen), 207 Out of Africa (film), 207, 211, 220 Out of the Rock Comes Life, 336 overconsumption, in UAE, 169–70, 196 Owen-Edmunds, Libby, 280 Pacheca island, 248 Pachequilla island, 248 Pacific Asia Travel Association, 287 Paggiarin, Claudio, 35–36, 78–79, 82 Palestinians, 185 Palin, Sarah, 165 Palm Jumeirah, 178 Panama, 157, 161 national parks of, 249 ship registry of, 140 Panama Canal, 247–48 Pan American Airways, 27 pandas, 335–38 “panther path,” 262 Papi, Daniela Ruby, 103 Parayil, Gopinath, 263 Paris, France, 70–72 as center for business meetings, 53 Twain’s love of, 50 Universal Exposition (1889) in, 50 Parker, Robert, 65–66 Park West Gallery, 131, 147–48 Parnell, Sean, 161 partisan politics, tourism policy and, 366–67 Patients Beyond Borders, 379 Patrick, Deval L., 374 Payton, Donald L., 148 Peace Corps, 228 Pei, I.

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Eventually those endless hours spent looking at animals in well-appointed enclosures rearranged my images of wildlife. The raccoons and possums that prowled our backyard at night were wild. The animals in those cages were not. That could be one reason why I never jumped at the suggestion of going on an African safari. I’d read Isak Dinesen’s autobiographical novel Out of Africa about her life in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Kenya and saw the movie adaptation starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. This was beautiful, romantic Africa seen through the eyes of privileged Europeans who killed buffalo, lions and antelope, who eventually understood the harm being done and, too late, mended their ways.

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To attract more tourists and encourage them to spend more days and money on the continent, the industry offers packages of visits to three and four wildlife camps in different countries, trumpeting what officials call their sublime “nature base” tourism. One visit to the Johannesburg airport, the massive air hub of the region, says it all. The shopping area of the terminal is kiosk after kiosk of safari-themed clothes, toys, gadgets and books. It is called, naturally, “Out of Africa.” Despite some attractive marketing, the parks are not on firm footing. The checkered history and modern pressures have created considerable problems: poaching, corruption, deforestation and, above all, encroaching human settlements. The promise is singular for the industry: without those animals, the industry would shrink, and with it the $76 billion in revenue tourism brings to the continent every year.

The Origins of the British by Stephen Oppenheimer

active measures, agricultural Revolution, British Empire, Eratosthenes, gravity well, Gregor Mendel, it's over 9,000, mass immigration, Neolithic agricultural revolution, out of africa, phenotype, Recombinant DNA, the scientific method, trade route

I have also retained some alliterative and biblical names from my previous book, Out of Eden, such as the out-of-Africa Y-line founder Adam and his three descendent lines, Cain, Abel and Seth. There is no intention in adopting such names to infer any deeper meaning – they are simply aides-mémoires. The mtDNA picture is slightly easier. Many of the different labs agreed at an early stage to try to use a single nomenclature (perhaps there was less testosterone involved in the process!). For instance, there are two agreed non-African daughter and granddaughter lines relevant to the colonization of Europe and Western Eurasia in general: N, from the single out-of-Africa line L3, and her daughter R.

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It turns out that the oldest changes in our mtDNA (i.e. the earliest in the tree) took place in Africa between 190,000 and 150,000 years ago. Then new mutations start to appear in Asia, about 80,000 to 60,000 years ago. This tells us that modern humans evolved in Africa, and that 80,000 years ago some of us began to migrate out of Africa into Asia. It is important to realize that because of the random nature of individual mutations, the dating is only approximate. Various mathematical ways of dating population migrations were tried during the 1990s with varying degrees of success, but in 1996 a method was established which dates each branch of the gene tree by averaging the number of new mutations in daughter types of that branch.2 This method (estimation of rho) has stood the test of time, and is the main approach used to calculate the mtDNA genetic dates I give in this book.

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Gene group boxes for Europe are labelled in consensus nomenclature5 qualified after Capelli,11 with relevant nicknames Ruisko, Ivan and Rostov below. These three clusters are expanded respectively in Figures A4 to A6. The dotted lines indicate major world gene groups A, B and C not represented in Europeans; nicknames are shown for the common male ancestor and the three out-of-Africa lines.8 (Haplogroups are based on ‘unique event polymorphisms’ – labelled horizontal lines along branches; branch length does not represent age.) After dividing the entire composite dataset of 3,084 into gene groups and sub-groups, I then ranked the haplotypes within each group.15 As found previously,16 within each group there were several groups of related gene types clustering around a common or modal haplotype.

Why geography matters: three challenges facing America : climate change, the rise of China, and global terrorism by Harm J. De Blij

agricultural Revolution, airport security, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial exploitation, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, John Snow's cholera map, Khyber Pass, manufacturing employment, megacity, megaproject, Mercator projection, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, UNCLOS, UNCLOS

The worsening of Cenozoic Ice Age conditions, of course. Before Miocene climatic conditions deteriorated, the global environment, though cooler than it had been during the Oligocene, remained fairly stable (Fig. 3-4). During that time, the descendants of Proconsul and other early apes probably moved out of Africa into environmentally diverse Eurasia, where forest habitats varied widely and relatively warm temperatures ensured an ample supply of fruits and other forage. Now Eurasia, not Africa, was the heartland of differentiation and adaptation for the great apes, and numerous lineages evolved, some of them now part of the known fossil record.

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Eventually and ironically, descendants of Dryopithecus and Sivapithecus would come face to face—but not ape to ape. When interglacials in the late Pliocene warmed the Earth enough to revive forests and refill desiccated lakes, Africa's hominids did what early Miocene apes had done before them: migrate WHY GEOGRAPHY MATTERS EARLY PRIMATE DISPERSALS Fig. 3-5 out of Africa into Eurasia. And so the first of these emigrants, Homo erectus, moved across Arabia and southern Asia and, one day somewhere in Malaya or on Java or Borneo, saw a creature that, if the trip had been swifter, would have reminded her of the chimpanzees and gorillas left behind in Africa. Orangutan and hominid had closed a 9-million-year circle.

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When the first modern humans (the Cro-Magnons, as they are known) reached Europe from India via the Middle East and found the Neanderthals, and earlier Homo species, on the scene, they quickly overwhelmed them with their complex culture ranging from cave art to tool kits and from EARTH'S CHANGEABLE ENVIRONMENTS 71 Fig. 3-7 inventive fishing gear to sewn clothing. They lived in cooperative communities and used sophisticated language, and thus modern humans had all the advantages over the survivors of earlier out-of-Africa migrations. Their technology gave them the opportunity to cope with the Wisconsinan's climatic swings: in milder times they expanded their frontiers, and when it got colder they devised ways to cope with increasingly harsh environments. That is why paleoanthropologists are finding fossil evidence of human settlements in Europe that survived through pretty severe cold periods.

Imperial Legacies by Jeremy Black;

affirmative action, British Empire, centre right, colonial rule, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Great Leap Forward, imperial preference, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, out of africa, Scramble for Africa, Suez crisis 1956, transatlantic slave trade

Separately, and again helping to “locate” British and American imperialism, Athens and Rome, as their alleged forbears, have recently been criticized for their imperial policies and for denigrating other cultures. Thus, in the “out of Africa” debate, an alleged modern Western failure to appreciate the strengths of African culture, more specifically, the alleged failure adequately to acknowledge the African character of Ancient Egypt, and its influence on Greece and the Western tradition, was traced to Classical influences as well as to Western racism. Criticizing Athens and Rome becomes part of a pattern of trashing the Western legacy, a pattern that locates, and is located by, the critiques of British and American imperialism. In the case of the “out of Africa” debate, this is highly problematic and, as generally discussed, a product of tendentious modern anti-Western views.11 Some of the Classical Greeks, most prominently Demosthenes (c. 383–322 BCE) in his Philippics, developed anti-imperial language against the expansionist menace of Philip of Macedon (r. 359–336 BCE).

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Luttwak, The Virtual American Empire: War, Faith, and Power (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2009); A. G. Hopkins, American Empire: A Global History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018). 10 Herman Lebovics, Imperialism and the Corruption of Democracies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 11 Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (New York: Basic Books, 1996); Ronald H. Fritze, Invented Knowledge: False History, Fake Science and Pseudo-Religions (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), 251–56. 12 Richard Hingley and Christina Unwin, Boudica: Iron Age Warrior Queen (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2005). 13 Christopher Hagerman, British Imperial Muse: the Classics, Imperialism and the Indian Empire, 1784–1914 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Joanna de Groot, Empire and History Writing in Britain. c. 1750–2012 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). 14 Joanne Parker, England’s Darling: The Victorian Cult of Alfred the Great (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); Roy Strong, And When Did You Last See Your Father?

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For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below. 1765 Stamp Act 1925 Geneva Gas Protocol 1966 Defence White Paper Abolitionism Aborigines abroad, term Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in Restraint of Appeals Acton, John Aden Afghan war Africa; North Africa; out of Africa, debate; Scramble for Africa; South Africa; West Africa ahistoricism air policing alien, word Amelioration American Civil War Amin, Idi amnesia; enforced; historical; imperial; postimperial; term Amritsar Massacre Ancient Roman Empire and the British Empire in India, The Anglo-Chinese Opium Wars Anglo-Irish Treaty Anglosphere apartheid apologist Appeasement Arminius Arrow Asian Civilisations Museum assimilation Atlantic slavery Attlee, Clement Atwal, Jaspal Australia Australasia Ayers Rock National Park Baden-Powell, Robert banal imperialism Bashford, Alison Bathos Battle of Koregaon Bavaria Bean, Richard Beckles, Hilary Bengal famine Benn, Tony Wedgwood Bevin, Ernest Biggar, Nigel BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) Black Armband view Black Hole of Calcutta Blair, Tony Blighty UK Café Boer War Bolshevism Bose, Subhas Chandra Boston Tea Party Boudicca Braveheart (film) Bringing Them Home, report Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt British Empire; placing, question of British Empire Exhibition bubble, term Bulwer-Lytton, Edward Burma.

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Brownian motion, California gold rush, Cepheid variable, clean water, Copley Medal, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Attenborough, double helix, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Gregor Mendel, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, out of africa, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, supervolcano, Thomas Malthus, Wilhelm Olbers

., p. 189. 17 “people began to look a little more closely . . .” Scientific American, “Is Out of Africa Going Out the Door?” August 1999. 18 “DNA from the arm bone of the original Neandertal man . . .” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Ancient DNA and the Origin of Modern Humans,” January 16, 2001. 19 “all modern humans emerged from Africa . . .” Nature, “A Start for Population Genomics,” December 7, 2000, p. 65, and Natural History, “What's New in Prehistory,” May 2000, pp. 90–91. 20 “more diversity in one social group of fifty-five chimps . . .” Science, “A Glimpse of Humans' First Journey Out of Africa,” May 12, 2000, p. 950. 21 “In early 2001, Thorne and his colleagues . . .”

…

Then, beginning about five million years ago, Panama rose from the sea, closing the gap between North and South America, disrupting the flows of warming currents between the Pacific and Atlantic, and changing patterns of precipitation across at least half the world. One consequence was a drying out of Africa, which caused apes to climb down out of trees and go looking for a new way of living on the emerging savannas. At all events, with the oceans and continents arranged as they are now, it appears that ice will be a long-term part of our future. According to John McPhee, about fifty more glacial episodes can be expected, each lasting a hundred thousand years or so, before we can hope for a really long thaw.

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In older textbooks, Oldowan tools are usually shown as blunt, rounded, hand-sized stones. In fact, paleoanthropologists now tend to believe that the tool part of Oldowan rocks were the pieces flaked off these larger stones, which could then be used for cutting. Now here's the mystery. When early modern humans—the ones who would eventually become us—started to move out of Africa something over a hundred thousand years ago, Acheulean tools were the technology of choice. These early Homo sapiens loved their Acheulean tools, too. They carried them vast distances. Sometimes they even took unshaped rocks with them to make into tools later on. They were, in a word, devoted to the technology.

A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright

Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, Bretton Woods, British Empire, clean water, Columbian Exchange, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, invention of agriculture, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, nuclear winter, out of africa, Parkinson's law, post-war consensus, precautionary principle, Ronald Reagan, technological determinism, Thomas Malthus, urban sprawl

One camp, that of the “multiregional” hypothesis, sees Homo erectus evolving by fits and starts into modern humanity wherever he happened to be through gene diffusion, otherwise known as mating with strangers. This view seems to fit well with many of the fossil finds but less well with some interpretations of DNA. Another camp — the “Out of Africa” school — sees most evolutionary change taking place on that continent, then erupting over the rest of the world.25 In this second view, successive waves of new and improved humans kill off, or, at any rate, outcompete, their forerunners wherever they find them, until all the lowbrows are gone.

…

Christopher Stringer and Robin McKie, African Exodus: The Origins of Modern Humanity (New York: Henry Holt/John Macrae, 1997), p. 11. At the start of the Upper Palaeolithic, about 35,000 years ago, Stringer estimates that Homo sapiens had “a breeding population of at least 300,000.” Ibid., p. 163. 25. For the Out of Africa hypothesis, see Stringer and McKie, African Exodus. For opposing views, see recent works by M. Wolpoff, G. A. Clark, J. Relethford, and F. H. Smith. For a balanced overview, see Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us Human (New York: Doubleday, 1992). 26.

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See also bronze; iron Mexico City, 92, 111, 161n22 migrations of humans, 37, 102–3, 138n1, 147n48 missionary projects, 7 Moby Dick (Melville), 38, 142n21 moderation, 131 Monte Verde, 41, 143n26 morals of civilization, 4, 33–34 myth of progress, 4–5, 124 myths, 4 natural capital, 83, 84, 101, 117, 125, 129 natural regeneration, 102 Neanderthals, 18–26, 27, 136n29, 136n30, 137n31, 137n33, 138n37 characteristics and customs, 20, 21, 22, 137n35 relations with Cro-Magnons, 20–21, 23–26, 31, 36, 66, 138n39 need and greed, 8 New Right, 127 News from Nowhere (Morris), 120 Newton, Sir Isaac, 11, 134n14 Old Stone Age, 8, 14, 31, 32, 34–35 Olmecs, 95 onslaught of progress, 124–25 Origin of Species (Darwin), 19 Oryx and Crake (Atwood), 123 Our Final Century (Rees), 125–26, 182n54 “Out of Africa” hypothesis, 17–18, 135n25 Ovid, 88–89 Palaeolithic era, see Old Stone Age Palenque, 98, 167n55 patriotism, 49 pesticides, 181n51 Pincher Martin (Golding), 35–36, 140n12 Pisistratus, 87 plants, cultivated, see crops; domestication; farming Pollard, Sidney, 3, 4 pollen studies, 97, 169n66 pollution, 7 Polynesia, 51, 85 Pope, Alexander, 7 Popol Vuh (Maya creation epic), 118, 179n37 population Americas, 111, 113, 175n18 China, 104 cities, 91–92, 94, 160n20, 161n22 early humans, 17, 135n24 Egypt, 68–69, 103–4 and food supply, 44 Sumerian, 68, 154n38, 157n2 world, 17, 30, 44, 109, 162n33, 171n2 population growth, 32, 100, 101, 103–4, 108, 115, 128, 130, 170n71 acceleration, 109, 171n3 and warfare, 48–49 potatoes, 114, 145n33, 176n21, 176n22 poverty, 128.

A Second Chance by Jodi Taylor

Donald Trump, Eratosthenes, financial independence, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, out of africa, publish or perish, trade route

I know this sounds like one of those violent computer games to which the security and technical sections are always challenging each other down in Hawking, but the Gates of Grief is actually the narrow stretch of water in the Red Sea, where the Horn of Africa nearly touches the Yemen, and, according to the latest research, it’s the place where our ancestors made their second and only successful crossing out of Africa, to spread across the rest of the world. I stared at him. Even after all these years, he still had the power to surprise me. ‘But sir … How …’ and then remembered he wasn’t in the best mood and was unlikely to appreciate a member of his senior staff bleating at him like a confused sheep. He raised a discouraging eyebrow but I battled on anyway.

…

‘Oh, we’re not back to that again, are we? You must learn to let go, Max.’ ‘OK, if you’re not interested …’ ‘I didn’t say that.’ I waited. ‘All right. What is it?’ ‘The Gates of Grief.’ ‘That sounds cheerful. What particular disaster are you leading me into now?’ ‘The second and only successful migration out of Africa. Sunny climate. Beach views. No crowds. Simple observation. No interaction of any kind. Anything from two days to two months. Cheap holiday.’ ‘Sounds good, actually. Yes, sign me up. Anyone else?’ ‘No,’ I said, maybe a little too quickly, but he said nothing. ‘When?’ ‘Day after tomorrow?’ ‘Fine.’

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That line failed. As the Sahara grew even harsher, people began to look east for a way out. Which would bring them here – to the Gates of Grief. To perhaps one of the most important events in all the long story of mankind. Because DNA evidence is quite clear. There was only ever one successful migration out of Africa and every one of us – every single person outside of Africa – is descended from one of the people who made that one crossing. Estimates put the number at around two hundred to two hundred and fifty people. That’s how closely we’re all related. Something we should remember sometimes. And we were here to witness that single, successful crossing.

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning by Jeremy Lent

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, demographic transition, different worldview, Doomsday Book, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Metcalfe's law, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, scientific management, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, ultimatum game, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, wikimedia commons

It's generally agreed that humans were anatomically modern 150,000 years ago or earlier. Why did it take so long for symbolic thinking to get going? This rather awkward question was first framed by archaeologist Colin Renfrew, who referred to it as the “sapient paradox.”4 Figures 3.2 a-d: Ivory bird, “Venus,” “Lion-man” and bone flute from Hohle Fels Cave Out of Africa According to a growing number of experts, it actually did happen sooner. A lot sooner. In fact, there's evidence that the beginnings of cultural modernity may have occurred at least seventy-five thousand years ago. It's just that these early stirrings of modernity showed up not in Europe but in southern Africa.

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Granted, some cross-hatching and engraved eggshells are not as impressive as the later explosion of symbolic thinking in Europe, but they are valuable clues to the origins of modern humans.6 In place of the Great Leap Forward, another epic story has moved into the foreground. The story, called by some “Out of Africa,” has emerged through advances in DNA analysis, which have enabled scientists to provide accurate time estimates regarding the migrations of different groups. Around seventy thousand years ago, a certain lineage of humans expanded throughout Africa, reaching as far north as Ethiopia. A small contingent, no more than a few hundred strong, then migrated across the mouth of the Red Sea, through Arabia and eastward along southern Asia until reaching Australia.

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The significance of shamanism goes beyond its hunter-gatherer origins: it influenced agrarian cultures around the world, and elements of it can be seen in Indian Yoga, certain practices of ancient Chinese culture, and in the Aztec and Mayan civilizations of Mesoamerica.17* Why would shamanism be prevalent all around the world? There are two possible explanations. It could be because it was originally practiced by the early humans who took the first epic journey out of Africa. The original Upper Paleolithic immigrants to Europe would have brought shamanistic beliefs with them, as would their fellow travelers who migrated throughout Asia. Some of those Asian settlers then crossed the Bering Strait around thirteen thousand years ago, making it all the way down to South America within a couple of thousand years.

Happy Valley: The Story of the English in Kenya by Nicholas Best

British Empire, Cape to Cairo, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Etonian, lateral thinking, out of africa, Scramble for Africa

She was great friends in particular with Berkeley Cole and with Denys Finch-Hatton, brother of the Earl of Winchilsea, who was her occasional lover for much of her time in Kenya. Finch-Hatton too was an interesting character, although not perhaps as remarkable as Karen Blixen liked to make out. A tall, bald aristocrat, very gifted at sport, he had been president of Pop at Eton. He was played, not entirely convincingly, by Robert Redford in the film Out of Africa. He is said to have been deep on safari once, hundreds of miles from anywhere, when a telegram reached him all the way from London. It had been carried in a cleft stick from Nairobi by relays of sweating natives who had strained every nerve to get the message to him. The telegram consisted of just one sentence: ‘Do you know Gervase Pippin-Linpole’s address?’

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Finch-Hatton thought hard, then apparently scribbled a reply for the runner to carry through the bush back to civilisation. ‘Yes,’ he wrote. When not on safari, he spent long evenings with Karen at her house, teaching her Latin and an appreciation Greek poetry. He struck a chord in Karen that was to inspire her in later years to write what is still one of the great classics of African literature, Out of Africa. The book is the story of her farm at Ngong, of her servants and animals, of the waifs and strays both black and white who came knocking at her door for help, of attempts to juxtapose civilisation with a culture still locked firmly into the Dark Ages. The story is hardly original – all Kenya settlers could have told similar tales if they had found the time and talent to set them down – but it is written with a perception and insight that make it several cuts above other books of the period.

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Almost the first thing Macleod did on taking office was to set up a constitutional conference aimed at preparing Kenya for independence as quickly and as decently as possible. Up until then, 1975 had been regarded as the earliest conceivable date for independence. But Macleod was a radical Tory – a bloody Communist, in the revised opinion of most settlers. He understood that the time had come for Britain to stop playing the imperial game and get out of Africa at top speed. With the full approval of the cabinet, he tore up a whole sheaf of pledges given to European settlers by previous administrations. He made it clear that the 999-year-leased white highlands were henceforth to be opened to Africans. As for compensation, if anybody was going to reimburse the settlers for all the money they had poured into their farms, it certainly wouldn’t be the British taxpayer.

Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives by Michael Specter

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 13, Asilomar, autism spectrum disorder, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, food miles, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, invention of gunpowder, John Elkington, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, personalized medicine, placebo effect, precautionary principle, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Simon Singh, Skype, stem cell, synthetic biology, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, twin studies, Upton Sinclair, X Prize

Some leaders simply reject Western products on principle, particularly those, like drugs and engineered crops, that are hyped as vehicles of salvation. Commerce, too, plays a role, and so does history. “The governments and citizens of Europe continue to exercise considerable postcolonial influence in Africa through a range of mechanisms,” Robert Paarlberg wrote in his 2008 book Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa. Paarlberg, who has long studied the impact of science and technology on farmers in the developing world, noted that European countries provide a great deal of technical assistance, financial aid, and nongovernmental advocacy to Africa. But nothing comes without strings attached, and African governments learned quickly that nobody in European countries had any intention of purchasing exports grown with modified seeds.

…

Collins, the renowned geneticist who led the federal effort to map the genome, pointed out that the data showed there were probably more significant genetic differences within racial groups than between them. (In 2009, Collins was named by Barack Obama as director of the National Institutes of Health.) All those comments provide support for the comforting idea of a family of man, even a society without race. Nor should such findings be surprising; we are a young species, one that migrated out of Africa and throughout the world only about one hundred thousand years ago—relatively recently in evolutionary terms. Many scientists already understood this well. In fact, during the first decade of the Human Genome Project some participants were so convinced of the homogeneity of humanity that they insisted that the genomic sequence of any one person could be used as a basic reference template for everyone else on earth.

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Vaccinated: One Man’s Quest to Defeat the World’s Deadliest Diseases. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. ———. Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Paarlberg, Robert. Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Pauly, Philip J. Controlling Life: Jacques Loeb and the Engineering Ideal in Biology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Pennock, Robert T., ed. Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics: Philosophical, Theological, and Scientific Perspectives.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

"there is no alternative" (TINA), 15-minute city, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, Day of the Dead, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, imperial preference, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Monroe Doctrine, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, social distancing, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, UNCLOS, universal basic income, urban planning, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

McKinsey Global Institute, “Globalization in Transition: The Future of Trade and Value Chains,” January 2019, 72, https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/featured%20insights/innovation/globalization%20in%20transition%20the%20future%20of%20trade%20and%20value%20chains/mgi-globalization%20in%20transition-the-future-of-trade-and-value-chains-full-report.ashx. 181 “South-South trade”: Susan Lund and Laura Tyson, “Globalization Is Not in Retreat: Digital Technology and the Future of Trade,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2018. 181 less than 35% of Asia’s GDP: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Report: “Perspectives on Global Development 2019: Rethinking Development Strategies,” November 2018, Figure 4.9, 164, http://obela.org/system/files/persp_glob_dev-2019-en.pdf. 181 $120 billion: Benn Steil and Benjamin Della Rocca, “Belt and Road Tracker,” Council on Foreign Relations, Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies, May 8, 2019, accessed July 13, 2020, https://www.cfr.org/article/belt-and-road-tracker. 181 495 million people: “Overview and Benefits of the CPTPP,” Government of Canada, February 11, 2019, https://www.international.gc.ca/trade-commerce/trade-agreements-accords-commerciaux/agr-acc/cptpp-ptpgp/overview-apercu.aspx. 182 migrating out of Africa: Cassandra Love, “In Their Footsteps: Human Migration out of Africa,” National Geographic, January 18, 2019, https://www.nationalgeographic.org/article/their-footsteps-human-migration-out-africa/. 182 the long process of globalization: For a recent work that dates globalization substantially earlier than most accounts (globalization primarily within the Old World of Africa-Eurasia, but including Norse expeditions to Iceland, Greenland, and Canada), see: Valerie Hansen, The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World and Globalization Began (New York: Scribner, 2020). 182 “most important events”: Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Volume II, Chap.

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But for most of the rest of the world, there is no alternative to more trade. GLOBALIZATION EVER AFTER? Human beings don’t want to stand still. Movement has been the way of the world for tens of thousands of years. If we think of globalization as the increasing movement of people, goods, and capital, it has been at work ever since the first humans began migrating out of Africa sometime between 60,000 and 90,000 years ago—most likely as increasing droughts and famines (and perhaps disease) forced them to search for new pastures. In the intervening millennia, the long process of globalization has continued apace, through wars and plagues. As empires rose—Persian, Roman, Incan, Mali, Mongol, and Ottoman—they all expanded trade routes, discovered new frontiers, and caused the intermingling of peoples.

The Ages of Globalization by Jeffrey D. Sachs

Admiral Zheng, AlphaGo, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, circular economy, classic study, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, Commentariolus, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, domestication of the camel, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, European colonialism, general purpose technology, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income per capita, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, out of africa, packet switching, Pax Mongolica, precision agriculture, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rewilding, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, systems thinking, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, zoonotic diseases

Some were sent to North America, where slave labor would take hold as the basis of the cotton empire in the colonies that would become the southern United States after the American War of Independence. 6.7 The Slave Trade from Africa, 1500-1900 Source: Eltis & Richardson, ATLAS OF THE TRANSATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE (2010), Map 1 from accompanying web site, Overview of Slave Trade out of Africa, 1500–1900. Reproduced with the permission of Yale University Press. African slaves powered the new plantation and mining economies of the Spanish, Portuguese, and British colonies, especially in the tropical regions. The most important plantation commodity was sugar, grown in northeast Brazil and the Caribbean, which together accounted for the vast preponderance of slave arrivals to the Americas, and also the Peruvian coast.

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Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 366, no. 1567 (2011): 1060–69. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2010.0340. Eltis, David, and David Richardson. Atlas of The Transatlantic Slave Trade. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Map 1 from accompanying web site, Overview of Slave Trade out of Africa, 1500–1900. Reproduced with the permission of Yale University Press. Everson, S. ed. Aristotle: The Politics and the Constitution of Athens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Fernihough, Alan, and Kevin HjortshØj O’Rourke. Coal and the European Industrial Revolution. No. w19802. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2014.

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“Estimates of regional and global life expectancy, 1800–2001.” Population and Development Review 31, no. 3 (2005): 537–43. Rito, Teresa, Daniel Vieira, Marina Silva, Eduardo Conde-Sousa, Luísa Pereira, Paul Mellars, Martin B. Richards, and Pedro Soares. “A Dispersal of Homo Sapiens from Southern to Eastern Africa Immediately Preceded the Out-of-Africa Migration.” Scientific Reports 9, no. 1 (2019): 4728. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-41176-3. Robinson, Andrew. The Story of Writing. London: Thames & Hudson, 2007. Rossel, Stine, Fiona Marshall, Joris Peters, Tom Pilgram, Matthew D. Adams, and David O’Connor. “Domestication of the Donkey: Timing, Processes, and Indicators.”

The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth by Michael Spitzer

Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, Asperger Syndrome, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, Douglas Hofstadter, East Village, Ford Model T, gamification, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hive mind, horn antenna, HyperCard, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loose coupling, mandelbrot fractal, means of production, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, out of africa, planetary scale, power law, randomized controlled trial, Snapchat, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, talking drums, technological singularity, TED Talk, theory of mind, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, Yom Kippur War

Because of course there is nothing simple about Pygmy music, just as there is nothing ‘primitive’ about Pygmy society. Anthropologists such as Ingold turn the usual narrative on its head to hold up hunter-gatherer egalitarianism as a model for later ‘civilizations’.36 For Western musicology, the idea that counterpoint originates in Africa – notionally before the ‘out-of-Africa’ dispersal – and that music was originally polyphonic (and thus not melodic) is nothing short of a scandal. I shall return to this scandal again and again in this book. The question, then, is why? Why might polyphony, rather than melody, be closer to the musical source? As with many evolutionary questions, the answer lies in the convergence of a range of separate strands.

…

We can, with reasonable logic, extrapolate this dispersal back to the cave at Geissenklösterle 40,000 years ago, and conjecture that lots of hunter-gatherer music, which has since then evolved apart, would have originally been sung and played together. America, the last continent to be reached by the ‘out of Africa’ migration, is host to 200 First Nation tribes who display virtually every feature of the music of the Pygmies, Inuit and indigenous Australians, in assorted combinations.61 Native American culture is egalitarian, has no notion of private property, has loose tribal affiliations (with individuals leaving and joining a tribe at will), and was historically nomadic, following the buffalo herd’s movements across the rolling grasslands in search of water.62 Music, ascribed a supernatural origin, was heard in dreams by the medicine man.

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It is a perfect metaphor for the persistence of the past through layers of innovation. With their circular rituals, the Choctaw knock on the door of a new world of sedentary societies governed by the rotation of the seasons. We cannot know for certain that these four hunter-gatherer cultures echo the flow of sapiens out of Africa and east to west. In the end, my account is what evolutionary scientists call a just-so story: a high-end parable. On the other hand, for these modern cultures from far-flung corners of the Earth to share common musical practices testifies to a prehistoric core: the story must have a kernel of truth.

She Has Her Mother's Laugh by Carl Zimmer

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, clean water, clockwatching, cloud computing, CRISPR, dark matter, data science, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flynn Effect, friendly fire, Gary Taubes, germ theory of disease, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, lolcat, longitudinal study, medical bankruptcy, meta-analysis, microbiome, moral panic, mouse model, New Journalism, out of africa, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Scientific racism, statistical model, stem cell, twin studies, W. E. B. Du Bois

Modern humans make a brief appearance at Mount Carmel about 100,000 years ago, and then the Neanderthals return for another 50,000 years before giving way for good to modern humans. It’s possible that the 100,000-year-old humans of Mount Carmel belonged to a brief expansion out of Africa. Before they vanished, they may have contributed their own DNA to Neanderthals. The DNA of living humans documents more recent encounters, after humans expanded successfully out of Africa sometime between 50,000 and 80,000 years ago. In a 2016 study, Joshua Akey and his colleagues at the University of Washington found different patterns of Neanderthal DNA in different groups of people, suggesting that the interbreeding happened in at least three separate episodes.

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While too much ultraviolet radiation is harmful, too little can cause trouble as well. When the rays strike the skin, they supply the energy our cells need to make vitamin D. Dark skin may have interfered with its production among the San, leading them to evolve their tan skin. Somewhere between fifty thousand and eighty thousand years ago, a small group of humans expanded out of Africa. Tishkoff and her colleagues discovered that the dark-skinned people of southern India, Australia, and New Guinea all carry the same dark genetic variants she and her colleagues found in Africa. It’s possible that one wave of migrants carried the genes for dark skin on a journey across the southern edge of Asia and into the Pacific.

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Some genes managed to flow for thousands of miles through a network of small bands. The ancient DNA Reich and his colleagues studied suggests that at some point the eastern hunter-gatherer population expanded both to the west and east. To the west, Western Africans inherited a substantial amount of their DNA. To the east, these Africans moved out of Africa altogether; their descendants settled across Europe, Asia, and beyond. But the flow of genes also traveled back into Africa. When Reich and his colleagues studied a three-thousand-year-old girl from a tribe of Tanzanian cattle herders, they found that a third of her ancestry belonged not in Africa but in the Near East, among the first farmers.

River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life by Richard Dawkins

Boeing 747, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Ford Model T, job satisfaction, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, out of africa, phenotype

And the branch point that unites all womankind-the birth date of Mitochondrial Eve-is between a hundred fifty thousand and a quarter of a million years ago. Whether Mitochondrial Eve was an African or not, it is important to avoid a possible confusion with another sense in which it is undoubtedly true that our ancestors came out of Africa. Mitochondrial Eve is a recent ancestor of all modern humans. She was a member of the species Homo sapiens. Fossils of much earlier hominids, Homo erectus, have been found outside as well as inside Africa. The fossils of ancestors even more remote than Homo erectus, such as Homo habilis and various species of Australopithecus (including a newly discovered one more than four million years old), have been found only in Africa.

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The fossils of ancestors even more remote than Homo erectus, such as Homo habilis and various species of Australopithecus (including a newly discovered one more than four million years old), have been found only in Africa. So if we are the descendants of an African diaspora within the last quarter of a million years, it is the second African diaspora. There was an earlier exodus, perhaps a million and a half years ago, when Homo erectus meandered out of Africa to colonize parts of the Middle East and Asia. The African Eve theory is claiming not that these earlier Asians didn't exist but that they leave no surviving descendants. Whichever way you look at it, we are all, if you go back two million years, Africans. The African Eve theory is claiming in addition that we surviving humans are all Africans if you go back only a few hundred thousand years.

Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist by Richard Dawkins

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Boeing 747, book value, Boris Johnson, David Attenborough, Donald Trump, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mahatma Gandhi, mental accounting, Necker cube, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, out of africa, p-value, phenotype, place-making, placebo effect, precautionary principle, public intellectual, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, the scientific method, twin studies, value engineering

We know that fire was tamed more than a million years ago by Homo erectus, the species that was probably our immediate predecessor in evolution. It is controversial when our ancestors dispersed out of Africa. We know that there were Homo erectus in Asia a million years ago, but many believe that nobody today is descended from those early migrants and that all surviving humans are the descendants of a second, more recent exodus of Homo sapiens out of Africa.*32 Whenever the exodus, there has evidently been time for humans to adapt to non-African conditions. Arctic humans are different from tropical. We northerners have lost the black pigmentation that our African ancestors presumably had.

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But the existence of particular bad examples is no reason to dismiss an entire scientific discipline. The best practitioners of evolutionary psychology, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Steven Pinker, David Buss, Martin Daly, the late Margot Wilson and others, are good scientists by any standards. *32 Current thinking favours several excursions out of Africa, and genetic evidence suggests a bottleneck, that is, a temporary, dramatic reduction in the population from which all non-Africans are descended, some time under one hundred thousand years ago. Yan Wong, in the second edition of The Ancestor’s Tale which he co-authored with me, managed to use my genome (which happened to have been fully sequenced for a different purpose concerned with a television documentary) to estimate the population size at various times in the past.

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He did it by comparing my maternal genes and my paternal genes, estimating, for each pair, the time elapsed since they ‘coalesced’, i.e. since they split off from a common ancestral gene. A significant majority of my pairs of genes coalesced about sixty thousand years ago. This suggests that the population was briefly very small about sixty thousand years ago – hence a ‘bottleneck’. It is probable that this bottleneck represents a particular out-of-Africa migration event. *33 And sanctioned by the ultimate role model: ‘…for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me’ (Exodus 20: 5). *34 I didn’t have time to spell out in the lecture why it is too simple.

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert

Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Columbian Exchange, correlation does not imply causation, double helix, Easter island, Honoré de Balzac, index card, Jacob Silverman, Maui Hawaii, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, out of africa, seminal paper, Skype, Steven Pinker, the long tail, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Yogi Berra

A second theory holds that the fungus was spread by North American bullfrogs which have been introduced—sometimes accidentally, sometimes purposefully—into Europe, Asia, and South America, and which are often exported for human consumption. North American bullfrogs, too, are widely infected with Bd but do not seem to be harmed by it. The first has become known as the “Out of Africa” and the second might be called the “frog-leg soup” hypothesis. Either way, the etiology is the same. Without being loaded by someone onto a boat or a plane, it would have been impossible for a frog carrying Bd to get from Africa to Australia or from North America to Europe. This sort of intercontinental reshuffling, which nowadays we find totally unremarkable, is probably unprecedented in the three-and-a-half-billion-year history of life

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* * * WHEN, exactly, the New Pangaea project began is difficult to say. If you count people as an invasive species—the science writer Alan Burdick has called Homo sapiens “arguably the most successful invader in biological history”—the process goes back a hundred and twenty thousand years or so, to the period when modern humans first migrated out of Africa. By the time humans pushed into North America, around thirteen thousand years ago, they had domesticated dogs, which they brought with them across the Bering land bridge. The Polynesians who settled Hawaii around fifteen hundred years ago were accompanied not only by rats but also by lice, fleas, and pigs.

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Specifically, Europeans and Asians shared more DNA with Neanderthals than did Africans. “We tried to make this result go away,” Reich told me. “We thought, ‘This must be wrong.’” For the past twenty-five years or so, the study of human evolution has been dominated by the theory known in the popular press as “Out of Africa” and in academic circles as the “recent single-origin” or “replacement” hypothesis. This theory holds that all modern humans are descended from a small population that lived in Africa roughly two hundred thousand years ago. Around a hundred and twenty thousand years ago, a subset of that population migrated into the Middle East, and from there, further subsets eventually pushed northwest in Europe, east into Asia, and all the way east to Australia.

The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter by Joseph Henrich

agricultural Revolution, capital asset pricing model, Climategate, cognitive bias, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, demographic transition, disinformation, endowment effect, experimental economics, experimental subject, Flynn Effect, impulse control, language acquisition, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Nash equilibrium, nocebo, out of africa, phenotype, placebo effect, profit maximization, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, side project, social intelligence, social web, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, sunk-cost fallacy, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, ultimatum game

However, archaeological evidence suggests that these kinds of expansions, on large and small scales, go deep into our species’ evolutionary history. Over a million years ago, our genus expanded out of Africa into a vast range of Eurasian environments that were experiencing rapid climatic and ecological shifts. To the degree that survival in these evolutionarily new and harsh environments depended on cooperation or social networks to sustain technologies (like fire, bows and arrows, fishing, and clothing), differential extinction would have favored any culturally transmitted behaviors that fostered either.31 Around 60,000 years ago, groups of Homo sapiens expanded out of Africa (our lineage), this time at the expense of other members of our genus and species.

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The right institutions allow groups to enter new ecological niches, for example, by fostering survival in the Arctic through cooperation in whale hunting, or by surviving shocks, like droughts in deserts, that would exterminate or disperse less cooperative groups. Groups with superior institutions simply out last and eventually replace those with fewer cooperation-galvanizing norms. Since humans expanded out of Africa and into harsh environments, for which they had few genetic adaptations or innate proclivities, this may have been particularly important during human evolution. For this kind of process to work, groups don’t ever have to meet each other, and violence between groups need not occur.5 3. Differential migration.

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Further, he argues, if natural selection explains the continental-level variation, then perhaps it also explains the prevalent psychological, behavioral, and biological variation observed across continents. Both of Wade’s inferential moves between these lines of evidence are fraught with problems. To understand the issues with the first inference, we must realize that the genetic variation among different continental populations traces to the spread of humans out of Africa, which occurred relatively recently. These migrations gave rise to evolutionary genetic drift and founder effects, as small samplings (groups) of much larger populations set off to become founding populations on new continents. These migrations created genetic variation, but not functional variation due to natural selection.

The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins

Alfred Russel Wallace, Andrew Wiles, Arthur Eddington, back-to-the-land, Claude Shannon: information theory, correlation does not imply causation, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Danny Hillis, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, Dmitri Mendeleev, domesticated silver fox, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, invisible hand, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, out of africa, phenotype, precautionary principle, Thomas Malthus

So what were these Homo erectus specimens doing out of Africa? The phrase ‘out of Africa’ has been borrowed from Karen Blixen* to refer to the great exodus of our ancestors from Africa. But there were two exoduses and it is important not to confuse them. Relatively recently, maybe less than 100,000 years ago, roving bands of Homo sapiens looking pretty much like us left Africa and diversified into all the races that we see around the world today: Inuit, native Americans, native Australians, Chinese, and so on. It is to this recent exodus that the phrase ‘out of Africa’ is normally applied. But there was an earlier exodus from Africa, and these erectus pioneers left fossils in Asia and Europe, including the Java and Peking specimens.

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He meant Africa, and the quest was not helped by the fact that his immediate successors largely ignored his advice and searched Asia instead. It was indeed in Asia that the ‘missing links’ first began to become less missing. But those first fossils to be discovered were relatively recent, less than a million years old, dating from a time when hominids were pretty close to modern humans and had migrated out of Africa and reached the Far East. They were called ‘Java Man’ and ‘Peking Man’ after their discovery sites.* Java Man was discovered by the Dutch anthropologist Eugene Dubois in 1891. He named it Pithecanthropus erectus, signifying his belief that he had realized his life’s ambition and found ‘the missing link’.

Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World by Mark Pendergrast

business climate, business cycle, commoditize, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Honoré de Balzac, it's over 9,000, land reform, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, open economy, out of africa, profit motive, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, The Great Good Place, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, vertical integration, women in the workforce

Industry Survives the War Good Neighbors No Longer The Legacy of World War II PART THREE - BITTER BREWS Chapter 13 - Coffee Witch Hunts and Instant Nongratification Guy Gillette’s Coffee Witch Hunt Instant, Quick, Efficient, Modern—and Awful Invention of the Coffee Break The Boob Tube Price Wars, Coupons, and Fourteen-Ounce Pounds Neglecting a Generation The Land That Smelled Like Money The Great Fourth of July Frost A CIA Coup in Guatemala Suicide in Brazil Chapter 14 - Robusta Triumphant Out of Africa Hot Coffee, Cold War Regular Robusta The Chock-Full Miracle The Coffeehouse: A Saving Grace London Espresso European Coffee in the Fifties Japan Discovers Coffee Googie Coffee In Denial Scared into Agreement Stumbling Toward Ratification Boomer Bust Merger Mania The Maxwell Housewife The Decline of Hills Brothers The Creation of Juan Valdez In a Vortex PART FOUR - ROMANCING THE BEAN Chapter 15 - A Scattered Band of Fanatics Zabar’s Beans Mentors, Fathers, and Sons Tourist Coffee and Other Problems The Think Drink Thunks The GI Coffeehouses “Caution: Coffee May Be Hazardous to Health” Gold Floats, Coffee Sinks Coffee Inroads in Japan and Europe The King of the Robustas and the Burundi Massacres Starbucks: The Romantic Period God’s Gift to Coffee A Coffee Love Affair The Ultimate Aesthete Specialty Proliferates Mrs.

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During the first half of the 1950s, as coffee prices had risen, hopeful growers in the tropics planted new trees. Arabica trees produce four years after they are planted. Robusta trees, however, take only two years from seedling to harvest and produce more heavily. Encouraged by the popularity of instant coffee, many African colonies increased robusta growth dramatically. Out of Africa With the European powers weakened by World War II and natives eager to share in the wealth around them, the traditional method of rule—white Europeans applying an iron-fisted Bula Matari (“rock crusher,” in Kikongo)—clearly would not work anymore. As one African politician told the French National Assembly in 1946, “The colonial fact, in its brutal form . . . is impossible today.

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As one African politician told the French National Assembly in 1946, “The colonial fact, in its brutal form . . . is impossible today. This historical period of colonization is over.” In 1947 the British granted independence to India, and pressure grew for Britain, France, Portugal, and Belgium to release the colonies they had carved out of Africa in the late nineteenth century. In 1951 Britain gave Libya its independence, and the next year a military coup in Egypt severed its ties to England as well. Issues of economic inequities, forced labor, racism—and coffee—played a major role in the independence movement in countries such as Kenya, Uganda, the Ivory Coast, Angola, and the Belgian Congo.

Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot by Mark Vanhoenacker

Airbus A320, Boeing 747, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, computer age, dark matter, digital map, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Joan Didion, John Harrison: Longitude, Louis Blériot, Maui Hawaii, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, phenotype, place-making, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, the built environment, transcontinental railway, Year of Magical Thinking

These questions remind me that while airplanes have overturned many of our older sensibilities, a deeper part of our imagination lingers and still sparks in the former realm, among ancient, even atavistic, ideas of distance and place, migrations and the sky. Flight, like any great love, is both a liberation and a return. Isak Dinesen wrote in Out of Africa: “In the air you are taken into the full freedom of the three dimensions; after long ages of exile and dreams the homesick heart throws itself into the arms of space.” When aviation began, it was worth watching for its own sake; it was entertainment, as it still is for many children on their early encounters with it.

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On the way we flew down the Somali coastline—I had never before seen a land of such colors, mixed yellow and deep red—and I realized that one reason for my particular excitement about this journey was that it required two flights, not one. Perhaps, even, I was more excited about flying to Kenya than about what I hoped to find in a dusty archive there. My mother and I both loved Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa. My mom had left her small hometown in Pennsylvania for work and college, and later lived in Paris; her love for the book was perhaps because it’s a tale of a great life-journey that starts and ends in a small place. Personally I loved the book best for its descriptions of flight, and as the plane descended over the hills around Nairobi I half-seriously asked myself whether, if the book had not contained such elegiac descriptions of aviation, I might have picked a different branch of history, if I might now be flying to a different country or continent.

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Penguin Random House: Excerpt from “The Poem of Flight” from New Selected Poems by Philip Levine, copyright © 1991 by Philip Levine; excerpt from Travels With Charley by John Steinbeck (Penguin Books, 1992), copyright © 1961, 1962 by The Curtis Publishing Company Inc., copyright © 1962 by John Steinbeck, copyright renewed 1989, 1990 by Elaine Steinbeck, Thom Steinbeck and John Steinbeck IV. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Random House LLC. Rungstedlund Foundation: Excerpts from Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen. Reprinted by permission of the Rungstedlund Foundation. A Note About the Author Mark Vanhoenacker is a pilot and writer. A regular contributor to The New York Times and a columnist for Slate, he has also written for Wired, the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Independent.

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future by John Brockman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asperger Syndrome, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, biofilm, Black Swan, bread and circuses, British Empire, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Danny Hillis, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, financial engineering, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Google Earth, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lone genius, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Schrödinger's Cat, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, social distancing, social graph, social software, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telepresence, the medium is the message, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yochai Benkler

I’m aware that I’m living on the cusp of perhaps the third great tipping point in human history, and that this is an awesome and lucky thing to experience. First, I imagine myself with a small band moving out of Africa into the Fertile Crescent around 60,000 years ago, when humans mastered language and began to conquer the globe. More than half a million years ago, the Neanderthal and human branches of evolution began to split from our common ancestor Homo erectus (or perhaps Homo ergaster). Neanderthals, like H. erectus before, spread out of Africa and across Eurasia. But our ancestors, who acquired fully human body structures about 200,000 years ago, remained stuck in the savanna grasslands and scrub of first eastern and then southern Africa.

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But our ancestors, who acquired fully human body structures about 200,000 years ago, remained stuck in the savanna grasslands and scrub of first eastern and then southern Africa. Recent archaeological and DNA analyses suggest that our species may have tottered on the verge of extinction as recently as 70,000 years ago, dwindling to fewer than 2,000 souls. Then, in an almost miraculous change of fortune about 60,000 to 50,000 years ago, one or a few human bands moved out of Africa for good. This beginning of human wanderlust was likely stirred by global cooling and the attendant parching of the African grasslands, which led to loss of game and grain. But there is also the strong possibility, based on circumstantial evidence relating to a “cultural explosion” of human artifacts and technologies, that a mutation rewired the brain for computational efficiency.

Twilight of Abundance: Why the 21st Century Will Be Nasty, Brutish, and Short by David Archibald

Bakken shale, carbon tax, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, deindustrialization, energy security, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), means of production, Medieval Warm Period, mutually assured destruction, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, out of africa, peak oil, price discovery process, rising living standards, sceptred isle, South China Sea, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

POSTSCRIPT We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all who came before us, and with just as much apparent reason. On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, are we to expect nothing but deterioration before us? —Thomas Macaulay, 1830 When modern human beings made their way out of Africa 50,000 years ago, the different branches of humanity that formed from that exodus spread out over the continents. Those branches became separated for tens of thousands of years but evolved to become agricultural societies within a few thousand years of each other. They went on to produce massive stone buildings a few thousand years after that—without knowing what the other branches of humanity had achieved, or even being aware that they existed.

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They went on to produce massive stone buildings a few thousand years after that—without knowing what the other branches of humanity had achieved, or even being aware that they existed. It was as if there was an alarm clock going off in human development—as if the development of agriculture and civilization was encoded in our genetic makeup when we made that first step out of Africa, as if there is a trajectory of inevitable material progress in human affairs. Let’s hope so, because we need another technological push forward if life is not going to revert to being nasty, brutish, and short—in the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren. Of all the problems facing humanity in the twenty-first century, the question of what will replace fossil fuels looms largest.

Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future by Ian Goldin, Geoffrey Cameron, Meera Balarajan

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, conceptual framework, creative destruction, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, endogenous growth, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, labour mobility, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, life extension, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine readable, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, open borders, out of africa, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, Richard Florida, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, spice trade, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce, working-age population

Despite the global dispersion of humans, communities remained connected through trade networks and conquest. Diversity emerged through the separate development of populations, but cross-cultural contact ensured continuing interaction between scattered human communities. EARLY MIGRATION Out of Africa Every one of us has migrant blood running through our veins. As Spencer Wells put it, “We all have an African great-great…grandmother who lived approximately 150,000 years ago.”6 Around 80,000 years ago, the archaeological record of homo sapiens grows vague, and Wells argues that the human population dwindled to around 2,000 people.

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Around 40,000 years ago, people began to occupy the relatively colder, though still temperate, regions of Europe and inner Eurasia through several different routes. One involved movement along the rivers and valleys of the Himalayas from South China into the Eurasian steppes. Another would have followed the Pacific shore before turning inland. A final western route may have come more directly out of Africa toward the Black Sea. An ice age between 30,000 and 15,000 years ago, however, led human populations that had initially settled the warmer parts of Eurasia to retreat farther south. The evidence for how humans occupied northern Eurasia and the Americas is unclear, and there are many competing accounts based on genetic tracing, linguistics, and archaeology.

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In the concluding chapter, we will examine global migration governance and proposals for reform. 8 A Global Migration Agenda In the preceding chapters, we have contended that migration is a defining characteristic of human societies and a driving force of global history. The audacious movement of our common ancestors out of Africa launched the settlement of diverse ecologies, forcing adaptation, innovation, and learning. Before the advent of modern communications technologies, migrants and travelers served as the broadcast medium connecting settlements and civilizations. They carried knowledge and know-how across cultural and geographic boundaries, transmitting the ideas that animate human progress.

Text Analytics With Python: A Practical Real-World Approach to Gaining Actionable Insights From Your Data by Dipanjan Sarkar

bioinformatics, business intelligence, business logic, computer vision, continuous integration, data science, deep learning, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, functional programming, general-purpose programming language, Guido van Rossum, information retrieval, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, iterative process, language acquisition, machine readable, machine translation, natural language processing, out of africa, performance metric, premature optimization, recommendation engine, self-driving car, semantic web, sentiment analysis, speech recognition, statistical model, text mining, Turing test, web application

., Vertigo, West Side Story, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Silence of the Lambs, Singin' in the Rain, It's a Wonderful Life, Some Like It Hot, Gandhi, To Kill a Mockingbird, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Exorcist, The French Connection, It Happened One Night, Rain Man, Fargo, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Nashville, The Graduate, American Graffiti, Pulp Fiction, The Maltese Falcon, A Clockwork Orange, Rebel Without a Cause, Rear Window, The Third Man, North by Northwest ======================================== Cluster 1 details: -------------------- Key features: [u'water', u'attempt', u'cross', u'death', u'officer'] Movies in this cluster: Chinatown, Apocalypse Now, Jaws, The African Queen, Mutiny on the Bounty ======================================== Cluster 2 details: -------------------- Key features: [u'family', u'love', u'marry', u'war', u'child'] Movies in this cluster: The Godfather, Gone with the Wind, The Godfather: Part II, The Sound of Music, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Philadelphia Story, An American in Paris, Ben-Hur, Doctor Zhivago, High Noon, The Pianist, Goodfellas, The King's Speech, A Place in the Sun, Out of Africa, Terms of Endearment, Giant, The Grapes of Wrath, Wuthering Heights, Double Indemnity, Yankee Doodle Dandy ======================================== Cluster 3 details: -------------------- Key features: [u'apartment', u'new', u'woman', u'york', u'life'] Movies in this cluster: Citizen Kane, Titanic, 12 Angry Men, Rocky, The Best Years of Our Lives, My Fair Lady, The Apartment, City Lights, Midnight Cowboy, Mr.

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Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Apocalypse Now, Saving Private Ryan, Patton, Platoon, Dances with Wolves, All Quiet on the Western Front ======================================== Cluster 10 details: -------------------- Key features: [u'despite', u'drop', u'family', u'confront', u'drive'] Movies in this cluster: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, City Lights, Midnight Cowboy ======================================== Cluster 11 details: -------------------- Key features: [u'discover', u'always', u'feel', u'city', u'act'] Movies in this cluster: Raging Bull, It Happened One Night, Rain Man, Rebel Without a Cause ======================================== Cluster 12 details: -------------------- Key features: [u'discuss', u'alone', u'drop', u'business', u'consider'] Movies in this cluster: Singin' in the Rain, An American in Paris, The Apartment, Annie Hall, Network ======================================== Cluster 13 details: -------------------- Key features: [u'due', u'final', u'day', u'ever', u'eventually'] Movies in this cluster: On the Waterfront, It's a Wonderful Life, Some Like It Hot, The French Connection, Fargo, Pulp Fiction, North by Northwest ======================================== Cluster 14 details: -------------------- Key features: [u'early', u'able', u'end', u'charge', u'allow'] Movies in this cluster: A Streetcar Named Desire, The King's Speech, Giant, The Grapes of Wrath ======================================== Cluster 15 details: -------------------- Key features: [u'enter', u'eventually', u'cut', u'accept', u'even'] Movies in this cluster: The Philadelphia Story, The Green Mile, American Graffiti ======================================== Cluster 16 details: -------------------- Key features: [u'far', u'allow', u'apartment', u'anything', u'car'] Movies in this cluster: Citizen Kane, Sunset Blvd., The Sound of Music, Out of Africa, Terms of Endearment, Wuthering Heights, Yankee Doodle Dandy ======================================== # visualize the clusters In [304]: plot_clusters(num_clusters=num_clusters, feature_matrix=feature_matrix, ...: cluster_data=cluster_data, movie_data=movie_data, ...: plot_size=(16,8)) The preceding outputs show the contents of the different clusters and their visualization.

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It is definitely interesting indeed that with just movie synopses, our algorithm has clustered movies with similar attributes and genres together! The blue colored movies give us similar results, in that Braveheart and Gladiator are action, drama, and war classics. We also have some classics related to drama , romance, and biographies like The Sound of Music, Wuthering Heights, Terms of Endearment, and Out of Africa. Toward the top of the dendrogram you will observe movies related to science fiction and fantasy, like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, all close to each other. Can you find more interesting patterns? Which movies do you think do not belong together in the same clusters?

The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

out of africa

I had one and my roommate, Ward Stradlater, had one. The arms were in sad shape, because everybody was always sitting on them, but they were pretty comfortable chairs. The book I was reading was this book I took out of the library by mistake. They gave me the wrong book, and I didn't notice it till I got back to my room. They gave me Out of Africa, by Isak Dinesen. I thought it was going to stink, but it didn't. It was a very good book. I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot. My favorite author is my brother D.B., and my next favorite is Ring Lardner. My brother gave me a book by Ring Lardner for my birthday, just before I went to Pencey.

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It's a pretty good book and all, but I wouldn't want to call Somerset Maugham up. I don't know, He just isn't the kind of guy I'd want to call up, that's all. I'd rather call old Thomas Hardy up. I like that Eustacia Vye. Anyway, I put on my new hat and sat down and started reading that book Out of Africa. I'd read it already, but I wanted to read certain parts over again. I'd only read about three pages, though, when I heard somebody coming through the shower curtains. Even without looking up, I knew right away who it was. It was Robert Ackley, this guy that roomed right next to me. There was a shower right between every two rooms in our wing, and about eighty-five times a day old Ackley barged in on me.

A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life by Brian Grazer, Charles Fishman

4chan, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, Apple II, Asperger Syndrome, Bonfire of the Vanities, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, game design, Google Chrome, Howard Zinn, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Norman Mailer, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, out of africa, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple

So there would be six or eight of us, from totally different disciplines, spending the day in a relaxed atmosphere, trading our problems and our experiences and our questions. What a fabulous idea. And we did it. Dr. Salk invited a robotics expert from Caltech and Betty Edwards, the theorist and teacher who wrote the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I brought director and producer Sydney Pollack (Out of Africa, Tootsie) and producer George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars and Indiana Jones, and George brought Linda Ronstadt, the singer who was his girlfriend at the time. The whole thing was Dr. Salk’s idea. He was curious—in particular, he was curious about how the “media mind” worked, how people like Lucas and Pollack thought about the world and what they created, and he was curious about storytelling.

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Seuss story, 113 fear and, 116 to Grazer, 101, 102, 103–5, 106–7, 114 Grazer saying, 178 in Hollywood/entertainment business, 33, 61, 101–2, 169 as inside your head, 114, 116, 118 persistence and, 109, 114, 118 reactions to, 101–2 Splash and, 103–5, 106–7, 109 ways to beat, 102, 114, 116–18 Noah (movie), 78, 280 Obama, Barack, 13, 207, 209–11, 212 obstacles, Grazer’s views about overcoming, 167–69 open-ended questions, 139–40, 198–99, 261 openness, 181–85, 198–99, 200 opinions, 177–78, 179, 180 optimism, 172 others: curiosity on behalf of, 162–66 See also: point of view; relationships Out of Africa (movie), 157 Ovitz, Michael, 121 Page, Larry, 146 painful topics: and when not to be anti-curious, 175 Paley, William, 204 The Paper (movie), 128 Paramount Studios: Grazer as producer at, 28–31 Parenthood (movie), 31, 45, 128, 213 Parker, Dorothy, 1, 273 parochialism, 44–45 passion, 172, 173, 180 Penn, Sean, 93 persistence, 108–9, 114, 118 perspective of others.

Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places by Paul Collier

business cycle, carbon tax, dark matter, deskilling, failed state, information security, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, price stability, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, zero-sum game

Government armies buy Kalashnikovs most vigorously when they are fighting a rebellion. So the guns are officially imported into Africa, stolen, and so become illegal, but cannot easily be re-exported to the markets in which secondhand Kalashnikovs fetch a high price. That is because to export the guns out of Africa they have to be imported into countries that generally have sufficiently good border controls to make it difficult. But the guns do not just stay in the country whose government first imported them to Africa. Africa’s internal borders are highly porous, and so the cheap guns slosh around the continent going to 116 WARS, GUNS, AND VOTES where there is currently demand: which means wherever there is a war.

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While the governments of South Africa and Nigeria might well not wish to host foreign forces with an unclear mandate, they should welcome them for the specified purpose of protection from coups against governments that have committed themselves to proper standards of democratic elections. “Keep out of Africa” is irresponsible if it condemns the continent to unaccountable government. Finally, I turn to my most demanding readers: those presidents who, having read the section that sets out strategies for reducing the risk of a coup, still could not sleep soundly. Gentlemen, I promised you that if you read on you would find a fully reliable protection from your own army.

The Serengeti Rules: The Quest to Discover How Life Works and Why It Matters by Sean B. Carroll

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, clean water, discovery of penicillin, Fellow of the Royal Society, out of africa, pattern recognition, phenotype, Skype, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship

Humanity does not live by bread alone; in East African wilds a stream of men and women down the generations may find quickening, refreshment, inspiration. Huxley was a schoolmate and friend of safari guide and hunter Denis Finch-Hatton, who was later made famous as Karen Blixen’s lover in her memoir and the film Out of Africa. Finch-Hatton, whose clients included the future King Edward VIII, was a private man who eschewed the limelight. But he was appalled by the excessive killing in the Serengeti by tourist hunters. He wrote to the Times of London to condemn the “orgy of slaughter” and to push for protection of the Serengeti “before it was too late.”

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See also Gorongosa National Park Mozambique Resistance Movement, 186, 197 Muagura, Pedro, 197 Mukkaw Bay, 111–115, 118–119, 121 mussels, 119, 120 mutations, genetic research and, 63–67 myc gene, 97 necessity, sufficiency and, 182 negative feedback, 67–68 negative regulation: density-dependent regulation as form of, 147–150, 198–199; overview of, 68f, 153; predation as, 164–165, 166f; starfish, mussels and, 119; wildebeest, rinderpest virus and, 140–143, 141f, 142f Ngorogoro Crater, 1–3 Nielsen, Mark, 192 Nieuwe Meer, Lake, 158 Nigeria, 206–207 Nile crocodiles, 192–193 Nobel Prizes: for discovery of allostery, 71; for discovery of penicillin, 40, 92; for discovery of virus causing cancer in chickens, 93, 96; for understanding of cholesterol regulation, 78, 87 norepinephrine, 17 Norges Pattedyr (Collett), 40–41 North East Land, 39–43 northern elephant seals, 199 Norton-Griffiths, Mike, 138–140 Novartis, 103–104 Nuttall Ornithological Club, 113 ochre starfish, 111–115, 112f, 118–120 Olduvai Gorge, 3–4 olive baboons, 161–162, 164, 165f Olympic Peninsula, 111–115, 118–119 oncogenes: cancer and, 98–100, 99f, 105; discovery of, 96–97; as drug targets, 102–104; leukemia and, 98–100; retinoblastoma and, 100–102 “One Care for Our Common Home” (Pope Francis), 203–204, 210 optimism, 211 orcas, 126 Order of the Bath, 25 oribi, 145, 145f Orwell, George, 127 otters, sea, 120–123, 124f, 126, 199 Out of Africa (film), 132 Oxford University Expeditions to Spitsbergen, 32–43, 33f Paine, Robert: on future, 203; image of, 128f; sea otters as keystone species and, 120–123; starfish as keystone species and, 111–115, 118–120; Tatoosh Island and, 119–120, 121, 127 Palmisano, John, 122 pancreas, 27 parasites, population size and, 45 Pardee, Arthur, 65 Pasteur Institute, 54, 58, 60 pathogens, 45, 137–138 Paul Lake, 171–172, 173f penicillin, 40, 81, 82, 92 Penicillium citrinum, 82–84 Penicillium fungus, 81 “Periodic Fluctuations in Numbers of Animals” (Elton), 42–43 peristalsis, 18–21 Pershing, John J., 25 pesticides, 159–161, 164, 211 pests, rice production and, 158–161, 160f, 164 Peter Lake, 171–172, 173f Peterson, Charles “Pete,” 163 Philadelphia chromosome (22), 93, 98–100, 99f phosphate fertilizers, 163 phosphate groups, protein regulation and, 98–99, 101 phosphorylation, 101 phytoplankton, 171–172, 173f pigeon pea, 197 Pingo, Mike, 192, 198 Pisaster ochraceus (ochre starfish), 111–115, 112f, 118–120 plankton, 53, 171–172, 173f, 176 planthopper, brown, 159–161, 160f, 164 Plowright, Walter, 136 poaching, 146, 195, 197 political will, social will and, 210 pollution, water supply and, 155–158 population growth: buffalo and, 134–138; fluctuations in, 42f; human, 5; wildebeest and, 136–138, 137f, 148f, 149 population size: competition and, 143–144, 150; density-dependent regulation of, 147–150, 148f; factors limiting, 45; fluctuations in, 41–43; migration and, 150–152; pesticide use in rice production and, 159–161, 164; predators and, 45, 150 positive regulation, overview of, 68f, 153 Pourquoi-Pas?

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, c2.com, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, charter city, classic study, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer vision, cotton gin, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, George Gilder, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, life extension, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, Picturephone, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, rewilding, Richard Florida, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, silicon-based life, skeuomorphism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the built environment, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Vernor Vinge, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, yottabyte

A number of your blades would be held by bone or wood handles, hafted with cane or hide cord. When you crouched around the fire, someone might play a drum or bone flute. Your handful of possessions might be buried with you when you died. But don’t take this progress for harmony. Within 20,000 years of the great march out of Africa, Sapiens helped exterminate 90 percent of the then-existing species of megafauna. Sapiens used innovations such as the bow and arrow, spear, and cliff stampedes to kill off the last of the mastodons, mammoths, moas, woolly rhinos, and giant camels—basically every large package of protein that walked on four legs.

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Only when the mind, liberated by language and enabled by the technium, transcended the constraints of nature 50,000 years ago did greater realms of possibility open up. There was a price to pay for this transcendence, but what we gained by this embrace was civilization and progress. We are not the same folks who marched out of Africa. Our genes have coevolved with our inventions. In the past 10,000 years alone, in fact, our genes have evolved 100 times faster than the average rate for the previous 6 million years. This should not be a surprise. As we domesticated the dog (in all its breeds) from wolves and bred cows and corn and more from their unrecognizable ancestors, we, too, have been domesticated.

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Saffo, Paul Sagan, Carl Sahlins, Marshall Sale, Kirkpatrick San Francisco slums of Sapiens clothing of cooking by diet of diverse niches occupied by early inventions of grandmother effect and hominins displaced by increased longevity of items traded by language invented by megafauna extinctions and out of Africa migration of population growth of sedentism of tools of see also hunter-gatherers satellites night photography by Schachter-Shalomi, Rabbi Zalman Scheele, Carl Schwartz, Barry science fringe increase in journal articles of information compressed by in progress simultaneous discoveries in as structured global knowledge science fiction scientific method scissors Scott, W.

Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong-And the New Research That's Rewriting the Story by Angela Saini

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, classic study, demographic transition, Drosophila, feminist movement, gender pay gap, Large Hadron Collider, meta-analysis, mouse model, out of africa, place-making, scientific mainstream, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, women in the workforce

They’ve been known to go long distances even while pregnant. One example is Amber Miller, an experienced runner who in 2011 ran the Chicago marathon before giving birth seven hours later. English runner and world record holder Paula Radcliffe has also trained through two pregnancies. For a large chunk of early human history, when humans migrated out of Africa to the rest of the world, women would have traveled hundreds or thousands of miles, sometimes under extreme environmental conditions. If they were pregnant or carrying infants, the daily physical pressures on them would have been far greater than those faced by men. “Just reproducing and surviving in these conditions, talk about natural selection!”

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Indeed, Kristen Hawkes’s latest work suggests that hardworking grandmothers may have appeared very early in human development, around two million years ago, meaning they could hold much more than just the key to human longevity. “It may have been helpful grandmothering that allowed the spread of genus Homo out of Africa and into previously unoccupied regions of the temperate and tropical Old World,” she speculates. In her version of the story of us, ancient grandmothers weren’t just powerhouses in their families but vehicles for enormous change as humans migrated across the globe, tens of thousands of years ago.

QI: The Third Book of General Ignorance (Qi: Book of General Ignorance) by John Lloyd, John Mitchinson

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Boris Johnson, British Empire, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, double helix, epigenetics, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route

Almost all wild lions live on the African savannah (apart from the 400 in Gir Forest National Park in India, which isn’t a jungle either). Some lions may have to move as their habitat shrinks – one lioness was spotted in the Ethiopian jungle in 2006, but there’s no evidence she was hunting and breeding there. ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ is the most famous song ever to have come out of Africa. Originally called ‘Mbube’ (Zulu for ‘lion’) it was recorded in 1939 by Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds. During the studio session the Birds sang ‘Mbube, uyiMbube’ (‘Lion, you’re a lion’) while Solomon improvised over the top. It sold 100,000 copies in South Africa alone. It has since been translated into Danish, Japanese, Congolese and Navaho, and broadcast on US radio for the equivalent of 300 years of continuous play.

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If the weather had been nicer, they might have spent the time going on bracing walks. As it was, they were forced to stay inside and think up ghost stories. But Krakatoa and Tambora both pale into insignificance beside the most violent of all volcanic eruptions: Lake Toba in Sumatra (also west of Java). It happened 70,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens had just emerged out of Africa. The eruption ejected nearly 700 cubic miles of debris into the sky – the equivalent of 19 million Empire State Buildings. Toba’s eruption appears to have had a devastating effect on the human race. Genetic analysis shows the population fell to no more than 10,000 and, according to some estimates, as few as 40 breeding couples.

Affluence Without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushmen by James Suzman

access to a mobile phone, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, clean water, discovery of the americas, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, full employment, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, means of production, Occupy movement, open borders, out of africa, post-work, quantitative easing, rewilding, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, trickle-down economics, unemployed young men, We are the 99%

The same data suggests that it was only during the last twenty-two thousand years that other African branches of the human family tree, including those that would later form the first human populations in Europe and Asia, began to grow significantly. The researchers analyzing this data speculate that climatic changes in central and western Africa, as well as the challenges of adapting to new and unfamiliar habitats as they expanded out of Africa, affected these declines.2 As genetically diverse as Khoisan were before the arrival of others in southern Africa, they shared similar cultures, similar technologies, similar views on the nature of the cosmos, and similar ways of relating both to one another and to their environments. While Khoisan peoples spoke—and continue to speak—a range of mutually unintelligible languages, these languages all share the same roots marked out most obviously by the use of a series of distinctive click consonants.

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If the ultimate measure of sustainability is endurance over time, then hunting and gathering is by far the most sustainable economic approach developed in all of human history, and the Khoisan are the most accomplished exponents of this approach. And the success of hunting and gathering as an economic system cannot be doubted. It is as hunter-gatherers that modern Homo sapiens expanded out of Africa and occupied Asia, the Pacific Islands, Australia, and eventually the Americas. It is hard to imagine that the globalized economy symbolized by da Gama’s voyage will endure anywhere near as long as the Khoisan managed to survive by hunting and gathering. Some of the more doom-laden forecasts of climate change suggest that it is already too late—that an important threshold has already been passed and that we should all be channeling our inner Noah and building arks of one sort or another.

How We'll Live on Mars (TED Books) by Stephen Petranek

Apollo 11, California gold rush, Colonization of Mars, Dennis Tito, Elon Musk, Hyperloop, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, out of africa, Richard Feynman, TED Talk, trade route

The backstory of that mistake is worth understanding—how a single decision by one US president stunted space travel for decades, how we might have inspired two generations of earthlings with humankind’s ability to deliver on almost anything our brains can imagine. Nearly five decades ago we had the ability to extend ourselves into the solar system and beyond. Now private rocketry has opened a new window to the stars. Perhaps the need to explore is built into our DNA; homo sapiens began venturing out of Africa about 60,000 years ago, pushing beyond the horizon until they populated the entire globe. Exploration may be connected to human survival. But it has also led to colonization of lands already occupied, the devastation of cultures, and the plundering of resources. The settlement of Mars is about to happen far sooner than most people realize, and in a nonregulated way.

Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life by Nick Lane

Benoit Mandelbrot, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clockwork universe, double helix, Drosophila, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, out of africa, phenotype, power law, random walk, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, stem cell, unbiased observer

If all modern humans came from Africa less than 200 000 years ago, then we are all the same under the skin. We have barely had time, in an evolutionary sense, to diverge, but we can perhaps be held responsible for the extinction of our closest relatives, such as the Neanderthals. This theory is known as the ‘Out of Africa’ hypothesis. On the other hand, if the human races evolved in parallel then the differences between us are not skin deep, and our unique racial and cultural identities are firmly grounded in biology, challenging our ideals of equality. Both scenarios could have been offset by interbreeding, to an unknown degree.

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Most populations from outside Africa had ‘multiple origins’, in other words, peoples living in the same place had different mitochondrial DNA sequences, implying that many areas were colonized repeatedly. In sum, Wilson’s group concluded that Mitochondrial Eve lived fairly recently in Africa, and the rest of the world was populated by repeated waves of migration from that continent, lending support to the ‘Out of Africa’ hypothesis. Not surprisingly these unprecedented findings gave birth to a dynamic new field, which dominated genealogy in the 1990s. The unresolved questions raised by skeletal morphology, by linguistic and cultural studies, by anthropology and population genetics, could at last all be answered with ‘hard’ scientific objectivity.

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S 154–5, 171, 192, 271, 285, 297 Hall, Alan 102 Halliwell, Barry 275 Hamilton, William 192, 221, 234 Harden, Sir Arthur 79 Harman, Denham 274–5, 278 Harold, Franklin 92, 103, 195–6 heart disease, vulnerability to 255–6 heat production, by uncoupling respiration 92, 183–4, 254–6, 305–6 Helmholtz, Hermann von 73 Hemmingsen, A. M. 167 hermaphrodite lifestyle 232–3, 238 Heusner, Alfred 159, 167 Heyerdahl, Thor 246 histones 10, 32, 48–9 Hochachka, Peter 176 Horovitz, Bob 204 Hulbert, Tony 181 human evolution: mitochondrial DNA studies 244–7 ‘Out of Africa’ hypothesis 242–3, 246 population genetic studies 243–4 human genome project 68 nuclear mitochondrial sequences (numts) 132–3, 252 n. human mitochondrial genome 16, 135–9, 141–4, 281 Huntington’s disease 285, 298 Hurst, Laurence 234 Hussein, Saddam, identification of 4 Jacob, François 114 Jacobs, Howard 299–300 Jaffe, Bernard 71 Jagendorf, André 89–90 Jansen, Robert 263 Jones, Laura 38 Joule, James Prescott 73 immune function, and apoptosis 204 infertility 260 male cytoplasmic sterility 238 male infertility (asthenozoospermia) 256 ooplasmic transfer 4, 240, 264 intelligence, evolution of 23, 24 iron, as a catalyst 73–4 iron-sulphur minerals, and the first cells 99–102, 101, 103–4 isoprenes 99, 135 isoprenoids 135 Kalckar, Herman 80 Karr, Timothy 239 Keilin, David 74–7, 85, 209 Kennedy, Eugene 13, 72 Kerr, John 203 Khrapko, Konstantin 250 Kingsbury, B.

Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies by Edward O. Wilson

biofilm, out of africa, phenotype, social intelligence

Our thought and literature remain energized by the widespread belief that all of prehistory and history, including every great transition, somehow served the purpose of placing us upon the Earth. Everything, it has been argued, from the origin of life 3.8 billion years ago was meant for us. The spread of Homo sapiens out of Africa and around the habitable world was somehow preordained. It was meant to establish our rule of the planet with the inalienable right to treat it as we please. That mistake, I suggest, is the true human condition. So let us look more closely at the great transitions. The first transition and the most difficult to visualize is the origin of life itself.

You Can't Make This Stuff Up: The Complete Guide to Writing Creative Nonfiction--From Memoir to Literary Journalism and Everything in Between by Lee Gutkind

airport security, Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, Columbine, David Sedaris, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Mark Zuckerberg, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, out of africa, personalized medicine, publish or perish, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology, working poor, Year of Magical Thinking

Angela’s Ashes (1996) by Frank McCourt and This Boy’s Life (1989) by Tobias Wolff were both made into major motion pictures; the British actress Emily Watson starred as McCourt’s mother, Angela, and the Academy Award winner Robert De Niro played Wolff’s stepfather, Dwight Hansen. The Liars Club (1995) by Mary Karr, another of these best-selling tell-all memoirs, rode the new interest in the genre. Memoirs are not new to the literary world. Henry David Thoreau’s Walden is a classic of the form as is Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa, first published in this country in 1938. The Kiss, however, pushed into new territory, with the subject of incest scandalizing both critics and ordinary readers. Even in 1997, book-reviewing venues were drying up, and any controversy that might help sell a few more magazines or newspapers was a boon at the time.

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See also Frame Narrative historians, recreation and Narrative journalism Narrative line Narrative nonfiction Narrator, trustworthiness of Nasar, Sylvia Nasdijj Nash, John National Book Award National Book Critics Awards National Endowment for the Arts Navel gazing New journalism The New Journalism (Wolfe) New Republic (magazine) Newsday (newspaper) Newspapers, reading Newsweek (magazine) The New Yorker (magazine) creative nonfiction in DeLillo article in Malcolm and McPhee and New York Herald Tribune (newspaper) New York (magazine) New York Observer (newspaper) New York Post (newspaper) New York Times Book Review (periodical) New York Times Magazine New York Times (newspaper) creative nonfiction in hoaxes and recreation and The Next American Essay (D’Agata) Nick Adams Stories (Hemingway) Nickel and Dimed (Ehrenreich) Nixon (film) Norton Note-taking Novels Nuland, Sherwin Nutmeg (Nathaniel) Obama, Barack Objectivity, creative nonfiction and Ohio University O magazine O’Malley, Walter The Omnivore’s Dilemma (Pollan) On Death and Dying (Kübler-Ross) One Children’s Place (Gutkind) One-on-one interviews On Looking (Purpura) On the Road (Kerouac) Opening paragraphs Opening Skinner’s Box (Slater) Oranges (McPhee) The Orchid Thief (Orlean) Orlean, Susan Orwell, George Other Press O’Toole, Peter Outlines Out of Africa (Dinesen) Page, P. K. Palin, Sarah Parachuting Parallel narratives Paris Review (magazine) Patterson, James Patton (film) Pearson, Michael Pentimento (Hellman) The People of Penn’s Woods West (Gutkind) The Perfect Storm (Junger) Perkins, Maxwell Permission disclaimer form Persepolis (Satrapi) Personal essay.

Escape from Hell by Larry Niven; Jerry Pournelle

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, clean water, out of africa, the long tail

GEORGE LINCOLN ROCKWELL Commander, USNR. Leader of the American Nazi Party. Died 1967. PHLEGYAS Legendary king of the Lapiths, grandfather of Asclepius. Died second millennium B.C. KAREN BLIXEN AKA ISAK DINESEN (alluded) Danish author who wrote primarily in English. Her works include Out of Africa and “Babette’s Feast.” Died 1962. The City of Dis JAMES GIRARD One–time deputy district attorney of New Orleans, now an official in the Prosecutor’s Office in Hell. Died twenty–first century. HENRI LEBEAU Professor of civil and canon law, Tulane University, assigned to the Prosecutor’s Office in Hell.

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I have been told that the rape was necessary to produce him, and I had no right to interfere with the will of Zeus and the gods by taking revenge for my daughter’s rape.” “Don’t tempt the gods,” Rosemary said. “Be watchful and don’t tempt the gods,” Phlegyas said. “I recall saying that. Where did you hear that?” “A story we read in college mentioned you,” Rosemary said. “By the Danish woman who wrote Out of Africa. This was a really scary story.” I asked, “So Minos put you here?” “He did.” “As king?” He didn’t answer. The boat was slowing now. The fog was clearing, and I could see we were coming to a landing. Chapter 11 Fifth Circle The City Of Dis * * * And my good Master said: “Even now, my son, The city draweth near whose name is Dis, With the grave citizens, with the great throng.”

Mysteries of the Mall: And Other Essays by Witold Rybczynski

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", additive manufacturing, airport security, Buckminster Fuller, City Beautiful movement, classic study, edge city, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Jane Jacobs, kremlinology, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Eisenman, rent control, Silicon Valley, the High Line, urban renewal, young professional

The image may be the result of a remembered family photograph, or a painting, or the experience of a real porch somewhere. For one person, getting away means a shady porch with a rocking chair and a slowly turning ceiling fan. That particular image has haunted me for years—I think I first saw it in a magazine ad for whiskey. And for me one of the pleasures of watching the film Out of Africa is the beautiful porch of Karen Blixen’s house in Kenya, with Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto playing on a windup gramophone. Alas, for Luc a porch was just a utilitarian appendage. Moreover, the image it conjured up for him was not rural but urban. I also had the impression that he considered porches to be old-fashioned—or maybe just places for old people.

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., 1995 bombing in Olbrich, Joseph Maria Olin (landscape architecture firm) Olmsted, Frederick Law as city planner foresight of inevitability of big cities foreseen by parkways of pragmatism of on suburbs Olmsted, Rick Olmsted Brothers Olympics, Beijing (2008) OMA On the Art of Building in Ten Books (Alberti) Opéra Bastille, Paris architectural competition for as Big Project cost of exterior of innovative technology of interior of political fights over as too big for site Opéra Comique, Paris Orinda, Calif. Orlando, Fla. Ormandy, Eugene Osceola County (Fla.) School Board Oslo, 2011 bombings in Otranto House, North Charleston Ott, Carlos Otto, Frei, West German pavilion, Expo 67 of Oud, J.J.P. Out of Africa (film) Ove Arup: Masterbuilder of the Twentieth Century (Jones) Paimio Sanatorium, Finland Palais Garnier (Paris Opéra) Palazzo Ducale, Venice Palazzo Pretorio, Cividale, Italy Palladianism Palladio, Andrea Carità convent of drawings of Il Redentore church of influence of Palazzo Pretorio of Quattro libri of San Giorgio Maggiore of Villa Foscari of Villa Godi of Villa Rotonda of Villa Saraceno of villas of Pampanito, USS (submarine) Panama Canal Pan American Union Building, Washington, D.C.

The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa by Calestous Juma

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, business climate, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, conceptual framework, creative destruction, CRISPR, double helix, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, export processing zone, global value chain, high-speed rail, impact investing, income per capita, industrial cluster, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, land tenure, M-Pesa, microcredit, mobile money, non-tariff barriers, off grid, out of africa, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, Recombinant DNA, rolling blackouts, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, total factor productivity, undersea cable

United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and African Union, Economic Report on Africa 2009: Developing African Agriculture Through Regional Value Chains (Addis Ababa: United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and African Union, 2009), 125–126. 45. R. Paarlberg, Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 81. 46. United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and African Union, Economic Report on Africa 2009: Developing African Agriculture Through Regional Value Chains (Addis Ababa: United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and African Union, 2009), 126. 47.

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But evidence of unintended benefits is emerging. See, for example, W. D. Hutchison et al., “Areawide Suppression of European Corn Borer with Bt Maize Reaps Savings to Non-Bt Maize Growers,” Science 330, no. 6001 (2010): 222–225. 41. R. Paarlberg, Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 2. 42. J. O. Adeoti and A. A. Adekunle, “Awareness of and Attitudes Towards Biotechnology and GMOs in Southwest Nigeria: A Survey of People with Access to Information,” International Journal of Biotechnology 9, no. 2 (2007): 209–230. 43. E. J. Morris, “The Cartagena Protocol: Implications for Regional Trade and Technology Development in Africa,” Development Policy Review 26, no. 1 (2008): 29–57.

The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans by Mark Lynas

Airbus A320, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Easter island, Eyjafjallajökull, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Negawatt, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, special drawing rights, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Tragedy of the Commons, two and twenty, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, We are as Gods

And rightly so, for fire dramatically changed our relationship with the natural world. Acquiring the power of gods separated humans permanently and irretrievably from all other species. As well as cooked food, it afforded protection against predators and warmth on cold nights, allowing early humans to spread north out of Africa during the depths of the last ice age. Fire may have facilitated the spread of genes for hairlessness, as the need for body insulation diminished. However, once our hair was lost and our guts had shrunk, we were tied to the hearth—we could no longer exist without it. No human can hope to survive in the wild today without fire, and this dependence marks a major qualitative shift in human relations with the biosphere.

…

In what looks like a prehistoric bout of all-too-modern ethnic cleansing, Homo sapiens probably drove its closest hominid relatives, Homo neanderthalensis and Homo erectus, to oblivion. A minority of archaeologists cling to the notion that some interbreeding must have taken place, but genetic studies show this is unlikely.7 Modern human DNA instead confirms that all of us are descended from the same small initial Homo sapiens population that migrated out of Africa 50,000 years ago.8 The last Neanderthals hung on in remote mountainous parts of France until 38,000 years ago, and in southern Spain until about 30,000 years ago. The very last families died a few thousand years later in Gorham’s Cave in what is now Gibraltar, when their final refuge on the extreme southern edge of the continent was overrun.9 Officially, the direct cause of their ultimate demise is a mystery, but I think we can guess who the culprit was.

Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars by Lee Billings

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, California gold rush, Colonization of Mars, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dava Sobel, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ford Model T, full employment, Hans Moravec, hydraulic fracturing, index card, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Magellanic Cloud, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planetary scale, private spaceflight, profit motive, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, selection bias, Silicon Valley, space junk, synthetic biology, technological singularity, the scientific method, transcontinental railway

After ninety minutes, you would find yourself in the Bronze Age, around the time of the construction of Stonehenge, the domestication of the horse, and the founding of Abrahamic religions. A day later, you would be in the middle of the Stone Age, just as small bands of foraging humans began to migrate out of Africa. To reach the beginning of the Cambrian, the base of the Phanerozoic, would take you about 17 years. Now remember that almost a decade of earlier Precambrian time underlies each and every passing Phanerozoic year—departing from the far-distant Cambrian, your year-per-second time machine would take another 125 years to transport you to our planet’s first moments.

…

An observer somewhere among the trillion stars of Andromeda, our nearest neighboring spiral, would today see the Earth of 2.5 million years ago, when the forerunners of Homo sapiens were perfecting the production of crude stone tools in sub-Saharan Africa. Seen from the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy swooping near the Milky Way, our world would be locked in the glacial advance of 160,000 B.C., with our ancestors poised to migrate out of Africa as the ice sheets retreated. Within our own galaxy, the echoes are closer to home. Among the open clusters and blue hypergiant stars of the Carina Nebula, somewhere between 6,500 and 10,000 light-years away, the Earth appears as it was during the rise of agriculture and the Bronze Age civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus Valley.

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities by Howard P. Segal

1960s counterculture, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, complexity theory, David Brooks, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, deskilling, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, Future Shock, G4S, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, intentional community, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nikolai Kondratiev, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, pneumatic tube, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog

A notable exception was Japan, which, having escaped colonization and having become a world power early in the twentieth century, never relinquished its old attitudes about racial supremacy and homogeneity.78 Interestingly, in recent years there have been controversies about the alleged African origins of Western (especially Greek) science and technology and condemnations of the supposed Western theft of these intellectual and material treasures (despite that post-World War I skepticism about modern developments). But 170 Utopia Reconsidered such attempted revisionism had been decisively refuted, especially in Mary Lefkowitz’s superb Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (1996). Meanwhile, in a throwback to that skepticism about Western science, South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki (born in 1942), the successor to Nelson Mandela and the nation’s second black president, set back his country’s response to its widespread AIDS epidemic during his administration.

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Bradley 92 Lane, Robert 106–107, 108, 109, 114, 117–118, 119, 122 Laos 104 Lartigue, Jacques-Henri 165 Las Vegas 36 Lasser, David 9 Last Hero, The: A Life of Henry Aaron (Bryant) 191 Latin America 102 and European ideas 21–22 indigenous cultures and movements 21, 23 liberation theology and communities 52 Spanish conquest 21 utopias in 21–23 Lawrence, Francis 212 Lea, Homer 98 278 Index League of Nations 251 Lease, Mary 98 Lee, Ann 26 Lefkowitz, Mary 171 Left Hand of Darkness, The (LeGuin) 92 legitimation crisis in US science and technology 122 LeGuin, Ursula 92 LeMay, General Curtis 105 Lemontey, Pierre Edouard 60 Lenin, Vladimir 104 Lessing, Doris 9 Levitas, Ruth 7 Levittown, Long Island 244 Ley, Willy 9 library usage 218 Life in a Technocracy: What It Might Be Like in 1933 (Loeb) 89, 106, 239, 240 limits to growth 234, 237 Literary Digest 97 “literary intellectuals” 114 “living the dream” 254 Loeb, Harold Albert 89, 90, 95, 96, 239 and politics 109 Loewy, Raymond 34 London, Jack 98 Longxi, Zhang 18 Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (Bellamy) 10, 13, 24, 27, 31–32, 34, 90, 194 attitudes toward 59–60, 254 Lost Horizon 13 Lucas, George 204 Luddites 240, 241 Maastricht Treaty 252 Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, The (Leo Marx) 84 Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Adas) 169 Macnie, John 82, 87 Maine and nuclear power 142–157 Maine Yankee Atomic Power Company 142–143, 145, 146–148, 149, 151 as “cargo cult” 147 closure of 148 opposition to 156–157 referenda on 147, 155 utopian and dystopian aspects 156 views of 156–157 Malthus, Thomas 63 Mandela, Nelson 171 Manhattan Project 156 “Manifest Destiny,” American 11 Manuel, Frank and Fritzie 16 Manuel, Frank 6 Mao Tse-Tung 18, 243 utopian vision 19 Mao’s Great Famine (Dikotter) 19 Maraniss, David 191 marginalizing utopias 29, 245 Marx, Karl 32, 53, 60, 66–67, 105, 250–251 Marxism 22 Marx, Leo 84, 85 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 52 Massey, Ranymond 240, 241 Mauchly, John 160 Mayer, Anna-K. 98, 114 Mbeki, Thabo, President of South Africa 171 McDonald, Michael J. 111 McIntyre, Vonda N. 9 McKinley, President William 94 McNamara, Robert 104–105, 106, 112, 113, 166 “McNamara Line” 105 Medieval Machine, The: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (Gimpel) 236 “megachurches” 11 megaprojects: and climate change 187–188 retreat from 139ff, 157 skepticism toward 141–142 taxpayer support for 122, 150 Megatrends and Megatrends 2000 (Naisbitt and Aburdene) 168 Men Like Gods (Wells) 251 mercantilism 77 Metamorphosis (Ovid) 47 Mexico 23 mice, as subjects of research 125 Micklethwait, John 11 Microsoft 158, 192 “middle landscape” 85 military technology 238 millenarian movements 8 God and millenarianism 8, 10 Christians and millenarianism 8, 10 Judaism and millenarianism 8, 10 Mormonism 10 and Pansophism 54–55 and utopia 55 Miller, Lisa 12 Mitchell, General Billy 142 Mizora: A Prophecy (Lane) 92 Model T car 165 Modern Times in Maine and America, 1890–1930 191 “Modernization” theory 102ff, 114 over-reliance on technology 105 Index 279 Mojave Desert, California 151 monkeys, genetically modified 125 Montgomery, David 212 Montreal Expo 1967 246 Moon and the Ghetto: An Essay on Public Policy Analysis, The (Nelson) 117 Moon landing 139, 140, 141, 190, 200 moon landing fraud claims 141 More, Thomas 23, 42, 58, 247 coining of term utopia 5 and history 164 and utopias 251 utopia described 48–50 see also Utopia Morison, George Shattuck 89–90 Mormonism 10 Morozov, Evgeny 189 Morris, William 17, 32, 58–59, 60, 237, 254 see also News from Nowhere Mosquito Coast, The 202 Mumford, Lewis 1, 106, 245, 246 music, digitization of 221 Mussolini, Benito 98 MySpace 205 Naisbitt, John 161, 162, 168, 186 Nantucket Sound 150 NASA 7, 140 National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC) 213–214 National Park Service 238–239 National Science Foundation (NSF) 99, 100, 115 Native Americans 81 natural user interface 220 Nazi Germany 104, 244 Nazism and utopia 188 280 Index Negroponte, Nicholas 161–162, 163, 186 Nehru, Jawaharlal 172 Nelson, Richard 117 Neo-Confucian thought 19–20 Net Delusion, The: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (Morozov) 189 Neumann, Franz 109 Neumann, John Von 160 New Atlantis, The (Bacon) 53, 251 Condorcet on 56 New Christianity, The (Le Nouveau Christianisme) (SaintSimon) 57 New Deal 106, 159 New England 3, 24, 27, 147, 150, 156, 249 New Harmony, Indiana. settlement at 60 New Lanark Mills, Scotland 60, 62, 64 New View of Society A (Owen) 62 New World and Old World compared 24, 244 New World Order 242 New World, The; Or, Mechanical System to Perform the Labours of Man and Beast by Inanimate Powers, that Cost Nothing (Etzler) 78 New York City’s New School for Social Research 97 New York Public Library 242, 245, 254 New York World’s Fair World of Tomorrow 1939–1940 164, 240 News from Nowhere (Morris) 17, 32, 59–60, 237 newspapers and digital media 218, 221–222 Newton Message Pad 219 Newton, Isaac 55, 219 Nexi the robot 126 Nixon, President Richard 108, 155 Noble, David F 187, 190, 207, 216 non-utopian reform 244 North Americans, early European perceptions of 244 North Vietnam 105–106 Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (Lefkowitz) 171 Noyce, Robert 158 Noyes, John Humphrey 10, 27, 28 nuclear industry: France 152 Germany 152 Japan 152 US 142–156 nuclear power 142–157 being “too cheap to meter” 156 changing attitudes toward 146–147 experts and 155–156 leakage of tritium 153 and power station decommissioning 148, 149–150 possibility of disaster 154–155 nuclear weaponry 187 Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) 148, 149, 153, 154 Nutty Professor, The 201 Nye, David 81, 168, 169, 190, 237 Nyhan, David 148–149 O’Neil, Gerard 9 Obama, President Barack 140, 151 Office of Science and Technology Policy 108 Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) 117–119, 121 One Laptop per Child 161 Oneida community 10, 24, 27–28 daughter communities 28 open marriage in 27, 199 Oneida Limited 28 “Oneida Perfectionists” 28 ordinary readers and utopian writings 11, 139, 254 Organization Man, The (Whyte) 114–115 original sin 8 Orwell, George 14, 124, 166 Other America, The (Harrington) 101 Ovid 47 Owen, Robert 53, 60–64, 66, 67 and drawbacks of industrialization 62 influence on Japan 196 utopian plans 62–63 see also New Harmony, Indiana, New Lanark Mills ozone layer, monitoring of 121 pacifism 26 Packard, David 158 Page, Larry 158 Palestine 25, 35 Pansophists 48, 52, 53–55 Paradise Within the Reach of All Men, Without Labor, By Powers of Nature and Machinery, The (Etzler) 79 parents, children, and technology 239 Paris exposition 1937 35, 251–252 Paris Peace Conference 1919 251 Paris World’s Fair 1900 251, 253 Pasteur, Louis 120–121 Index 281 Pasteur’s Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation (Stokes) 120 patriot missiles 238 Peale, Norman Vincent 168, 208 Pelle, Kimberly 36 Pentagon 109 People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Potter) 101 Performance Measurement for World Class Manufacturing 212 Perrin, Noel 234, 235 Perry, Commodore Matthew 20 Persian Gulf War 1991 238 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life 11–12 Pew Research Center for the People 116 phalansteries 29, 64–65 Physics of Star Trek, The (Krauss) 202 Picasso, Pablo 35, 252 Piercy, Marge 92 Pilgrims, US 24 Pindar 47 Plato 13, 47, 48, 50, 123 podcast 218–219 Point East Maritime Village, Wiscasset 150 Pol Pot 243 “Politics of Consensus in an Age of Affluence, The” 106 politics, affluence, and knowledge 106–107 significance of political power 109 Positivism 58 Post Shredded Wheat 191 post-9/11 period 142 “post-colonial” critique of Western imperialism 169–173 post-Millennialists 8, 27 282 Index post-modern skepticism and relativism 160 Postrel, Virginia 161, 164, 186 post-World War II period, beliefs, and projects 160 Potter, David 101, 102 poverty and progress 82 Prague Spring 1968 268 Prakash, Gyan 171, 172 Preface to Democratic Theory, A (Dahl) 106 pre-Millennialists 8 Press and the American Association 116 primitivism 92 Productivity for the Academic World 212 Productivity Press 212 professional forecasting 160–169 failures of 160–161 Progress and Poverty (George) 82 proletariat 66 public faith in government and scientific-technological advance 113 Puffer, Erma 145 Puritans, US 24 “Quick Technological Fixes” 107–108, 117 Quindlen, Anna 221 racism 9, 169, 172 radiation, issues with 144–145, 155 Ramo, Simon 110–111, 112, 113, 122, 160 utopian vision of 110, 166 rationalism 55 Reactionary Modernism (Herf) 104 Read and Go 220 Reader Pocket Edition and Reader Touch Edition 220 Reagan, President Ronald 8, 108, 115, 140, 142, 248 real world and the internet 194–195 Recent Social Trends in the United States (Hoover) 102 recovery narrative 81, 237 Reevely, David 221–222 Religion of Technology, The: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (Noble) 187 religion 169 attitudes toward belief 56 declining beliefs 11–12 freedom of religion 168 religious beliefs and utopianism 9–12, 24, 29–30, 31, 90, 96, 239 in US 25, 26, 103 Western 172 Report to the County of Lanark (Owen) 62, 63 Republic (Plato) 13, 47, 48, 50, 123 Rescher, Nicholas 239–240 Research Applied to National Needs” 115 “Returning to Our Roots” 215, 216 Revenge of the Nerds 201 revolution of rising expectations 50 Ricardson, Ralph 240 Rittel, Horst 112 Road Ahead, The (Gates) 163 Robinson, Kim Stanley 9 robotics, development of 126–127 Roddenberry, Gene 200, 201, 202 Rodriquez, Simon 22 Roebling, John 79 Roemer, Kenneth 254 Rogers, Deborah 193 Rome 1960: The Olympics that Changed the World (Maraniss) 191 Roosevelt, President Franklin 102, 159 Rosas, Juan Manuel de 22 Rostow, Walt 104, 105 Roszak, Theodore 111, 112 Rural Electrification Administration 94 Ruskin, John 58, 59, 60 Russ, Joanna 92 Rydell, Robert 36, 37 94, Saddam Hussein 11 Saint-Simon, Henri de 22, 52, 56–58, 65, 66 Sale, Kirkpatrick 117 “salvation by technology” 248 Samurai “technology assessment” 235 Sargent, Lyman Tower 16, 253 Satellite (machine developed by Etzler) 79–80, 81 Saunders, Doug 105 Schindler, Solomon 10 Schuller, Robert 168 Science Advisory Committee 106 science and technology 57 science fiction 8–9, 199–203, and utopias 201 Science in the National Interest 119–122 Science Wars” 159 “science-driven globalization” 8 Science – The Endless Frontier (V.

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

British Empire, carbon-based life, company town, conceptual framework, coronavirus, invention of radio, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, optical character recognition, out of africa, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, the High Line, trade route, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche

For some 3 million years more, we were too few to create more than local patchworks of grassland and forests whenever distant ice ages weren’t doing it for us. Yet in that time, long before Pan prior s most recent descendant, surnamed sapiens, appeared, we must have become numerous enough to again try being pioneers. Were the hominids who wandered out of Africa again intrepid risk-takers, their imaginations picturing even more bounty beyond the savanna’s horizon? Or were they losers, temporarily out-competed by tribes of stronger blood cousins for the right to stay in our cradle? Or were they simply going forth and multiplying, like any beast presented with rich resources, such as grasslands stretching all the way to Asia?

…

Martin mourned, but by then he had been setting blazes of his own in the paleontology world with his theory of what had wiped out millions of ground sloths, wild pigs, camels, Proboscidea, multiple species of horses—at least 70 entire genera of large mammals throughout the New World, all vanished in a geologic twinkling of about 1,000 years: “It’s pretty simple. When people got out of Africa and Asia and reached other parts of the world, all hell broke loose.” Martin’s theory, soon dubbed the Blitzkrieg by its supporters and detractors alike, contended that, starting with Australia about 48,000 years ago, as humans arrived on each new continent they encountered animals that had no reason to suspect that this runty biped was particularly threatening.

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, back-to-the-land, biofilm, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, business process, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dark matter, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, digital divide, Easter island, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, megaproject, microbiome, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, out of africa, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, rewilding, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, We are as Gods, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, William Langewiesche, working-age population, Y2K

The difference in productivity was so obvious that Brazilian farmers smuggled the seeds across the border, until their government relented and legalized GE agriculture. • Why do environmentalists want to deny the advantages of GE crops to farmers in the developing world, who need it most? Robert Paarlberg, author of Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa (2008), theorizes that rich countries have the luxury of debating the nuances of economics and perceived risk around GE crops, whereas poor countries don’t:The technology is directly beneficial to only a tiny number of citizens in rich countries—soybean farmers, corn farmers, a few seed companies, patent holders.

…

The book has a real-life texture missing in most works about GE or organic. The Doubly Green Revolution: Food for All in the Twenty-first Century (1999), Gordon Conway. Experience tells. Conway has seen it all and knows exactly how GE fits into simultaneously feeding the world and protecting the environment. Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa (2008), Robert Paarlberg. Anatomy of an ongoing Green-sponsored atrocity in Africa. Mendel in the Kitchen: A Scientist’s View of Genetically Modified Foods (2006), Nina Fedoroff. Geneticist Federoff gives a much fuller background for how GE works with food crops than I could. CropBiotech Update (online).

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

In fact, many of the most powerful technologies we’ll have at our disposal—artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, biotechnology—are only starting to come online. So yes, the threats we face might seem dire, but the solutions we already possess will only continue to increase in power. CHAPTER FOURTEEN The Five Great Migrations Our species is a migratory one. Over the past seventy thousand years, we wandered out of Africa and kept on wandering. We climbed mountains, forged forests, swam rivers, crossed continents, sailed oceans, and, eventually, managed to work our way into every corner of the Earth. It was an exodus-driven influx of innovation. While we left the old and sought the new, we brought our ideas, technologies, and cultures along for the ride.

…

In America, twenty million people end up underwater. In Washington, DC, sea levels reach the Pentagon. And if you thought real estate in New York was expensive today, just wait until everything south of Wall Street disappears. Beyond the deluge, global warming also puts the ancient nemesis of drought on the horizon. Drought drove us out of Africa some seventy thousand years ago, and is still driving us today. Syria has the highest number of refugees in the world, and it’s partially because of drought. In Europe, even if we halt warming at two degrees, the Mediterranean will continue to dry, with Italy, Spain, and Greece being especially hard hit.

The Atlas of Disease by Sandra Hempel

clean water, coronavirus, Easter island, Edward Jenner, global pandemic, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, out of africa, trade route, wikimedia commons

Clarifying how the virus is transmitted. Then in March 2014, everything changed. Ebola struck in West Africa, where it had previously been unknown, first in Guinea and then in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Over the next two years, it proceeded to go global, spreading to Mali, Nigeria and Senegal, and then out of Africa to Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States, where it affected people other than laboratory workers. In the summer of 2014, panic seized the developed world, with ebola dominating the news agenda for months and being compared with the great plagues of the Middle Ages. From 2014 to 2016, 28,616 people across the world contracted the disease and 11,310 of them died but – despite the terror and the headlines in the Western world – the vast majority of cases were in West Africa, where the long-term effects on the affected societies have been devastating.

It's Our Turn to Eat by Michela Wrong

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, clean water, colonial rule, disinformation, Doha Development Round, Easter island, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, foreign exchange controls, Kibera, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, out of africa, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, structural adjustment programs, upwardly mobile, young professional, zero-sum game, éminence grise

This pre-eminence can in part be traced to Britain's colonial role and the astonishingly resilient memory of ‘a sunny land for shady people’, where English aristocrats swapped wives and downed gin-and-tonics while snorting quantities of recreational drugs. Long before Barack Obama's ancestry came to intrigue the Western public, a pith-helmeted fantasy woven from Ernest Hemingway's tales and Martha Gellhorn's writings, the escapades of the Delamere family, stories of the man-eating lions of Tsavo, Karen Blixen's Out of Africa and the White Mischief cliché – all references irrelevant to ordinary Kenyans but stubbornly sustained by the tourism industry – guaranteed the country a level of brand recognition other African states could only dream about. But there are less romantic reasons for Kenya's disproportionately high profile.

…

Having refused to surrender State House, Kibaki was bent on entrenching his position. Much of the eventual 1,500 death toll could be laid at the door of the government, which announced an unnecessary ban on public demonstrations and then ordered the mainly Kikuyu GSU, issued with live ammunition, to ruthlessly enforce it. Taking the wind out of Africa Union mediation efforts, Kibaki named a partial cabinet whose members, among them Kiraitu Murungi, George Saitoti, John Michuki, Amos Kimunya and Martha Karua, included not only a host of Mount Kenya Mafia hardliners, but any survivors of the Anglo Leasing and Goldenberg scandals who had managed to hold on to their parliamentary seats.

The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art by David Lewis-Williams

Alfred Russel Wallace, behavioural economics, centre right, conceptual framework, intentional community, Isaac Newton, language acquisition, Menlo Park, out of africa, Plato's cave, social intelligence, theory of mind

Because our principal interest lies elsewhere, I summarize this evidence and avoid the detail of human fossil types, dates and dating techniques, site names, differences between what is known in Africa as the Middle Stone Age and the European Middle Palaeolithic, stone artefact typologies, demographic patterning within Africa, highly specific internal debates, and much else – fascinating and important though all these issues are.70 Although there is still some residual opposition, as well as a good deal of refining that needs to be done, researchers today generally accept the ‘Out of Africa’ hypothesis. They believe that the fossil evidence shows conclusively that the precursors of anatomically modern human populations evolved in Africa and left the continent in two waves. This hypothesis explains why western Europe was occupied by anatomically archaic Neanderthals for thousands of years before the Homo sapiens communities made their way west from the Middle East and through eastern Europe.

…

This is a point that some researchers into the origins of language do not appreciate. When we speak of the acquisition of fully modern language, we are in effect also speaking of the evolution of higher-order consciousness. In sum, in western Europe at the time of the Transition, the Neanderthals, descendants of the first out-of-Africa emigration, had a form of primary consciousness and the Homo sapiens communities had higher-order consciousness. This hypothesis clarifies a number of puzzling issues. First, it explains why the Neanderthals were able to borrow certain things from their new neighbours but not others. Because their consciousness and form of language were essentially confined to ‘the remembered present’, Neanderthals could learn how to make fine blades but they could not conceive of a spirit world to which people went after death.

Moon Rush: The New Space Race by Leonard David

agricultural Revolution, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, dark pattern, data acquisition, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, financial engineering, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, Jeff Bezos, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mars Society, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, telepresence, telerobotics, Virgin Galactic

In this migration of the human species into space, it should be remembered that throughout history, plans that designate common access to natural resources have a notorious record of failure and ultimately do not result in full productivity. Systems that recognize private property have provided far more benefit to the world than those that attempt to provide common ownership. Whenever and however a return to the Moon occurs, one thing is assured. That return will be historically comparable to the movement of our species out of Africa about 150,000 years ago. If led by an entity representing the democracies of the Earth, our return to the Moon will rejuvenate the foundations of self-government that continue to enhance human well-being. APPENDIX Lunar Exploration Time Line Adapted from NASA Space Science Data Coordinated Archive (NSSDCA), NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland. 1959 USSR Luna 1 - Jan 2, 1959 - Flyby USA Pioneer 4 - Mar 3, 1959 - Flyby USSR Luna 2 - Sep 12, 1959 - Impact USSR Luna 3 - Oct 4, 1959 - Probe 1961 USA Ranger 1 - Aug 23, 1961 - Attempted Test Flight USA Ranger 2 - Nov 18, 1961 - Attempted Test Flight 1962 USA Ranger 3 - Jan 26, 1962 - Attempted Impact USA Ranger 4 - Apr 23, 1962 - Impact USA Ranger 5 - Oct 18, 1962 - Attempted Impact 1963 USSR Luna 4 - Apr 2, 1963 - Flyby 1964 USA Ranger 6 - Jan 30, 1964 - Impact USA Ranger 7 - Jul 28, 1964 - Impact 1965 USA Ranger 8 - Feb 17, 1965 - Impact USA Ranger 9 - Mar 21, 1965 - Impact USSR Luna 5 - May 9, 1965 - Impact USSR Luna 6 - Jun 8, 1965 - Attempted Lander USSR Zond 3 - Jul 18, 1965 - Flyby USSR Luna 7 - Oct 4, 1965 - Impact USSR Luna 8 - Dec 3, 1965—Impact 1966 USSR Luna 9 - Jan 31, 1966 - Lander USSR Luna 10 - Mar 31, 1966 - Orbiter USA Surveyor 1 - May 30, 1966 - Lander USA Lunar Orbiter 1 - Aug 10, 1966 - Orbiter USSR Luna 11 - Aug 24, 1966 - Orbiter USA Surveyor 2 - Sep 20, 1966 - Attempted Lander USSR Luna 12 - Oct 22, 1966 - Orbiter USA Lunar Orbiter 2 - Nov 6, 1966 - Orbiter USSR Luna 13 - Dec 21, 1966 - Lander 1967 USA Lunar Orbiter 3 - Feb 4, 1967 - Orbiter USA Surveyor 3 - Apr 17, 1967 - Lander USA Lunar Orbiter 4 - May 8, 1967 - Orbiter USA Surveyor 4 - Jul 14, 1967 - Attempted Lander USA Explorer 35 (IMP-E) - Jul 19, 1967 - Orbiter USA Lunar Orbiter 5 - Aug 1, 1967 - Orbiter USA Surveyor 5 - Sep 8, 1967 - Lander USA Surveyor 6 - Nov 7, 1967 - Lander 1968 USA Surveyor 7 - Jan 7, 1968 - Lander USSR Luna 14 - Apr 7, 1968 - Orbiter USSR Zond 5 - Sep 15, 1968 - Return Probe USSR Zond 6 - Nov 10, 1968 - Return Probe USA Apollo 8 - Dec 21, 1968 - Crewed Orbiter 1969 USA Apollo 10 - May 18, 1969 - Orbiter USSR Luna 15 - Jul 13, 1969 - Orbiter USA Apollo 11 - Jul 16, 1969—First Crewed Landing USSR Zond 7 - Aug 7, 1969 - Return Probe USA Apollo 12 - Nov 14, 1969 - Crewed Landing 1970 USA Apollo 13 - Apr 11, 1970 - Crewed Landing (aborted) USSR Luna 16 - Sep 12, 1970 - Sample Return USSR Zond 8 - Oct 20, 1970 - Return Probe USSR Luna 17 - Nov 10, 1970 - Rover 1971 USA Apollo 14 - Jan 31, 1971 - Crewed Landing USA Apollo 15 - Jul 26, 1971 - Crewed Landing USSR Luna 18 - Sep 2, 1971 - Impact USSR Luna 19 - Sep 28, 1971 - Orbiter 1972 USSR Luna 20 - Feb 14, 1972 - Sample Return USA Apollo 16 - Apr 16, 1972 - Crewed Landing USA Apollo 17 - Dec 7, 1972—Last Crewed Landing 1973 USSR Luna 21 - Jan 8, 1973 - Rover USA Explorer 49 (RAE-B) - Jun 10, 1973 - Orbiter 1974 USSR Luna 22 - Jun 2, 1974 - Orbiter USSR Luna 23 - Oct 28, 1974 - Lander 1976 USSR Luna 24 - Aug 14, 1976 - Sample Return 1990 JAPAN Hiten - Jan 24, 1990 - Flyby and Orbiter 1994 USA Clementine - Jan 25, 1994 - Orbiter 1997 PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA/USA AsiaSat 3/HGS-1 -Dec 24, 1997 - Lunar Flyby 1998 USA Lunar Prospector - Jan 6, 1998 - Orbiter 2003 EUROPE SMART 1 - Sep 27, 2003 - Lunar Orbiter 2007 JAPAN Kaguya (SELENE) - Sep 14, 2007 -Lunar Orbiter CHINA Chang’e 1 - Oct 24, 2007 - Lunar Orbiter 2008 INDIA Chandrayaan-1 - Oct 22, 2008 - Lunar Orbiter 2009 USA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter - Jun 18, 2009 - Lunar Orbiter USA LCROSS - Jun 18, 2009 - Lunar Impactor 2010 CHINA Chang’e 2 - Oct 1, 2010 - Lunar Orbiter 2011 USA Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) -Sep 10, 2011 - Lunar Orbiter 2013 USA Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) - Sep 6, 2013 - Lunar Orbiter CHINA Chang’e 3 - Dec 1, 2013 - Lunar Lander and Rover 2014 CHINA Chang’e 5 Test Vehicle - Oct 23, 2014 -Lunar Flyby and Return 2018 CHINA Queqiao - May 20, 2018 - Lunar Relay Satellite CHINA Chang’e 4 - Dec 7, 2018 - Lunar Far Side Lander 2019 on SOUTH KOREA Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter CHINA Chang’e 5 Lunar Sample Return Mission INDIA Chandrayaan-2 Moon Orbiter, Lander, and Rover INDIA TeamIndus Lunar Lander (Private Mission) ISRAEL SpaceIL Lunar Lander (Private Mission) USA Astrobotic Peregrine Lunar Lander (Private Mission) USA Moon Express (Private Mission) RUSSIA Lunar 25 (Lander); Luna 26 (Orbiter); Luna 27 (Lander); Luna 28 (Lander/Sample Return); Luna 29 (Lander/Rover) JAPAN Small Moon Landing Demonstration Machine ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Special thanks to David Kring, Lunar and Planetary Institute; James Head, Brown University; Ian Crawford, Birkbeck College London; Bernard Foing, European Space Agency; Angel Abbud-Madrid, Center for Space Resources at the Colorado School of Mines; Mark Robinson, Arizona State University; William Hartmann, Planetary Science Institute; Clive Neal, University of Notre Dame; and the solid footing of Apollo moonwalkers Buzz Aldrin and Harrison Schmitt for their assistance in writing this book.

The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy

Cape to Cairo, East Village, indoor plumbing, Nelson Mandela, out of africa

I did not, after all, have children. I was free to experience just a little more. I decided I would spend a weekend in the Kruger National Park. I was eager to see the copper herds of impala, the leopards winding themselves in the trees. I imagined my fellow tourists would be like Robert Redford and Meryl Streep in Out of Africa—daring loners. Instead, they were suburban couples from England and Australia on romantic vacations. At mealtimes, I wrote in my journal or read Disgrace, while the husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends, sat at their tables laughing and drinking wine. Every evening, the staff placed rose petals in the shape of a heart on all the beds and I brushed them off into the trash.

How to Survive a Pandemic by Michael Greger, M.D., FACLM

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Anthropocene, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, double helix, Edward Jenner, friendly fire, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Helicobacter pylori, inventory management, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, New Journalism, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, phenotype, profit motive, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, supply-chain management, the medium is the message, Westphalian system, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zoonotic diseases

The public health threat of emerging viral disease. Journal of Nutrition 127:951S-56S. 867. Voigt K. 2005. What ails Asia. Wall Street Journal, April 22. 868. Beran GW, Steele JH. 1994. Handbook of Zoonoses (London, UK: CRC Press). 869. Calvert S, Kohn D. 2005. Out of Africa: a baffling variety of diseases. Baltimore Sun, May 15, p. 4A. 870. Calvert S, Kohn D. 2005. Out of Africa: a baffling variety of diseases. Baltimore Sun, May 15, p. 4A. 871. Benenson AS (ed.), 1990. Control of Communicable Diseases in Man, 15th Edition (Washington, DC: American Public Health Association). 872. Torrey EF, Yolken RH. 2005.

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Pan Africa News 3(2):1–6. 954. Rose, AL. 1998. Growing commerce in bushmeat destroys great apes and threatens humanity. African Primates 3:6–10. 955. Walsh PD, Abernethy KA, Bermejo M, et al. 2003. Catastrophic ape decline in western equatorial Africa. Nature 422:611–614. 956. Fox M. 2000. The killer out of Africa. Hobart Mercury (Australia), February 9. 957. Karpowicz P, Cohen CB, van der Kooy D. 2004. Is it ethical to transplant human stem cells into nonhuman embryos? Nature Medicine 10(4):331–5. 958. Gunter C, Dhand R. 2005. The chimpanzee genome. Nature 437(7055):47. 959. Lovgren S. 2005. Chimps, humans 96 percent the same, gene study finds.

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

Jackhammers pound away day and night to construct a giant granite addition to the mosque, as well as a multistory elevated walkway for the throngs of pilgrims walking in centripetal circles around the giant black Kaaba. The fastest-growing source of new visitors to Saudi is not surprisingly the continent with the most rapidly growing number of converts to Islam: Africa. Sixty thousand years ago, there were two main passages for man’s earliest migration out of Africa into Mesopotamia: the Sinai Peninsula and across the Red Sea over the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which like the Bering Strait was as much as a hundred meters lower before the current cycle of climate change. A decade or two from now, that crossing will be much easier again with the planned construction of an ambitious fifty-four-kilometer bridge connecting Djibouti to Yemen.

…

To my dismay, it turns out my genetic ancestry is a blur of 22 percent Mediterranean (Sampras’s family emigrated from Greece), 17 percent Southeast Asian, 10 percent northern European, and only about 50 percent Southwest Asian. And I thought I was just an un-exotic Punjabi. National Geographic’s data suggests that mankind’s ancestry is mixed in ways few anthropologists even realized. Since man wandered out of Africa over sixty thousand years ago—the first wave of globalization—large-scale genetic mixing has occurred at regular junctures. Native Americans, for example, are descended as much from European and Middle Eastern genes as from the Altai region of Siberia. Maps 35, 36, and 37, corresponding to this chapter, appear in the map insert

Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made by Gaia Vince

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, bank run, biodiversity loss, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, citizen journalism, clean water, climate change refugee, congestion charging, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, driverless car, energy security, failed state, Google Earth, Haber-Bosch Process, hive mind, hobby farmer, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), ITER tokamak, Kickstarter, Late Heavy Bombardment, load shedding, M-Pesa, Mars Rover, Masdar, megacity, megaproject, microdosing, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Peter Thiel, phenotype, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, supervolcano, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology

A supervolcanic eruption at Toba in Indonesia 74,000 years ago nearly wiped us all out – the human population shrank to a few thousand. But, by 35,000 years ago, truly modern humans, indistinguishable from people alive today and littering caves and rocks with signs of their culture, had emerged and migrated out of Africa. Thus began the heroic ascent of man. In the Stone Age, our impact as a species on the planet was limited to some extinctions – particularly of large mammals – and some local landscape changes, such as the burning of forests. Technologies were primitive and minimal, and were fashioned entirely from renewable materials.

…

It was on the African savannahs that human bipedalism emerged – our upright-walking species, with two hands free for all-important tool use and carrying capacity, owes its extraordinary success in part to changes evolved on the windswept grassy plains, millions of years ago. Humans began ‘managing’ savannahs tens of thousands of years ago, enlarging and creating new ones by regularly burning vegetation, and cutting trees. We learned to track and outrun faster and stronger animals; and, when climate change sent the ruminants on long migrations we followed them out of Africa and across the globe. Journeying after those beasts gave humans a source of food over long distances, allowing us to trade and explore new pastures. When the world became warmer at the end of the last ice age, it was the grasses growing on savannahs that inspired the first farmers to begin cultivating crops.

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, food miles, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Medieval Warm Period, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, packet switching, patent troll, Pax Mongolica, Peter Thiel, phenotype, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, working poor, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Yet even now there was no hint of what was to come, no clue that this was anything but another evolutionary avatar of a precariously successful predatory ape. The new African form, with its fancy tools, ochre paint and shell-bead ornaments, might have displaced its neighbours, but it would now settle down to enjoy its million years in the sun before gracefully giving way to something new. This time, however, some of the L3 people promptly spilled out of Africa and exploded into global dominion. The rest, as they say, is history. Starting to barter Anthropologists advance two theories to explain the appearance in Africa of these new technologies and people. The first is that it was driven by climate. The volatility of the African weather, sucking human beings into deserts in wet decades and pushing them out again in dry ones, would have placed a premium on adaptability, which in turn selected for new capabilities.

…

For simplicity, I am going to call all the species of hominid that lived between about 1.5 million and 300,000 years ago ‘erectus hominid’ after the longest-established and most comprehensive name used for hominids of this period. The current fashion is to include four species within this group: H. ergaster earliest in Africa, H. erectus a little later in Asia, H. heidelbergensis coming out of Africa later into Europe and its descendant, H. neanderthalensis. See Foley, R.A. and Lahr, M.M. 2003. On stony ground: Lithic technology, human evolution, and the emergence of culture. Evolutionary Anthropology 12:109–22. p. 51 ‘it was a natural expression of human development’. See Richerson, P. and Boyd, R. 2005.

The Ape That Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve by Steve Stewart-Williams

Albert Einstein, battle of ideas, carbon-based life, David Attenborough, European colonialism, feminist movement, financial independence, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, moral panic, out of africa, Paul Graham, Peter Pan Syndrome, phenotype, post-industrial society, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies

Thus, hunting and gathering represents an extremely deep trend in our lineage. And third, after taking the hunter-gatherer baton from our premodern ancestors, humans continued to live as hunter-gatherers in Africa for most of the rest of our history. It’s only in the last 70,000 years or so that a handful of modern humans ventured out of Africa and began spreading around the globe. And it’s only in the last 10,000 years that some people gave up the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and adopted agriculture instead. As evolutionary psychologists like to say, 10,000 years is a mere blink of an eye in evolutionary terms. Moreover, agriculture wasn’t common until at least 5,000 years ago, so that’s half a blink.

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As Robert Wright observed in his book The Moral Animal, “We live in cities and suburbs and watch TV and drink beer, all the while being pushed and pulled by feelings designed to propagate our genes in a small hunter-gatherer population.” Or as S. Boyd Eaton put it, modern humans are “Stone Agers in the fast lane.”43 Critics of evolutionary psychology like to point out that human evolution didn’t just come to a standstill when agriculture took off or when humans migrated out of Africa. But no evolutionary psychologist is claiming (or should be claiming) that it did. Homo sapiens are not in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. (Google it if you’re interested; it’s an important concept in population genetics.) The claim is not that there’s been no evolutionary change since the dawn of agriculture or the African exodus.

The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha

Airbnb, Andy Kessler, Apollo 13, Benchmark Capital, Black Swan, business intelligence, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, follow your passion, future of work, game design, independent contractor, information security, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joi Ito, late fees, lateral thinking, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, out of africa, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, recommendation engine, Richard Bolles, risk tolerance, rolodex, Salesforce, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the strength of weak ties, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, Duleesha Kulasooriya, and Dan Elbert, “Measuring the Forces of Long-term Change: The 2010 Shift Index,” Deloitte Center for the Edge (2010), 2, http://​www.​deloitte.​com/​assets/​Dcom-​UnitedStates/​Local​%20Assets/​Documents/​TMT_​us_​tmt/​Shift​%20Index​%202010/​us_​tmt_​si_​shift​%20Index​2010_​110310.​pdf 14. Reed Hastings, as told to Amy Zipkin, “Out of Africa, Onto the Web,” New York Times, December 17, 2006, http://​www.​nytimes.​com/​2006/​12/​17/​jobs/​17boss.​html 15. Rick Newman, “How Netflix (and Blockbuster) Killed Blockbuster,” U.S. News & World Report, September 23, 2010, http://​money.​usnews.​com/​money/​blogs/​flowchart/​2010/​9/​23/​how-​netflix-​and-​blockbuster-​killed-​blockbuster.​html 16.

The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans by David Abulafia

Admiral Zheng, Alfred Russel Wallace, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, colonial rule, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discovery of the americas, domestication of the camel, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, land reform, lone genius, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, megacity, new economy, out of africa, p-value, Peace of Westphalia, polynesian navigation, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, wikimedia commons, yellow journalism

There are finds of axes from northern New Guinea that can be shown to be 40,000–60,000 years old.7 In 2017 Australian archaeologists announced the discovery of a rock shelter in northern Australia that contained implements dating back to 65,000 years ago, and wondered whether there was interaction between what seem to be the first Australian members of Homo sapiens and other types of human who could still be found in east Asia, notably the mysterious Denisovans, who are thought to have been similar to but different from the European Neanderthals.8 There is therefore no doubt that the original Aborigines (very possibly the ancestors of the modern ones) arrived on the continent more than 60,000 years ago; and they must have done so by crossing spaces of over a hundred miles of open sea, often finding themselves out of sight of land.9 Archaeologists sometimes express surprise and puzzlement at the idea that early humans of the sapiens type could have turned into sailors. But it is not at all surprising; as humans, of various types, moved out of Africa to colonize much of the world by land they had to cross rivers, and used the skills learned on rivers to cross lakes; and having learned about lakes seas were a challenge, but one that could be met. Short sea journeys taken by the first humans to move eastwards on the route out of Africa may well have included a crossing of the Red Sea near Aden and a crossing of the Persian Gulf near Hormuz. These early humans had plenty of mental equipment, which they turned to good use in establishing that extraordinary mastery over nature that the Australian Aborigines still possess.

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They were also places where different social mixes came into being, whether through the arrival of Genoese in Madeira and Flemings in the Azores, or the presence of Jewish converts, black slaves and Portuguese convicts in the remotest island, São Tomé. They also offer insights into the very earliest phases of the European slave trade out of Africa, insights that can now be developed further following excavations in the Cape Verde Islands. For this was a clean New World, the first New World, newer than the New World that was soon to be discovered, because all the island groups in the eastern Atlantic apart from the Canaries were uninhabited.

…

Those slaves who survived the ‘Middle Passage’, the journey across the Atlantic, were likely to be robust and resilient, and the constant flow of African labour into the Caribbean, and, once the Portuguese decided to capitalize on its resources, into Brazil, meant that high mortality among the African workers was not seen as a problem: they could be replaced, since the source of labour seemed to be bottomless: African war captives and other victims of internecine conflict in west Africa. For much of his career, Las Casas was so obsessed (with good reason) by the fate of the American Indians that he failed to register the appalling realities of the slave trade out of Africa. He was aware that the Indians were, legally, free subjects of the Crown, and had less sympathy for those who arrived as slaves in the New World, people who had never been subjects of the Spanish kings but had already lost their freedom before they were passed along the trade routes by the Portuguese.

To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others by Daniel H. Pink

always be closing, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, business cycle, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, complexity theory, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disintermediation, Elisha Otis, future of work, George Akerlof, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, out of africa, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Steve Jobs, The Market for Lemons, Upton Sinclair, Wall-E, zero-sum game

Lessons from Tinseltown At the epicenter of the entertainment business is the pitch. Television and movie executives take meetings with writers and other creative types, who pitch them ideas for the next blockbuster film or hit TV series. Motion pictures themselves offer a glimpse of these sessions. “It’s Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman,” promises an eager writer in the Hollywood satire The Player. “It’s like The Gods Must Be Crazy except the Coke bottle is an actress!” But what really goes on behind those studio walls is often a mystery, which is why two business school professors decided to helicopter behind the lines for a closer look.

"They Take Our Jobs!": And 20 Other Myths About Immigration by Aviva Chomsky

affirmative action, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, call centre, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, European colonialism, export processing zone, full employment, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, invisible hand, language acquisition, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, mass incarceration, new economy, open immigration, out of africa, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, thinkpad, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

There are really two parts of the issue that we need to understand. First, we need to understand why the United States and other immigrant-receiving countries, like the European countries, are so wealthy. It is not just chance: it has much to do with the colonial world system that emerged after 1492, which drained resources out of Africa, Latin America, and Asia and into the United States and Europe. Given this background, it is little wonder that inhabitants of these former regions want some of the wealth that was created out of their resources and their labor—but that they’re denied access to in their homelands. Second, we need to look at the continuing relationships and ties that make immigration a possibility and a reality.

The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return by Mihir Desai

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, assortative mating, Benoit Mandelbrot, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, carried interest, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, follow your passion, George Akerlof, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, housing crisis, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jony Ive, Kenneth Rogoff, longitudinal study, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, Monty Hall problem, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, principal–agent problem, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, tontine, transaction costs, vertical integration, zero-sum game

On the other hand, it’s an illuminating and resonant set of vignettes about his patients and their struggles—and you can relate to each of them. At the end of the story of Peter, a young man who unconsciously sabotages his friendships and relationships, Grosz concludes: “Karen Blixen [aka Isak Dinesen, author of Out of Africa] said ‘all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story about them.’ But what if a person can’t tell a story about his sorrows? What if his story tells him? Experience has taught me that our childhoods leave in us stories like this—stories we never found a way to voice, because no one helped us find the words.

A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage

Berlin Wall, British Empire, Colonization of Mars, Copley Medal, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, gentleman farmer, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Lao Tzu, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, out of africa, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

Uncover their origins, and you may never look at your favorite drink in quite the same way again. BEER in MESOPOTAMIA and EGYPT 1 A Stone-Age Brew Fermentation and civilization are inseparable. —John Ciardi, American poet (1916-86) A Pint of Prehistory THE HUMANS WHO migrated out of Africa starting around 50,000 years ago traveled in small nomadic bands, perhaps thirty strong, and lived in caves, huts, or skin tents. They hunted game, caught fish and shellfish, and gathered edible plants, moving from one temporary camp to another to exploit seasonal food supplies. Their tools included bows and arrows, fishhooks, and needles.

Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity by Brian Hare, Vanessa Woods

autism spectrum disorder, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, desegregation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, drone strike, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Law of Accelerating Returns, meta-analysis, microbiome, Milgram experiment, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, out of africa, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, smart cities, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, zero-sum game

We had boned harpoons; nets for fishing and traps; and snares for birds and small mammals. Neanderthals, for all their hunting prowess, were never more than mid-ranking carnivores. With our new technology, we became the ultimate predator, largely immune to predation by other species. We ventured out of Africa and spread rapidly across Eurasia. We may even have reached as far as Australia within a few thousand years. This arduous crossing would have required planning and packing food for an indefinite journey, taking tools that could repair unforeseen damage and catch unfamiliar food, and solving future imagined problems like replenishing drinking water at sea.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation: A Novel by Ottessa Moshfegh

East Village, illegal immigration, index card, messenger bag, off-the-grid, out of africa, Pepto Bismol, rent control, white picket fence

I realized I was wearing a hot pink Juicy Couture sweat suit. A tag from the Jewish Women’s Council Thrift Shop dangled from the cuff. There were new used VHS tapes stacked on the bare floor in the hallway, all Sydney Pollack movies: Three Days of the Condor, Absence of Malice, The Way We Were. Tootsie. Out of Africa. I had no memory of ordering Chinese food or going to the thrift store. And I had no memory of what I’d said in any message. Dr. Tuttle said she’d been “baffled by the emotional intensity” in my voice. “I’m concerned for you. I’m very, very, very concerned.” She sounded like she always sounded, her voice a breathy, high-pitched hoot.

Jaws by Sandra Kahn,Paul R. Ehrlich

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, clean water, desegregation, Edward Jenner, epigenetics, Great Leap Forward, hygiene hypothesis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Indoor air pollution, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, out of africa, randomized controlled trial, twin studies, Wall-E, women in the workforce

In some cases we’ve simply speculated—we suspect that snoring in hunter-gatherer children was rare, for example, but we haven’t found evidence to support that notion—no reports from, say, people who lived with!Kung people on their sleeping habits, no evidence that leopards were attracted to snoring kids during humanity’s long trek out of Africa. Considering the relationship of snoring to modern jaw configuration, mouth breathing, and similar factors,21 we thought it likely that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were not heavy snorers. In any case, we’ve tried to make clear, at least by context, when we are simply speculating, and our reasons for doing so.

The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker

Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, David Attenborough, double helix, Drosophila, elephant in my pajamas, finite state, Gregor Mendel, illegal immigration, Joan Didion, language acquisition, Loebner Prize, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, natural language processing, out of africa, phenotype, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Saturday Night Live, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, transatlantic slave trade, Turing machine, Turing test, twin studies, Yogi Berra

Strikingly, this non-obvious racial grouping corresponds to the non-obvious linguistic grouping of Japanese, Korean, and Altaic with Indo-European in Nostratic, separate from the Sino-Tibetan family in which Chinese is found. The branches of the hypothetical genetic/linguistic family tree can be taken to depict the history of Homo sapiens sapiens, from the African population in which mitochondrial Eve was thought to evolve 200,000 years ago, to the migrations out of Africa 100,000 years ago through the Middle East to Europe and Asia, and from there, in the past 50,000 years, to Australia, the islands of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and the Americas. Unfortunately, the genetic and migrational family trees are almost as controversial as the linguistic one, and any part of this interesting story could unravel in the next few years.

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Homo erectus, which spread from Africa across much of the old world from 1.5 million to 500,000 years ago (all the way to China and Indonesia), controlled fire and almost everywhere used the same symmetrical, well-crafted stone hand-axes. It is easy to imagine some form of language contributing to such successes, though again we cannot be sure. Modern Homo sapiens, which is thought to have appeared about 200,000 years ago and to have spread out of Africa 100,000 years ago, had skulls like ours and much more elegant and complex tools, showing considerable regional variation. It is hard to believe that they lacked language, given that biologically they were us, and all biologically modern humans have language. This elementary fact, by the way, demolishes the date most commonly given in magazine articles and textbooks for the origin of language: 30,000 years ago, the age of the gorgeous cave art and decorated artifacts of Cro-Magnon humans in the Upper Paleolithic.

Persian Gulf Command: A History of the Second World War in Iran and Iraq by Ashley Jackson

Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, fixed income, full employment, it's over 9,000, out of africa, power law, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment

No doubt whatsoever that this successful use of power politics has made a very deep impression.’2 Similarly, during the Eighth Army’s ‘Crusader’ offensive in the Western Desert in November, which relieved the siege of Tobruk, the Political Adviser Central Area reported that the Initial success of the Libyan offensive has overshadowed all other political effects. With a people as volatile as the Arab the effect is much exaggerated – indeed to talk to some of them one would think that not only are the Axis driven out of Africa but the war is as good as over. The more sober minded have watched the Russian campaign with renewed misgivings but there can be no doubt that Libya has riveted most of their attention. The effect of this blow, coming on top of the cumulative effects of the capture of most of Rashid Ali’s supporters in Persia, and on top of the transportation of the many Nazi supporters to Fao [al-Faw] and the obvious pro-British politics of the present Government, has certainly been very great.3 But things could swing both ways, and news of German victories, of which there continued to be many, caused great excitement and kept the flame of anti-British and anti-Soviet sentiment burning brightly across the region.

…

The 5th Division was almost immediately followed by the 56th Division, and Wilson decided to ‘regroup the remaining formations within the Command and issued orders for their location in the general area of Mosul–Kirkuk’.89 The Tenth Army was now able to release the greater part of its fighting units to join the campaign in North Africa. The Anglo-American ‘Torch’ landings the previous November had opened a new phase in the struggle to clear Axis forces out of Africa, and this was now reaching its culmination point.90 General Alexander, Commander-in-Chief Middle East, informed Churchill of his plans for a mid-January offensive intended to reach Tripoli. Churchill searched for ‘a source of further reinforcements, not only for North Africa but for a possible Turkish front’, and asked the Chiefs of Staff to look at the scale of the Tenth Army under Persia and Iraq Command: ‘With the German army no longer able to push beyond the Caucasus, the Tenth Army “can now be considered available in whole or in part for action in the Eastern Mediterranean or in Turkey”.’91 In February Wilson left PAIC to replace Alexander as Commander-in-Chief Middle East.

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, Akira Okazaki, antiwork, behavioural economics, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, British Empire, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Costa Concordia, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, crony capitalism, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, Ford Model T, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, George Akerlof, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Harrison: Longitude, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, land reform, liberation theology, lone genius, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, open economy, out of africa, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, Pier Paolo Pasolini, pink-collar, plutocrats, positional goods, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, rent control, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, very high income, wage slave, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yogi Berra

Mencken 1917 (2006), p. 63. 29. Knight 1923 (1997), p. 137. 30. For example, “The migration of modern humans out of Africa resulted in a population bottleneck [in the small bands of humans migrating] and a concomitant loss of genetic diversity”(Campbell and Tishkoff 2008); “all systems show greater gene diversity in Africans than in either Europeans or Asians” (Jorde et al. 2000, abstract). There is, they say, “a marked founder effect associated with the expansion out of Africa.” 31. Pritchard et al. 1999, pp. 1795, 1797. 32. Personal communication at HedgePo’s Global CIO Summit, Gleneagles, Scotland, October 23, 2014.

…

The number of people disposed by nature to enact betterments did not leap up after 1800. Human inventiveness viewed as a certain share of any population with unusual combinations of prudence, courage, and hope is a background condition, available at any time from the first clear evidence of art among Homo sapiens race on the eve of the migrations out of Africa. The social hostility to the man of business and the rulers’ hostility to hierarchy-disturbing creative destruction was suppressing betterment. The ancient problem was, as Schoeck put it, “social controls . . . imposed in the name and interest of ‘the whole society.’” Andrew Coulson of the Cato Institute, among others, has suggested to me that there has to be in the story a threshold of people with good ideas.

Thinking Machines: The Inside Story of Artificial Intelligence and Our Race to Build the Future by Luke Dormehl

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, book scanning, borderless world, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Flash crash, Ford Model T, friendly AI, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, hive mind, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet of things, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, out of africa, PageRank, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Throughout The Player, a running joke is the lazy shorthand descriptions that Hollywood insiders use to describe the different projects they are working on, which are always billed as ‘Movie A meets Movie B’, with each referring to an existing popular hit. The joke is that the titles being mashed together to form new projects are totally diametrically opposed to one another. ‘It’s Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman,’ says a screenwriter, pitching her script to a studio executive at the start of the film. Later, someone describes a ‘psychic, political, thriller comedy with a heart’ that is ‘not unlike Ghost meets Manchurian Candidate’. Creating a computer program that could do the same thing – only much quicker – is well within our grasp.

How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, bank run, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, borderless world, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, congestion pricing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, double entry bookkeeping, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, friendly fire, global village, Global Witness, Google Earth, high net worth, high-speed rail, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, private military company, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, Ted Nordhaus, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, X Prize

Because he shares commissions on investments fifty-fifty with local brokers, he provides a great incentive for them to act professionally. “In sixteen years in Africa I’ve never had a customer fail, a trade not fulfilled. They have the same Bloomberg terminals in Zambia and do the trades in real time like rich countries do.” When the public sector alone ran the show in Africa, more capital fled out of Africa and into European banks than came into Africa in investment. Now, growth in Burundi and Tanzania has been greater than 7 percent for several years straight, savings rates are increasing, and cell phone and Internet usage have doubled every year. When Botswana’s president Festus Mogae visits the United States, he courts private equity firms and hedge fund managers and reminds them that investments in Africa can return more than 300 percent, impossible anywhere else in the world.

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham

Alfred Russel Wallace, experimental subject, means of production, out of africa, sexual politics, social intelligence

An early form of earth oven is the kind of innovation that could have been influential because it would have marked an important advance in cooking efficiency. Hunter-gatherers worldwide used earth ovens that employed hot rocks. The ovens do not appear to have been used by the people who expanded out of Africa more than sixty thousand years ago and colonized the rest of the world, since they are not recorded in Australia until thirty thousand years ago. However, it is possible that a simpler design, now vanished and forgotten, may have been used in earlier times. In recent earth ovens the hot rocks provide an even, long-lasting heat.

Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams, Mark Carwardine

David Attenborough, Isaac Newton, out of africa, South China Sea

Other species are still poached, but intensive protection over the past five years has at last begun to have an effect. In fact, there have been a number of rhino births and the population now stands at a slightly better twenty-two. Twenty-two. An astounding feature of the situation is this: the eventual value of a rhino horn, by the time it has been shipped out of Africa and fashioned into a piece of tasteless costume jewelry for some rich young Yemeni to strut around and pull girls with, is thousands of dollars. But the poacher himself, the man who goes into the park and risks his life to shoot the actual rhino that all of this time, effort, and money are going into protecting, will get about ten or twelve or fifteen dollars for the horn.

Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea by Robert D. Kaplan

Ayatollah Khomeini, citizen journalism, disinformation, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Great Leap Forward, land reform, Live Aid, mass immigration, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, the market place

The American Spectator “Behind Ethiopia's Hunger.” Kaplan, Robert D. October 29, 1986. Wall Street Journal/Europe, “Why Sudan Starves on Western Aid.” Kaplan, Robert D. (April 1987). (Book Review). The American Spectator “The Harvest of Sorrow by Robert Conquest” Kaplan, Robert D. July 6, 1987. The New Republic, “Out of Africa.” Keating, Robert. (July 1986). Spin “Live Aid: The Terrible Truth.” Keating, Robert. (September 1986). Spin “Sympathy for the Devil.” Legum, Colin. May 20, 1986. International Herald Tribune, “Ethiopia: A Regime of Torture.” Matthews, Christopher J. January 21, 1985. The New Republic, “The Road to Korem.”

The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It by Paul Collier

air freight, Asian financial crisis, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, British Empire, business cycle, Doha Development Round, export processing zone, failed state, falling living standards, Global Witness, income inequality, mass immigration, out of africa, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, structural adjustment programs, trade liberalization, zero-sum game

For example, Indonesia had corruption on a world-class scale. President Suharto took what we might politely term “Asian family values” to extraordinary heights of paternalistic generosity. But most of the money stayed in the country. Africans took their money, whether corruptly acquired or honestly acquired, out of Africa because the opportunities for investment were so poor. One reason why the investment opportunities were so poor was because the countries were stuck in one or another of the traps. Capital flight was a response to the traps. In the sophisticated language of professional economics, capital flight was a “portfolio choice”: people were holding their assets where they would yield a reasonable and a safe return.

Buzz: The Nature and Necessity of Bees by Thor Hanson

airport security, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, Columbine, Gregor Mendel, Honoré de Balzac, if you build it, they will come, Nelson Mandela, new economy, out of africa, wikimedia commons

Bumblebee ocelli and navigation at dusk. Science 183: 550–551. Weyrich, L. S., S. Duchene, J. Soubrier, L. Arriola, et al. 2017. Neanderthal behaviour, diet, and disease inferred from ancient DNA in dental calculus. Nature 544: 357–361. Whitfield, C. W., S. K. Behura, S. H. Berlocher, A. G. Clark, et al. 2007. Thrice out of Africa: Ancient and recent expansions of the honey bee, Apis mellifera. Science 314: 642–645. Whitman, W. (1855) 1976. Leaves of Grass. Secaucus, NJ: Longriver Press. Whitney, H. M., L. Chittka, T. J. A. Bruce, and B. J. Glover. 2009. Conical epidermal cells allow bees to grip flowers and increase foraging efficiency.

The Lunatic Express by Carl Hoffman

airport security, low cost airline, Mercator projection, off-the-grid, out of africa, Rubik’s Cube

There were thousands of taxis and they were all hustling me, but something about Wambugo caught my eye. He had shoulder-length dreadlocks and the whites of his eyes were as red as if they’d been caught by a too-close camera flash, but there was kindness in them. I hired him take me to the house where Karen Blixen, the author of Out of Africa, had lived, and on the way back into town I asked him if he knew any matatu drivers that I could spend the day with. Yes, he said, and in minutes he was on his cell phone and it was all arranged: he’d pick me up at my hotel at five the following morning. It was still dark the next morning when I left my hotel, and there he was.

My Shit Life So Far by Frankie Boyle

airport security, banking crisis, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Brixton riot, credit crunch, dark matter, David Attenborough, Jon Ronson, Live Aid, out of africa, pez dispenser, Russell Brand, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, traveling salesman, urban planning

Celebrities appear on these things to get exposure. Great, climb towards that money pot on the backs of dying children you sick, sick fucks. I’m appalled by telethons but I’d hate you to think that I don’t do my bit. I give a lot of money to the Third World. Indirectly, through my investments in landmines and diamorphine. I’ve made more money out of Africa than Paul Simon. There are a lot of shows out there that are boring or halfwitted, but you feel that if they just lowered their standards a couple of notches it could all become genuinely fun. Here are a few examples of what I’d like to see. THE 2050 HOUSE A modern British family are set the task of living as they would in the year 2050.

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, conceptual framework, coronavirus, dark matter, digital map, double helix, experimental subject, facts on the ground, Fellow of the Royal Society, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Google Earth, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, South China Sea, the long tail, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

Then, later still, its real significance would emerge from work at the level of molecular genetics. Another perceived starting point was Gaëtan Dugas, the young Canadian flight attendant who became notorious as “Patient Zero.” You’ve heard of him, probably, if you’ve heard much of anything about the dawning of AIDS. Dugas has been written about as the man who “carried the virus out of Africa and introduced it into the Western gay community.” He wasn’t. But he seems to have played an oversized and culpably heedless role as a transmitter during the 1970s and early 1980s. As a flight steward, with almost cost-free privileges of personal travel, he flew often between major cities in North America, joining in sybaritic play where he landed, notching up conquests, living the high life of a sexually voracious gay man at the height of the bathhouse era.

…

“In fact, it is highly likely that several other persons”: Leroy et al. (2009), 5. VIII. The Chimp and the River 385. “profoundly depressed” in number: Gottlieb et al. (1981), 251. 387. “strikingly similar to the syndrome of immunodeficiency”: Pitchenik et al. (1983), 277. 387. written about as the man who “carried the virus out of Africa”: e.g., Wikipedia, “Gaëtan Dugas,” citing Auerbach et al. (1984), although Auerbach et al. do not make that assertion. 387. vain but charming, even “gorgeous” in some eyes: Shilts (1987), 47. 388. “I’ve got gay cancer”: Shilts (1987), 165. 388. “Although the cause of AIDS is unknown”: Auerbach et al. (1984), 490. 388. to the more resonant “Patient Zero” of his book: Shilts (1987), 23. 389.

The Places in Between by Rory Stewart

Ayatollah Khomeini, clean water, Khyber Pass, out of africa, trade route, upwardly mobile

I designed a journey around the world that would finish where I began in Turkey. I thought about evolutionary historians who argued that walking was a central part of what it meant to be human. Our two-legged motion was what first differentiated us from the apes. It freed our hands for tools and carried us on the long marches out of Africa. As a species, we colonized the world on foot. Most of human history was created through contacts conducted at walking pace, even when some rode horses. I thought of the pilgrimages to Compostela in Spain; to Mecca; to the source of the Ganges; and of wandering dervishes, sadhus, and friars who approached God on foot.

Poorly Made in China: An Insider's Account of the Tactics Behind China's Production Game by Paul Midler

barriers to entry, corporate social responsibility, currency peg, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, full employment, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, language acquisition, new economy, out of africa, price discrimination, unpaid internship, urban planning

“They’re real all right,” she said, surprised that I would be working at the exhibition but did not seem to know the difference. She then explained how you could tell. It had to do with how the light refracted from the diamonds. I thanked her for the easy lesson, and I asked her what she was doing at the show. She was from Dallas, Texas, but worked primarily out of Africa. Her business had her joining safaris there, and she sought out a particular kind of high-end adventure, one that put her in the company of big-game hunters who were spectacularly wealthy. On these hunting trips, she wore jewelry she had designed herself. Looking at just the necklace she wore, I could imagine her decked out in a safari outfit with jewels dangling about her neck, ears, and wrists, while holding an elephant gun.

Culture Shock! Costa Rica 30th Anniversary Edition by Claire Wallerstein

anti-communist, bilateral investment treaty, call centre, card file, Day of the Dead, Easter island, fixed income, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, out of africa, Silicon Valley, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban sprawl

Local newspaper advertisements announce houses for sale just 15 minutes outside San José and boast of their ‘great climate’. It’s not a joke, as within the space of just a few miles, the topography, vegetation and temperature can go from being strongly reminiscent of rolling Devon hills to something more like Out of Africa. 38 CultureShock! Costa Rica One of the country’s most distinctive features is its volcanoes. Seven of them are active and straddle the meeting place of two tectonic plates along the Pacific Rim of Fire. These also give rise to frequent earth tremors, occasional quakes and have helped build the three mountain ranges that run through the country.

What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live by Rachel Botsman, Roo Rogers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, Community Supported Agriculture, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global village, hedonic treadmill, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, information retrieval, intentional community, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer rental, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Simon Kuznets, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, South of Market, San Francisco, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, traveling salesman, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, web of trust, women in the workforce, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Retrieved August 2009, www.ararental.org. 9. R. Meijkamp, Changing Consumer Behavior Through Eco-Efficient Services: An Empirical Study of Car Sharing in the Netherlands,” Design for Sustainability Research Programme, Delft University of Technology (2000), 296. 10. Reed Hastings quoted in Amy Zipkin, “Out of Africa, onto the Web,” New York Times (December 17, 2006), www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/jobs/17boss.html?_r=2. 11. Joan O’C. Hamilton, “Home Movies,” Stanford Magazine, www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2006/janfeb/features/netflix.html. 12. Statistics retrieved from Netflix.com, September 2009, www.netflix.com/MediaCenter?

Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker, John Ibbitson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, off grid, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban planning, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

Now Toba made things much, much worse. We foraged for tubers and harvested shellfish in the last inhabitable African enclaves. One more bit of bad news, and that might have been the end of us. This, at least, is one theory held by anthropologists and archeologists; there are others who suggest humans had already migrated out of Africa by this time and that the impact of Toba is exaggerated.7 But it’s hard to abandon the thought of a bedraggled humanity on the cusp of extinction struggling to nourish its few remaining young in a hardscrabble world, before the skies cleared, the earth wobbled, and the sun once again warmed the land.

The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties by Paul Collier

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, bonus culture, business cycle, call centre, central bank independence, centre right, commodity super cycle, computerized trading, corporate governance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, full employment, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, late capitalism, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, negative equity, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, rent control, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, too big to fail, trade liberalization, urban planning, web of trust, zero-sum game

Framing these behaviours as a ‘human right’ belittles the obligations that they breach. Most people are not saints: while they recognize their obligations, if they are presented with enticing temptations, they take them. When this happens, the moral responsibility is on those who tempt. For decades, much of the capital flight out of Africa was facilitated by lawyers in London and banks in Switzerland. Similarly, the human capital exodus from Africa is an understandable response to public policies that create opportunities. To illustrate with an extreme example: Norway has accumulated a sovereign wealth fund worth $200,000 per person.

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Apollo 13, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, charter city, crack epidemic, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Easter island, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, ghettoisation, gig economy, Golden age of television, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Islamic Golden Age, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, life extension, low interest rates, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oculus Rift, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, private spaceflight, QAnon, quantitative easing, radical life extension, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y2K

Different from the stereotypes of African backwardness that it was invented to rebuke, obviously, but also strikingly different from the modern liberal order as we know it, with technologies that exceed our own but a politics and culture that are proudly illiberal—indeed, monarchical and theocratic. So it isn’t just that Black Panther—in, yes, the inevitably superficial way of a blockbuster, with the inevitably play-it-safe conclusion—taps into a yearning for an out-of-Africa renaissance, for an African-shaped future that’s dynamic rather than dystopian: Make Africa Great, and then Make the World Great Again As Well. The different facets of Wakandan exceptionalism also suggest the different ways in which a renaissance might ultimately come about, the different trajectory-altering transformations—technological, political, and religious—that might lead our civilization or its inheritors up from decadence.

Happier at Home: Kiss More, Jump More, Abandon Self-Control, and My Other Experiments in Everyday Life by Gretchen Rubin

A Pattern Language, airport security, Albert Einstein, clean water, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Everything should be made as simple as possible, knowledge worker, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, placebo effect, Saturday Night Live, Telecommunications Act of 1996

New York: Summit Books, 1992. BIOGRAPHIES AND MEMOIRS OF PARTICULAR INTEREST Boswell, James. The Life of Samuel Johnson. New York: Penguin, 2008. Delacroix, Eugene. The Journal of Eugène Delacroix. 3rd ed. Translated by Hubert Wellington. London: Phaidon Press, 1951. Dinesen, Isak [Karen Blixen]. Out of Africa. New York: Penguin, 2001. Dylan, Bob. Chronicles: Volume One. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005. Jung, Carl. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Edited by Aniela Jaffe. New York: Vintage, 1989. Spink, Kathryn. Mother Teresa. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997. Strachey, Lytton. Queen Victoria.

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel

air freight, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cotton gin, COVID-19, David Graeber, decarbonisation, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairphone, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, microbiome, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, passive income, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rupert Read, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, universal basic income

I remember, as a postgraduate student, walking out of classes sometimes feeling almost overwhelmed with a sense of new perspective, as if I had just stepped out of a prosaic little cottage only to find myself on the lip of a vast escarpment, with landscapes of time rolling out before me. The story of humanity plays out like a journey, with our ancestors venturing out of Africa and migrating across the planet, over tens of thousands of years. Along the way they encountered a vast array of different ecosystems – from savannah to deserts, jungles to steppes, wetlands to tundra. With each new zone they entered, they had to learn how these ecosystems worked so that they could live within them sustainably, in reciprocity with the other species they depended on for nourishment and sustenance.

Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World by Mo Gawdat

3D printing, accounting loophole / creative accounting, AI winter, AlphaGo, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, call centre, carbon footprint, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, digital map, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, game design, George Floyd, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, microplastics / micro fibres, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, OpenAI, optical character recognition, out of africa, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, subprime mortgage crisis, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, TikTok, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

You, me and everyone we know are descended from this resilient bunch. To deal with the sudden change in climate, the survivors needed to be intelligent enough to invent new tools and ways of life. They needed to find new sources of food and improvise ways to stay warm. This is when the first real signs of intelligence in humans started to emerge. Migration out of Africa then followed towards the very end of the Middle Palaeolithic era, some 60,000 years ago. Figurative art, music, trade and other forms of behaviours that hint at intelligence, however, only started to become evident around 30,000 years ago. This is when examples of art such as the Venus figurines, the cave paintings in the Chauvet Cave and musical instruments, such as the bone pipe of Geissenklösterle, started to appear.

Werner Herzog - a Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations With Paul Cronin by Paul Cronin

Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, classic study, Dr. Strangelove, Francisco Pizarro, Kickstarter, land reform, MITM: man-in-the-middle, out of africa, Pier Paolo Pasolini

What audiences see of the continent are things they aren’t used to, like court rituals and flag signals along the coast, and the wonderfully anarchic and chaotic crowd scenes have real life to them. In most films set in Africa the place is portrayed either as a crumbling, primitive and dangerous place full of savages, or with a kind of Out of Africa nostalgia. Cobra Verde deviates from all that. I set out to show things that had been ignored, like the continent’s sophisticated and complex social structures, its kingdoms, tribes and hierarchies. I even managed to get His Royal Highness Nana Agyefi Kwame II, the real king of Nsein, to play the king of Dahomey.

…

., 1, 2, 3, 4 Music Room, The (Ray), 1, 2 My Best Fiend: filming, 1, 2, 3; Fitzcarraldo material, 1, 2; Golder’s role, 1, 2, 3n; material and stories, 1, 2, 3; opening, 1; relationship between Herzog and Kinski, 1; responses to, 1 My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5n Nain et géant (Méliès), 1 Nana Agyefi Kwame II, 1 Nanga Parbat, 1, 2 NASA, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 National Enquirer, 1 Nazarin (Buñuel), 1 Nazism: Aguirre question, 1; attitudes to, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; capital punishment, 1; Eisner’s career, 1, 2; German cinema, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; Jewish survivors, 1; Nosferatu rats, 1; occupation of Greece, 1; origins, 1; rise, 1, 2; threat, 1, 2 New German Cinema, 1, 2 New York Film Festival, 1, 2, 3 Newton, Isaac, 1, 2 Nicaragua, 1, 2, 3, 4 Nicholson, Jack, 1 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1, 2 Nigger of the Narcissus, The (Conrad), 1 No One Will Play with Me, 1 Nosferatu: cameraman, 1; casting, 1; character of Nosferatu, 1; filming, 1, 2; image of Renfield, 1; importance to Herzog, 1; Kinski in, 1, 2; landscapes, 1, 2; language, 1; light and darkness in, 1; material in Aguirre, 1; mummies in, 1; Murnau’s film, 1, 2, 3; music, 1, 2; place in Herzog’s career, 1, 2; rats in, 1, 2; rejected by Cannes, 1; Renfield role, 1; responses to, 1, 2; script, 1, 2; Twentieth Century Fox, 1, 2, 3, 4; vampire myth, 1 Oberhausen Film Festival, 1, 2, 3, 4 Oberhausen Manifesto, 1, 2n, 3, 4 O’Connor, Flannery, 1 Ode to the Dawn of Man, 1 Of Walking in Ice, 1, 2 Okello, John, 1 On the Black Hill (Chatwin), 1 On Death Row, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Ondaatje, Michael, 1 Ophüls, Marcel, 1 Oppenheimer, Joshua, 1 Oresteia (Aeschylus), 1, 2 Orwell, George, 1 Out of Africa (Pollack), 1 Oxford English Dictionary, 1, 2 Pabst, Georg Wilhelm, 1 Pacheco, David, 1 Pachelbel, 1 Pacific Film Archive, 1, 2 Padre Padrone (Taviani brothers), 1, 2 Paganini, Niccolò, 1, 2 Palovak, Jewel, 1 Parsifal (Wagner), 1, 2 Pascal, Blaise, 1 Pashov, Stefan, 1 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 1, 2 Passion of the Christ (Gibson), 1 Passion of Joan of Arc, The (Dreyer), 1, 2 Penn, Zak, 1, 2 Pepin the Short, 1 Peregrine, The (Baker), 1 Perry, Michael, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Perth Film Festival, 1 Peters, Jon, 1 Petit, Philippe, 1 Petrarch, 1 Physics of Star Trek, The (Krauss), 1, 2n Picasso, Pablo, 1, 2 Pilgrimage, 1, 2 Pinochet, Augusto, 1 Pitt, Brad, 1 Pittsburgh, 1, 2, 3 Plage, Dieter, 1 Plainfield, Wisconsin, 1 Planète sauvage, La (Laloux), 1 Plateau, Joseph, 1 Poetic Edda, 1, 2 Pohle, Rolf, 1 Popol Vuh, 1 Popol Vuh (band), 1, 2 Prawer, S.

The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization by Richard Baldwin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Branko Milanovic, buy low sell high, call centre, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, commodity super cycle, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, domestication of the camel, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, financial intermediation, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Henri Poincaré, imperial preference, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invention of the telegraph, investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Dyson, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, low skilled workers, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, New Economic Geography, out of africa, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, profit motive, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, Skype, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus

The DNA and archaeological data suggest that about forty millennia ago, humans were continuously present in Africa, Asia, and Australia (Figure 5). Northern Europe was settled somewhat later, say, 35,000 years ago. Around fifteen millennia ago, people entered the Americas; by 12,000 years ago they had reached Patagonia. This phase of globalization—within Africa and then out of Africa—lasted about 185 millennia. FIGURE 5: Globalization of the human race. The human race dispersed across the Middle East, Asia, and Australia over a span of tens of thousands of years. Europe, which was much less hospitable to human life, was populated tens of thousands of years later, sometime after 30,000 years ago.

West With the Night by Beryl Markham

Beryl Markham, Louis Blériot, out of africa

Ostrich and civet cat have contributed more to the requirements of civilized society, but I think it not unjust to say that the zebra clan, in spite of it all, is unaffected by its failure to join in the march of time. I base this conclusion on a very warm friendship that developed, not too long ago to remember, between myself and a young zebra. My father, who has raised and trained some of the best Thoroughbreds to come out of Africa, once had a filly named Balmy. He chose all of the names for his horses with painstaking care, sometimes spending many evenings at his desk on our farm at Njoro jotting down possibilities by the light of a kerosene lamp. Balmy was selected for this particular filly because no other name suited her so precisely.

Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder

airport security, clean water, colonial rule, disinformation, Elisha Otis, out of africa, The Soul of a New Machine

It lingered in my mind, the secondhand memory of someone else’s memories, as strange and unresolved as the memory of a dream. Three years later, I saw Deo again. I had arranged to meet him at a coffee shop in Hanover, New Hampshire, and I asked him for the story of his escape. He told it briefly at first. His six months on the run, with all their horrors, went by in only minutes. But then, once he was safely out of Africa and had arrived at JFK, his accounting grew detailed. As he went on, telling me how he had stood alone in line at Immigration, I began to sense he was no longer in the coffee shop with me. He was describing the moment when he understood that the Russian journalist wasn’t going to help him. His voice was steady.

The Post-American World: Release 2.0 by Fareed Zakaria

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, mutually assured destruction, National Debt Clock, new economy, no-fly zone, oil shock, open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, The future is already here, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, Washington Consensus, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

But whatever the apparent similarities, the circumstances are not really the same. Britain was a strange superpower. Historians have written hundreds of books explaining how London could have adopted certain foreign policies to change its fortunes. If only it had avoided the Boer War, say some. If only it had stayed out of Africa, say others. Niall Ferguson provocatively suggests that, had Britain stayed out of World War I (and there might not have been a world war without British participation), it might have managed to preserve its great-power position. There is some truth to this line of reasoning (World War I did bankrupt Britain), but to put things properly in historical context, it is worth looking at this history from another angle.

Are We Getting Smarter?: Rising IQ in the Twenty-First Century by James R. Flynn

confounding variable, Flynn Effect, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, out of africa, popular electronics, traumatic brain injury, twin studies

The correlation was −0.82 for both the set of 113 nations and the set of 192. They also found correlations of similar size within the world’s six major geographic regions with the exception, oddly, of South America. Eppig et al. controlled for temperature and distance from Africa to test an evolutionary scenario called “out of Africa.” Lynn (1987) and Rushton (1995) posit that extreme cold creates a more challenging environment, one that maximizes selection for genes for intelligence. During the Ice Ages, the ancestors of East Asians are supposed to have been north of the Himalayas where the cold was most intense, the ancestors of whites north of the Alps where the cold was next worst, and the ancestors of blacks still in Africa where it was relatively warm.

Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution by Francis Fukuyama

Albert Einstein, Asilomar, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, Columbine, cotton gin, demographic transition, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, impulse control, life extension, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, precautionary principle, presumed consent, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sexual politics, stem cell, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Turing test, twin studies

We know, for example, that different population groups around the world have different distributions of blood types; roughly 40 percent of Europeans have type O blood, while Native Americans have almost exclusively type O.12 The alleles that are linked to sickle-cell anemia are more common among African-Americans than among whites. The population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza has mapped out a speculative history of past migrations of early humans as they wandered out of Africa to different parts of the globe, based on distributions of mitochondrial DNA (that is, DNA that is contained within the mitochondria, outside the cell nucleus, which is inherited from the mother’s side).13 He has gone further, linking these populations to the development of languages, and has provided a history of early language evolution in the absence of written records.

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Charles Babbage, Columbine, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, endowment effect, facts on the ground, impulse control, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, out of africa, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, subprime mortgage crisis, Thales of Miletus, trolley problem

THE TREMENDOUS MAGIC In 1949, Arthur Alberts traveled from his home in Yonkers, New York, to villages between the Gold Coast and Timbuktu in West Africa. He brought his wife, a camera, a jeep, and—because of his love of music—a jeep-powered tape recorder. Wanting to open the ears of the western world, he recorded some of the most important music ever to come out of Africa.1 But Alberts ran into social troubles while using the tape recorder. One West African native heard his voice played back and accused Alberts of “stealing his tongue.” Alberts only narrowly averted being pummeled by taking out a mirror and convincing the man that his tongue was still intact. It’s not difficult to see why the natives found the tape recorder so counterintuitive.

Copenhagenize: The Definitive Guide to Global Bicycle Urbanism by Mikael Colville-Andersen

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, business cycle, car-free, congestion charging, corporate social responsibility, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Enrique Peñalosa, functional fixedness, gamification, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, megaproject, meta-analysis, neurotypical, out of africa, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, safety bicycle, self-driving car, sharing economy, smart cities, starchitect, transcontinental railway, urban planning, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

Let’s agree from now on that anything with the word Sky in it is probably not conducive to city life. A conference like Winter Cities Shake-up is the unwitting offspring of society’s climaphobia. Its goal is to get people to enjoy outdoor life—even in the winter. Something homo sapiens have been doing since we wandered northward out of Africa. Don’t get me wrong—the Shake-up was a great conference with brilliant speakers from 60 cities around the world. I’m just trying to wrap my brain around the societal developments leading up to it. Is it enough to merely try and communicate the fact that “Hey! Winter’s okay!” and work to inspire citizens to “rediscover outdoor winter pleasures”—especially when their perception has been warped by a generation of vacuum-packing?

The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis by Ruth Defries

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, Columbian Exchange, demographic transition, double helix, Easter island, European colonialism, food miles, Francisco Pizarro, gentleman farmer, Gregor Mendel, Haber-Bosch Process, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jevons paradox, John Snow's cholera map, out of africa, planetary scale, premature optimization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, social intelligence, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-evolution-timeline-interactive. Sol, D., R. Duncan, T. Blackburn, P. Cassey, and L. Lefebvre. 2005. Big brains, enhanced cognition, and response of birds to novel environments. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 102:5460–5465. Stewart, J., and C. Stringer. 2012. Human evolution out of Africa: The role of refugia and climate change. Science 335:1317–1321. Strimling, P., M. Enquist, and K. Eriksson. 2009. Repeated learning makes cultural evolution unique. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106:13870–13874. Sweeney, M., and S. McCouch. 2007. The complex history of the domestication of rice.

Netflixed: The Epic Battle for America's Eyeballs by Gina Keating

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, business intelligence, Carl Icahn, collaborative consumption, company town, corporate raider, digital rights, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Netflix Prize, new economy, out of africa, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price stability, recommendation engine, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Superbowl ad, tech worker, telemarketer, warehouse automation, X Prize

“Blockbuster buys movie download service Movielink.” Reuters, Aug. 8, 2007. ———. “Netflix scrambles future of TV and films.” Reuters, Dec. 1, 2010. Zeidler, Sue, and Keating, Gina. “Blockbuster takes on Netflix with new set-top box.” Reuters, Nov. 25, 2008. Zipkin, Amy. “The Boss: Out of Africa, Onto the Web.” New York Times, Dec. 17, 2006. INDEX The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of this book. To find the corresponding locations in the text of this digital version, please use the “search” function on your e-reader. Note that not all terms may be searchable.

The Burning Land by George Alagiah

"World Economic Forum" Davos, fear of failure, gentrification, land reform, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, pre–internet, urban decay, white flight, éminence grise

Of course blood would be spilled. How naive he’d been. Back in her Greenside guesthouse, Lindi called Anton in London. ‘Hey! How’s it feel to be back home?’ ‘The weird thing is that it does sort of feel like home – even after, what, twenty years.’ ‘You know what they say. You can take the girl out of Africa, but you can’t take Africa out of the girl. How are you getting on?’ ‘Did you tell anyone I was coming down here? Did the High Commission call back or anything?’ ‘No – and yes. I mean, yes, the High Commission did call back. And, no, all I said was that at some stage we might want to get involved.

No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention by Reed Hastings, Erin Meyer

Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, FedEx blackjack story, global village, hiring and firing, job-hopping, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, late fees, loose coupling, loss aversion, out of africa, performance metric, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, super pumped, tech worker, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, work culture

But Chelsea ran three times a week and we had twenty-four hours after each filming to get it translated in a bunch of languages and have it posted online. My job was to manage all of that. Then one day, my boss Aaron put a meeting on my calendar, which he titled, “The Future.” We were sitting in the Out of Africa conference room. That room is all yellow—yellow walls, rug, carpet, and chairs. Aaron pulled up a chair right in front of me and said: “Nothing’s been decided. But it’s fifty-fifty the program management role you play will be eliminated. We are discussing a reorg and your job might go away, but I won’t know for six to twelve months.”

We Don't Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy by Caseen Gaines

Albert Einstein, index card, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Skype

Before the end of the year, the movie arrived in well over a dozen countries, including Italy, France, West Germany, and the United Kingdom. In Japan, Future became the sixth-highest-grossing film in the country’s history. All told, an additional $170.5 million was earned overseas. Only two other films made more money internationally that year—Out of Africa and Rocky IV, which earned $179.1 million and $172.6 million, respectively. Critics and audiences alike applauded the movie, with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert giving the movie two thumbs up, while journalists from major publications such as the New York Times and People praised the story, direction, and performances.

The scramble for Africa, 1876-1912 by Thomas Pakenham

active measures, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, Etonian, European colonialism, God and Mammon, imperial preference, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, out of africa, Scramble for Africa, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

We must turn back three years, to 27 June 1890, when Cecil Rhodes’s pioneer column splashed across the Motlousi river and set out to occupy and develop his vast new empire in the territory to which he would give his name. CECIL JOHN RHODES CHAPTER 21 A New Rand? Mashonaland and Matabeleland (Rhodesia), Cape Colony, the Transvaal and England 27 June 1890-December 1892 and before ‘I am tired of this mapping out of Africa at Berlin; without occupation, without development… the gist of the South African Question lies in the extension of the Cape Colony to the Zambesi.’ Cecil Rhodes in the Cape House of Assembly, 1888 It was just over fifty years since the voortrekkers, the Boer pioneers of the Great Trek, had shaken the dust of Cape Colony off their feet.

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On 18 April he told the new nation that the ‘wrongs of the past must be forgiven and forgotten’. Mugabe was a statesman in the making. And Zimbabwe had one all-important advantage over most of its predecessors on the road to independence. Its new African rulers were quite as well educated as the men they replaced. * * * The Scramble out of Africa in the eleven years from 1957 to 1968 was pursued at the same undignified pace, taking the world as much by surprise, as the Scramble into Africa more than half a century earlier. Torschlusspanik (the ‘door-closing-panic’ of Bismarck’s day) seized France, Belgium and even Britain. Of course imperial perspectives were now very different from those of the 1880s.

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When the Belgians scuttled out of the Congo in July 1960, they had left the country well prepared for civil war and anarchy. The prospect of their departure from Ruanda-Urundi, though delayed for two years, had the same disastrous effect. By 1968 the British had set free the last impoverished scraps of their empire south of the Zambezi: Basutoland (Lesotho), Bechuanaland (Botswana) and Swaziland. The Scramble out of Africa was complete, except for Portugal, the first European nation to go in. Portugal was now trapped up to the neck in Angola, Mozambique and Guiné. It was her policy, she claimed, to assimilate these ancient possessions. She had certainly exploited them systematically. After the Belgian Congo collapsed, Angola caught the prevailing fever, and soon ferocious guerrilla wars broke out in all three territories.

The Best of Best New SF by Gardner R. Dozois

back-to-the-land, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, Columbine, congestion charging, dark matter, Doomsday Book, double helix, Extropian, flag carrier, Future Shock, gravity well, hydroponic farming, Kim Stanley Robinson, language acquisition, lateral thinking, Mason jar, military-industrial complex, offshore financial centre, out of africa, pattern recognition, phenotype, pneumatic tube, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, three-masted sailing ship, Turing machine, Turing test, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, zero-sum game

“Well, our Christians do.” “That’s just the doctor’s little joke,” said Manimenesh. “Sometimes strange rumors spread about us, because we raid our slaves from the Nyam-Nyam cannibal tribes on the coast. But we watch their diet closely, I assure you.” Watunan smiled uncomfortably. “There is always something new out of Africa. One hears the oddest stories. Hairy men, for instance.” “Ah,” said Manimenesh. “You mean gorillas, from the jungles to the south. I’m sorry to spoil the story for you, but they are nothing better than beasts.” “I see,” said Watunan. “That’s a pity.” “My grandfather owned a gorilla once,” Manimenesh said.

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It had been running for three days. It would only end when the hotel did. The party at the edge of the end of the world. In one glance she saw thirty newsworthy faces and peeked into her bag to check the charge level on her disc recorder. She talked to it as she moved between the faces to the bar. The Out of Africa look was the thing among the newsworthy this year: riding breeches, leather, with the necessary twist of twenty-first-century knowing with the addition of animal-skin prints. Gaby ordered a piña colada from the Kenyan barman and wondered as he shook it what incentive the management had offered him – all the staff – to stay.

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Irony is: Now the tourists are gone, there’ve never been so many bloody animals, all headed in. Counted forty-five elephant in one day; no one gives a stuff anymore. Tell me, how can it be alien if the animals are going in there? How could gas know how to build something like that? Feels to me like it’s something very old, that animals knew once and have never forgotten, that’s come out of Africa itself. Everything starts here, in East Africa; the land is very old, and has a long memory. And strong: Maybe Africa has had enough of what people are doing to it – enough thinking – and has decided to claim itself back. That’s why the animals aren’t afraid. It’s giving it back to them.” “But taking yours away,” Gaby said.

The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty by Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kula ring, labor-force participation, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, openstreetmap, out of africa, PageRank, pattern recognition, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Skype, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, the market place, transcontinental railway, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks

Obviously it is not heading toward a digital dictatorship. History hasn’t ended in Lagos either. All the same, the city shows that even starting from desperate situations a move toward the corridor is possible. The Roman soldier and scholar Pliny the Elder remarked, “There is always something new out of Africa.” He was right. Today there is much local experimentation out of Africa, for people are finding a way to improve their crumbling state capacity and liberty. A huge mass of people still live in poverty in Lagos, and compared to those of us residing in the United States, their lives are short. However, they are a lot less short than they were in 1999 and there are far fewer poor people.

Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement by Amy Lang, Daniel Lang/levitsky

activist lawyer, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bonus culture, British Empire, capitalist realism, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, deindustrialization, different worldview, facts on the ground, gentrification, glass ceiling, housing crisis, housing justice, Kibera, late capitalism, lolcat, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, plutocrats, Port of Oakland, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Slavoj Žižek, social contagion, structural adjustment programs, the medium is the message, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, white flight, working poor

I will not go to a good school. I will live with the fact of darkness, without electricity. Etc etc. Now I am reinventing my own dialogue, I am taking apart my absence-and-hole-shaped existence. I am filling up the blank spaces. I am writing my story, my essence, my self. I am a young Nigerian. ‘Out of Africa always comes something new,’ some ancient Roman historian is supposed to have said. Because I am young I am burdened by the New. I know of the past injustices, the failed sunsets. I know of being labeled, being called a money-monger because I am Ibo, a fraudster because I am Nigerian, futureless because I am African.

An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies by Tyler Cowen

agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, big-box store, business climate, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cognitive bias, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, food miles, gentrification, guest worker program, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, informal economy, iterative process, mass immigration, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, price discrimination, refrigerator car, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Upton Sinclair, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

On ecoterrorism in Spain, see http://foodfreedom.wordpress.com/2010/07/14/uprooting-ecoterrorism-syngenta-gm-crops-sabotaged-in-spain/. On the Amish and GMOs, see for instance http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7745726.stm. On GMOs in Africa, and also on European regulations, see Robert Paarlberg, Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). 8. Eating Your Way to a Greener Planet On Ed Begley, see for instance http://www.johnnyjet.com/folder/archive/I-Flew-with-Ed-Begley-Jr-Possibly-the-Greenest-Person-Alive.html, http://www.edbegley.com/environment/tipsandfaq.html. On Mathias Gelber, see http://greenmanplanet.blogspot.com/.

My Life as a Goddess: A Memoir Through (Un)Popular Culture by Guy Branum

bitcoin, different worldview, G4S, Google Glasses, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, pets.com, plutocrats, Rosa Parks, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, tech billionaire, telemarketer

Babette’s Feast is one of those well-reputed foreign films from before your time that you’ve never seen but people have told you to watch. It sounds vaguely boring and inoffensive, and while you’re not sure, there may be Nazis involved. Everything but that last part is true. It is, in actuality, an adaptation of a short story by Karen Blixen, the lady Meryl Streep played in Out of Africa. That’s how deep the 1980s prestige movie cred of Babette’s Feast goes: It was written by a Meryl Streep character. The story seems insanely dry. Two old sisters live in a community of Lutheran ascetics founded by their dad. Each has a chance at romance, one with a dashing army officer, the other with a French opera star.

Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age by Alex Wright

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, barriers to entry, British Empire, business climate, business intelligence, Cape to Cairo, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Babbage, Computer Lib, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, folksonomy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, linked data, Livingstone, I presume, lone genius, machine readable, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norman Mailer, out of africa, packet switching, pneumatic tube, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog

Such sentiments raised hackles among the Belgians. Some news outlets began to conflate the efforts of the organizers with the more radical agenda of the Marcus Garvey–led Universal Negro Improvement Association—which actively sought 170 H ope , L ost and Fo u nd to push Europe and the United States out of Africa—while others saw the Congress as a communist plot to stir up the Congolese natives against their occupiers. A correspondent for the Antwerp newspaper Neptune noted that it was reported in the United States that the organizers had received “remuneration from Moscow (Bolsheviki).” “The association has already organized its propaganda in the lower Congo, and we must not be astonished if some day it causes grave difficulties in the Negro village of Kinshasa, composed of all the ne’er-do-wells of the various tribes of the Colony, aside from some hundreds of labourers.”48 The flurry of public outrage spurred attendance at the event, so much so that white Europeans outnumbered the black participants by a wide margin.

The Hidden Family by Charles Stross

correlation does not imply causation, germ theory of disease, illegal immigration, out of africa, Silicon Valley, trade route

“Listen, they haven’t had a world war, have they?” “Nope, I’m afraid they have,” Miriam said, checking her watch to see if she could take another pain killer yet. “In fact, they’ve had two. One in the eighteen-nineties that cost them India. The second in the nineteen-fifties that, well, basically New Britain got kicked out of Africa. Africa is a mess of French and Spanish colonies. But they got a strong alliance with Japan and the Netherlands, which also rule most of northwest Germany. And they rule South America and Australia and most of East Asia.” “No tanks? No H-bombs? No strategic bombers?” “No.” Miriam paused. “Are you saying—” “Museum catalogues!”

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tim Harford

affirmative action, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Basel III, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Erdős number, experimental subject, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, game design, global supply chain, Googley, Guggenheim Bilbao, Helicobacter pylori, high net worth, Inbox Zero, income inequality, industrial cluster, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, microbiome, out of africa, Paul Erdős, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telemarketer, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche

At the end of 1940 and beginning of 1941, a small British army under General Richard O’Connor had destroyed a vastly larger Italian force in North Africa, taking 130,000 prisoners and pushing the Italians back from the borders of Egypt to the middle of Libya. It seemed likely that the British would soon advance to Tripoli itself, driving the Italians out of Africa entirely. Faced with this alarming prospect, the Italians accepted Hitler’s offer of assistance—a small, defensive detachment, just one division of tanks and one division of mechanized infantry. It was led by General Rommel.16 Rommel was flushed with success after the Blitzkrieg* invasion of France, when his panzer tanks had surged far ahead of their own troops, roaming freely behind French lines and taking 97,000 prisoners.

The Hot Zone by Richard Preston

Beryl Markham, British Empire, Louis Pasteur, out of africa, white picket fence

One possibility is that the Reston strain originated in Africa and flew to the Philippines on an airplane not long ago. In other words, Ebola has already entered the net and has been traveling lately. The experts do not doubt that a virus can hop around the world in a matter of days. Perhaps Ebola came out of Africa and landed in Asia a few years back. Perhaps—this is only a guess—Ebola traveled to Asia inside wild African animals. There have been rumors that wealthy people in the Philippines who own private estates in the rain forest have been importing African animals illegally, releasing them into the Philippine jungle, and hunting them.

QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance by Lloyd, John, Mitchinson, John

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, Ada Lovelace, Apple Newton, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, disinformation, double helix, Etonian, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, Isaac Newton, Lao Tzu, Louis Pasteur, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, Stephen Fry, the built environment, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, traveling salesman, US Airways Flight 1549

They had bigger brains than modern humans, but they couldn’t run as fast and were shorter and less adept at using tools. What they lacked in height they made up for in strength: Neanderthal females had bigger biceps than the average male human does today. Humans and Neanderthals diverged into separate species somewhere between 440,000 and 270,000 years ago. Early Neanderthals moved out of Africa into the Middle East and northern Europe much sooner than Homo sapiens did, and lived there for four times as long. They became extinct 30,000 years ago (the last recorded Neanderthal community was on Gibraltar), which means that humans and Neanderthals coexisted for at least 12,000 years. No one knows why the Neanderthals died out.

The Weather of the Future by Heidi Cullen

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, air freight, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, availability heuristic, back-to-the-land, bank run, California gold rush, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, data science, Easter island, energy security, hindcast, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, millennium bug, ocean acidification, out of africa, Silicon Valley, smart cities, trade route, urban planning, Y2K

The dessication is considered by many scientists to be one of the most striking examples of climate variability the world has seen. A looming question now facing climate scientists is: when will another drought of this magnitude occur? Another question is: if and when such a drought recurs, who will emerge as the winner—the people or the sand? During the 1970s, striking images of this crisis made their way out of Africa and reached television screens and magazine covers all over the world. The pictures of barren landscapes and children with haunting eyes and distended bellies led to coordinated international humanitarian efforts to help reduce the suffering. The crisis also revived a long-standing debate within the scientific community over the fundamental causes of drought.

The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, double helix, energy security, facts on the ground, failed state, gentleman farmer, global supply chain, illegal immigration, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, out of africa, precautionary principle, QAnon, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, tech bro, telemarketer, the new new thing, working poor, young professional

He wondered: perhaps the pythons had survived their injections because they had long ago evolved a tolerance for Ebola. That is, perhaps they were the species in which Ebola was stored. “The little game of finding the reservoir species has been easy for coronaviruses,” said Joe. “No one has ever figured it out for Ebola. People took whole zoos out of Africa and they never found the animal.” There were a couple of ways to solve this mystery. The less satisfying was to travel to Africa and gather a bunch of pythons and see if any harbored the Ebola virus. On one hand, you might find what you were looking for; on the other, if you didn’t, that did not mean it did not exist.

Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood's Creative Artists Agency by James Andrew Miller

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, collective bargaining, corporate governance, do what you love, Donald Trump, Easter island, family office, financial engineering, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, Joan Didion, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, obamacare, out of africa, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, stem cell, Steve Jobs, traveling salesman, union organizing, vertical integration

It cost $60 million, which was a huge amount of money, and we took a huge hit to earnings within a month after they bought us. And by the way, Michael didn’t force me to make it; anyone would have made it. The last film Sydney Pollack had made was Out of Africa starring Robert Redford, which was wonderful. I liked the script for Havana. What none of us realized is between Out of Africa and Havana Bob had gotten older and the movie opened with a big close-up of his face on the screen, and while he was still incredibly good looking, he was an older person in a business that is still about younger people. We had great years, we had bad years—that’s the way the movie business works.

The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber, David Wengrow

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, degrowth, European colonialism, founder crops, Gini coefficient, global village, Hernando de Soto, Hobbesian trap, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, labour mobility, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, means of production, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, public intellectual, Scientific racism, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl

What we do know is that we are composite products of this original mosaic of human populations, which interacted with one another, interbred, drifted apart and came together mostly in ways we can still only guess at.5 It seems reasonable to assume that behaviours like mating and child-rearing practices, the presence or absence of dominance hierarchies or forms of language and proto-language must have varied at least as much as physical types, and probably far more. Perhaps the only thing we can say with real certainty is that, in terms of ancestry, we are all Africans. Modern humans first appeared in Africa. When they began expanding out of Africa into Eurasia, they encountered other populations such as Neanderthals and Denisovans – less different, but still different – and these various groups interbred.6 Only after those other populations became extinct can we really begin talking about a single, human ‘us’ inhabiting the planet. What all this brings home is just how radically different the social and even physical world of our remote ancestors would have seemed to us – and this would have been true at least down to around 40,000 bc.

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The Sahara seems to have acted as a kind of turnstile for human evolution, periodically turning green and then dry again with the cyclical advance/retreat of monsoon rains, opening and shutting the gates of interaction between northern and southern parts of the African continent (see Scerri 2017). 5. Geneticists assume, reasonably enough, that a fair amount of genetic admixture did take place. 6. Green et al. 2010; Reich et al. 2010. Fossil evidence tells us that the first expansions of modern humans out of Africa began as far back as 210,000 years ago (Harvati et al. 2019), but these were often tentative and quite short-lived, at least until the more decisive radiations of our species began around 60,000 bc. 7. Recent and historical hunter-gatherers, as we shall see, present an enormous range of possibilities, from assertively egalitarian groups like the Ju/’hoansi of the Kalahari, the Mbendjele BaYaka of Congo or the Agta in the Philippines to assertively hierarchical ones like the populations of the Canadian Northwest Coast, the Calusa of Florida Keys or the forest-dwelling Guaicurú of Paraguay (these latter groups, far from being egalitarian, are known to have traditionally kept slaves and lived in ranked societies).

Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction by Derek Thompson

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, always be closing, augmented reality, Clayton Christensen, data science, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Golden age of television, Gordon Gekko, hindsight bias, hype cycle, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, information trail, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Roose, Kodak vs Instagram, linear programming, lock screen, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social contagion, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, subscription business, TED Talk, telemarketer, the medium is the message, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, women in the workforce

Paul Hekkert, a professor of industrial design and psychology, received a grant several years ago to develop a grand theory for why people like what they like, a Unified Model of Aesthetics. Hekkert’s grand theory begins with two competing pressures. On the one hand, humans seek familiarity, because it makes them feel safe. On the other hand, people are charged by the thrill of a challenge, powered by a pioneer lust. Our ancestors didn’t just walk out of Africa; they also walked out of the Middle East, and out of the Balkans, and out of Asia, and out of North America. Humans have climbed the peak of Mount Everest and descended to the nadir of the Mariana Trench. They have radical curiosity crossed with conservative minds. This battle between discovery and familiarity affects us “on every level,” Hekkert said—not just our preferences for pictures and songs, but also for ideas and even people.

The Panama Papers: Breaking the Story of How the Rich and Powerful Hide Their Money by Frederik Obermaier

air gap, banking crisis, blood diamond, book value, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Snowden, family office, Global Witness, high net worth, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, mega-rich, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, optical character recognition, out of africa, race to the bottom, vertical integration, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks

Half the world’s diamond deposits are found on African territory, along with a quarter of the world’s gold reserves, 10 per cent of oil reserves and 9 per cent of gas reserves. And then there’s uranium, mineral ores, and much more. The population gets virtually nothing from it: the money simply disappears, into the accounts of large multinational companies or the safes of the elite. Experts estimate that more than $50 billion flows out of Africa every year. $50 billion! On top of that, the African states avoid paying about $38 billion in taxes, because companies operating there divert their profits to tax havens, as revealed in 2013 by a group of experts led by Kofi Annan. After the meeting in Johannesburg, we and our colleagues continue to find links to Africa on an almost daily basis.

Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible by Stephen Braun, Douglas Farah

air freight, airport security, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, plutocrats, private military company, Timothy McVeigh

It’s up to the individual member states to act.”25 By 1993, Bout had turned to South Africa as a base of operations on the continent. Although many of his aircraft were already operating out of Sharjah in the UAE, Bout began using Pietersburg Airport, 180 miles northeast of Johannesburg, as a hub from which he could ply his assorted trades. Bout was already flying gladiolas and other flower species out of Africa to the UAE, at a considerable profit. He began flying beef and poultry from South Africa to other African nations. On a continent with little transportation infrastructure, air freight was the only way to move perishable goods any distance, and Bout’s companies soon grew from the original three to several dozen.

The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability by Lierre Keith

British Empire, car-free, clean water, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, Drosophila, dumpster diving, en.wikipedia.org, Gary Taubes, Haber-Bosch Process, longitudinal study, McMansion, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, out of africa, peak oil, placebo effect, Rosa Parks, the built environment, vertical integration

He corresponded with doctors in Africa who witnessed the increase in cancer in populations that had been cancer-free, concomitant with their acculturation to European foods. My favorite Tanchou quote: “Cancer, like insanity, seems to increase with the progress of civilization.” Doctors across Africa submitted reports detailing essentially the same observations to publications like the British Medical Journal and The Lancet. And not just out of Africa. Articles and indeed entire books on the health of Native Americans from across North America appeared during the beginning of the twentieth century, drawing the same conclusions. Farther afield, British doctors reported from distant Fiji, where, among 120,000 Aborigines, there were exactly two reported cancer deaths.171 This continued on into the mid-twentieth century.

Living in a Material World: The Commodity Connection by Kevin Morrison

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, energy security, European colonialism, flex fuel, food miles, Ford Model T, Great Grain Robbery, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), junk bonds, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Michael Milken, new economy, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, planned obsolescence, price mechanism, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, young professional

But even government agreements lost their meaning upon the outbreak of the Second World War, which terminated the cartel. The 1930s saw the emergence of copper supplies from more countries. The American grip on the copper market loosened, and African copper production started to take hold. 202 | LIVING IN A MATERIAL WORLD Out of Africa From 1870 to 1939 global copper production rose twenty-fold, far greater than the increases in lead, tin and zinc (Fetter, 1999), with the higher output coming from Chile, Canada, Northern Rhodesia and Belgian Congo. Just as in the battles of antiquity, copper was again used in warfare, but on a bigger scale during the Second World War: ‘Copper played a fundamental part in the slaughter that took place during the war with hundreds of thousands of pounds worth devoured by the assembly lines that made brass cartridges and cannon shells.

A Devil's Chaplain: Selected Writings by Richard Dawkins

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Desert Island Discs, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, gravity well, Gregor Mendel, Necker cube, out of africa, Peoples Temple, phenotype, placebo effect, random walk, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

I have always dreamed of returning to the site of this unwitting baptism, not because there was anything remarkable about the place, but because my memory is void before it. That garden with the two whitewashed huts was my infant Eden and the Mbagathi my personal river. But on a larger timescale Africa is Eden to us all, the ancestral garden whose Darwinian memories have been carved into our DNA over millions of years until our recent worldwide ‘Out of Africa’ diaspora. It was at least partly the search for roots, our species’ ancestors and my own childhood garden, that took me back to Kenya in December 1994. My wife Lalla happened to sit next to Richard Leakey at a lunch to launch his The Origin of Humankind 141 and by the end of the meal he had invited her (and me) to spend Christmas with his family in Kenya.

The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History by Kassia St Clair

Apollo 11, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, butterfly effect, Dmitri Mendeleev, Elon Musk, flying shuttle, Francisco Pizarro, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, gravity well, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Neil Armstrong, North Ronaldsay sheep, out of africa, Rana Plaza, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, spinning jenny, synthetic biology, TED Talk, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Virgin Galactic, Works Progress Administration

Body lice feed, unsurprisingly, on human bodies, but live exclusively in clothing. Finding out when these lice evolved from their forebears, head lice, would indicate when humans began habitually wearing clothing. Going by this method, evidence suggests we only donned clothes sometime between 42,000 and 72,000 years ago, or around the time that humans began migrating out of Africa, implying that we remained naked for around a million years.11 Not all clothing has to be made of woven materials, of course. It’s likely that for a very long time people made do with draped animal pelts and then began roughly sewing these together (although they would perhaps have used fibrous thread to do so).

Discover Kaua'i Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

carbon footprint, Easter island, G4S, haute couture, land reform, Maui Hawaii, off-the-grid, out of africa, Peter Pan Syndrome, polynesian navigation, profit motive, union organizing, white picket fence

Over the years we have seen hundreds of visitors miss their tour because they waited until the last minute and there was a weather cancellation. Biplane TROPICAL BIPLANES Biplane ( 246-9123; Lihu'e Airport; tropicalbiplanes.com; 30/45/60min flight per couple $210/310/410) When it comes to fixed-wing aircraft, there is nothing like an open-cockpit biplane. It is the convertible of the sky. So if you want to have that Out of Africa moment, do consider this unique outfit, which flies a beautiful red replica Waco that can seat two people up front. Visibility is not the same as a helicopter, but the roar of the engine and the wind in your hair makes for an entirely different experience, and the route is customized. The company also offers cheaper flights in a Cessna 182, but a helo is preferable in this case.

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions by Jason Hickel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Attenborough, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, degrowth, dematerialisation, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, European colonialism, falling living standards, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Howard Zinn, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Watt: steam engine, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, Money creation, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration

If we tally up all types of legal and illegal financial flows, including investment, remittances, debt forgiveness and natural resource exports, we see that Africa sends more money to the rest of the world than it receives. The provocative graph on the following page illustrates the sheer scale of the capital that is dripping out of Africa’s open veins. In total, developing countries may have lost as much as $2 trillion in 2013 through hot money and trade mispricing, or a mind-boggling $14.3 trillion over the past decade.21 And in case these numbers aren’t staggering enough, keep in mind that the misinvoicing figures only reflect trade in goods, not trade in services.

The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World by Jacqueline Novogratz

access to a mobile phone, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business process, business process outsourcing, clean water, disinformation, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, Hernando de Soto, Kibera, Lao Tzu, low interest rates, market design, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, tontine, transaction costs, zero-sum game

Though I was supposed to go to Côte d’Ivoire, my new boss informed me that I was to first fly to Nairobi to attend a women’s conference, where I would meet a lot of African women in the network and get a better sense of the organization itself. I could imagine Kenya much more easily than Côte d’Ivoire, especially since the film Out of Africa had recently been released (I didn’t have a clue about how little Kenyans cared for it at the time). Starting in Nairobi might be a gentler introduction to the continent. I remember making my way through the streets of Nairobi for the first time, stunned by the gentle shower of purple jacaranda flowers floating around me in Uhuru Park.

The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World by Steven Radelet

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, colonial rule, creative destruction, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, export processing zone, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, megacity, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, off grid, oil shock, out of africa, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, women in the workforce, working poor

Economists Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson argued that where European colonizers faced serious health threats from disease (think the Belgian Congo in the late nineteenth century), they set up repressive institutions to extract resources through violence, and that these tactics and institutions established hundreds of years ago are central to understanding institutions in developing countries today.5 Other researchers suggest that differences in income today date back to inventions from three thousand years ago, or even further to the timing of the migration of different groups out of Africa to form new societies around the world. These hotly debated studies are helpful in understanding the historical origins of the large differences between rich and poor countries today. But their conclusions provide little help for people in today’s developing countries, as they suggest that their fate is tied to decisions and actions taken centuries ago or factors outside their control.

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, altcoin, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon tax, Columbian Exchange, computer age, Corn Laws, cosmological constant, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, Donald Davies, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Eben Moglen, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, endogenous growth, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fail fast, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, George Santayana, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, imperial preference, income per capita, indoor plumbing, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, land reform, Lao Tzu, long peace, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Necker cube, obamacare, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, twin studies, uber lyft, women in the workforce