Author : Clive Gamble
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 327 pages
File Size : 11,7 MB
Release : 2021
Category : History
ISBN : 0198870698
The discovery of ancient stone implements alongside the bones of mammoths by John Evans and Joseph Prestwich in 1859 kicked open the door for a time revolution in human history. Clive Gamble explores the personalities of these revolutionaries and the significant impact their work had on the scientific advances of the next 160 years.
Author : Clive Gamble
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 20,71 MB
Release : 2021-03-25
Category : History
ISBN : 0192643681
One afternoon in late April 1859 two geologically minded businessmen, John Evans and Joseph Prestwich, found and photographed the proof for great human antiquity. Their evidence — small, hand-held stone tools found in the gravel quarries of the Somme among the bones of ancient animals — shattered the timescale of Genesis and kicked open the door for a time revolution in human history. In the space of a calendar year, and at a furious pace, the relationship between humans and time was forever changed. This interpretation of deep human history was shaped by the optimistic decade of the 1850s, the Victorian Heyday in the age of equipoise. Proving great human antiquity depended on matching the principles of geology with the personal values of scientific zeal and perseverance; qualities which time-revolutionaries such as Evans and Prestwich had in abundance. Their revolution was driven by a small group of weekend scientists rather than some great purpose, and it proved effective because of its bonds of friendship stiffened by scientific curiosity and business acumen. Clive Gamble explores the personalities of these time revolutionaries and their scientific co-collaborators and adjudicators — Darwin, Falconer, Lyell, Huxley, and the French antiquary Boucher de Perthes — as well as their sisters, wives, and nieces Grace McCall, Civil Prestwich, and Fanny Evans. As with all scientific discoveries getting there was often circuitous and messy; the revolutionaries changed their minds and disagreed with those who should have been allies. Gamble's chronological narrative reveals each step from discovery to presentation, reception, consolidation, and widespread acceptance, and considers the impact of their work on the scientific advances of the next 160 years and on our fascination with the shaping power of time.
Author : Andrew Shryock
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 360 pages
File Size : 50,35 MB
Release : 2011-11-07
Category : History
ISBN : 0520270282
This breakthrough book brings science into history to offer a dazzling new vision of humanity across time. Team-written by leading experts in a variety of fields, it maps events, cultures, and eras across millions of years to present a new scale for understanding the human body, energy and ecosystems, language, food, kinship, migration, and more.
Author : Siegfried Zielinski
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 391 pages
File Size : 30,57 MB
Release : 2008-02-15
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 026274032X
A quest to find something new by excavating the "deep time" of media's development—not by simply looking at new media's historic forerunners, but by connecting models, machines, technologies, and accidents that have until now remained separated. Deep Time of the Media takes us on an archaeological quest into the hidden layers of media development—dynamic moments of intense activity in media design and construction that have been largely ignored in the historical-media archaeological record. Siegfried Zielinski argues that the history of the media does not proceed predictably from primitive tools to complex machinery; in Deep Time of the Media, he illuminates turning points of media history—fractures in the predictable—that help us see the new in the old. Drawing on original source materials, Zielinski explores the technology of devices for hearing and seeing through two thousand years of cultural and technological history. He discovers the contributions of "dreamers and modelers" of media worlds, from the ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles and natural philosophers of the Renaissance and Baroque periods to Russian avant-gardists of the early twentieth century. "Media are spaces of action for constructed attempts to connect what is separated," Zielinski writes. He describes models and machines that make this connection: including a theater of mirrors in sixteenth-century Naples, an automaton for musical composition created by the seventeenth-century Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, and the eighteenth-century electrical tele-writing machine of Joseph Mazzolari, among others. Uncovering these moments in the media-archaeological record, Zielinski says, brings us into a new relationship with present-day moments; these discoveries in the "deep time" media history shed light on today's media landscape and may help us map our expedition to the media future.
Author : Daniel Lord Smail
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 287 pages
File Size : 48,16 MB
Release : 2008
Category : History
ISBN : 0520252896
When does history begin? What characterizes it? This book dissolves the logic of a beginning based on writing, civilization, or historical consciousness and offers a model for a history that escapes the continuing grip of the Judeo-Christian time frame. It lays out a new case for bringing neuroscience and neurobiology into the realm of history.
Author : Fred Spier
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 371 pages
File Size : 32,3 MB
Release : 2015-05-06
Category : History
ISBN : 1118881729
big history and the future of humanity “This remains the best single attempt to theorize big history as a discipline that can link core concepts and paradigms across all historical disciplines, from cosmology to geology, from biology to human history. With additional and updated material, the Second Edition also offers a fine introduction to the history of big history and a superb introductory survey to the big history story. Essential reading for anyone interested in a rapidly evolving new field of scholarship that links the sciences and the humanities into a modern, science-based origin story.” David Christian, Macquarie University “Notable for its theoretic approach, this new Second Edition is both an indispensable contribution to the emerging big history narrative and a powerful university textbook. Spier defines words carefully and recognizes the limits of current knowledge, aspects of his own clear thinking.” Cynthia Brown, Emerita, Dominican University of California Reflecting the latest theories in the sciences and humanities, this new edition of Big History and the Future of Humanity presents an accessible and original overview of the entire sweep of history from the origins of the universe and life on Earth up to the present day. Placing the relatively brief period of human history within a much broader framework – one that considers everything from vast galaxy clusters to the tiniest sub-atomic particles – big history is an innovative theoretical approach that opens up entirely new multidisciplinary research agendas. Noted historian Fred Spier reveals how a thorough examination of patterns of complexity can offer richer insights into what the future may have in store for humanity. The second edition includes new learning features, such as highlighted scientific concepts, an illustrative timeline and comprehensive glossary. By exploring the cumulative history from the Big Bang to the modern day, Big History and the Future of Humanity, Second Edition, sheds important historical light on where we have been – and offers a tantalizing glimpse of what lies ahead.
Author : Martin J. S. Rudwick
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 371 pages
File Size : 33,82 MB
Release : 2014-10-15
Category : Science
ISBN : 022620409X
“Tells the story . . . of how ‘natural philosophers’ developed the ideas of geology accepted today . . . Fascinating.” —San Francisco Book Review Earth has been witness to dinosaurs, global ice ages, continents colliding or splitting apart, and comets and asteroids crashing, as well as the birth of humans who are curious to understand it. But how was all this discovered? How was the evidence for it collected and interpreted? In this sweeping and accessible book, Martin J. S. Rudwick, the premier historian of the Earth sciences, tells the gripping human story of the gradual realization that the Earth’s history has not only been long but also astonishingly eventful. Rudwick begins in the seventeenth century with Archbishop James Ussher, who famously dated the creation of the cosmos to 4004 BC. His narrative later turns to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when geological evidence was used—and is still being used—to reconstruct a history of the Earth that is as varied and unpredictable as human history. itself. Along the way, Rudwick rejects the popular view of this story as a conflict between science and religion and shows how the modern scientific account of the Earth’s deep history retains strong roots in Judeo-Christian ideas. Extensively illustrated, Earth’s Deep History is an engaging and impressive capstone to Rudwick’s distinguished career. “Deftly explains how ideas of natural history were embedded in cultural history.” —Nature “An engaging read for nonscientists and specialists alike.” —Library Journal “Wonderfully erudite and absorbing.” —Times Literary Supplement “Fascinating, well written, and novel . . . Essential.” —Choice “Thrilling.” —London Review of Books
Author : Joseph LeDoux
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 434 pages
File Size : 15,45 MB
Release : 2020-08-25
Category : Science
ISBN : 0735223858
Longlisted for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award A leading neuroscientist offers a history of the evolution of the brain from unicellular organisms to the complexity of animals and human beings today Renowned neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux digs into the natural history of life on earth to provide a new perspective on the similarities between us and our ancestors in deep time. This page-turning survey of the whole of terrestrial evolution sheds new light on how nervous systems evolved in animals, how the brain developed, and what it means to be human. In The Deep History of Ourselves, LeDoux argues that the key to understanding human behavior lies in viewing evolution through the prism of the first living organisms. By tracking the chain of the evolutionary timeline he shows how even the earliest single-cell organisms had to solve the same problems we and our cells have to solve each day. Along the way, LeDoux explores our place in nature, how the evolution of nervous systems enhanced the ability of organisms to survive and thrive, and how the emergence of what we humans understand as consciousness made our greatest and most horrendous achievements as a species possible.
Author : Clive Gamble
Publisher :
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 28,35 MB
Release : 2021
Category : Chronology
ISBN : 9780192643674
The discovery of ancient stone implements alongside the bones of mammoths by John Evans and Joseph Prestwich in 1859 kicked open the door for a time revolution in human history. Clive Gamble explores the personalities of these revolutionaries and the significant impact their work had on the scientific advances of the next 160 years.
Author : James Suzman
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 465 pages
File Size : 17,51 MB
Release : 2022-01-18
Category : History
ISBN : 0525561773
"This book is a tour de force." --Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Give and Take A revolutionary new history of humankind through the prism of work by leading anthropologist James Suzman Work defines who we are. It determines our status, and dictates how, where, and with whom we spend most of our time. It mediates our self-worth and molds our values. But are we hard-wired to work as hard as we do? Did our Stone Age ancestors also live to work and work to live? And what might a world where work plays a far less important role look like? To answer these questions, James Suzman charts a grand history of "work" from the origins of life on Earth to our ever more automated present, challenging some of our deepest assumptions about who we are. Drawing insights from anthropology, archaeology, evolutionary biology, zoology, physics, and economics, he shows that while we have evolved to find joy, meaning and purpose in work, for most of human history our ancestors worked far less and thought very differently about work than we do now. He demonstrates how our contemporary culture of work has its roots in the agricultural revolution ten thousand years ago. Our sense of what it is to be human was transformed by the transition from foraging to food production, and, later, our migration to cities. Since then, our relationships with one another and with our environments, and even our sense of the passage of time, have not been the same. Arguing that we are in the midst of a similarly transformative point in history, Suzman shows how automation might revolutionize our relationship with work and in doing so usher in a more sustainable and equitable future for our world and ourselves.
