Day: July 9, 2021

Curiositys, History, ScienceLeave a comment

Clues to The Collapse of a Maya Civilization Found in Ancient Human Feces

Fernando Kaskais

by DAVID NIELD Human poop can reveal more than you might think, even when it’s really, really old. In a new study of a Central American Maya civilization, samples of ancient feces have shown how the size of this community varied significantly in response to contemporary climate change. Researchers identified four distinct periods of population size shift as a reaction to particularly dry or particularly wet periods, which haven’t all been documented before: 1350-950 BCE, 400-210 BCE, 90-280 CE, and 730-900 CE. In addition, the flattened poop piles show that the city of Itzan – which in the modern day would be in … Continue reading Clues to The Collapse of a Maya Civilization Found in Ancient Human Feces

Media&Culture, Philosophy, PsychologyLeave a comment

Ideas that work

Fernando Kaskais

Matthieu Queloz is a junior research fellow at Wolfson College and a member of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He is the author of The Practical Origins of Ideas: Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering (2021). Edited bySam Dresser ‘Ideas, Mr Carlyle, ideas, nothing but ideas!’ scoffed a hard-headed businessman over dinner with Thomas Carlyle, the Victorian essayist and historian of the French Revolution. The businessman had had enough of Carlyle’s endless droning on about ideas – what do ideas matter anyway? Carlyle shot back: ‘There was once a man called Rousseau who wrote a book containing nothing but ideas. … Continue reading Ideas that work