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'Wir, die 8 Milliarden Menschen, wohnen auf einem unbedeutenden Planeten, der sich um einen ganz gewöhnlichen Stern dreht. Aber dieser Planet hat eine Besonderheit, die bislang noch nirgendwo sonst beobachtet wurde: Er birgt Leben. Natürlich sind wir nur eine Variante im bunten Strauß der Lebensformen auf diesem Planeten, aber immerhin eine, die sich als besonders eroberungsfreudig erwiesen hat, um nicht zu sagen,. Die wachsende Umweltangst angesichts des Klimawandels, des Artensterbens und der schweren Umweltverschmutzung spielte bei der Entwicklung dieses Atlas eine zentrale Rolle. Sein Interesse gilt unseren heutigen Anforderungen und Fragestellungen – was in diesem Bereich etwas vollkommen Neues ist.'In über 300 farbigen Karten, Grafiken und Schaubildern schildert dieser Band den Weg von den Anfängen des Universums bis zu den schweren Zerstörungen unserer Umwelt in der Gegenwart. Astrophysiker, Archäologen, Historiker, Geologen, Biologen, Klimawissenschaftler, Ozeanographen, Zoologen – Christian Grataloup hat 30 von ihnen zusammengeholt und einen Atlas geschaffen, wie es ihn noch nie gab.

This book provides an overview of social life in ancient Mesopotamia, bringing together leading experts to survey key social domains of daily life as well as major non-dominant social groups. It serves as a point of entry to the current research in this field.

Jusqu'à ce livre, il n'existait pas d'histoire culturelle du faucon crécerelle.Pourtant, la crécerelle, pour reprendre son nom commun, a beaucoup à nous apprendre, sur elle bien sûr, mais également sur nous.En effet, elle a imprégné la culture de tous les pays où elle existe, de l'aube de l'humanité jusqu'à aujourd'hui, aussi bien chez les ornithologues que dans les populations, qu'elles soient rurales ou urbaines.Cet ouvrage écrit à deux mains s'inscrit dans une zoosémiotique culturelle, il présente le faucon crécerelle sous ses facettes biologiques et éthologiques mais aussi étymologiques et historiques.

Serving as both an accessible textbook and an original synthesis of interdisciplinary scholarship, Emerging Infections traces the social and environmental determinants of human infectious diseases from the Paleolithic to the present day. Contrary to earlier predictions of a post-infectious era, humanity now faces a post-antimicrobial era with the emergence of drug-resistant pathogens and the entry of new and deadly viruses such as Ebola and COVID-19 in the human population. Yet despite the novelty of these infections, their evolution is primarily driven by the same human activities of subsistence, settlement, and social organization that have been recurring over the last ten thousand years. Approaching these activities from a biocultural perspective, this book examines the prehistory and history of human infectious diseases. Much has happened in the decade since the first edition, with significant developments in both disease research and in the evolution of the diseases themselves. As such, this new edition has been expanded to include recent epidemics of Ebola, Zika, MERS, and of course, COVID-19. Indeed, the book's biocultural approach is especially relevant to the COVID-19 pandemic, examining it from a deep time perspective and placing it within a much-needed explanatory framework. Emerging Infections is suitable for advanced undergraduates, graduates, and researchers in anthropology, the medical social sciences, public health, and the history of medicine. The book will also appeal to a more general readership with an interest in public health and infectious diseases.

What do animals—other than human animals—have to do with religion? How do our religious ideas about animals affect the lives of real animals in the world? How can we deepen our understanding of both animals and religion by considering them together? Animals and Religion explores how animals have crucially shaped how we understand ourselves, the other living beings around us, and our relationships with them.Through incisive analyses of religious examples from around the world, the original contributions to this volume demonstrate how animals have played key roles in every known religious tradition, whether as sacred beings, symbols, objects of concern, fellow creatures, or religious teachers. And through our religious imagination, ethics, and practices, we have deeply impacted animal lives, whether by domesticating, sacrificing, dominating, eating, refraining from eating, blessing, rescuing, releasing, commemorating, or contemplating them. Drawing primarily on perspectives from religious studies and Christian theology, augmented by cutting-edge work in anthropology, biology, philosophy, and psychology, Animals and Religion offers the reader a richer understanding of who animals are and who we humans are. Do animals have emotions? Do they think or use language? Are they persons? How we answer questions like these affects diverse aspects of religion that shape not only how we relate to other animals, but also how we perceive and misperceive each other along axes of gender, race, and (dis)ability.Accessibly written and thoughtfully argued, Animals and Religion will interest anyone who wants to learn more about animals, religion, and what it means to be a human animal.

Encyclopedia of Archaeology, Second Edition, Three Volume Set covers the standing of archaeology as a scientific discipline, how archaeology is practiced, both in the field and in the lab, provides an archaeological geographical overview encompassing all continents and time periods, and covers the role of archaeology in the modern world. This clearly structured thematic manner ensures a well-balanced presentation of the discipline across the world by the people who perform and experience archaeology as native scholars. Led by a brand new international editorial team, this book contains approximately 250 articles. From using home kits to analyze our DNA and find our ancestors'origin, to walking among ancient monuments embedded in modern cityscapes, visiting museums and archaeological sites, watching adventure movies, or playing video games about mummies coming to life, archaeology touches on many aspects of our everyday life. - Provides approximately 300 outstanding articles coherently structured into four key sections - Includes many brand new chapters on topics which have recently shot to prominence, including digital archaeology, and Islamic archaeology - Puts a greater emphasis on ethnic and gender diversity in editorial boards and contributors with its truly global authorship - Contains multiple diverse case studies and real-life examples in order to aid the reader

In this book, the late Richard Redding synthesizes his decades-long work on the ancient agricultural economy of Egypt. Drawing on a diverse range of data, including zooarchaeology, ancient texts, and iconographic sources, he explores the role of cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs in the economic infrastructure of ancient, mainly Pharaonic, Egypt and the complexities of decision-making processes that shaped the use and management of these vital livestock resources. The book integrates zooarchaeological and historical data with information on unimproved breeds of cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs from Egypt and the broader Middle East as well as considers texts and tomb paintings. Redding argues that understanding the interplay between economic forces, environmental factors, and herders'knowledge of animal characteristics is crucial for unraveling the dynamic nature of decision-making. The author explores herd growth rates, meat yields, caloric and nutritional benefits, and optimal herd structures. By employing that data and ecological models, including the annual Nile floods, he provides insights into the adaptive strategies employed by ancient Egyptian herders. In this way, Redding examines the economic rationale behind ancient Egyptian herding communities. His models of Pharaonic herding strategies generate expectations tested using zooarchaeological evidence. Redding long advocated the modeling approach he demonstrates here, understanding zooarchaeological data through a lens of animal biology and environmental context. This work should therefore spark wide interest among archaeologists working in disparate regions.

This book invites a close textual encounter with the first 11 chapters of Genesis as an intimate drama of marginalised peoples wrestling with the rise of the world's first grain states in the Mesopotamian alluvium.The initial 11 chapters of Genesis are often considered discordant and fragmentary, despite being a story of beginnings within the context of the Bible. Readers discover how these formative chapters cohere as a cross-generational account of peoples grappling with the hegemonic spread of domesticated grain production and the concomitant rise of the pristine states of Mesopotamia. The book reveals how key episodes from the Genesis narrative reflect major societal revolutions of the Neolithic period in Mesopotamia through a three-fold hermeneutical method: literary analysis of the Bible and contemporary cuneiform texts; modern scholarship from archaeological, anthropological, ecological, and historical sources; and relevant exegesis from the Second Temple and rabbinical era. These three strands entwine to recount a generally sequential story of the earliest archaic states as narrated by non-elites at the margins of these emerging state spaces.The Dawn of Agriculture and the Earliest States in Genesis 1–11 provides a fascinating reading of the first 11 chapters of Genesis, appealing to students and scholars of the Hebrew Bible and the Near East, as well as those working on ecological injustice from a religious vantage point.

This study blends together ethical philosophy, neurocognitive-evolutionary studies, and literary theory to explore how imaginative discourse addresses a distinctively human deep sociality, and by doing so helps shape cultural and literary history. Deep sociality, arising from an improbable evolutionary history, both entwines and leaves non-reconciled what is felt to be significant for us and what ethical sense seems to call us to acknowledge as significant, independent of ourselves.Ethical Sense and Literary Significance connects literary and cultural history without reducing the literary to a mere expression of something else. It argues that affective differences between non-egocentric and egocentric registers of significance are integral to the bioculturally evolved deep sociality that verbal art addresses—often in unsettling and socially critical ways. Much imaginative discourse, in early societies as well as recent ones, brings ethical sense and literary significance together in ways that reveal their intricate but non-harmonized internal entwinement. Drawing on contemporary scholarship in the humanities and sciences, Donald R. Wehrs explores the implications of interdisciplinary approaches to topics central to a wide range of fields beyond literary studies, including neuroscience, anthropology, phenomenological philosophy, comparative history, and social psychology.

Welche Beziehung hat die Menschheitsentwicklung der letzten zwei bis fünf Millionen Jahre zu unserer heutigen Zeit? Wie kam es, dass wir wurden, der wir sind? Wie fanden wir zum aufrechten Gang? Wieso wurden wir nackt? Wie entwickelte sich unsere Sexualität in diesen erstaunlichen Zeitspannen? Und wie entstand das Prinzip der Familie? Wie das der Kultur? Welche großen Technologien, die unsere Vorfahren entwickelten und langfristig nutzten, prägten die weitere Entfaltung des Menschen und bestimmen heute unsere zukünftige Morgendämmerung? Der Anthropologe Richard L. Currier zeigt anschaulich und im großen Stil des brillanten Erzählers, wie uns im Laufe der Jahrmillionen immer wieder Technologien zuteil wurden, die wiederum dabei unterstützten, uns in Ernährung, Sprache, Kunst und Gemeinschaft zu dem zu entwickeln, der wir heute sind. Wie wir also zu Gesellschaften und Kulturen heranreiften, die nun erstmals -- als Menschheitsfamilie wahrgenommen -- vor wirklich globalen Herausforderungen stehen -- und dass wir sie meistern können. Ein Buch, das einen weiten und spannenden Bogen über die erfolgreiche und erstaunliche Geschichte der Hominiden wirft und uns heute an die Aufgaben erinnert, die zu Hause auf Erden eine Lösung von jedem erwarten. Nicht um lediglich unfrei zu überleben, sondern um als zunehmend freiere Menschen und stetig weiter Entbundene von den Lasten jeder Zeit, in zunehmendem Einklang mit sich, anderen und der Natur, zu leben.

Wann wurden die ersten Textilien hergestellt?Wie kleideten sich die Menschen im alten Ägypten?Welche Rolle spielte der Tuchhandel im Mittelalter?Warum begann die Industrielle Revolution mit der Textilherstellung?Warum kleiden wir uns heute alle in Polyester?Wie wird die Zukunft der Textilherstellung aussehen?Diese und viele weitere Fragen werden in dem reich bebilderten und fundiert geschriebenen Buch anschaulich beantwortet. Neben der Vorstellung aller wichtigen Fasern, Technologien zur Garn- und Flächenherstellung und Er ndungen von der Steinzeit bis heute geht es in dem Buch auch um die gesellschaftlichen Veränderungen, die mit der Herstellung und dem Handel von Textilien einhergingen.Besonders hervorzuheben ist der globale Ansatz: Nicht nur Europa steht im Fokus, sondern auch die Entwicklungen in Asien, Afrika und Amerika werden behandelt. Sagen und Märchen mit Textilbezug, die Veränderung der Mode im Laufe der Jahrhunderte sowie gebräuchliche textile Redewendungen runden das Werk ab und stellen einen Bezug zu unserem Alltag her.

Our universe is characterized by constant motion. From electrons to galaxies, all things are on the move. This resonates within the human condition; we are born to move. From the earliest hunters, sailors, and horse-riders to the modern world of trains, bicycles, and cars, movement is everywhere in human life. Our history as nomads compares starkly to our increasingly sedentary life today. This fundamental disruption of the human as a moving being led to the invention of the wheel, new religious cultures, and even the rational mind. This book considers the full depth of the link between humanity and motion, examining how it manifests in us and how we embody it. Broad and multidisciplinary, it blends history, geography, psychology, philosophy, architecture, anthropology, and spirituality.

This book encapsulates a long period of history of human progress by highlighting crucial social, economic, and cultural dynamics. It presents recent historiography and new analytical tools used to analyse multi-dimensional themes involved in social formations in different parts of the world. This is a reader-friendly book with simple and lucid language and fulfils the pressing needs of students studying the course on Social Formations and Cultural Patterns of the ancient and medieval world at various universities across the world. The summary, key words, and representative questions at the end of each chapter would assist in revision and a better understanding of the issues dealt with therein. A detailed chapter-end reference would enable and motivate the readers to engage in further studies for a better understanding of the themes.This book will be of interest to students, researchers, and academics in the area of history – ancient and medieval world history, in particular, and anthropology. It will also be an interesting read for general readers interested in knowing about the ancient and medieval world.

Research in human evolution in Asia has long been thought to lag far behind similar research in Africa and Europe. However, the limited dissemination of findings is often to blame, rather than a lack of scholarship. The Paleoanthropology of Eastern Asia attempts to rectify this misconception by synthesizing research on human evolution in eastern Asia into a single authoritative and definitive text. Covering the span of time from more than two million years ago to the end of the last Ice Age 15,000 years ago, this book examines key events, such as the arrival of the earliest hominins in eastern Asia and the evolution and interaction of various hominin species, including Homo erectus, Homo sapiens, and and a few more in between.While fossils reveal what these hominins may have looked like, the rich Paleolithic archaeological record yields insights into their behavior: Hand axes have been found in eastern Asia where they were previously believed to have been absent. Watercraft was used by foragers as early as 40,000 years ago to voyage to the Japanese archipelago. In Indonesia, cave art paintings older than those from the Lascaux caves in France have been reported. Such new and important discoveries continue to emerge. Providing comprehensive coverage of paleoanthropological research in eastern Asia—from the groundbreaking finds in a cave near Beijing in the early twentieth century to the discovery and identification of new human species during the twenty-first century—this book will captivate anyone interested in the human evolutionary record.

Struggling for Time examines how time is used as a mechanism of control by the Israeli state and a site of mundane resistance among Palestinian agriculture professionals. Natalia Gutkowski unpacks power structures to show how a settler society lays moral claim on indigenous time through agrarian environmental policies, science, technologies, landscapes, and bureaucracy. Shifting the analysis of Israel/Palestine from land and space to time, she offers new insight into the operation of power in agrarian environments and develops a contemporary framework to understand land and resource grabs under temporal justifications. Traveling across both policymaking arenas and Palestinian citizens'agrarian fields, Gutkowski follows the multiple ways that state officials, agronomists, planners, environmentalists, and agriculturalists use time as a tool of collective agency. Through investigations of wetland drainage in Galilee, transformations in olive agriculture, sustainable agrarian development, and regulation of the shmita biblical commandment, the'year of release'for agricultural fields, this work highlights how Palestinian citizens'agriculture has become a site for the state to settle and mediate time conflicts to justify its existence. As Struggling for Time demonstrates, time politics will take on ever greater urgency as societies and governments plan for an uncertain future in our era of climate change.

Materials science institutions have always been crucial to the development of materials research. Even before materials science emerged as a discipline in the 20th century, these institutions existed in various forms. They provided specialized facilities for research, educated new generations of researchers, drafted policies and funded programs, enabled valuable connections between research groups, or played any other role which were needed to further the progress of materials science.This volume, the third in a series of volumes covering the development and history of materials science, presents illuminating perspectives on material science institutions. Twenty chapters are organized into six comprehensive parts of which each cover a characteristic aspect or historical feature. True to the topic they write about, the contributors to this volume have varied backgrounds. Some are materials scientists and engineers, but others are historians, philosophers of science, sociologists, or even directors of institutions themselves. This comprehensive, unified collection is a valuable resource for undergraduates, graduate students, academics, policymakers and professionals who are actively interested in materials science and its development from the past to the future.

Які ключі до прогресу людства? За останні двісті років приголомшливий прогрес у сфері здоров'я, багатства та тривалості життя докорінно змінив досвід людського життя. Але це не було випадковістю історії. Спираючись на дослідження всього життя, Одед Ґалор визначає універсальні сили, що стоять за цією зміною, і таким чином розкриває таємницю людського розвитку.Проривне бачення Ґалора спростовує багато припущень. Революцією, що змінила гру останніх століть, була не індустріалізація, а масова освіта; не епоха дитячої праці, а її кінець. Нові технології можуть підвищити рівень життя, але це сталося лише завдяки зменшенню розміру сім'ї та стимулюванню більшої гендерної рівності. Як Європа випередила раніше більш розвинені цивілізації, такі як Китай та Османська імперія? Чому виклики Болівії є протилежністю Ефіопії? Чи сумісне подальше зростання з подоланням кліматичної кризи? Встановлюючи приголомшливі зв'язки між континентами та тисячоліттями, «Подорож людства» відповідає на всі ці та багато іншого у сміливій та захоплюючій розповіді, яка переосмислює наше розуміння людської історії.