Latest from Yuval Harari

[Lou Gold]

"IZ" Kamakawiwoʻole?

I did get a shot of this one on Maui, but can't make out the details at the base ...

Here is Wikipedia on "IZ".

Nice shot from Maui. Having seen the details "rubber to the road and up close" I have no difficulty imaging what is also there in your lovely photo.

You have given us a mental/poetic expression of "emptifulness". Can you not see it in your own photo?

[Lou Gold]

Jim,

Here is another new archeology finding story that seriously challenges Eurocentrism:

[Recent analyses of Indonesian cave paintings revealed a surprise] ... a date was handed down: the painting of the warty pig was at least 45,500 years old. This makes it the oldest known example of figurative cave art in the world.

The implications of these dates are profound. The famous animal paintings in the Chauvet cave, of France, are dated at around thirty-five thousand years old; the Sulawesi warty pig outdoes them by roughly ten thousand years. Many archeologists and anthropologists talk about a “great leap forward” in human culture, suggesting that it occurred sometime between thirty thousand and sixty thousand years ago. During this “leap,” Homo sapiens are said to have initiated behaviors characteristic of modern humans. Such discoveries indicate that the leap may have occurred toward the more ancient end of that range.

The warty pig also upends any lingering belief that figurative cave art was a European thing. “The early cave art in Europe is so spectacular that it was hard for archeologists to tear their eyes away from it,” Brumm told me. This sometimes resulted in a “not fully conscious Eurocentrism.” According to Aubert, several scientific journals refused to publish the group’s papers on the Sulawesi cave-art finds, not because the data were incorrect but because “they just wouldn’t believe it.” He went on, “It’s ingrained in everything, this Eurocentrism.” These discoveries may help erase it.

The colonized mind spread globally mostly (but not exclusively) via European Conquest is a powerful and presently dominant storyteller-historian. The mission of G&W was not in the first of what was intended to be a series of books to provide a compelling description of a future solution but instead to challenge the hegemony of the consensus story. Judging from the many reviews I've read, they did a brilliant job and have created a big intellectual buzz. No small accomplishment methinks.