The history of the world in 100 objects

source. The British Museum

How do we know about our past selves? About 8000 years BC we started to develop clay tokens to enumerate good. This can be said was the first gesture of the symbolic function stem out of our minds as a tool to record and manipulate the complexity of the world on which we were living. The tokens would then evolve into enumerating systems and later into what we know now as writing systems. From that point on we have what we know as history.

Writing is a tool that come from our minds and is meant to be use to shape the intangible realm of -again- the mind. But what happened with the tools we create to shape our environment or even our selves, or those object on which we project our intangible inner existence into the material world? all those stories, all those  evidences are embodied as solid reflections of our selves in different developmental stages and tainted with variant comprehensions of our meanings and perspectives.

This is the stories that a join project between the BBC and the British Museum have to tell delivered in various formats:
As Web site: http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/a_history_of_the_world.aspx
As radio show, now as a podcast: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/about/british-museum-objects/
As an interactive web: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/explorerflash/?timeregion=7
And as a book: http://www.britishmuseumshoponline.org/invt/cmc44134/?__utma=1.432636122.1363320116.1363320116.1363322472.2&__utmb=1.5.9.1363322644495&__utmc=1&__utmx=-&__utmz=1.1363320116.1.1.utmcsr=uclue.com|utmccn=(referral)|utmcmd=referral|utmcct=/&__utmv=-&__utmk=132295566

At a Loss for Words: Modern Lessons From a Lost Language

At a Loss for Words: Modern Lessons From a Lost Language

A new old Peruvian language discovered.

''Magdalena document shows
translations for numbers from Spanish to a lost language. ''

Something that really worth to know:

'' We estimate that, in most world regions, about 90% of the languages may be replaced by dominant languages by the end of the 21st century.''

from the monkey to the homoEmpathicus

Some weeks ago i came across with the knowledge that we posses some neurons call mirror system-or mirror neurons- wich give us the ability to feel what others are felling, just by see them or by hear them. Well this system is the base of the empathy, but empathy may be the base of another big thing...Society perhaps? but how study empathy can give us insights of how society evolve? -here it gets really good- because studying empathy we can study the history of human social counsiousness or to whom we think -and fell- we are related to. From the blood ties, passing through religion to Nations states and going further, Jeremy Rifkin explain the ideas coming from his six years research on this topic. This video extract, and illustrate in the very clear way of CongnitiveMedia, a part of a talk given by the autor on which he refers to the discovery of the mirror system and how that new insight open a new path for understand history, pass and future.

What we can lean from what we have forgot

The great tragedy of our era will not be ecological, but ethnographical

''...Biologist suggest that perhaps 20 percent of mammals , 11 percent of birds, and 5 percent of fish are threatened, and the botanist anticipate the loss of 10 percent of floristic diversity, linguist and anthropologist today bear witness the imminent disappearance of half the extant languages of the world.'' '' Of the 7000 languages spoken today, fully half...will disappear within our lifetime.''

-Wade Davis. The Wayfinders, Why ancient wisdom matters in the modern world

The Ethnosphere, humanity's greatest legacy is in extintion danger. With the disappearence of the half of our own diversity we will loss also the half of our history, of our spirituality, and the half of our knowledge on wich we can stand upond to face the challenges of the future. Challenges like the climate change and the lost of biodiversity, because when these voices fade out it will fade away too the cultures wich have develop and conserve the most extensive knowledge about how to live in a true and simbiotic relation with nature.

the next video it's a sample of a lecture given by Wade Davis, for the complete lecture clickHERE