Category: History
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The first urbanites
AROUND 6200 years ago, farmers living on the eastern fringes of Europe, in what is now Ukraine, did something inexplicable. They left their neolithic villages and moved into a sparsely inhabited area of forest and steppe. There, in an area roughly the size of Belgium between the modern cities of Kiev and Odessa, they congregated…
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Dark and frozen matter: science in the Alps
I’m shamelessly advertising the following 6-day tour of Switzerland and France that’s being organised by New Scientist and Kirker Holidays, because I’m going to be a guide on it – talking about all that the melting glaciers are revealing about our past – and because if scientific holidays are your thing, this one promises to…
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Cambridge Union: This house believes lockdown was a mistake
Sir Graham Brady, Richard Tice and Toby Young proposing; me, Phil Whitaker and Layla Moran opposing. Online on 28 January 2021 (lockdown obliged). Worth a watch:
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Time for some home truths about deforestation
TO prevent future pandemics, we must stop deforestation and end the illegal wildlife trade. Do you agree? Of course you do, because what’s not to like? The buck stops with the evil other. The question is, will doing those things solve the problem? And the answer is, probably not. They will help, but there’s another,…
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Magh mela 2021 will go ahead despite the pandemic
THE Magh Mela, the annual Hindu pilgrimage to Prayagraj, India, usually attracts around 10 million people. Officials announced last month that it will go ahead as planned this winter—despite the country’s high number of new COVID-19 cases… This article first appeared in National Geographic on 12 November 2020. To continue reading, click here.
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Meet the collapsologists
MICHEL Rosell gathers up a mass of papers and divides them into two piles. On the left are bills: a single sheet. On the right is a sheaf of letters from friends and lovers. “If the pile of letters is growing faster than the pile of bills, you’re on the right track,” says Rosell. “If…
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The Covid novels are arriving
THE first coronavirus novel from a major British writer has just been published. Summer, the last book in Scottish writer Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet, is infused with the pandemic we are living through. That it has appeared now is a tribute to the agility of both author and publisher, whose goal was to produce literature…
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On the origins of smallpox
THE death date of smallpox is clear. After killing more than 300 million people in the twentieth century, it claimed its last victim in 1978; two years later, on 8 May 1980, the World Health Assembly declared that the variola virus, which causes smallpox, had been eradicated. But the origins of this devastating virus are…
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On plague memory (again)
RUMINATING on why the 1918 flu pandemic wasn’t better remembered, the African historian Terence Ranger concluded in the early 2000s that the story wasn’t being told right. The vast majority of the victims—50 million of them at a conservative count—perished in a mere 13 weeks at the tail end of 1918, all over the globe.…
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Phylloxera – a pest’s genome reveals its past
A CENTURY and a half ago an alien insect alighted in Europe. It displaced millions, ruined local economies and forced scientists, politicians and ordinary folk into a frenzy of defensive activity. Phylloxera, a member of the group known to entomologists as Hemiptera, or “true” bugs (as opposed to all the other critters known colloquially as…