ፍትህ ለሁሉም / Justice for All
There is barely a country in Europe that cannot look back on Germanic roots. The term ‘Germanic’ actually refers to a number of tribes and clans that lived in Central and Northern Europe from the 6th century BC. Gaius Julius Caesar is said to have used the word when talking about the Gallic war. However, …
The eruption of the Mount Toba supervolcano in the Indonesian island of Sumatra 74,000 years ago brought about an era of severe environmental degradation that decimated populations of Neanderthals and modern humans. Archaeological evidence suggests that modern humans survived this era by creating cooperative intergroup social networks and behaving like tribes. Neanderthals, on the other …
Of all species on the face of the earth, humans are the most disperse, in that they occupy the most diverse eco-systems present on all large land masses and most large islands. In recent time, much work has been done using maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA, and non-recombinant Y (NRY) chromosome markers to map human migration …
For more than three hundred years during the Late Bronze Age, from about 1500 BC until just after 1200 BC, the Mediterranean region played host to a complex international world in which Egyptians, Mycenaeans, Minoans, Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Cypriots, Trojans, and Canaanites all interacted. They created a cosmopolitan world-system, with flourishing cities such as Mycenae, …
The collapse of complex societies of the past can inform the present on the risks of collapse. Dr. Joseph Tainter, author of the book The Collapse of Complex societies, and featured in Leonardo Dicaprio’s film The Eleventh Hour, details the factors that led to the collapse of past civilizations including the Roman Empire. Watch the …
Peter Turchin is a social scientist at the University of Connecticut who studies the math of social integration and disintegration. Peter created the field of Cliodynamics and delves into how he predicts the trajectory of social cohesion based on historical data from 200 societies, why elite overproduction is bad, and how we can avoid disaster …
What are the key differences between complicated and complex? How can we better understand energy and society through these key distinctions? Tainter explains our current predicament based on decades of research and offers pathways for our collective future. Joe Tainter has been a professor at Utah State University in the Environment and Society Department since …
Peter Turchin, author of End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, joins The Realignment. Peter and Marshall discuss his 2010 prediction that the U.S. would experience significant political turmoil in 2020, the factors that drove 2010-2020s political conflict, why the elite-overproduction phenomenon is one of the strongest determinants of societal health, and …
How people choose to wield their power affects our daily lives, whether it’s a dictator or simply an obnoxiously officious member of a homeowner’s association. Brian Klaas, a political scientist and author of “Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How it Changes Us,” joins Big Think to talk about the nature of power, the people who …
Life is about choice. What we eat, what we read, who we elect; every day we make choices that determine how we want to live. But what if these choices are just an illusion? In an era where regulations and red tape rule every industry, where lobby groups and big business wield more influence than …