So the bear became synonymous with the cycle of the seasons, even the cause of the cycle. And the willful, ritualized little death that the bear undertakes every winter a sacrifice for the world itself. The world reawakens because of this sage-like, artistic, visionary, powerful figure who secludes himself in a cave and puts himself in a dream-like state of deprivation so that spring might once again come to the world. Sound familiar?

Many rural crime sprees punctuated the last two decades of King Chulalongkorn’s reign, but one of the worst broke out in early 1903. A violent gang of robbers repeatedly made off with herds of water buffaloes, consistently eluding the newly established provincial police force…

The interrogation of this group of robbers yielded such a wealth of information about bandit practices that Damrong concluded that it ought to be written down and distributed to the kingdom’s administrators so that they would be better informed in dealing with rural crime.

A Thai prince’s manual on how crime worked in rural Thailand, written in an elevated question-and-answer style no doubt inspired by the Theravāda exegetical tradition.

Technologies are only obvious in hindsight.

A ruler had no power to enact law. He was born to maintain order and peace and to protect his subjects from dangers…

The fascinating history of the law: first as it was understood in ancient India, then as it was practiced in medieval Burma, and finally how it was enacted in modern Thailand.

Perhaps the biggest of all the snacks the Milky Way has had since the Gaia Enceladus breakfast is the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy which first fell in about 5 billion years ago.

Continuously enfolding the lives, activities, values and times of all its previous inhabitants, the landscape is simultaneously unfolding to its current inhabitant or observer as a corpus of heterogeneous narratives – myths, legends, historical accounts or individual life-histories attached to it. […] ‘Landscape is time materializing.’

Who decides where a river starts? …

… the tourist town
below us, in buildings made old
by the deliberate hand of business,
not the rain, the sun, the untold
billions of raindrops and tear drops…

You will also need a writing implement and a blank sheet of paper, and you should find the darkest spot possible…

Take a few minutes to copy a text by candlelight 🕯️ and reflect on the experience 🪞.

A model lab report for this exercise can be read here.

Using their skill and their astonishing knowledge of bison biology and behaviour, bands of hunters drove great herds of buffalo over steep cliffs and into wooden corrals. In the blink of an eye they obtained more food in a single moment than any other people in human history.

The relationship between Buddhism and society was apparent in nearly every aspect of medieval life…

Thaumaturgic thinking and a polytheistic outlook pervaded premodern agricultural life. Much as we in modern times depend on scientific technology, people in premodern times relied on magical ceremonies for an abundant harvest.

…there’s a river that runs beside it the whole way down,
and there’s an over-song that keeps the river company: I’m leaves,
you’re the wind…

… and now the geneticists say I may have 2% Neanderthal DNA, which presumably changes the status of Neanderthals, or the [definition] of species, or [possibly] both.

The units of paleontology, and of biology more generally, are different from the units of paleoanthropology, in that the latter are units in a story of our ancestors, and the ancestors are invariably sacred.

On why the species of historic hominids are so numerous and contested.

… the “Axial Age” presents a puzzle: why did this emerge at the same time as distinct moralizing religions, with highly similar features in different civilizations? The puzzle may be solved by quantitative historical evidence that demonstrates an exceptional uptake in energy capture (general prosperity) just before the Axial Age in these three regions.

Statistical modeling confirms that economic development, not political complexity or population size, accounts for the timing of the Axial Age.

In truth, it’s the cynic who’s out of touch. In truth, we’re living on Planet A, where people are deeply inclined to be good to one another. So be realistic. Be courageous. Be true to your nature.

Menocchio was certain that at death man reverted to the elements of which he was composed. But an irresistible yearning drove him to picture some sort of survival after death.

A riveting reconstruction of the thought-world of a particular, early-modern, Italian peasant who had fashioned for himself an unpopular popular cosmology.

The victory of written over oral culture has been, principally, the victory of the abstract over the empirical.

As with language, culture offers to the individual a horizon of latent possibilities—a flexible and invisible cage in which he can exercise his own, conditional, liberty.

The shift from hunting-gathering to farming began only about 11,000 years ago; the first metal tools were produced only about 7,000 years ago; and the first state government and the first writing arose only around 5,400 years ago. “Modern” conditions have prevailed, even just locally, for only a tiny fraction of human history

Paints a vivid picture of what traditional life was like (is still like in some places) in prehistoric human societies and contrasts this with how most humans (especially in the West) live today. Jared Diamond himself lived this way for some time and brings a unique and earnest voice to the subject which I found affective and memorable.

… the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.

A refreshing and unromantic take on the history of our species heavily influenced by the author’s vipassana practice.