Category: General

The Neolithic Age

I find the process of civilisation fascinating. As far as we know modern man, homo sapiens arrived on the planet, 200, 000 years ago. He evolved out of homo erectus.

Then we have the old stone age for some 190,000 years of the 200,000 years that we have have existed. Yes for most of our time on this planet we have been chipping flints, not blogging. Every now and then we would come up with a better shaped flint and shout eureka. I guess we were like the tribes in the Amazon. Really advanced animals, not much more. Can you imagine, people like us put up with that type of existence for eons.

Then 10,000 years ago something extraordinary happened the neolithic age arrived. Maybe our latest flints were so good we killed off all the game, and maybe we were eating better and bred faster. Or maybe we just got clever. Anyway this was the tipping point. Mankind learnt farming, could keep sheep and grow wheat. Suddenly we are talking about the cradle of civilisation, Mesopotamia. Egypt and China followed shortly after.  Villages came along and then 5000 years ago came towns.We discovered metal working, bronze then iron. Writing was 7000 years ago, legal systems, architecture, urban planning, aqueducts and by the time you get to the Greeks 2500 years ago people were doing such abstract things as measuring the circumference of the earth and creating works of art that have never been bettered. Wow what a rush after all those years of stagnation in just 7500 years we had done civilisation. Then for 1500 years we stagnated again, even went backwards. Finally another 500 year rush and here we are blogging.

I just find it stupendous. Who could have ever predicted that on this planet with roaming dinosaurs, jumping insects suddenly human civilisation would crop up. I guess at the cosmic level we are just like a large ants’ nest, but it doesn’t feel like that.

What I can’t get out of my system is what the hell were we doing in that first 190, 000 years. Yes that is 95 times the time elapsed between the birth of christ and today.Why did we just sit back and chip stones and run after mamouths when we had the intellectual capacity to be an Einstein?  Or maybe we didn’t.

How much will you spend on Hot Air?

In spite of the whitewash over the leaks from the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University, which concentrated on the leaked emails and resolutely ignored the real story – the flawed programmes which manipulated the raw data into showing warming whatever was happening in the real World, the convenient ‘loss’ of the world-wide raw data upon which the over-hyped warming predictions were made, and the total discrediting of the IPCC and its corrupt leader Rajendra Pachauri – the actual science is actually beginning to influence politicians as the Australian and US Governments abandon their ridiculous Emissions Trading schemes. bad science

Freedom day

Voting in South African elections

Today is a public holiday in South Africa, it has been since 1995 and commemorates the first democratic elections to be held here.

Unlike other countries our public holidays are on the actual date i.e 27th April, 16th June irrespective of which day of the week upon which it falls.

With this weeks holiday falling on a Tuesday a lot of South Africans took Monday off as well and enjoyed a long weekend.

But I digress, I want to introduce you to Dan Heymann, he wrote the words and music of “Weeping” during the mid-1980’s when he ‘was an unwilling soldier Continue reading “Freedom day”

Three coffee songs

Here are three songs with ‘coffee’ in the title. The first is a Bob Dylan one, ‘One More Cup of Coffee’, from the Mexican-flavoured Desire album, released in the mid-seventies during his second creative peak. Bizarrely, the Dylan version isn’t available on YouTube, but this one by the White Stripes is pretty good … it doesn’t have Scarlet Rivera’s violin or Emmylou’s harmonies, but it retains a touch of Mexican mystery. Continue reading “Three coffee songs”

Gentle stroll in the Chilterns

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Nothing too strenuous you understand, but a pleasant stroll on chalk downland, avoiding the rabbit holes. Lovely views, which unfortunately, are quite difficult to photograph successfully.

Not another soul in sight, but a lamentable lack of red kites; wrong time of day, so the photograph is one I took earlier.  It’s the closest I could get. They seem to soar in leisurely fashion, but in fact they are moving much too fast for me to snap successfully.