Homo Sapiens: An Illustrated Field Guide

 Nepal

Like many other animal species, Homo sapiens are said to be sexually dimorphic. Not only are male sapiens on average somewhat larger than females, but since very early in their evolutionary history, the sapiens sexes have had very distinct cultural and behavioral patterns as well. Typically, in the context of the ancient hunter-gatherer cultures from which all modern sapiens arose, the females were relegated to gathering wild plant material, maintaining the hearth, and of course, nurturing the young. In these circumstances the characteristic attributes of female sapiens - their behavioral bias to utilize social mechanisms rather than direct action, and their heightened empathy compared to males, for example - must have emerged through natural selection.

 Spain

This arrangement left sapiens males in charge of hunting other animals and providing dietary protein in the form of meat. This of course involved the development of weapons, skills and cooperative strategy. In the process, the typical male sapiens aggressiveness and tendency toward risk-taking must have been selected for as well.

World View

Ideological renovations...

Beijing, China

Homo Sapiens: An Illustrated Field Guide

 Inner Mongolia

Early in their evolutionary history, Homo sapiens began expressing a unique urge to understand and influence their environment, seeking to explain phenomena and manipulate materials. This instinct led to the development of technology.  Beginning with the mastery of fire and the fashioning of stone tools in the Paleolithic, sapiens slowly and incrementally accumulated a vast array of tools and skills, eventually allowing them to invade virtually every habitat on the planet.

 Afghanistan

Technological development was excruciatingly slow for tens of thousands of years, until, beginning in the era we call the Enlightenment, advances in the natural sciences laid the foundation for an explosion of technical expansion.  Since then, sapiens technology has become so refined that some members of the species are even capable of making replacement body parts.

Ruins of Datong

Datong, located in northern Shanxi Province, China, was since ancient times, an important node of enterprise and exchange on the Silk Road between China and Mongolia.  Beginning in the mid-7^th century CE, it became a centre of Buddhist scholarship and worship as well.  Its library once contained the entire Chinese Buddhist canon carved on over eighty thousand wood blocks for printing.  Its grottoes still contain over 50,000 carved images of the Buddha.  Datong was sacked and destroyed in 1649 in the violence that led to the collapse of the Ming dynasty.

Ruins of Heliopolis

 Heliopolis, located in modern Lebanon at the town of Balbec, was, at its peak in the 2nd century CE, the largest spiritual sanctuary in the classical world.  Its temples feature the largest stones ever quarried, moved and set in place by human endeavor; some weighing almost 1,000 tonnes. The city dwindled in importance as Christianity gradually took hold in the area in the subsequent centuries.  A series of devastating earthquakes did the rest.

Homo Sapiens: An Illustrated Field Guide

Sri Lanka

Beginning roughly ten thousand years ago, having wiped out most of the world's megafauna, fully anatomically modern Homo sapiens began to domesticate some of the various plant and animal species with which they found themselves sharing the environment.

Spain

The transition to the so-called Neolithic and the dawn of agriculture laid the social and economic foundations for the emergence of civilization and led to highly complex and varied relationships between sapiens and all the other animal species globally.


To be continued...

Ruins of Hiroshima

On August 6, 1945, Hiroshima became the first city in history to be destroyed by an atomic bomb.

Even with hindsight it’s impossible to be sure whether the use of the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki led to the post-war nuclear arms race or whether the bombs demonstrated their horror in a way that no harmless experiment could ever have done, and so helped to hold the ultimate violence in check throughout the Cold War.

World View

Looking into Saudi Arabia from Oman.

Homo Sapiens: An Illustrated Field Guide

Iran

The tendency toward a relatively long survival after menopause in the life cycle of the sapiens female is thought by anthropologists to be an evolutionary adaptation allowing more resources to be allocated to the nurture and protection of the young, who are born helpless and take many years to reach maturity.

Nicaragua

The acquisition of language early in its evolutionary history, also an evolutionary adaptation, allows Homo sapiens to pass both practical skills and cultural information across time and to accumulate such skills and information down the generations.

To be continued..

Homo Sapiens: An Illustrated Field Guide

Japan

The sapiens' powerful brain perceives the external world through a variety of senses tuned to the spectrum of vibrations and chemical signals coming from the environment. Each individual is influenced by their own unique experiences, leading to subjective views of existence and the passage of time.

Homo sapiens are said to possess consciousness, self-awareness, and a mind, which correspond roughly to the mental processes of thought.

Spain

Although the sapiens brain is the most complex in the animal kingdom in terms of both structure and cognitive ability, most of these abilities are known in a more primitive form among other species. Modern anthropology has tended to support Darwin's idea that differences in mind between sapiens and the other great apes, for example, great as they are, are differences in degree and not of kind.

To be continued...

Ruins of Tikal

Tikal, located in present day Guatemala, one of the most powerful kingdoms of the ancient Maya, reached its peak about 900CE, only to be abandoned within a century due to over-exploitation, deforestation and erosion, exacerbated by climate change.