Sublime

‘Many seasons ago: slavery and its rejection among foragers on the Pacific Coast of North America’

Certainly, if one encounters an argument ascribed to a ‘savage’ in a European text that even remotely resembles anything to be found in Cicero or Erasmus, one is automatically supposed to assume that no ‘savage’ could possibly have really said it – or even that the conversation in question never really took place at all.12 If nothing else, this hab

Because the sounds he heard were not identical to what others heard, he needed something beyond the standardized language that tied every human to the past and reduced every new adventure to merely a slight variation on some earlier episode.

os sapiens têm sido capazes de mudar seu comportamento rapidamente, transmitindo novos comportamentos a gerações futuras sem necessidade de qualquer mudança genética ou ambiental.

Children who observed their parents using language as a tool for cognitive exploration, rather than just control, were more likely to emulate that usage.

He raised doubts that the dead were ‘possessors of great knowledge’ in order to explain how his own experiences at times seemed to prove otherwise.

In a few remarkable pages of The Descent of Man, Darwin made the case for group selection, raised the principal objection to it, and then proposed a way around the objection: When two tribes of primeval man, living in the same country, came into competition, if (other circumstances being equal) the one tribe included a great number of courageous, s

The loss of ancestral language not only means the extinction of cultural heritage, it is directly linked to our worldwide ecological collapse.

This is one area in which early missionary or travellers’ accounts of the Americas pose a genuine conceptual challenge to most readers today. Most of us simply take it for granted that ‘Western’ observers, even seventeenth-century ones, are simply an earlier version of ourselves; unlike indigenous Americans, who represent an essentially alien, perh