Hit Me With A Cool Fact Of The Brain!(short If Possible?I Have Duslexia)Thanks!✨

So how bad is Guns, germs, and Steel? Is it still worth reading or do people consider it bunk/ too pop history.

It is a garbage book. Diamond tries to answer difficult questions, but in doing so simplifies issues and topics to the point of being wrong. This is compounded by his use of out of date information and poor understanding of topics within anthropology. Fans of his book like to say it is just sour grapes among academics, but his fans are the same sort of people who think colonialism was justified and that we no longer need to do anything for contemporary Native peoples.Instead, I recommend reading 1491 by Charles Mann. He presents a lot of information, much of it very new and groundbreaking at the time of its publication in 2006. It is a favorite among academics to assign to their intro classes because Mann does not try and interpret research to fit a narrative like Diamond does. His sequel, 1493, is equally great with his discussion on the effects of the the Columbian Exchange. My favorite topics are the spread of the potato to Europe, the lack of European use of Native agricultural practices for cultivating the potato, and the resulting potato famines as a result of using New World guano as fertilizer which introduced a fungus that killed the potato. The effects of the famines were compounded by the use of European agricultural practices for the potato which greatly increased the spread of the fungus. If they had used Andean potato cultivation practices the potato famines may not have been so severe. My other favorite topic is how all the silver wealth extracted by Spain fro the New World initially made them rich, but the continued introduction of silver quickly caused a financial crisis with rampant inflation. Spain’s response was to use more silver. All this silver made its way to China which destabilized China’s economy and left it open for later colonization efforts.

do I dare to tag toes and feet on tumblr dot com y/n?

More on birds since y’all seem to be really into birds. Transcript under the cut.

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Crime scene investigators are about to get a helping hand from our ancient ancestors. The earliest known synthetic pigment, Egyptian blue, is found in some of the paint on ancient statues, coffins, tomb walls, and amulets. Most other pigments long ago faded. Modern scientists, intrigued by its longevity, worked out Egyptian blue’s chemical composition decades ago. Recently it was discovered that it emits near-infrared radiation when exposed to certain kinds of light. Basically: it has rare, invisible luminescence.

And why does that help crime-stoppers? Egyptian blue can be dusted onto complicated surfaces where fingerprints are normally hard to retrieve. The surface is then photographed with a modified camera and a filter sensitive to Egyptian blue’s near-infrared rays. If fingerprints are there, they glow clearly in the resulting image. Science is amazing.

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