Echoes_ Chapter I

I wake up. Such a sensation… like no other I’ve experienced before. I am suspended but no string is pulling me. Inside a womb I am held.

A subtle humming fills the liquid I am breathing, I try to open my eyes but they were never closed: the darkness is all around me. The humming turns into vibrations resonating throughout the womb, I now know how small it is, only holding my body.

Nuclear Family Is Not A Given

New data using DNA from victims of the Pompeii eruption has highlighted the distorted conception our civilisation has been attempting to impose nuclear family as the forever and unique and culturally superior vision of family.

The DNA obtained on the corpses still intact from the eruption and the plaster cast has shown people in arms found under the same roof thought to be a parent and their child are not related. First of all, adoption was a trend at the time explaining some parenthood not being blood relationship. While we can deconstruct the idea on nuclear blood-related families leaving their final moments in each other’s arms, it does not necessarily mean households at the time were a mix of individuals living together. The reality is roman households were also the home of slaves and it was common practice for masters and slaves to live with their families together under the same roof.

Origins of Mankind Through Data Extrapolation

What is history and how does it relate to humankind’s story?

History is a series of events that shaped our species into being what it is. These events can be man made but are also beyond the scope of Man’s actions; such is the case of climate and geological formations that changed the landscape where our ancestors evolved. Not only did nature change our relation to the world and its environment and wildlife, but it also modifies greatly how we interact with our fellow man or woman. Our species is the only one to have spread on such a scale that we now inhabit every continent except Antarctica. While our adaptation and curiosity pushed our species to always venture further, we were however the subject of geographic distances and disturbances that created differentiation inside our species. And so much so that individuals discovering new land were surprised to see communities that had thrived there for thousands of years without any contact with others. And finally, because history does not permeates through time, we have to discover events that happened over the millennia.

Orientalism and Harems

We have been talking on this blog about how Western hegemony has influenced and continues to maintain stereotypes on cultures which have seen better recognition from the work of scholars in many fields of study (archaeologists, historians, anthropologists, etc.). Schools of thought carried by European nations, reinforced during their subjugation of parts of the world as colonisers,

Fantasy as reality

The school of thought carried by European nations, reinforced during their subjugation of parts of the world as colonisers, that lesser peoples possess cultural phenomenons inherent to their late and immature development is still, to this day, source of fantasies in the collective imagination. Authors would often use tropes to expose issues Europeans were facing in terms of religious code of conduct governing even the slightest parts of everyday life and marital relations; for example, the Ottoman Empire was thought to harbour the most ludicrous aspects of men to women relationships, eroticism and lovers intrigue taking up most of a sultan’s busy day. Such fantasies include the harem, a place forbidden to men where the monarch where he would store his women to fulfill his most epicurean depravity on the most lavish setting which would certainly contrast with a king’s way of life on the European continent. These orientalist clichés scholars have been trying to deconstruct are still common tropes in today’s fiction, from cinema to literature.

Animal Grief: Another Understanding of Death

Cult of death has long been one of mankind’s cornerstone in terms of acknowledgement of the abstract, understanding of the universe and the sacred. Rituals of the last rites to honour death and most commonly celebrate a person’s life.

Research in ethology (a branch of zoology studying animal behaviour) has focused in recent years on the way animals mourn their own. While the outcome showed animals do not care for deaths in animals of other species except in some specific cases, such as death of an individual of another species replacing a child, theories are still ongoing as to how animals treat death, a scientific discipline known as thanatology.

How Advanced Understanding of Gestures in Apes Shapes Early Human Developments in Language

By developing complex languages, homininans have been able to achieve a better understanding of their surroundings, develop more complex group behaviours and share information helping expand upon adapting to new environments using new necessary skills.

A bigger brain and its many connections are what helped the hominina branch gain distance on its ape counterparts. It did also create a chasm when it comes to language.

Three theories to explain gesture languages in great apes

Indeed, recent developments in research on language in apes have exploited different theories to explain how apes possess the ability to use gestures in order to communicate.

Farewell to Humanity’s Childhood

The idea that theories of yesteryear were developed considering tools and information available at the time leads us to understand the writings not as true statements but as the start of critical thinking by rejecting them using new data.

Because Jean-Jacques Rousseau was living at a time when Europeans were discovering a new continent and new people displaying what appeared rudimentary customs (or so they thought by comparison with life in Europe), he was led to believe that they were the exact model of a way of life before civilisation transformed humans into a social species. To say that these “savages” reflected what humanity was stuck doing for thousands of years (we are here talking about those who still harbour this same line of thinking even with modern archaeological advancements), it is foregoing our creative, inventive and curious nature trying to rise above our condition: too simple of a thought.

The Dawn of Everything: Introduction

A few months ago, I was perusing a book shelf inside a book shop (evidently) looking for a book(Géohistoire - Une autre histoire des humains sur la Terre by Christian Grataloup) about how geography partially determined of the evolution of mankind that I might read later because on a complete struck of luck my gaze was captured by this book with a beautiful golden lettering on blue cover. After rapidly looking through the book and looking on the Internet what people interested/researching in history and ethnology were saying, I decided to take it home.

Using remote desktop system VNC on Gnome

I have been wanting to use my ancient iPad 2 which still works like a charm instead of buying a new tablet. I have succeeded in jailbreaking it and downgrading from iOS 9 to iOS 8, but in any case it is nearly unusable to browse the web because of obsolete webkit and certificates. So I started thinking about using it as a remote desktop access device. However, here again its archaic encryption features made it hard to fine tune the right method so it took me a few hours to finally be able to use VNC under Fedora 40.

A Separation: how to control without physical violence

A separation starts with a couple about to be ripped apart, as the wife left the marital home and seeks to offer their daughter a better life, and as the father has to take care of his disabled dad and get involved in an imbroglio with another couple and their daughter.

In countries where cultural and religious pressure dictate the daily lives of people, and intrinsically the interactions between men and women where superiority of one gender over the other primes above all, one usually imagines a kind of abuse that is physically and psychologically showing. However, instead of the usual trope of fanatics wielding their justified will onto helpless women, the film shows a more subtle image of how men impact the lives of their female counterpart as their will is imposed and immutable. As the movie progresses, we spiral into the inevitable for women who, despite their efforts and cunning, cannot escape their fate as they lie in the wake of men’s selfish tyranny. But boy do we see them fight, fight to survive as well as combat the crushing layers of authoritative judiciary and executive powers, where ultimately flight to another more open country is vital. Ultimately, Mixed with the more assertive excess of strength, the strategy of subjugation highly effective through using emotions of fear and culpability.