Image via Wikipedia Human evolution presents a puzzle. Nothing seems to explain the sudden takeoff of the last 45,000 years—the conversion of just another rare predatory ape into a planet dominator with rapidly progressing technologies. Once “progress” started to produce new tools, different ways of life and burgeoning populations, it accelerated all over the world, [ Read More ]
Cover via Amazon Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya One of the great mysteries of the twentieth century was the way Britain got away with pillaging nearly every country on the planet without suffering any retribution. I’ve spent a long, bitter time brooding over this experimental proof that there’s no such [ Read More ]
Koro: A Natural History of Penis Panics. A woman in Nigeria narrowly escaped a recent lynching from an enraged crowd after a market trader claimed she had stolen his penis. This is an example of Koro, (as it is most commonly known in the West), a belief that the genitals have been stolen, or in [ Read More ]
Image by DCZwick via Flickr Gorillas may go extinct in much of central Africa by the mid-2020s — victims of a meat trade, of logging and mining, and even the Ebola virus, a new report says. Unless action is taken to guard the gorillas’ habitat and counter poaching, the dire prediction will come to pass, [ Read More ]
Image via Wikipedia Awassa, Ethiopia — We turned off the main road to Awassa,talked our way past security guards and drove a mile across empty land before we found what will soon be Ethiopia’s largest greenhouse. Nestling below an escarpment of the Rift Valley, the development is far from finished, but the plastic and steel [ Read More ]