The Post-Partisan Emporium

  How Christianity rebooted cognitive evolution The aftermath of a collapse Peter Frost Portrait of Augustine, 6th century fresco Mean cognitive ability fell under Imperial Rome but rose again as the Empire became Christian. Cognitive ability is the capacity to process information, recognize patterns, and solve problems. It initially served to meet the challenges of hunting and gathering – a way of life that, by 30,000 years ago, spanned the full range of natural environments from the equator to the Arctic. Colder environments presented a greater number of cognitive challenges, as shown by the inverse correlation between temperature and technological complexity among present-day hunter-gatherer groups (Hoffecker, 2002, p. 10, Figure 1.5). The coldest and most challenging environments existed during the last ice age, and covered northern Eurasia until about 12,000 years ago. Food was potentially abundant but made up largely of “meat on the hoof” – large herds of wandering reindeer and o

  Rotten Meat & Fly Larvae: What You  Aren't Told About Traditional Diets Fermenting seals, botulism, ancestral foods and the use of decaying meat in prehistory Stone Age Herbalist Somewhere around 1950, botulism cases in Alaska began to trend upwards. The disease doesn’t wait long, and after about 15 hours or so the sufferer begins to rapidly lose control of their muscles, spreading downwards in a classic wave of paralysis. Curiously for health officials these new cases of botulism were affecting mostly the Inuit and other indigenous groups such as the Aleuts. Why would this be so? The culprits were eventually identified - putrid seal flippers, a beaver tail left to rot in a bag and then eaten, fermented fish heads buried in the ground. Who would eat this stuff, and why? The next few decades would see modern science come up against traditional circumpolar food knowledge and start to make sense of the problem. As we’ll see, diets around the world are nothing like as standardise

  Imperial Anthropology? America in Afghanistan Counter-insurgency, scholar-soldiers and the failure of the Human Terrain System (2005-2014) STONE AGE HERBALIST The kinetic phase of the war ended. Soldiers and Marines found themselves immersed in an alien culture unable to differentiate friend from foe. Today, the enemy's motives often remain a mystery, and the constant casualties due to the inability to understand the enemy and to predict his actions have been tragically too great… In the late 19th century, the British army developed a habit of sending bright young officers to different regions of the world to study the cultures and live with the local leaders and learn their habits. Names like China Gordon, T.E. Lawrence, I think all testified to the wisdom of that custom, a custom that the British Army continues today. Think about a culture-centric approach to future warfare that creates a cadre of what commonly now has been called global scouts, officers and non-commissioned of