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Weekly roundup 2/8 (Patreon)

Published:
2026-02-08 19:06:44
Imported:
2026-06

Content

Interesting Tangent

In his world history lecture series, Richard Bulliet talks about a lot of interesting things. One that stuck with me was his ideas on why so few human remains have been found in Africa. He hits on two reasons:

One, since modern humans evolved in Africa, they evolved alongside predators. One likely predator is the hyena. Hyenas, unlike many predators, don't just eat the meat of their prey, they eat the bones too. Completely inconsiderate of future archeologists!

Two, humans, with their little fingernails and relatively weak teeth, aren't going to be great at hunting prey with tough hides. Eventually, widespread tool use helps with this, but until then, what are people doing? Likely, they ate a lot of fish. Fish would have been abundant along any coast, and humans migrating along coastlines helps explain why humans show up in far away places relatively quickly on the prehistory timeline, but take a long time to get to other 'closer' places. And of course, a big chunk of this coastal migration would have been happening during the ice age. As soon as the ice age ends, about 100 meters of sea level rise completely covers all the sites early humans would have occupied (and not just on the African coast).

That's not all that related to Enteria; I just think it's interesting.

Okay, there is sort of a connection. As people expand out and adopt tool use and organized civilizations, they don't really have predators to deal with anymore. I think I've mentioned before that Enteria's history tries to speculate on what civilization looks like when humanity still has to deal with constant predators even after this stage. I always find it interesting to consider a material change in life--usually, some sort of magic or monster--and then think about how that changes the culture, technology, development, and daily life.

Hope everyone's week is going well!

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Comments

Andrew Logan

I have read this before for a paper. It was not in the same words (more boring) but the gist is the same. Another interesting factoid is that bone density has decreased with the modern age. Old human bones were bigger and denser than modern counterparts. Another one I like is that the color Blue was only recently named and old literature never mentions anything like the color. And the color blue is also usually the last one a language makes a word for. Old books like the odyssey describe the ocean as 'wine dark' and never describe the color of the sky.

Chris O

Do you have a list of non-fiction historical books that you recommend, e.g. that fuel these tangents? I’d love to see it, if so.

Uranium Phoenix's Projects
>>202529591

I haven't written up a formal list, but I know I've mentioned at least a few titles in the post about a given tangent. The lecture series in question is still up on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_w7pfulsn8&list=PL49C7AA14331CFEF3

Bacon Macleod
>>202490482

Interestingly, there's a series of distinct stages that languages go through in defining basic colours with individual terms. Stage 1: Light/Dark (black/white) Stage 2: A specific term for red is introduced Things are less defined by their brightness. Darker shades like blue and brown etc are still wrapped into black, yellow etc gets wrapped into red Stage 3+4: Yellow/Green. One gets integrated first, then the other. Blue is usually considered a shade of green, though some languages its wrapped into black (japanese and chinese its covered under the same term as blue historically, though modern japanese has some green specific terms now, one a transliteration from english) Stage 5: Blue Stage 6: Likely brown (as a basic colour term) Interestingly, this is the first stage in english (and other languages) colours are based less on hue, and more on lightness. Eg, brown is mostly just dark green or orange rather than a different slice of the colour wheel. Stage 7: introduces terms for orange, pink, grey or purple Like stage 3/4, these new terms do not follow a direct introductory hierarchy and may involve some or multiple of these. >English is here, with 11 basic colour terms. Stage 8+: further basic colour terms are used to describe varying forms of shades/hues. Eg, having distinct terms for 'light blue' and 'dark blue'. Hebrew, Russian, Hungarian, Turkish, Italian, and a few other languages sit here with 12+ basic colour terms The weird thing is all languages fit this pattern, and follow the same progression. Though, Irish is an interesting exception. They have two separate basic terms for green that differentiate if something is natural or artificially green (and sometimes grey).