02/18/19

The Village of One Hundred

If we were to reduce the seven and a half billion people currently residing on the planet, down to only one hundred people and all living in the only village in the world, who would they be? Or rather what would the village initially look like before any changes, which would undoubtedly occur, and if they would survive. Would they get along? Where would the village be? These are questions that could be discussed at extreme length and have been, throughout human history, and when discussing, one could easily fall down into numerous bottomless rabbit-holes. Since we are talking about human nature here, and not just any other far less complicated, but just as intelligent animal on the planet. Roles would obviously change, especially since all the focus would have to be on hunting, gathering and growing, and not spending. As to authority it’d either be one of two eggs, egalitarian or ego. There would also be just as many males and females with alpha, sigma or beta traits. All of which is far too interesting, with most conclusions based on the roll of the dice, for all the permutations, outcomes, and scenarios there would be. For being human is a very complicated affair.

The following statistics were first published in 1992 by the Retired Peace Corps Volunteers of Madison, Wisconsin, in a curriculum entitled “Unheard Voices: Celebrating Cultures from the Developing World”. Shortly thereafter the statistics appeared as an email that continues to be circulated and viewed by millions of people around the world. This updated version includes the detailed research, statistics and source information of the “100 People: A World Portrait, A Global Education Toolbox” project at 100people.org/statistics, first posted in 2016. And also includes a further updated version made in January 2019 by Matt Rosenberg, at thoughtco.com/if-the-world-were-a-village.

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02/7/13

The Age of Myth – Chapter Four

Cro-Magnon, the first anatomically modern man, began to move into Europe about 40,000 years ago, with the skeletal remains of one of its population, found in the cave Pestera Cu Oase, in Romania, and radiocarbon dated to 37,800 years ago. They had broken away from the main group of Homo sapien survivors of the eruption of Mt Toba, 30,000 years previous, who had come out of the Ethiopian highlands and had replaced survivors of the earlier species, Homo erectus, throughout Africa, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. And though they had also made their way to Australia and the Far East, the majority of the Cro-Magnon population lived around the lakes of the Mediterranean basin, which was not a sea yet, North Africa, the Canary Islands, and the Eastern Mediterranean. They had become highly specialized hunters and gatherers and had developed speech, and soon, their own languages, while the environment of wherever they had ended up on the planet would dictate the race of human they would become, with random mutations in our DNA providing the basis of variation. Continue reading →