Cicero once said that to be ignorant of what has come before was to remain a child, and our world today we face many challenges as documentaries like Mission Blue and Racing Extinction illustrate: climate change, ocean acidification, mass extinction and the like which points towards a grim Malthusian outcome. However these documentaries always hold out hope that it can change with adaptations made to prevent this outcome, and as can be seen with the meeting of world powers in Paris there is an effort to make those changes. Yet without a full understanding of the process behind these effects, the driving cause cannot be addressed. To understand the origin of agriculture is to find those factors which led to that adaptation and the forming of our modern world system. To achieve a unified theory for the origin of agriculture differing theories need to be considered. For th...
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Have you ever been curious about where the expression 'deaf and dumb' came from? Did you know that Deaf people have their own culture? This paper I wrote when studying ancient medicine explores the roots of western Deaf culture and attempts, as much as possible for a hearing person to do, to view the subject from a Deaf perspective. The Hippocratic view of deafness in the ancient world is based on a philosophical foundation rather than a physiological understanding. In the extant texts there is a clear linking of the function of intelligence to the ability to speak which placed a stigma on the deaf, particularly those deaf prelingually. The scholarship in this area to date has focused on the issue from a hearing perspective; that of deafness as a disability. I argue that the nature of the discussion needs to be changed to one of the roots of Deaf [i] culture in western civilization. The inability of Hippocratic medicine to understand dea...