That Time the Mediterranean Sea Disappeared

PBS Eons

Jan 9, 2020

Download the PBS Video App: https://www.pbs.org/pbs-video-app/
How could a body of water as big as the Mediterranean just…disappear? It would take decades and more than 1,000 research studies to even start to figure out the cause — or causes — of one of the greatest vanishing acts in Earth’s history. Special thanks to everyone at the MEDSALT project, including Aaron Micallef, Daniel Garcia-Castellanos, Angelo Camerlenghi, and Luca Mariani, for allowing us to use their incredible graphics and videos in this episode.

Check out their work here: https://medsalt.eu/ and the full version of their incredible recreation of the MSC and the Zanclean Flood here: https://youtu.be/B5uW7Qg6rXM
This episode was written by Gabi Serrato Marks!

And thanks as always to Ceri Thomas (https://alphynix.tumblr.com/), Julio Lacerda (https://twitter.com/JulioTheArtist) and Franz Anthony (http://franzanth.com/) for their wonderful paleoart used in this episode. Produced in collaboration with PBS Digital Studios: http://youtube.com/pbsdigitalstudios

Super special thanks to the following Patreon patrons for helping make Eons possible: Anthony Callaghan, Jerrit Erickson, shelley floryd, Kevin Griffin, Laura Sanborn, Jack Arbuckle, David Sewall, Anton Bryl, Ben Thorson, Andrey, MissyElliottSmith, Zachary Spencer, Stefan Weber, Ilya Murashov, Robert Amling, Larry Wilson, Merri Snaidman, John Vanek, Esmeralda Rupp-Spangle, Gregory Donovan, Gabriel Cortez, Marcus Lejon, Robert Arévalo, Robert Hill, Todd Dittman, Betsy Radley, PS, Philip Slingerland, Eric Vonk, Henrik Peteri, Jonathan Wright, Jon Monteiro, James Bording, Brad Nicholls, Miles Chaston, Michael McClellan, Jeff Graham, Maria Humphrey, Nathan Paskett, Daisuke Goto, Hubert Rady, Gregory Kintz, Tyson Cleary, Chandler Bass, Joao Ascensao, Tsee Lee, Alex Yan

If you’d like to support the channel, head over to http://patreon.com/eons and pledge for some cool rewards!

Stuart Scott’s Intervention to DeGrowth Colloquium

Facing Future

Sep 3, 2020

I was invited to give a speech at the joint colloquium of the European contact in that regard. With sincere gratitude for Life on Earth, Stuart Scott

Extreme Summer Weather Ravages U.S. | NowThis

NowThis News

Published on Sep 3, 2020

Devastating weather ravaged the U.S. in the summer of 2020, causing destruction from coast to coast — here were the scenes from across the nation.

How big is the universe … compared with a grain of sand?

The Guardian

Feb 12, 2013

How big is the universe … compared with a grain of sand? Subscribe to the Guardian HERE: http://bitly.com/UvkFpD ‘You’ll never get your head around how big the universe is,’ warns astronomer Pete Edwards of the University of Durham in this film about measuring astronomical distances. ‘There are as many stars in the universe as there are grains of sand on the Earth.’ So how far is a light year? And supposing our galaxy were the size of a grain of sand, how big would the universe be?

The Africa Map Circle – a brief introduction

For additional information see: “The Africa Map Circle – Learning & Teaching from Maps of Africa: Historical and Modern.”  and The Africa Map Circle – “Explorations.”

See related:

• Online Research & Teaching with Africa Maps: Tips, Techniques, Examples & Resources – Introductory Web Page
• Online Research & Teaching with Africa Maps: Tips, Techniques, Examples & Resources – Tim Weiskel (PDF)
• Online Research & Teaching with Africa Maps: Tips, Techniques, Examples & Resources – ASA 2020 Online Meeting, 21 November 2020

Male Head, Nok culture

Smarthistory

Mar 13, 2017

Male Head, c. 550-50 B.C.E., Nok culture, Nigeria, terra-cotta, 30/5 x 19.1 x 24.1 cm (The Brooklyn Museum) Speakers: Dr. Peri Klemm and Dr. Beth Harris

Nok – Ein Ursprung afrikanischer Skulptur: Ausstellung in Frankfurt (ancient african art)

Kunst und Film, Mar 12, 2014

Impressionen der Ausstellung “Nok — Ein Ursprung afrikanischer Skulptur” vom 30.10.2013 bis 23.03.2014 im Liebieghaus, Frankfurt/Main.

Nur echt als Scherbenhaufen: Komplette Nok-Figuren aus Nigeria sind meist Fälschungen. Mehr als 2000 Jahre alte Original-Fragmente zeigt das Liebieghaus: ein faszinierender Einblick in eine rätselhafte Kultur, die Afrikas älteste Skulpturen schuf.

Einen ausführlichen Bericht finden Sie bei “Kunst+Film”:
http://kunstundfilm.de/2014/03/nok-ur…

See related:

• Archae-Facts: Don’t Nok it Before You Try it?
• Nok: African Sculpture in Archaeological Context: Peter Breunig
  and
• The Nok Terracotta Enigma

Archae-Facts: Don’t Nok it Before You Try it?

Archaeology Soup

Jul 29, 2015

Welcome to Archae-Facts, the place to find bite-sized chunks of Archaeological Trivia! Today, we consider the validity of an old adage…

Nok: African Sculpture in Archaeological Context: Peter Breunig

https://www.amazon.com/Nok-African-Sculpture-Archaeological-Context/dp/3937248463/ref=ecoethicA/

This book provides insights into the archaeological context of the Nok Culture in Nigeria (West Africa). It was first published in German accompanying the same-titled exhibition Nok – Ein Ursprung afrikanischer Skulptur at the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung in Frankfurt (30th October 2013 – 23rd March 2014) and has now been translated into English. A team of archaeologists from the Goethe University Frankfurt/Main has been researching the Nok Culture since 2005.

The results are now presented to the public. The Nok Culture existed for about 1500 years – from around the mid-second millennium BCE to the turn of the Common Era. It is mainly known by the elaborate terracotta sculptures which were likewise the focus of the exhibition. The research of the archaeologists from Frankfurt, however, not only concerns the terracotta figures. They investigate the Nok Culture from a holistic perspective and put it into the larger context of the search for universal developments in the history of mankind. Such a development – important because it initiated a new era of the past – is the transition from small groups of hunters and gatherers to large communities with complex forms of human co-existence. This process took place almost everywhere in the world in the last 10,000 years, although in very different ways.

The Nok Culture represents an African variant of that process. It belongs to a group of archaeological cultures or human groups, who in part subsisted on the crops they were growing and lived in mostly small but permanent settlements in the savanna regions south of the Sahara from the second millennium BCE onwards. The discovery of metallurgy is the next turning point in the development of the first farming cultures. In Africa the first metal used was not copper or bronze as in the Near East and Europe, but iron. The people of the Nok Culture were among the first that produced iron south of the Sahara.

This happened in the first millennium BCE – about 1000 years after the agricultural beginning. While iron metallurgy spread rapidly across sub-Saharan Africa, the terracotta sculptures remained a cultural monopoly of the Nok Culture. Nothing comparable existed in Africa outside of Ancient Egypt and the Mediterranean coast. The oldest, securely dated clay figures date back to the early first millennium BCE. Currently, it seems as if they appeared in the Nok Culture before iron metallurgy, reaching their peak in the following centuries.

At the end of the first millennium BCE they disappeared from the scene. There is hardly any doubt about the ritual character of the Nok sculptures. Yet, central questions remain unanswered: Why did such an apparently complex world of ritual practices develop in an early farming culture just before or at the beginning of the momentous invention of iron production? Why were the elaborate sculptures – as excavations show – intentionally destroyed? And why did they disappear as suddenly as they emerged?

See related:

• The Nok Terracotta Enigma

NEBO TV – Some sources on the History of Benin, Nigeria