Amazon had large cities
Just when you thought we had been everywhere, seen everything and know it all about our world, along comes a discovery like this. Or, just blame it on our Eurocentric view of the world. After all, there was no civilization before Rome. Right. A new report, published in the journal Science, used archeological and satellite evidence to conclude that the northern Amazon was densely populated with an advanced and complex society, that used the forest withour destroying it. They found nineteen evenly spaced villages, that were linked by parallel, straight roads - implying use of mathematics.
The first chef
First came fire ... and then, as the camera shifts to the soon to be late-village idiot, you're left wondering -- just what was going through that mind -- and food is put on the fire, for the first time, and cooking is accidentally discovered by humanity. The first chef is ridiculed by grunts, then the local thug tries a sample of the burnt carcass, and soon, everybody gets queued at the McDonalds drive-thru. What happened? Richard Wrangham of Harvard believes there's more to cooking than evolutionary history would have you believe. Wrangham points out that there is no way homo sapiens could survive on just raw food. Raw food just doesn't give up calories as easily as cooked food -- and raw food makes the digestive system expend more energy to get at those calories. Cooking on the other hand breaks complex molecules down, allowing the digestive system to make easy work of them -- and cooking also softens food, allowing the body to get to the calories with less effort...
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