Walls
We're so adept at building walls -- walls to separate 'us' from 'them' -- from the ancient walls of Jericho and the Great Wall of China, to walls of more recent times, built to separate 'us' from 'them', like the Berlin Wall, the India-Pakistan fence, Kuwait-Iraq fence, Korea's DMZ, US-Mexico fence, Zambia-Angola fence, and the fence separating the Turkish and Greek sides of Cyprus. Now Israel is building walls to keep out or in, depending on the way you look at it, the Palestinians and terrorists. Walls are short-term and ill conceived -- they never solve the problem, and eventually, the problem of the Palestinians will need to be solved. (Here's a comparison of the modern walls [PDF].)
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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