International Big History Association

With his 12-year, 1250 hour Milky Way composite, astrophotographer J-P Metsavainio has created a masterpiece. Spanning 2,750 square degrees 7% of the entire sky it makes a 1.7 gigapixel photomosaic. Comparatively, over 31 years in space, Hubble’s cumulative ~550,000 images reveal less than 1%. But space confers an advantage: ultra-high resolution. These 10 examples showcase how space telescopes compare to this composite. Over the past week, a beautiful composite of the ...central Milky Way, representing a enormous 7% of the entire sky visible from Earth, has gone viral. The culmination of 12 years of work from astrophotographer J-P Metsavainio, it’s truly something to behold. But many of the objects he’s captured have also been captured by some of humanity’s greatest space telescopes. Want to see the comparison and the difference for yourself? It’s an entirely novel way to look at the Universe, and one where images tell almost the full story themselves!

The world’s oldest known wooden sculpture a nine-foot-tall totem pole thousands of years old looms over a hushed chamber of an obscure Russian museum in the Ural Mountains, not far from the Siberian border. As mysterious as the huge stone figures of Easter Island, the Shigir Idol, as it is called, is a landscape of uneasy spirits that baffles the modern onlooker. Dug out of a peat bog by gold miners in 1890, the relic, or what’s left of it, is carved from a great slab of ...freshly cut larch. Scattered among the geometric patterns (zigzags, chevrons, herringbones) are eight human faces, each with slashes for eyes that peer not so benignly from the front and back planes. The topmost mouth, set in a head shaped like an inverted teardrop, is wide open and slightly unnerving. The face at the very top is not a passive one, said Thomas Terberger, an archaeologist and head of research at the Department of Cultural Heritage of Lower Saxony, in Germany. Whether it screams or shouts or sings, it projects authority, possibly malevolent authority. It’s not immediately a friend of yours, much less an ancient friend of yours. In archaeology, portable prehistoric sculpture is called mobiliary art. With the miraculous exception of the Shigir Idol, no Stone Age wood carvings survive. The statue’s age was a matter of conjecture until 1997, when it was carbon-dated by Russian scientists to about 9,500 years old, an age that struck most scholars as fanciful. Skeptics argued that the statue’s complex iconography was beyond the reach of the hunter-gatherer societies at the time; unlike contemporaneous works from Europe and Asia featuring straightforward depictions of animals and hunt scenes, the Shigir Idol is decorated with symbols and abstractions. https://www.nytimes.com//sc/archaeology-shigir-idol-.html

How did it all begin...? 5th NoRCEL conference - a virtual event on 29-30 March 2021 Public evening lectures jointly hosted by StA-CES and NoRCEL: Jorge VagoMonday 29 March, 19:30 BST: Jorge Vago, European Space Agency... "Searching for Signs of Life on Mars with the ExoMars Rover" Lowell GustafsonTuesday 30 March, 19:30 BST: Lowell Gustafson, Villanova University "Origins of Life Within Big History: Meanings for Humanity" https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/exoplanets/

Amazing what science and dating of events via bone scans and such can tell us about history now. Much is known about this standard-bearer. During excavations at El Palmar, a small plaza compound in Mexico near the borders of Belize and Guatemala, archaeologists led by Kenichiro Tsukamoto, an assistant professor of anthropology at UC Riverside, discovered a hieroglyph-adorned stairway leading up to a ceremonial platform. When deciphered, the hieroglyphs revealed that in June, 726 CE, Ajpach' Waal traveled and met the king of Copán, 350 miles away in Honduras, to forge an alliance with the king of Calakmul, near El Palmar. https://phys.org//2021-03-ancient-maya-ambassador-bones-li

David Christian | Education revolution with Big History What kind of education will our children need to prepare them to manage a planet? In his talk at the 2021 Frontiers Forum Speaker Series, David argues for an education revolution through teaching Big History a wide-angle approach to history covering 4.5 billion years and multiple disciplines, illuminating the complex connections between people and the Earth’s natural processes. ... David co-founded the Big History Project with Bill Gates, authored the New York Times bestseller Origin Story, and created Coursera’s 5-star Big History course. David's talk took place on March 2, 2021, and was attended by over 3,000 representatives from science, policy and business. The Frontiers Forum showcases science-led solutions for healthy lives on a healthy planet. https://youtu.be/JhowXxz_uAs

SAMBAVA, Madagascar Madagascar has always been one of the best places on Earth to study the natural world. Seventy percent of its species are found nowhere else the largest concentration of endemic wildlife anywhere. In the last 10 years alone, scientists have discovered 40 new mammals, 69 amphibians, 61 reptiles, 42 invertebrates and 385 plants in the country. Its parks are ecotourism destinations and points of national pride. With the world’s largest concentration of en...dangered species, Madagascar is also a leading place to study extinction. Last year the country lost the greatest percentage of primary forest, making it one of the most deforested places on Earth. Since 2012 the International Union for Conservation of Nature has named lemurs, which are found only in Madagascar, as the world’s most endangered group of animals, with 95 percent either threatened or endangered. Poaching, farming, charcoal cultivation and illegal logging have placed enormous pressure on the country’s wildlife. The next looming danger is climate change; in Madagascar and across the world, warming temperatures threaten to push wildlife out of the conservation areas created to protect it. The land that was set aside yesterday might not be right for tomorrow, requiring scientists to think outside traditional park borders. Parks and large tracts of land are the core of how we save stuff, said Timothy Male, the executive director of a Washington, D.C., think tank called the Environmental Policy Innovation Center. But, he added, small, local parks tend to be where a lot of dynamism happens. The Sambava region of northern Madagascar is home to both sprawling national parks and a growing network of locally run reserves. For decades many forests were protected simply by their hillsides, seemingly too steep to farm. But in the last five years, prices for vanilla, which thrives on slopes, have increased tenfold to $300 per pound, prompting a rush for hillside land. Erik Patel, a primatologist with Lemur Conservation Foundation, and Desiré Rabary, a manager in the organization, are trying to document how many lemurs remain in the region and where they are, sometimes one animal at a time. In August 2019, they planned an expedition to Antohakalava, a privately owned park just twice the size of Central Park in New York. Dr. Patel had heard that it held three critically endangered lemur species. These animals are really sensitive, Dr. Patel said. If you can protect them where they’re at, there are a lot of advantages to doing so. Dr. Patel once dreamed of studying the great apes of Africa, as Jane Goodall or Frans de Waal did, but he got hooked on lemurs in the late 1990s and has worked in Madagascar ever since. https://www.nytimes.com//madagascar-lemurs-climate-change.

https://cosmosmagazine.com//georges-lemaitre-comes-in-wi/

Implications of Cosmic Silence By; Dr. Albert Gottlieb, AAI Member

First Temple Period Weight Found Next to Western Wall in Jerusalem The inscribed two-shekel weight was likely used more than 2,600 years ago in a market at the foot of the Temple where pilgrims bought animals for sacrifices and other goods Israeli archaeologists digging the foundations of the Western Wall in Jerusalem have uncovered a two-shekel weight that was used more than 2,600 years ago during the First Temple period....Continue reading

Carl Sagan’s letter to Chuck Berry.

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Interested in learning more about Big History? Join the International Big History Association on Saturday, November 28th for the next online event. Registration is capped at 100 people. Message me if you want more details.

I thought I had done well jogging a few miles this weekend. https://gizmodo.com/record-breaking-bird-just-flew-nonstop-

https://jbh.journals.villanova.edu/issue/view/187

Matthew Malkan is a Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy at UCLA. After graduating Harvard with summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa honors, Dr. Matthew Malkan studied at the University of Cambridge as a Marshall Scholar. He received his PhD from Caltech on a Hertz Fellowship, and was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Arizona. Upon starting his Assistant Professorship at UCLA, Dr. Malkan was a Presidential Young Investigator from 1986 to 1991. He h...as been Professor of Physics and Astronomy at UCLA since 1992. In 2009, Malkan was the AMC-FUMEC Distinguished Visiting Professor in Mexico. He has published over 450 refereed articles in peer-reviewed journals, and has worked extensively on astronomy-related film and television shows, behind and in front of the camera. Malkan uses a wide range of telescopes in space and on the ground to study the evolution of galaxies and their massive black holes. Ben Zuckerman is a Professor in the Dept. of Physics & Astronomy at UCLA. He received undergraduate and graduate degrees from MIT and Harvard. His major scientific interests have been the birth and death of stars and planetary systems. He has maintained a continuing interest in the question of the prevalence of life especially intelligent life in the Universe and, beginning way back in the mid-1970s, developed and regularly taught a course on Life in the Universe. He also developed and taught a UCLA Honors course entitled The 21st Century: Society, Environment, Ethics. He believes that while our species (Homo sapiens) may be considered to be technological, because we are destroying our home Earth’s biosphere we cannot be considered to be intelligent. Zuckerman has co-edited six books including, Extraterrestrials, Where Are They? (Cambridge University Press) and Human Population and the Environmental Crisis (Jones & Bartlett). https://www.eventbrite.com/e/book-launch-origin-and-evoluti

Early Humans in Today’s Israel Used Ash as Their ‘Freezer’ Archaeological analysis of 300,000-year-old stone tools from Qesem Cave shows hominins treated food and animal hides with wood ash from their fires in order to preserve them for a rainy day Prehistoric hominins did not have refrigerators, but some 300,000 years ago they figured out a way to preserve their perishables for as long as months using wood ash, archaeologists have discovered....Continue reading