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Lewis Dartnell QUOTES

Lewis Dartnell QUOTES

1 " ...the iron in your blood not only links you to the ancient stars that created it in their nuclear forge but also to the magnetic shield around our world that protects life on Earth. "

― Lewis Dartnell , Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History

2 " We are as utterly reliant on fire today as were our Paleolithic ancestors who huddled around a campfire; we've just hidden it behind the scenes of the modern world. "

― Lewis Dartnell , Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History

3 " The most surprising result to come out of these global genetic studies is that the human species is exceedingly uniform. Despite superficial regional differences in hair and skin colour, or skull shape, the genetic diversity among the 7.5 billion humans living in the world today is astonishingly low.30 In fact, there’s more genetic diversity between two groups of chimpanzees living on opposite banks of a river in Central Africa than there is between humans on opposite sides of the world.31 "

― Lewis Dartnell , Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History

4 " In fact, there’s more genetic diversity between two groups of chimpanzees living on opposite banks of a river in Central Africa than there is between humans on opposite sides of the world. "

― Lewis Dartnell , Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History

5 " Correct scientific understanding and ingenious designs aren’t sufficient: you also need a matching level of sophistication in construction materials with the necessary properties and available power sources. "

― Lewis Dartnell , The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch

6 " In human evolution, the development of bipedalism clearly came a long way before significant increases in brain size – we walked the walk before we could talk the talk. "

― Lewis Dartnell , Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History

7 " During the peak of animal use for agriculture in Britain and the United States, which surprisingly occurred as late as ca. 1915 (even though mobile steam engines had existed for fifty years and gasoline-powered tractors were already available), a full third of cultivated land was committed to the upkeep of horses. "

― Lewis Dartnell , The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch

8 " dispose "

― Lewis Dartnell , The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch

9 " For 90 per cent of the planet’s history there has been no fire on Earth. While there were volcanic eruptions, there was not enough oxygen in the atmosphere to sustain combustion. "

― Lewis Dartnell , Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History

10 " South American silver exploited by the Spanish, and handled through European merchants, ultimately financed a monumental building project in India.55 "

― Lewis Dartnell , Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History

11 " the best way for the world to end would be at the hands of a fast-spreading pandemic "

― Lewis Dartnell , The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch

12 " from studying the "

― Lewis Dartnell , Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History

13 " Orogeny is a geological term for the building of a mountain range from subduction or collision of tectonic plates, although disappointingly the adjectival form is 'orogenic' not 'orogenous'. "

― Lewis Dartnell

14 " as the world warmed again after the last glacial maximum and sea levels rose, the Bering land bridge once again disappeared beneath the waves. The connection between Alaska and Siberia was severed, and the Eastern and Western hemispheres were cut off from each other. Lasting contact was not made again between the peoples of the Old World and the New for another 16,000 years, until Columbus set foot on the Caribbean islands in 1492. Genetically similar, but living in different landscapes with access to different plants and animals, these two isolated populations of humanity formed civilisations independently from each other but remarkably similar in their domestication of crops and livestock and the development of agriculture. "

― Lewis Dartnell , Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History

15 " During the ice age around 425,000 years ago (five ice ages before the most recent glaciation) a vast lake of water became trapped between the Scottish and Scandinavian ice sheets and the 30-kilometre-wide ridge of rock then still linking England and France. This lake was filled with meltwater from the ice sheets as well as the discharge from rivers like the Thames and Rhine. And with no outlet to escape through, the water rose and rose, until inevitably it began to spill over the top of the land bridge. These colossal waterfalls scooped out vast plunge pools on the channel floor and gouged backwards through the barrier until this natural dam collapsed. The entire trapped lake emptied itself as a catastrophic megaflood, widening the gaping breach in the barrier and carving the landforms on the floor of the Channel we can see with sonar today. This first megaflood 425,000 years ago "

― Lewis Dartnell , Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History

16 " Pretty much the entire wind pattern on Earth can therefore be explained by three simple facts: the equator is hotter than the poles, warm air rises, and the world spins. "

― Lewis Dartnell , Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History

17 " ploughshares, "

― Lewis Dartnell , The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch

18 " So if you were a survivor with an entire supermarket all to yourself, for how long could you subsist on its contents? Your best strategy would be to consume perishable goods for the first few weeks, and then turn to the dried pasta and rice, as well as the more resilient tuber vegetables, before finally resorting to the most reliable reserve of canned produce. Assuming also that you are careful to keep a balanced diet with the necessary intake of vitamins and fiber (the health supplements aisle will help you here), your body will need 2,000 to 3,000 calories a day, depending on your size, gender, and how active you are. A single average-size supermarket should be able to sustain you for around 55 years—63 if you eat the canned cat and dog food as well. "

― Lewis Dartnell , The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch

19 " In hypothesizing about the potential destruction of all scientific knowledge and what might be done about it, he allowed himself a single statement, to be transmitted securely to whichever intelligent creatures emerged after the cataclysm: What sentence holds the most information in the fewest words? “I believe,” said Feynman, “it is the atomic hypothesis . . . that all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. "

― Lewis Dartnell , The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch

20 " Environmental changes over a much longer timescale can be met by evolution adopting the body or physiology of a species over the generations (such as the camel adopting to constantly arid conditions). Intelligence on the other hand is the evolutionary solution to the problem of an environment that shifts faster than natural selection can adapt the body. "

― Lewis Dartnell , Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History