Category: History

History as Empathic Ecology: Edith Stein and the Practice of Ecological Empathy

There are moments in academic life when a concept stops being merely theoretical and becomes a lived practice. My presentation this past week at Christendom College’s Eternity In Time (Thinking With the Church Through History) conference on Edith Stein and what I’ve been calling ecological empathy has been one of those moments for me. My conference presentation is below if you’d like to read it, and I’ll post the full, longer paper shortly.

What began as a phenomenological question about how we know another’s experience is real has slowly widened into a question about how we inhabit history, land, and the more-than-human world at all.

Stein’s early work On the Problem of Empathy is often read within psychology or philosophy of mind. But her insight cuts much deeper. Empathy, for Stein, is not projection and not detached observation (probably my best post about this concept so far). It is a distinctive act in which another’s experience becomes present to me as other. I do not become the other, and I do not reduce them to an object. Instead, I encounter a real center of experience that exceeds me.

This structure has profound implications beyond interpersonal ethics. It suggests that knowing is always relational, always asymmetrical, and always grounded in encounter rather than mastery.

From Historical Method to Empathic Participation

In my talk, I suggested that if we take Stein seriously, history itself becomes an empathic practice.

Modern historical method often imagines itself as neutral reconstruction: gather sources, analyze context, produce explanation. But Stein’s phenomenology invites a different posture. The past is not merely a dataset. It is the trace of lived experience. To study history responsibly is therefore not just to explain events but to encounter the lives, intentions, and worlds that once unfolded within them.

This does not mean sentimental identification. Stein explicitly resists that. Instead, it means acknowledging that historical understanding involves a disciplined openness to experiences that are irreducibly not our own.

History, in this sense, becomes a form of relational knowledge… a practice of attending to the presence of others across time.

The Creaturely Horizon

Where this becomes especially compelling for my own work is when we widen the circle of empathy beyond human history.

If empathy is the recognition of another center of experience that is not reducible to me, then ecological awareness begins to look like an expansion of empathic perception. Landscapes, species, watersheds, and ecosystems are not simply backdrops to human drama. They are fields of lived processes, histories, and agencies that exceed human intention.

This is what I’ve been calling the creaturely horizon. It is the recognition that human life always unfolds within a wider community of beings whose existence is not defined by our narratives, economies, or theologies, even though those systems constantly attempt to do just that.

Here in the Carolina Piedmont, this is not abstract. The Pacolet (and Tyger) watershed near our home carries layers of agricultural history, Indigenous displacement, industrial transformation, and ongoing ecological stress. To walk along its edges is to encounter not just scenery but a dense historical and ecological presence. The river is not an object of study alone. It is a participant in a shared world.

Ecological empathy begins precisely at this point: when perception shifts from viewing land as resource to encountering it as a living historical partner.

Empathy, Ecology, and the Limits of Control

One of Stein’s most important contributions is her insistence that empathy preserves difference. The other never becomes fully transparent to me. There is always excess, always depth, always opacity.

Ecologically, this insight is crucial.

Many environmental crises emerge from the illusion that the world can be fully known, predicted, and controlled. Industrial agriculture, extractive economies, and technocratic planning all rely on the assumption that complexity can be reduced to manageable variables.

Stein’s phenomenology undermines this posture at its root. If genuine knowing involves encountering another reality that exceeds my grasp, then ecological knowledge must also involve humility. The more we understand ecosystems, the more we encounter their irreducible complexity.

Ecological empathy therefore does not produce domination. It produces attentiveness, patience, and restraint.

It shifts the question from “How do we manage this system?” to “How do we live responsibly within a world that is not ours alone?”

Toward an Ecological Practice of History

This perspective also reframes the study of Church history, theology, and religious tradition, which has been central to my recent work.

Too often, religious history is narrated as a story of doctrines, institutions, or human conflicts. But if we read it empathically and ecologically, we begin to see something else: traditions emerge within landscapes, climates, agricultural systems, and material constraints. Monastic rhythms follow seasonal cycles. Liturgical calendars mirror ecological time. Theologies of creation reflect lived encounters with land and weather as much as abstract metaphysics.

To study religious history responsibly is therefore to attend not only to texts and ideas but to the ecological worlds in which they were lived.

History, then, becomes not just human memory but a layered field of creaturely relations.

Ecological Empathy as Spiritual Practice

For me, this is not only an academic argument. It is also a spiritual practice.

Ecological empathy begins in small acts of attention. Watching how light changes across the backyard in late afternoon. Noticing the seasonal shifts in the black walnut tree I’ve been tracking. Listening to the sounds of insects returning in early spring. These are not sentimental exercises. They are ways of training perception to recognize the presence of other lives unfolding alongside ours.

Stein helps clarify that empathy is not something we manufacture emotionally. It is something we cultivate perceptually. It begins with learning to encounter others as real.

In a time of ecological crisis, this shift may be more urgent than any policy proposal. Laws and technologies matter. But without transformed perception, they remain fragile.

Ecological empathy invites us to inhabit the world differently… not as managers standing outside it, but as participants within a shared, creaturely history.

Conference Presentation Text

History as Empathic Ecology: Edith Stein and the Creaturely Horizon of Catholic Memory

Sam Harrelson
Christendom College, Feb 2026

Conference Presentation Script

Good afternoon, and thank you for the invitation to be part of this conversation.

Pope Francis recently called for a renewed study of Church history, warning against what he described as an “overly angelic conception of the Church,” one that forgets her spots, wrinkles, and historical embeddedness. His concern is not simply methodological. It is pastoral and ethical. If the Church forgets her historical entanglement with the world, she risks forgetting her responsibility within it.

Today I want to suggest that Edith Stein’s phenomenology of empathy offers a surprisingly powerful way to rethink what it means to study Church history at all. My claim is simple:
If we take Stein seriously, history becomes not only an intellectual discipline but also an empathetic practice… and potentially an ecological one.

Stein’s early work On the Problem of Empathy asks a deceptively basic question: how do we know another’s experience is real?

Her answer resists both projection and detachment. Empathy, for Stein, is neither imagining the other as myself nor observing them as an object. It is a distinctive act in which another’s experience is given to me as genuinely theirs… irreducibly other, yet meaningfully accessible.

Empathy therefore has structure. It involves:

First, the recognition of another as a subject.
Second, an entry into the meaning of their experience.
And third, a return to oneself, now transformed by that encounter.

This is not merely psychology. It is a phenomenology of relational knowing. We come to truth not by standing outside relationships, but by entering them responsibly.

What happens if we bring this insight into the study of Church history?

Too often, historical study oscillates between two poles.

On one side, there is triumphalist narration: the Church as a seamless unfolding of divine purpose.
On the other, there is purely critical detachment: the Church as a sociological object to be explained from the outside.

Both approaches, in different ways, fail Stein’s test. One collapses alterity into ideology. The other refuses encounter altogether.

A Steinian approach to Church history would instead treat the past as something we must empathically encounter.

To study a council, a missionary movement, a devotional practice, or a theological dispute is not only to catalog events. It is to ask:
What worlds of meaning were lived here?
What fears, hopes, and constraints shaped these actions?
What forms of life were made possible… and what forms were foreclosed?

History, in this sense, becomes an act of disciplined attentiveness to lived experience across time.

But Stein’s framework pushes us further than this.

Because once empathy is understood as an openness to real otherness, we face a deeper question:

Who counts as the “other” in historical understanding?

Stein herself focuses primarily on human persons. Yet the structure she identifies does not logically stop there. The Church’s history has always unfolded not only among human actors but within landscapes, climates, material resources, animals, and built environments.

The monasteries of medieval Europe were shaped by forests, rivers, and agricultural cycles.

Missionary expansion often followed trade routes, mineral extraction, and imperial ecologies.

Liturgical art depends on pigments, wood, stone, and labor drawn from specific places.

These are not background conditions. They are part of the creaturely field in which Christian history becomes possible.

If Stein teaches us that knowledge requires acknowledging the real presence of the other, then historical study must also attend to these more-than-human participants in the Church’s story.

This is what I call empathic ecology… or, in my broader work, ecological intentionality.

Here the tradition itself offers companions for Stein.

Hildegard of Bingen’s notion of viriditas, the greening vitality of creation, portrays divine life as manifest in the flourishing of the natural world. For Hildegard, spiritual history and ecological vitality are inseparable.

In contemporary theology, Leonardo Boff’s integral ecology similarly insists that Christian ethics cannot be disentangled from the well-being of Earth’s systems and communities.

Stein provides the phenomenological grammar that helps explain why these insights matter methodologically. If understanding requires empathic openness to real others, then historical truth demands attention not only to human intentions but to the material and ecological conditions that co-shaped them.

Let me offer one brief example.

In the nineteenth century, European engagement with the ancient Near East brought Assyrian reliefs and artifacts into Western museums and theological discourse. These objects were treated as confirmations of biblical history and symbols of civilizational continuity.

Yet their removal also depended on imperial infrastructures, environmental extraction, and the displacement of local cultural ecologies. The Church’s encounter with these artifacts cannot be understood fully without recognizing the ecological and political networks that enabled their movement.

A purely doctrinal history might note the apologetic value of these discoveries.
A purely political history might critique imperial appropriation.

A Steinian, empathic-ecological history asks something more layered:
What worlds of meaning were opened and closed here… for scholars, for local communities, and for the landscapes themselves?

Such questions do not dilute historical rigor. They deepen it.

What does this mean for Catholic higher education today?

If Church history is taught merely as a sequence of events or doctrines, students may inherit either nostalgia or cynicism.

But if history is taught as an empathic encounter with the lived, creaturely reality of the Church across time, it can cultivate something else entirely: humility, responsibility, and solidarity.

Students begin to see that the Church’s past is not an untouchable monument. It is a field of relationships still shaping our present obligations.

In this way, historical study becomes formative rather than merely informative. It trains perception. It forms conscience. It prepares a mode of witness that is less triumphalist and more cruciform… grounded in attention to vulnerability, interdependence, and the real costs of historical action.

Let me close with this thought.

Edith Stein teaches that empathy is not sentimental identification. It is a disciplined openness to the reality of another. It changes how we know, and therefore how we act.

If we bring that insight into the study of Church history, we may discover that the task is not simply to remember what the Church has done.

The deeper task is to learn how to perceive the Church’s past truthfully… within the full web of human and creaturely relations that made it possible.

Such perception does not weaken faith. It grounds it.

And perhaps this is precisely what Pope Francis is asking of us:
not a history that idealizes the Church,
but one that helps the Church inhabit time… and the living world… with deeper honesty, responsibility, and hope.

Thank you.

Does The Public Not Want to Hear It?

I’m going to stay out of this conversation/debate, but I do find it immensely fascinating as someone who has published a book on Assyrian artifacts sold and imported into US schools, such as Harvard and Yale, for religious purposes (and 19th-century “Assyromania”)…

Real Egyptology? The Public Doesn’t Want to Hear It | Egyptian Streets:

No other field that I know of, other than Egyptology, can gather so many pseudo-historians and alleged experts. A long-life reader or avid enthusiast can pass as an expert, amassing  millions of subscribers on YouTube or enjoying airtime on television. We would never treat any other profession the same way.

My friends and acquaintances take pleasure in sending me YouTube videos of ‘pyramids generating electricity’ or ‘evidence of long civilizations’.

Every other video I received has to have the word ‘secret’ or ‘mystery’ slapped on it as if Egyptologists and archeologists are steadfast gatekeepers of what is actually widely disseminated knowledge.

SciFi Predictions

Fun read here for fans of science fiction like myself…

Among the Prophets | Nicholas Russell:

For the past few months, I’ve been researching how science fiction has been used as a guide for predicting the future. This has included reading interviews and speeches, the testimony of would-be prophets. Naturally, certain quotes pop up like weeds—but, in the case of the more platitudinal selections, no one can seem to agree on who actually said them. “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future” was either coined by Danish physicist Niels Bohr or mythic Yankees catcher Yogi Berra. It’s entirely possible both men did, in fact, say some variation of the quote, though it’s more likely that Bohr, who was forty years older, said it first. But then again, he may not have said it at all.

Daimons, Demons, and Discernment

I’ve been following conversations (such as this one on Reddit) around UAPs and “high strangeness” with a mix of fascination and caution for a few years now. Part of that comes from my work in and around academic consciousness studies, particularly where ecology, perception, and meaning intersect. Part of it comes from being an ordained pastor with a Masters from Yale in ancient religious literature who has spent 30+ years reading and academically studying ancient religious texts (mainly Ancient Near Eastern as well as Jewish, Greek, and Christian) that modern people often misunderstand as either naïve or hysterical.

A recent Substack essay by Maze to Metanoia, “The Pentagon Calls Them Demons. The Public Calls Them Aliens. Both Are Wrong.”, crystallizes many of these tensions well.

The piece traces how some government and military insiders have evidently described UAP phenomena not as extraterrestrial, but as “demonic,” while arguing that this language reflects a collapse of conceptual nuance rather than genuine discernment. I’m broadly sympathetic to that concern, especially the frustration with oscillating between reductionist materialism that modern scientific thinking takes on phenomena and experience, and reactionary supernaturalism that gets classified in modern parlance as “woo.”

But I also think something more subtle is happening and that’s why I’ve long been fascinated with “the phenomenon” or “UFO / UAP” or transdimensional entities or whatever tag we’d like to use for these experiences.

Was “demonic” language really a regression?

There’s a common assumption that invoking demons signals a return to medieval superstition. Historically, however, religious traditions were often far more phenomenologically careful and nuanced than we give them credit for (from Sumerian and Babylonian traditions through medieval mystics in both Jewish and Christian traditions). Early Jewish, Greek, and Christian sources did not assume that every non-human encounter was evil. What they assumed was that such encounters required discernment, ethical scrutiny, and attention to long-term outcomes rather than fascination, power, or spectacle (or immediate worship).

The question was rarely “what is this thing?” in the abstract. It was “how does this encounter shape desire, attention, humility, fear, or care for others?” Those traditions were less interested in cataloging beings than in evaluating relationships. We see this in Ezekiel, Enoch (the beloved book of many podcasters these days, such as Joe Rogan, when describing ancient conceptions of this phenomenon), ancient Greek texts, ancient Hindu scripture, etc.

Our difficulty today is not that we’ve lost belief in demons or angels. It’s that modernity trained us to reduce experience to either brute matter or fantasy. Or, perhaps worse, to a thin modern notion of “myth” that bears almost no resemblance to how ancient cultures understood symbolic or participatory reality/realities.

When that reduction collapses under the weight of lived experience, what people now call “high strangeness,” the nearest available language is often moralized, flattened, and extreme. Everything becomes either benevolent space saviors or literal demons from hell, and nuance disappears.

Daimons were never monsters

The retrieval of the Greek concept of daimōn is helpful here, if we handle it carefully. In Plato’s Symposium and Apology, Socrates speaks of daimons not as horned villains, but as mediating presences that operate between gods and humans, shaping conscience, attention, and orientation toward the good. They were not objects of worship, nor simply metaphysical species to be classified. They were relational realities that required discernment.

Later Christian thinkers inherited this complexity more than is often acknowledged. While the category of “demon” hardened over time as did some doctrines, early Christian writers were deeply concerned with testing spirits, examining fruits, and resisting fascination. The danger was not that non-human encounters existed, but that humans would become captivated, destabilized, or morally disoriented by them.

This emphasis on discernment persists well into medieval mysticism. Figures such as Evagrius Ponticus, John Cassian, Hildegard of Bingen, and later Teresa of Ávila were all deeply wary of visions and encounters that bypassed humility, patience, and care for others. Spectacle was suspect while psychological destabilization mattered. In this way, ethical aftermath mattered more than ontological explanation.

Pasulka and technological mysticism

Diana Walsh Pasulka’s work has been especially clarifying for me here. In American Cosmic (interesting read!) and subsequent essays, she documents how contemporary UAP encounters function less like technological contact events and more like religious disclosures

Experiencers often reach for the language of craft, technology, or engineering, but the structure of the experience itself closely resembles mystical visions. They are disruptive, meaning-laden, psychologically destabilizing, and interpretively plastic. The language changes with the cultural moment, but the phenomenological pattern remains strikingly consistent.

This does not make the experiences “supernatural” in a simplistic sense. It does suggest that engineering metaphors alone are insufficient. The encounters are not just about information transfer or hardware. They are about being addressed.

The daimonic as a stance, not an ontology

For that reason, I’d frame the daimonic not as a third ontological category alongside aliens (or angels) and demons, but as a disciplinary stance. It names encounters with beings or phenomena that address us, shape desire, solicit attention, and reorient meaning without being reducible to either hardware or hallucination.

This aligns closely with phenomenological approaches to consciousness, which bracket premature explanations to attend carefully to how experience presents itself, how it affects perception, and how it alters relational posture over time. I’ve written elsewhere about this in the context of ecological intentionality and vegetal empathy, where the question is not whether trees or ecosystems “have consciousness” in a technical sense, but how learning to attend differently reshapes ethical life.

Ancient traditions were often more patient than we are. They assumed that some aspects of reality disclose themselves slowly through disciplined attention rather than through spectacle or proof.

Slowing down instead of swinging wildly

If modern discourse around this issue (and many others!) could recover that slower, ethical, wary posture, one that resists fascination and immediate worship, we would be in a far healthier place than swinging between cosmic alien saviors and cosmic demonic enemies. Discernment is restraint, not denial.

Socrates trusted his daimon, according to Plato, not because it dazzled him, but because it restrained him. Christian mystics trusted experiences that produced humility, patience, and love of neighbor, not fear, obsession, or special knowledge. Ecology teaches something similar. Attention that rushes to mastery often destroys what it seeks to understand.

Whatever these phenomena ultimately are, ancient wisdom suggests that the most important question is not what they are made of, but what kind of relationship they invite, and at what cost. That feels like a lesson worth recovering to me, whether discussing the fascinating phenomenon, politics, community ethics, or our broader ecologies.

Early Mathematical Thinking

I have a hunch mathematical thinking goes waaaayyy back into our human (and more-than-human) ancestry…

Ancient Pottery Shows Humans Were Doing Math 3,000 Years Before Numbers Existed – The Debrief:

Long before humans carved numbers into clay tablets or scratched equations onto stone, people in the ancient Near East were already dividing space, counting patterns, and thinking in mathematical sequences—without ever writing a single numeral.

Evidence for this surprisingly prehistoric mathematical thinking doesn’t come from proto-calculators or tally sticks, but from something far more familiar: pottery.

Dispersal of Domestic Cats to Europe

Cat lovers in Britain have the Roman Army to thank for their feline friends, evidently… interesting study!

The dispersal of domestic cats from North Africa to Europe around 2000 years ago | Science:

European samples that cluster with domestic cats only appear in the 1st century CE, suggesting a later dispersal of domestic cats than previously thought. Although broader sampling is needed, this study shows the complexity of population dynamics that is often revealed when looking beyond mitochondrial DNA

Ancient Greeks and Romans on Environmental Harm

Interesting readings from ancient voices and the connection between ecological intentionality and human health / wellbeing…

Ancient Greeks and Romans knew harming the environment could change the climate:

Since at least the fourth century BC, the ancient Greeks and Romans recognised that the climate changes over time and that human activity can cause it.

Oldest Known Figurine to Depict an Encounter Between a Human and a More-Than-Human

Fascinating find!

A clay figurine unveils a storytelling shift from 12,000 years ago (Science News):

A roughly 12,000-year-old clay figurine unearthed in northern Israel has unveiled a surprisingly ancient turning point in storytelling and artistic techniques.

This tiny item, which fits in the palm of an adult’s hand, represents the oldest known figurine to depict an encounter between a human and a nonhuman animal, say archaeologist Laurent Davin of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and colleagues. Meticulous sculpting captured a mythological scene involving a goose and a woman, the scientists report November 17 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Overnight at USS Yorktown with Ben

Ben and I are just getting back from his Scouts trip and overnight at the USS Yorktown in Charleston. I’ve been to the Yorktown several times over the years and have done overnight stays on the ship with middle school groups I’ve taught, but getting to spend the last few days with my son on board was such a great experience.

Sitting in the theater watching The Fighting Lady: The Lady And The Sea (1945) with him last night and hearing how silent and engaged all the boys were during the movie about the ship’s early role in WWII was incredibly moving (warning, there’s some ethnic and racial slurs in the film as was the style of the time, but it’s still an interesting timepiece).

I’m also glad to see Gov. McMaster taking seriously the ongoing pollution from the aging ship and working on ways to remediate some of it to protect the incredible beauty and diversity of Charleston Harbor’s ecosystem, which was in the news this week! We enjoyed watching the dolphins play in the water this morning, and I hope that unique area thrives for many more decades and centuries to come.

Lead has been with a very long time

Fascinating new info…

Hominins suffered lead poisoning starting at least 2 million years ago – Ars Technica:

Lead exposure sounds like a modern problem, at least if you define “modern” the way a paleoanthropologist might: a time that started a few thousand years ago with ancient Roman silver smelting and lead pipes. According to a recent study, however, lead is a much more ancient nemesis, one that predates not just the Romans but the existence of our genus Homo. Paleoanthropologist Renaud Joannes-Boyau of Australia’s Southern Cross University and his colleagues found evidence of exposure to dangerous amounts of lead in the teeth of fossil apes and hominins dating back almost 2 million years. And somewhat controversially, they suggest that the toxic element’s pervasiveness may have helped shape our evolutionary history…

…But perhaps its most interesting feature is that modern humans have a version of the gene that differs by a single amino acid from the version found in all other primates, including our closest relatives, the Denisovans and Neanderthals. This raises the prospect that the difference is significant from an evolutionary perspective. Altering the mouse version so that it is identical to the one found in modern humans does alter the vocal behavior of these mice.

Here’s some new thought technology

How am I just now reading this?? I should OF read it years ago as a teacher…

Would of, could of, might of, must of | Sentence first:

Unstressed ’ve is phonetically identical (/əv/) to unstressed of: hence the widespread misspellings would of, could of, should of, must of, might of, may of, and ought to of. Negative forms also appear: shouldn’t of, mightn’t of, etc. This explanation – that misanalysis of the notorious schwa lies behind the error – has general support among linguists.

R.I.P. Jane Goodall

Jane Goodall, legendary primatologist, has died at age 91 : NPR:

In just a few months, Goodall a made a major discovery. Chimps could make and use tools — as she learned by watching a chimp she’d named David Greybeard. (Goodall has called him “my favorite chimpanzee of all time.”) He stripped leaves off a twig, then used it to fish termites out of a mound. Goodall later told NPR that her mentor, Louis Leakey, was impressed.

“He said, ‘Well, it’s always been considered that man is the only toolmaking animal. So we now have to redefine tool, redefine man, or include chimpanzees with humans,’ ” she recalled.

Civilizations of Africa Review by Eleanor Konik

Wonderful review and reflection here by Eleanor Konik… highly suggest you read:

📚 REVIEW: Civilizations of Africa, A History to 1800:

Back in 2021, I asked the folks at r/AskHistorians for a good primer on African history. One of the moderators recommended The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800 by Christopher Ehret. I got it from the library and took extensive notes. I regret not just buying a copy from Amazon (affiliate link) because it’s probably the reference note1 I look back at most often. A friend of mine asked me to write a review for it, and I’ve been meaning to put my thoughts together and really process these notes in a high-level way for years, so let’s go.

Caligula as a Pharmacology Nerd

We still have lots to learn from the ancients… I’m hoping AI will help us process some of the lessons we’ve forgotten over the millennia, particularly with pharmacology…

Ancient Rome’s Most Notorious Emperor Was Also a Medicine Nerd, New Study Reveals (art net):

Conventional wisdom suggests Caligula was a madman, hence the apocryphal story of appointing his horse as a senator. But despite his character, and questionable sanity, Caligula was also man of great intellect and learning with a particularly keen knowledge of pharmacology. This is the conclusion of Andrew Koh and Trevor Luke, faculty in the Yale Ancient Pharmacology Program, who have delved into the unflattering histories concerning Caligula and found an Emperor who knew his medicinal plants.

Dead Sea Scrolls and AI

Fascinating (and much needed) work here on texts that still have much to teach us…

Many of Dead Sea scrolls may be older than thought, experts say | Archaeology | The Guardian:

“Overall, this is an important and welcome study, and one which may provide us with a significant new tool in our armoury for dating these texts,” he said. “Nevertheless, it’s one that we should adopt with caution, and in careful conjunction with other evidence.”

Origins of Human Use of Fire? 🔥

Lately, I’ve been thinking and writing about human uses and conceptions of fire in relation to liturgy, language, and ecologies. Research such as this about early uses of fire as technology (and I would include language, spirituality, and mythologies in there) has fascinated me recently as a result…

Stone age BBQ: How early humans may have preserved meat with fire:

Prof. Barkai explains, “The origins of fire use is a ‘burning’ topic among prehistory researchers around the world. It is generally agreed that by 400,000 years ago, fire use was common in domestic contexts—most likely for roasting meat, and perhaps also for lighting and heating.

“However, there is controversy regarding the preceding million years, and various hypotheses have been put forward to explain why early humans began using fire. In this study, we sought to explore a new perspective on the issue.”

Anglo-Saxons Fought in Syria and Iraq

Anglo-Saxons may have fought in northern Syrian wars, say experts | Archaeology | The Guardian:

“These finds put the Anglo-Saxon princes and their followers centre-stage in one of the last great wars of late antiquity. It takes them out of insular England into the plains of Syria and Iraq in a world of conflict and competition between the Byzantines and the Sasanians and gave those Anglo-Saxons literally a taste for something much more global than they probably could have imagined.

It adds an international dimension to those sites. We have looked at the Anglo-Saxons in a rather insular manner.”

Rome’s Colosseum as a Garden

Beautiful thoughts here about modern architecture…

Rome’s Colosseum Was Once a Wild, Tangled Garden – The Atlantic:

Plants growing today in the Colosseum include very rare species like Asphodelus fistulosus and Sedum dasyphyllum, which scientists believe can only survive when sheltered by the arena, a sanctuary from the urban environment outside. Due to increased pollution and the rising temperature of the city, the flora inside the ruined walls are beginning to change: Plants suited to a warmer and more arid climate are beginning to proliferate at the expense of those more used to cool and damp.

Inside a Genius Mind: Leonardo’s Notebooks

Amazing web app here (bottom link to direct Google Experiment) focused on major themes in Leonardo’s notebooks and connecting them with machine learning. I’m a huge fan of notebooks, and I use the example of Leonardo keeping his thoughts in them all the time with my own students.

If you’re like me and really into Leonardo’s “notebooking” practices and history, I highly suggest you check out the videos Adam Savage has done on his Tested YouTube channel. Wonderful and inspiring videos. May we all find something that moves us in such a way!

Leonardo da Vinci: Inside a genius mind post:

From the stages of his life to dispelling myths, and examining his masterpieces up close, everyone can delve into Leonardo’s mind as we’ve brought together for the first time 1,300 pages from his collections of volumes and notebooks. The codices, brimming sketches, ideas, and observations, offer a window into the boundless imagination of one of history’s greatest polymaths. With the aid of Machine Learning and the curatorial expertise of Professor Martin Kemp, the accompanying experiment also called “Inside a Genius Mind” unravels these intriguing and sometimes mysterious materials.

Full experiment here!