Download Free Prehistoric Future Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Prehistoric Future and write the review.

One of the most admired artists of the twentieth century, Max Ernst was a proponent of Dada and founder of surrealism, known for his strange, evocative paintings and drawings. In Prehistoric Future, Ralph Ubl approaches Ernst like no one else has, using theories of the unconscious—surrealist automatism, Freudian psychoanalysis, the concept of history as trauma—to examine how Ernst’s construction of collage departs from other modern artists. Ubl shows that while Picasso, Braque, and Man Ray used scissors and glue to create collages, Ernst employed techniques he himself had forged—rubbing and scraping to bring images forth onto a sheet of paper or canvas to simulate how a screen image or memory comes into the mind’s view. In addition, Ernst scoured the past for obsolete scientific illustrations and odd advertisements to illustrate the rapidity with which time passes and to simulate the apprehension generated when rapid flows of knowledge turn living culture into artifact. Ultimately, Ubl reveals, Ernst was interested in the construction and phenomenology of both collective and individual modern history and memory. Shedding new light on Ernst’s working methods and the reasons that his pieces continue to imprint themselves in viewers’ memories, Prehistoric Future is an innovative work of critical writing on a key figure of surrealism.
Feminist cultural historian Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum caps her previous work with The Future has an Ancient Heart, a scholarly study of the transformative legacy of African origins and values of caring, sharing, healing, and vision carried by African migrants throughout the world. Birnbaum focuses on the long endurance of these values from the first human communities in south and central Africa, ones that Africans manifested in the region of the African mediterranean landmass that later separated Africa from Europe and Asia when the ice melted and waters rose. These migrants reached every continent and later became spiritual as well as geograpical migrations back to Africa, from ancient times to the transformative present. Using the same methods as her teaching, Birnbaum employs a mutual learning process in her work to help us think about our own ancestral story, adding to the wisdom we need to surmount contemporary crises and give us the energy to help bring a more equal and just world into being. Her methodologies are grounded on empirical techniques of science and the social sciences and yet leave openings for the liminal knowledge that resides underneath and beyond boundaries of established religions, secular ideologies, and conventional science. A true work of transformation, The Future has an Ancient Heart opens the door to new possibilities within our world.
How did science rise up to so dramatically change our world, and where will it take us in the future? This book gives a unique and broad overview. A brief history reveals the major phases and turning points in the rise of science from the earliest civilizations to the present: How was science ‘discovered’? Why did it disappear a few times? When did it become ‘modern’? A critical assessment examines how science actually ‘happens’: the triumphs, the struggles, the mistakes and the luck. Science today is endlessly fascinating, and this book explores the current exponential growth, curiosity-driven vs. goal-oriented research, big and small science, the support of science, the relation of science to society, philosophy and religion, and the benefits and dangers of science. Finally a glimpse into the future: Will the current pace of science continue? Will we ever go backwards (again)? What remains to be discovered? Can science ever be complete? What can we imagine for the distant future? This book will be of wide interest to the general reader as well as to students and working scientists. This book provides a fresh, unique and insightful coverage of the processes of science, its impact on society and our understanding of the world, based on the author’s experience gained from a lifetime in science. Ron Ekers, FRS, CSIRO Fellow, CSIRO Astronomy & Space Science, former President of the International Astronomical Union Peter Shaver's comprehensive and lively survey deserves a wide readership. Scientific discoveries are part of our global culture and heritage, and they underpin our lives. It's fascinating to learn how they were made, and how they fit into the grand scheme. This book isn't just for scientists - it's written for all of us. Martin Rees, FRS, Astronomer Royal, former President of the Royal Society and former Master of Trinity College, Cambridge This book offers a wonderfully concise and accessible insight into science – its history, breadth and future prospects. Peter Shaver gives a feeling for what it actually means to be a practicing scientist. Stephen Simpson, FRS, Academic Director, Charles Perkins Centre, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Sydney
This book provides a concise overview of human prehistory. It shows how an understanding of the distant past offers new perspectives on present-day challenges facing our species - and how we can build a sustainable future for all life on planet Earth. Deborah Barsky tells a fascinating story of the long-term evolution of human culture and provides up-to-date examples from the archaeological record to illustrate the different phases of human history. Barsky also presents a refreshing and original analysis about issues plaguing modern globalized society, such as racism, institutionalized religion, the digital revolution, human migrations, terrorism, and war. Written in an accessible and engaging style, Human Prehistory is aimed at an introductory-level audience. Students will acquire a comprehensive understanding of the interdisciplinary, scientific study of human prehistory, as well as the theoretical interpretations of human evolutionary processes that are used in contemporary archaeological practice. Definitions, tables, and illustrations accompany the text.
Pack your bags, time-travelers! Prehistoric World is your ticket to exploring a wild landscape of over 1,200 incredible prehistoric mammals. Did you know that the woolly mammoth’s tusks could grow up to a whopping 16 feet long? Or that ancient kangaroos didn’t hop? From ferocious predators to gentle giants and strange critters that defy imagination, Prehistoric World is the ultimate journey into the past. Each page brings a new creature to life with incredible facts and stunning illustrations by award-winning paleoartist Julius Csotonyi. Inside you’ll find: Hundreds of species profiles covering anatomy, diet, habitat, cool features, and unique characteristics Features on well-known paleontologists and their awesome finds Other key discoveries and specimens in museums around the world Come face-to-face with a world where giant sloths hung from towering trees, mammoths battled the bitter cold, and fearsome saber-toothed tigers ruled the land with Prehistoric World.
Donald R. Prothero's science books combine leading research with first-person narratives of discovery, injecting warmth and familiarity into a profession that has much to offer nonspecialists. Bringing his trademark style and wit to an increasingly relevant subject of concern, Prothero links the climate changes that have occurred over the past 200 million years to their effects on plants and animals. In particular, he contrasts the extinctions that ended the Cretaceous period, which wiped out the dinosaurs, with those of the later Eocene and Oligocene epochs. Prothero begins with the "greenhouse of the dinosaurs," the global-warming episode that dominated the Age of Dinosaurs and the early Age of Mammals. He describes the remarkable creatures that once populated the earth and draws on his experiences collecting fossils in the Big Badlands of South Dakota to sketch their world. Prothero then discusses the growth of the first Antarctic glaciers, which marked the Eocene-Oligocene transition, and shares his own anecdotes of excavations and controversies among colleagues that have shaped our understanding of the contemporary and prehistoric world. The volume concludes with observations about Nisqually Glacier and other locations that show how global warming is happening much quicker than previously predicted, irrevocably changing the balance of the earth's thermostat. Engaging scientists and general readers alike, Greenhouse of the Dinosaurs connects events across thousands of millennia to make clear the human threat to natural climate change.
Wisdom, Consciousness, and the Future: Collected Essays Thomas Lombardo, Ph. D. Center for Future Consciousness Wisdom, Consciousness, and the Future is a profound, deeply important, and timely book that concerned people and change agents everywhere will want to read. Copthorne Macdonald The Wisdom Page As a college professor and teacher of psychology, philosophy, and the future, Tom Lombardos mind has been drawn toward such questions as: How will the human mind evolve in the future? In fact, how should the human mind evolve and improve itself? What might be the standards and ideals that guide this evolution? And what role does ethical development (or evolution) play in this process? The twenty previously published articles collected together in Wisdom, Consciousness, and the Future chronicle the development of Dr. Lombardos ideas on these related questions and topics, and together constitute a theoretical perspective on the nature of the human mind, on how to best educate and evolve the human mind in the future, and how to integrate into this vision the central importance of both future consciousness (as a key dimension of human consciousness) and ethical character virtues. True to its title, three key themes emerge in this collection: wisdom, consciousness, and the future, and all three concepts tie into the authors main contribution to the field of futures studies, future consciousness. Numerous essays (for example, Evolving Future Consciousness through the Pursuit of Virtue and The Evolution and Psychology of Future Consciousness) address the nature of future consciousness, a term Dr. Lombardo defines as the complex set of mental capacities all humans possess for imagining, conceptualizing, and approaching the future. Aside from describing the psychological make-up of future consciousness, which includes emotional, motivational, cognitive, and personal dimensions, the author also explains in numerous essays (such as Developing Constructive and Creative Attitudes about the Future) how to proactively enhance ones future consciousness. Other essays deal directly with consciousness and the human mind in the broadest sense (as in The Future Evolution of the Ecology of Mind) and connect this general area of inquiry with the futurist question of how consciousness and mind might evolve in the future. Dr. Lombardo proposes that the progressive emergence of cosmic consciousness is the central evolutionary trajectory of the human mind. Hence, this book contains essays on both consciousness of the future and consciousness in the future. While the discussion of consciousness and the future fascinates in its own right, Dr. Lombardo is a holistic and deep thinker who searches for connections among myriad philosophical topics. A number of essays address the question of ethics and virtue and how such concepts connect with both future consciousness and the evolution of consciousness in the future. He then expands on this theme to explore how virtue applies to the goals of higher education in essays such as Ethical Character Development and Personal and Academic Excellence. In thinking through the concept of virtue and how it applies to consciousness, education, and the future, Dr. Lombardo emphasizes the one key virtuewisdomthat provides the center of gravity around which all other character virtues revolve. Indeed, if any one concept unites the majority of essays in this collection, it is wisdom. In The Wisdom of Future Consciousness, the author argues that wisdom is the highest expression of future consciousness, and systematically describes the numerous connections between wisdom and heightened future consciousness. Further, according to the author, wisdom is the key ideal that we should model and teach within education, now and in the future. This argume
An examination of how modern art was impacted by the concept of prehistory and the prehistoric Prehistory is an invention of the late nineteenth century. In that moment of technological progress and acceleration of production and circulation, three major Western narratives about time took shape. One after another, these new fields of inquiry delved into the obscure immensity of the past: first, to surmise the age of the Earth; second, to find the point of emergence of human beings; and third, to ponder the age of art. Maria Stavrinaki considers the inseparability of these accounts of temporality from the disruptive forces of modernity. She asks what a history of modernity and its art would look like if considered through these three interwoven inventions of the longue durée. Transfixed by Prehistory attempts to articulate such a history, which turns out to be more complex than an inevitable march of progress leading up to the Anthropocene. Rather, it is a history of stupor, defamiliarization, regressive acceleration, and incessant invention, since the “new” was also found in the deep sediments of the Earth. Composed of as much speed as slowness, as much change as deep time, as much confidence as skepticism and doubt, modernity is a complex phenomenon that needs to be rethought. Stavrinaki focuses on this intrinsic tension through major artistic practices (Cézanne, Matisse, De Chirico, Ernst, Picasso, Dubuffet, Smithson, Morris, and contemporary artists such as Pierre Huyghe and Thomas Hirschhorn), philosophical discourses (Bataille, Blumenberg, and Jünger), and the human sciences. This groundbreaking book will attract readers interested in the intersections of art history, anthropology, psychoanalysis, mythology, geology, and archaeology.
An original and ambitious approach to understanding the creative achievements of one of the most important American artists of the twentieth century. Totality offers a deeply researched and thoughtful account of the art of Barnett Newman (1905–1970). While Newman’s paintings are widely regarded as among the most significant statements of abstract expressionism—and emblematic of modernism at midcentury—they pose distinct challenges to formal description and historical evaluation. With this book, Michael Schreyach guides readers toward a transformed understanding of Newman’s profound body of work. Through a sequence of close readings, Schreyach examines six key terms—symbol, surface, self-evidence, space, standpoint, and scale—that illuminate the meaning of Newman’s claims for the “metaphysical” content of his art. Totality progresses from the meticulous analysis of the technical structure and visual appearance of specific works to critical and archivally documented arguments about Newman’s intentions. The result is an altogether original interpretation of the artist’s enterprise, as surprising as it is nuanced.