history, we should say that slavery was ubiquitous. It existed in virtually every major civilization in the history of humans. Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, the Islamic world, Africa, the Americas, North and South America. We should also say something that, as I was looking into this, another big topic, which is the Atlantic slave trade. And it was surprising to me,
The invention of the alphabet took these huge numbers of symbol sets of Mesopotamian ununiform or Egyptian hieroglyphics and reduced it to 22 characters. That's the first alphabet, protosemitic
Before long, he'd seen multiple workers with either severe lung scarring or more concerningly, an extremely rare cancer called mesothelioma. - A mesothelioma is strongly associated with asbestos exposure and is cancer of those cells lining the inside of the chest cavity.
So we need to do more to get the rubber we're used to today. Early Mesoamericans improved the rubber slightly by mixing the latex with juice from the tropical morning-glory, a local flower. And they used this to form sandals, bottles and balls.
This is a series of very prominent academics who study this crucial change between the Mesolithic and the Neolithic. The Mesolithic is our hunter gatherer days. The Neolithic is the fancy stuff.
as I'll talk about in a second. The mesomorphs have the best deal in that they have bodies which are applicable to anything. They can do any sport, and they tend to build muscle.
Spinning means that the spider uses its legs to pull the silk out of its body. The mesophiles and the mygalomorphs will glue down the silk and then walk away from it. The araneomorphs pull the silk out with their legs.
our way as much as these lantern fish these little fish the bottom is what lives in the deep ocean they migrate their mesopelagic they live between two hundred and a thousand meters a thousand meters is very deep and these fish actually migrate from the largest daily migration of life on earth they hide down during the day and then they come up to the surface defeat at night and
Selikoff launched a formal investigation into hundreds of asbestos insulation workers, and what he found confirmed his fears, widespread disabling asbestosis, dozens of cases of mesothelioma, lung cancer rates roughly seven times higher than expected and a threefold increase in gastrointestinal cancers. In 1964, he organized a conference at the New York Academy of Sciences where for the first time, all this evidence was presented publicly in one place,
University of Birmingham where I went to university, and scholarly literature in Mesopotamia, it takes the form of omens, because they believed that events, accidental or deliberately stimulated, had implications for
It's known as that the pleasure compound of the brain. And although that mesolimbic pathway, the neurons in it constitute only a tiny percentage of all the nerve cells in the brain, something like 0.001%, it is enormously important in motivating our behavior towards survival and reproduction-- so eating food,
namely psychoactive drugs. So alcohol caffeine, nicotine, opiates, they all effectively short-circuit-- they all effectively hack that mesolimbic system by increasing the levels of dopamine in that pathway. But as a flip side of that, they're also intrinsically addictive.
change everything. The first revolution obviously was the invention of writing in Mesopotamia 4 and a half thousand years ago. And that was the birth of civilization because it meant for the first time knowledge could be accumulated
the very rivers of the Tigris and Euphrates flowing down alongside the feet of the Zagros mountains. And this Mesopotamia, this land between the rivers, around 3,000 BC, became the land of cities. We saw an emergence of the first civilization, the Sumerians.
of this foreland basin sagging down alongside that mountain range. And when the Mesopotamian civilizations were emerging around 3,000 BC on the other side of the planet, around in India, in an identical tectonic setting, in the foreland basin, the tectonic trough running alongside the Himalayan mountain range, the Indus Valley civilization was popping up around the same time.
And I took my camera with me. It's a mesocyclone basically.
And you'll probably win the case, but you also will die. Everybody that gets mesothelioma dies. And that's not a good way to regulate chemicals.
And protons and neutrons are baryons. Then there are also mesons, which are made from a quark and an antiquark. There are also antibaryons, which are three antiquirks, basically two body plans.
And it's a larger version of a series of sites that gradually emerged that are shown by these T-shaped symbols in upper Mesopotamia. And through time, a whole series of other sites emerged, shown by these circles, that are similar in the sense that they start in hunter-gatherer context,
That remained in Mesoamerica.
Well, it depends. Well, if you really went looking for them-- these kinds of spiders, mygalomorphs in general, will tend-- and mesophiles, actually, if you find one, you'll find more. Because they don't go far.
that was once called Mesopotamia a country that at one point was the cradle
And most commonly, it's this pleural cavity. These pleural membranes are aligned with mesothelial cells. Sometimes what happens is the fibers will work their way out of the lung tissue and directly get into this cavity here,
The last quick story I wanted to tell you, just to wrap up in the last five minutes, is now looking at aspects of our psychology and cognitive Because it does trigger that means the mesolimbic pathway.
The last quick story I wanted to tell you, just to wrap up in the last five minutes, is now looking at aspects of our psychology and cognitive Other mammal species have a very similar mesolimbic pathway also mediated by dopamine, and if not dopamine, then very,
And Enheduanna is an ancient Mesopotamian priestess who took it a step further.
The plumes would go in the mesosphere.
We're testing this out in the Mesoamerican reef.
of of the night sky but the Mesopotamians were actually inveterate
Writing likely happened around the time of Mesopotamia,
The modern version of a Mesopotamian baru is known as a technical analyst.
So modulo three, it has to be zero. So both the baryons and the mesons conform to that, because quarks have one, antiquarks minus one. Now, another possibility that does obey the rule of three but is more complicated than either mesons or baryons
So if you were producing silk back then, what you might want the silk for is something like this. These are a type of spider called mesophiles. There are three surviving major lineages of spiders.
These are like the coelacanths of the spider world. They are very similar to fossil mesophiles from 290 million years ago. The oldest mygalomorph fossil is about 240 million years old.
quote how his mastery of meson sin and at the end of her day in her reveries
ancient Sumer, Mesopotamia. Uh which roughly 3,500 I'm going to use BC
I see you, Mesopotamia with the good dirt.
And therefore it is linked intrinsically to addiction as well. So problems arose when humans discovered ways of lighting up that mesolimbic pathway by doing things other than activities to help our survival and reproduction, other than things we would have been doing in our natural world, namely drugs,
The last quick story I wanted to tell you, just to wrap up in the last five minutes, is now looking at aspects of our psychology and cognitive And the lab rats had control of that stimulation in the mesolimbic pathway with a button.
So I learned very early on about the Mesoamerican civilizations, and I found them to be absolutely fascinating.
I think of civilizations like those in ancient Mesopotamia, so the Assyrians.
The reef is relatively healthy compared to the rest of the Mesoamerican Reef.
Remember, this is the Mesoamerican reef region in the Caribbean.
it's where Rome blended with the Babylonian and Mesopotamian cultures and with the Persian cultures and with the ancient Egyptian cultures, and that
Baru, noun-- in ancient Mesopotamia, a priest who specialized in predicting the future by studying the contours of a liver or lung taken
It only arose about 3,000 BC in Mesopotamia when you have the rise of the first city-states.
So there were suburbs-- I actually go back to Mesopotamia in the beginning of the book, but don't let that sway you.
Now let's say you flash forward to ancient Mesopotamia and you want a contract because you're sending 478
And they had this intellectual breakthrough in both Egypt and Mesopotamia-- about the same time--
And that's what the scribes in Egypt and Mesopotamia were doing-- not knock-knock jokes, per se, but they were using the same