Tag Archives: World History

Stonehenge: Exhibition from a sacred place for all Britons

Modern geneticists have shown us that the past is much closer than most of us realize. We carry the genetic coding from previous generations in our DNA and it can be traced back 200,000 to 300,000 years. Adam Rutherford went further, proclaiming everyone with European roots descends from Charlemagne (as well as his most humble followers). His point being that the number of your direct ancestors doubles every generation you count backward. By the time you count back 33 generations—about 800 to 1,000 years ago—you have more than 8 billion ancestors. By way of contrast, the population of England is believed to have only been about 2 million in 1,000 AD. At that point you had 4,000 ‘ancestors’ for every living person. This means your genealogy is populated by the same people counted over and over again through different lines of descent.  If you are of English ancestry, something of even greater antiquity like the Stonehenge artefacts currently being exhibited at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria is definitely about your heritage. 

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The Quadra Project: Edo Japan

Maybe Edo Japan is an echo of our better past and can be a model for our better future. It was a period in Japanese history began with the consolidation of power by Tokugawa Ieyasu in 1603 and lasted until 1867, an ending that came as a result of the destabilizing effects of American and European traders who forced an isolated and sustainable Japan into the world of 19th century commerce and values.

The beginning of the Edo Period, as the Tokugawa Shogunate is known, brought to an end a century of political and military struggle among feudal lords (daimyo) that had left Japan in economic, social and environmental chaos. Internal warfare had created massive poverty as well as social disorder, and badly managed resources in the past had so damaged the natural ecology that it was unable to support the population of 12 million Japanese. By the end of the Edo Period, however, wars were long gone, Japan was comfortably providing for a population of 30 million, employment had established a meaningful place for everyone in the Japanese society, and the environmental problems had been corrected. So, what happened during the 264 years of the Edo Period?

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Visiting Athens: Part Two – 10 Days

In the first part of this story, I talked about my desire to go to Athens, gave a historical overview of the city’s Classical era and looked at some DNA research that suggests the ancestors of most people of European descent had a small part in Greece’s history. 

Our AirBnB was in the Plaka district, which has been inhabited for the past 5,000 years. The remains of a Roman bath house were in our basement and backyard. It seems to extend into the neighbouring property, where two men were at work throughout our stay. This does not seem to be exceptional. There are ruins throughout the older neighbourhoods of Athens. Only a block to the northeast of us, the remains of an ancient neighbourhood, with streets, houses, bath houses, public latrines and workshops dating from the 5th century BC to the 12th century AD, are on display underneath the Acropolis Museum. No one knew anything about them until construction on the museum began in the 1980s.

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Visiting Athens: Part One – A Genetic Odyssey

My desire to write grew out of stories from Greek antiquity that I read as a boy. I’ve always wanted to visit Greece, only something else always seemed to be more important. This year one of my daughters suggested, “Why don’t you just do it?” So we did!

A Greek electrical contractor named Alexander sat beside my wife and I during the last leg of our flight into Athens. He rents a home in London, where he works, but has purchased property in Patras. That’s where Alexander hopes to retire. 

“Get away from Athens and the tourist sites. Go into the country, that’s where you’ll get to see the real Greek people!” he advised us.

We did the opposite. 

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Photographer captures grain elevator images as they fade away on the prairies

By Nicole Goldsworthy, Humbolt Journal, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

NORTHEAST – Tim Lockhart has made it his passion to photograph as many prairie grain elevators as he can find. 

Lockhart was born and raised in Alberta and his dad was a manager at an Old Dutch potato chip plant. When he travelled with his father he gained a passion for grain elevators as each small town they pulled into had one.

About two and half years ago, he saw how many were rapidly being torn down. What every small town in Saskatchewan had was slowly vanishing. Lockhart decided to start documenting as many as he could find throughout the prairie provinces. To date, he has taken pictures of 465 elevators in the three prairie provinces — 275 of them in Saskatchewan alone — with 25 still to document.

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