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Sander van der Leeuw

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Sander van der Leeuw : The Archaeology of Innovation. Are we the first civilization to try and innovate our way out of climate change? How have past societies engineered sustainable solutions to a shifting world? Sander van der Leeuw, Director of the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University and External Faculty Member of the Santa Fe Institute, has spent his career studying these questions. At his Seminar van der Leeuw will be exploring this research into the past, as well as its application to our current global predicament. History of Innovation The development of human mental ability can be tracked through the progressive crafting of stone tools, Van der Leeuw explained.

First we learned to shape an edge---a line---then the surface, then the whole volume of the tool, then the sophisticated sequence required to make a superb spear point. The brain has not progressed since then, nor has needed to. Towns and then cities became humanity's innovation engine. But we have become "disturbance dependent. " Insights on Linking Forests, Trees, and People from the Air, on the Ground, ... Is Constant Innovation Dangerous? See Ancient Rome - a Actu et Politique video. 2009/11/18/Sander_van_der_Leeuw_The_Archaeology_of_Innovation. Stewart Brand: Good evening Im Stewart Brand from the Long Now Foundation. Ive just been talking with our speaker tonight. One of the peculiarities of archaeology he reminded me of is that we assume the past is the past and after we have done a century or two of archaeology we assume that our knowledge of the past is our knowledge of the past and thats that.

It doesnt work that way. We have barely touched the past, we have done tiny amounts of digging in tiny amounts of places and then formed these huge speculations about what actually happened, what our story is actually made of. And because the instruments keep getting better, the theories are getting better, well hear some good ones tonight, there are more and more archaeologists out there digging, we keep retelling the story of how we got here and this is not going to stop.

The history of humanity, interestingly enough, is, not only is our future work in progress, our past is a work in progress.