Was he being followed, even up here in the snow at the top of the mountain? The dagger had been painstakingly sharpened many times. He had a copper axe, bow and arrows and a dagger made of chert. Threaded onto a leather strap were two chewy lumps of anti-parasitic birch fungus fruit – useful when you’re suffering from whipworm. In a pouch on his belt, he held stone tools for cutting, scraping and boring, as well as chunks of pyrite he could strike to make fire. The man wore a coat, leggings, hat, shoes, backpack and other attire that had been stitched together from the skins of several different animals. This was not a journey for the faint of heart – or for the unprepared. Now he was far from home, at least one or two days’ walk through the ice and forest. An attack in the valley below had left him with a deep stab wound between the thumb and index finger of his right hand. More than 5,000 years ago, a man braced himself against the bitter cold as he ascended a mountain in the Alps. They are the authors of The Invention of Tomorrow: A Natural History of Foresight, from which parts of this essay were adapted. Adam Bulley is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Sydney and at Harvard University. Jonathan Redshaw is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Queensland. Thomas Suddendorf is a professor in the School of Psychology at the University of Queensland.
0 kommentar(er)
