When 'books' like 'Ascent of Man' disappoint, shows like 'Fall of Civilisations' restore your faith.

'The Ascent of Man' was a book I went back to after 3-4 years, I figured with the depth of my understanding gradually increasing I would love re-reading it as I loved it the first time around.

I, I have a tendency of getting excited about new knowledge/interest/subject/store very easily and I also like to share it with all the poor souls, who just wanted to know how my morning is going. A lot of it shows in the way I learn too. The toning of my excitement happens as I go deeper, and many a time my perspective changes and interest wanes. I know this might be true for many people. But with history I just keep going deeper and wider - I read about the same thing written by multiple people and the interest never wanes, think this is what people call passion.

This book though superb for factual knowledge carries a tone that I never picked up the first time around. The world along with me is waking up in so many ways.

The book is about, as he says, 'continuities of culture, history of man’s (no woman has contributed anything worthy enough to make it in this book) mind as an unfolding of his different talents’. Some things I loved reading about:

• Transhumance way of life - move with the herd, nomadic, no roots, no time for growth - the Lapps community

• The human brain is the seat of foresight - the reason for civilisation, visualises the future, has imagination and the ability to draw conclusions.

• End of last ice age - 10,000bc (some time periods need to be etched in our minds, especially with our current state of climate.

• Natufian pre-agricultural revolution - culture was unusual in that it supported a sedentary or semi-sedentary population - ate wild cereals and hunted animals

• Water & Emmer (hybrid wheat) and the domestication of the draught animal kickstarted a 'civilised' life.

Then came these kind of statements, 'The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation'. - wtf? And also this; paraphrased, 'the world(men) should move towards scientific enquiry and not be beguiled by the eastern philosophies (was the seventies), we shouldn't lose our way and we should continue our ascent towards more single-minded pursuits'. I ask you, why put down an entire way of life? This tone of disregard to anything that is not you has lead to the ridiculous inequalities we live with today. And as a man of science and other studies to perpetuate this thinking, is truly sad. Please don't say it was the thinking of the times, there were many who had a brilliantly open view of the world. It was the established, single-minded superiority of many experts in the field of history, archeology, geography etc. that has got our world to where it is today. Without breadth the depth is incomplete and vice verse, balance is the only to ensure we don't annihilate what is not us - Eastern philosophy.

In my quest to balance what this book stirred, I found a fabulous Youtube channel called 'Fall of Civilisations' and I watched the one about Easter Islands - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7j08gxUcBgc&t=13s

Brilliantly put together and covered all perspectives. The narrative was tempered with all the available research and not just the accounts of the captains of the Dutch ships or the Peruvians who enslaved the people of the island. It pieces together the story of the people who lived there from their perspective - which means trying to explain what they did and why they might have done it. The 'why' is not judged by the western sensibilities but from the life lived by the natives of the land. The account therefore is one with a truckload of empathy and the assumption that the people of Easter Island were intelligent, adaptable and highly creative. Watch the channel, it is heartening to see the balance being restored.