Historicizing Humans: Deep Time, Evolution, and Race in Nineteenth-Century British Sciences, ed. Efram Sera-Shriar

2019 ◽  
Vol 134 (569) ◽  
pp. 1033-1035
Author(s):  
Joel Barnes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Time Evolution ◽  
Deep Time

Franz Unger and plant evolution: Representations of plants through time

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larry B. Collins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life History ◽  
Transition Period ◽  
Plant Evolution ◽  
Modern Concept ◽  
Unique Contribution ◽  
Deep Time ◽  
Earth History ◽  
Fossil Evidence

ABSTRACT This chapter will highlight a series of lithographs produced by Franz Unger and Josef Kuwasseg that emphasize how Unger used plants to represent different periods of earth history. While Henry De la Beche is credited with the first depiction of ancient life through art (Duria antiquior), Unger’s work was the first to illustrate how plants could be used as indicators of changes in life history. In collaboration with artist Josef Kuwasseg, he embarked on a project entitled The Primitive World in Its Different Periods of Formation that consisted of 14 lithographs that were published in 1851. The title was unique in that it combined the concepts of a “primitive world,” or the widely accepted contemporary idea of undifferentiated deep time, with our modern concept of different periods of earth history. Unger selected periods for this project based upon major strata, but his botanical roots led him to emphasize the importance of plants in each lithograph. The series begins with the “Transition Period,” or the strata that contain the most fossil evidence to develop a reconstruction, and ends with a depiction of the arrival of man in a plant-filled world. This series of lithographs offers a unique contribution to the history and philosophy of geology as Unger recognized the importance of plants to our understanding of geology and deep time in the nineteenth century.

scholarly journals Cave men: Stone tools, Victorian science, and the ‘primitive mind’ of deep time

2010 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul B. Pettitt ◽  
Mark J. White
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Stone Tools ◽  
Cognitive Evolution ◽  
Deep Time ◽  
Phases Of Development ◽  
Victorian Science ◽  
Life On Earth ◽  
Archaeological Sediments

Palaeoanthropology, the study of the evolution of humanity, arose in the nineteenth century. Excavations in Europe uncovered a series of archaeological sediments which provided proof that the antiquity of human life on Earth was far longer than the biblical six thousand years, and by the 1880s authors had constructed a basic paradigm of what ‘primitive’ human life was like. Here we examine the development of Victorian palaeoanthropology for what it reveals of the development of notions of cognitive evolution. It seems that Victorian specialists rarely addressed cognitive evolution explicitly, although several assumptions were generally made that arose from preconceptions derived from contemporary ‘primitive’ peoples. We identify three main phases of development of notions of the primitive mind in the period.

The End of Time: Evolution, Extinction, and the Fate of Meaning

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashley Woodward
Keyword(s):  
Research And Development ◽  
Time Evolution ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Deep Time ◽  
Speculative Realism ◽  
Contemporary Science ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Heat Death ◽  
The Universe

Approximately one trillion, trillion, trillion (101728) years from now, the universe will suffer a “heat death.” What are the existential implications of this fact for us, today? This chapter explores this question through Lyotard’s fable of the explosion of the sun, and its uptake and extension in the works of Keith Ansell Pearson and Ray Brassier. Lyotard proposes the fable as a kind of “post-metanarrative” sometimes told to justify research and development, and indeed the meaning of our individual lives, after credulity in metanarratives has been lost: it replaces the adventure of the subject of history aimed towards the perfection and emancipation of the human with the adventure of inhuman, negentropic processes aimed towards the survival and extension of complexity. Negotiating Lyotard’s thought in relation to contemporary movements such as transhumanism and speculative realism, this chapter reflects on the existential significance of the “deep time” revealed by contemporary science.

Temporal Scale, The Far Future and Inhuman Times: Foresight in Wells and Woolf, Time Travel in Olaf Stapledon and Terrence Malick

2019 ◽  
pp. 166-211
Author(s):  
Charles M. Tung
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Long Range ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
Temporal Scale ◽  
Deep Time ◽  
Small Frame ◽  
Far Future ◽  
Olaf Stapledon ◽  
The Way

This chapter links the period’s visions of the far future with modernism’s engagement with deep time in order to show how the big historicising that begins in the nineteenth century is not solely about the expansion of historicity but the multiplicity and alternative futurity that follows from it. While the heterochrony of modernist temporal zoom includes the dissolution characteristic of immense expansions of perspective, it is not centred solely on the absorption of a small frame into some more certain, fundamental backdrop. The incongruity between the aesthetic’s imperative to scale itself to what we care about and the immensity of things that can only be registered from far away – temporal hyperobjects, speculative outsides, far-futural risks – is valuable not only for the critique of modernity’s compressed timescapes that it enables, but also for the way it reveals the plurality of times that cannot be nested within one another. This chapter constructs a relationship between genre fiction’s scope and modernism’s long-range aesthetics – the connection between SF’s literal movement away from earthly temporal units (days,years, events, lives, the career of the human as such) and modernist attempts to picture human life from an estranging distance.

Fighting it Through: England 1860–1880

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Rowley-Conwy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Evolution ◽  
Stone Tool ◽  
Human Species ◽  
Deep Time ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The People ◽  
Working Out ◽  
Palaeolithic Archaeology

On 29 July 1858, a stone tool was found among the bones of extinct mammals in Brixham Cave. More soon appeared; they were undeniably contemporary with the bones, and the antiquity of humankind was established. A carefully planned series of publications in 1859 ensured that most of the archaeological world accepted this conclusion very rapidly, and historians of archaeology have rightly identified this episode as one of the most crucial developments the discipline has ever seen. Darwin’s Origin of Species was also published in 1859, and evolution and human antiquity between them created a huge revolution in our understanding of ourselves. Histories of the archaeology of the rest of the nineteenth century correctly devote much attention to developments in the Palaeolithic, and to Near Eastern archaeology (Grayson 1983; Trigger 1989; van Riper 1993). These were the growth areas of the discipline. Palaeolithic archaeology was elucidating the new ‘deep time’ of the human species, by working out the sequence of industries in the ‘Drift’ (glacial moraine) and the caves, and the implications of human evolution. Near Eastern archaeology was deciphering long-forgotten scripts and excavating the ruins of cities hitherto known only from the Bible or the Iliad. Less consideration has been given to other areas of archaeology, in particular the study of the later pre-Roman periods in England, and this has left the impression that little remains to be said in this area (but see Daniel 1950: 79–84). In England, however, the debate about the adoption of the Three Age System was to continue for another twenty years, and that is the topic this chapter will address. The discovery of human antiquity outflanked the short chronology until then espoused by English archaeologists. Thomas Wright wrote rather plaintively that until recently, archaeologists had considered that the pre-Roman occupation of Britain amounted to ‘a few generations, at most’, and that they had been content with the biblical chronology of ‘somewhat more than six thousand years’ (Wright 1866a: 176). This very short chronology made unnecessary any subdivision into periods. Now these archaeologists found themselves jostled by an altogether alien group of new men, who dealt in huge (though unspecified) depths of time. For these people the Three Age System provided a vital series of intermediate periods bridging the gap between the people of the drift and the caverns, and the people of the classical world.

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