The wayfinders
by Wade Davis · first published 2009
5mentions
4recommended by
4HN commenters
2011–2022first – last mentioned
100% recommend
"Many of us are alarmed by the accelerating rates of extinction of plants and animals. But how many of us know that human cultures are going extinct at an even more shocking rate? While biologists estimate that 18 percent of mammals and 11 percent of birds are threatened, and botanists anticipate the loss of 8 percent of flora, anthropologists predict that fully 50 percent of the 7,000 languages spoken around the world today will disappear within our lifetimes. And languages are merely the canaries in the coal mine: what of the knowledge, stories, songs, and ways of seeing encoded in these voi
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The Wayfinders by Wade Davis If you're interested in what living 20k years ago would have been like this is a pretty good place to start.
on “Ask HN: Which book(s) did you read this summer?” ↗The Wayfinders, by Wade Davis, is a great book on the topic.
on “What the world’s most remote islands were like before humans arrived” ↗I highly recommend The Wayfinders by Wade Davis. This might expand your thinking on the topic. http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/home/search/?keywords=wayfinde...
on “Humans Deep-Sea Fishing 42,000 Years Ago” ↗…Robin Wall Kimmerer [0], because it brought the concept of reciprocity to the fore for me this year, and nudged me towards Finding the Mother Tree (Suzanne Simard), Eat Like a Fish (Bren Smith), and The Wayfinders (Wade Davis), all about ways of life that embrace diversity towards resilience in the face of the hyperobject of climate change. The life stories of the authors has been helpful in my personal development…
on “Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?” ↗Sometimes we just like a challenge, especially when we’re young and full of wanderlust. Wade Davis, in The Wayfinders, tells about a Pacific trade network of white beads going one way (clockwise, iirc; listened to the book) and red beads going the other, with acted-out hostility on the island, and approach-protocols…
on “Ostrich eggshell beads reveal 50k-year-old social network across Africa” ↗