The middle of the world 000 years
While the US has recently seen signs of impressive economic acceleration, one of the most important long term trends of the 21st century is likely to be the growth of emerging economies. This map, made by the Mc Kinsey Global Institute, is a cool visualization of data from the work of the late historian Angus Maddison on economic development around the globe over the last two thousand years. Mc Kinsey took the geographic center of each country, and at each year indicated on the map, used Maddison's estimates of the GDP for that country to find the approximate economic center of mass of the world and how that center has moved over time. Mc Kinsey also used their own models for the development of global GDP over the next few years to project where they think the center of mass will move by 2025: Mc Kinsey /-> In time, we also began to understand that the Earth was indeed round, and came up with rationalized explanations for the behavior of other celestial bodies. And by classical antiquity, scientists had formulated ideas on how the motion of the planets occurred, and how all the heavenly orbs fit together. This gave rise to the Geocentric model of the universe, a now-defunct model that explained how the Sun, Moon, and firmament circled around our planet. The notion that the Earth was the center of the Universe is certainly an understandable one. To ancient people, looking up at the skies, it seemed evident that the Sun, the Moon and the stars rotated around the Earth once a day. For the Earth-bound observer, the ground that they stood on seemed like a fixed point of reference, a flat plane from which to watch the circling cosmos. And over time, thanks to centuries of record-keeping by various civilizations – from ancient Babylonian and Egyptian astronomers to contemporary Mediterranean ones – a formalized system began to emerge that put the Earth at the center of all things. This would continue to endure well into the 17th and 18th centuries, by which point, the model’s inherent inconsistencies would lead to it being abandoned in favor of the heliocentric model. A comparison of the geocentric and heliocentric models of the universe. Credit: history.ucsb.edu Ancient Greece: The earliest.
Homo heidelbergensis Homo heidelbergensis (skin color and location of hair are only guesses by the artist, but the body shape is based on skeletal remains) The evolutionary dividing line between Homo erectus and modern humans was not sharp. It extended over several hundred thousand years during the middle of the Pleistocene Epoch. Adding to the confusion about this important transitional period is the fact that some regions were ahead of others in the process of evolving into our species. The evolutionary changes above the neck that would lead to modern humans may have begun in Southern Europe and East Africa 800,000-700,000 years ago. Elsewhere in the Old World, this change apparently began around 400,000 years ago or later. The transition to our species, Homo sapiens, was not complete until around 100,000 years ago and even later in someregions. It is difficult to speak of our ancestors in terms of specific species during this long period of accelerated change from 800,000 to 100,000 years ago. The more biologically progressive post-800,000 B. P. populations in Europe and Africa are commonly classified as a distinct species- Homo heidelbergensis. By 300,000 years ago, some of these populations had begun the evolutionary transition that would end up with Neandertals and other archaic humans (also called archaic Homo sapiens and premodern humans). By 100,000 years ago, some populations had evolved into modern humans. Others remained largely unchanged until about 28,000 years ago, when they became extinct. These were the Neandertals. Complicating the picture is the fact that, in at least one area of Indonesia, a few Homo erectus remained until at least 53,000 years ago, and the little understood dwarf Homo floresienses persisted until at least 18,000 years ago. Homo heidelbergensis( Petralona Cave, Greece) Homo heidelbergensis was named.
East Asia at the Center Book Description: A common misconception holds that Marco Polo opened up a closed and recalcitrant Orient to the West. However, this sweeping history covering 4,000 years of international relations from the perspective of China, Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia shows that the region's extensive involvement in world affairs began thousands of years ago. In a time when the writing of history is increasingly specialized, Warren I. Cohen has made a bold move against the grain. In broad but revealing brushstrokes, he paints a huge canvas of East Asia's place in world affairs throughout four millennia. Just as Cohen thinks broadly across time, so too, he defines the boundaries of East Asia liberally, looking beyond China, Japan, and Korea to include Southeast Asia. In addition, Cohen stretches the scope of international relations beyond its usual limitations to consider the vital role of cultural and economic exchanges. Within this vast framework, Cohen explores the system of Chinese domination in the ancient world, the exchanges between East Asia and the Islamic world from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, and the emergence of a European-defined international system in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The book covers the new imperialism of the 1890s, the Manchurian crisis of the early 1930s, the ascendancy of Japan, the trials of World War II, the drama of the Cold War, and the fleeting Asian Century from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. East Asia at the Center is replete with often-overlooked or little-known facts, such as:• A record of persistent Chinese imperialism in the region• Tibet's status as a major power from the 7th to the 9th centuries C. E., when it frequently invaded China and decimated Chinese armies• Japan's profound dependence on Korea for its early cultural development• The enormous influence of Indian cuisine on that.
Geocentric redirects here. For orbits around the Earth, see Geocentric orbit. Figure of the heavenly bodies — An illustration of the Ptolemaic geocentric system by Portuguese cosmographer and cartographer Bartolomeu Velho, 1568 ( Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris) In astronomy, the geocentric model (also known as geocentrism, or the Ptolemaic system) is a description of the universe where earth is at the orbital center of all the celestial bodies. This model served as the predominant cosmological system in many ancient civilizations such as ancient Greece including the noteworthy systems of Aristotle (see Aristotelian physics) and Ptolemy. As such, they believed that the Sun, Moon, stars, and naked eye planets circled Earth.[1] Two commonly made observations supported the idea that Earth was the center of the Universe. The stars, the sun, and planets appear to revolve around Earth each day, making Earth the center of that system. The stars were thought to be on a celestial sphere, with the earth at its center, that rotated each day, using a line through the north and south pole as an axis. The stars closest to the equator appeared to rise and fall the greatest distance, but each star circled back to its rising point each day.[2] The second observation supporting the geocentric model was that the Earth does not seem to move from the perspective of an Earth-bound observer, and that it is solid, stable, and unmoving. Ancient Greek, ancient Roman and medieval philosophers usually combined the geocentric model with a spherical Earth. It is not the same as the older flat Earth model implied in some mythology.[n 1][n 2][5] The ancient Jewish Babylonian uranography pictured a flat Earth with a dome-shaped rigid canopy named firmament placed over it. (רקיע- rāqîa.[n 3][n 4][n 5][n 6][n 7][n 8] However, the ancient Greeks believed that the motions of the planets were circular and.