Lewis Dartnell > Quotes

“Correct scientific understanding and ingenious designs aren’t sufficient: you also need a matching level of sophistication in construction materials with the necessary properties and available power sources.”
― Lewis Dartnell, The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch

“In fact, there’s more genetic diversity between two groups of chimpanzees living on opposite banks of a river in Central Africa than there is between humans on opposite sides of the world.”
― Lewis Dartnell, Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History

“The most surprising result to come out of these global genetic studies is that the human species is exceedingly uniform. Despite superficial regional differences in hair and skin colour, or skull shape, the genetic diversity among the 7.5 billion humans living in the world today is astonishingly low.30 In fact, there’s more genetic diversity between two groups of chimpanzees living on opposite banks of a river in Central Africa than there is between humans on opposite sides of the world.31”
― Lewis Dartnell, Origins: How the Earth Shaped Human History

“In hypothesizing about the potential destruction of all scientific knowledge and what might be done about it, he allowed himself a single statement, to be transmitted securely to whichever intelligent creatures emerged after the cataclysm: What sentence holds the most information in the fewest words? “I believe,” said Feynman, “it is the atomic hypothesis . . . that all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.”
― Lewis Dartnell, The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch

“In human evolution, the development of bipedalism clearly came a long way before significant increases in brain size – we walked the walk before we could talk the talk.”
― Lewis Dartnell, Origins: How the Earth Shaped Human History

“During the peak of animal use for agriculture in Britain and the United States, which surprisingly occurred as late as ca. 1915 (even though mobile steam engines had existed for fifty years and gasoline-powered tractors were already available), a full third of cultivated land was committed to the upkeep of horses.”
― Lewis Dartnell, The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch

“Sedimentary rocks are formed by the deposition and then cementation together of material which either eroded from older rocks or was produced biologically – sandstone, limestone and chalk are all examples. Igneous rocks such as granite, on the other hand, solidify from volcanic lava or magma still deep underground. And when sedimentary or igneous rocks are subjected to high temperatures and pressures – caught in the crunch of continental collisions or when magma intrudes up into them – they are transformed physically and chemically, becoming”
― Lewis Dartnell, Origins: How the Earth Shaped Human History

“Since the early seventeenth century we’ve been fervently digging up this buried ancient carbon that cook tens of millions of years for the Earth to slowly stockpile, and we burned a great deal of it in just a few centuries. While there are concerns over peak oil and the diminishing supply of crude, there is plenty of accessible coal still underground – certainly another few centuries’ worth at current consumption rates. In this sense, then, we’re not currently facing another energy crisis but a climate crisis, born as a result of our past solution to our energy hunger.”
― Lewis Dartnell, Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History

“South American silver exploited by the Spanish, and handled through European merchants, ultimately financed a monumental building project in India.55”
― Lewis Dartnell, Origins: How the Earth Shaped Human History

“Estos casquetes de hielo expansivos retuvieron enormes cantidades de agua, y el nivel del mar en todo el mundo descendió hasta 120 metros, dejando así al descubierto, como terreno seco, gran parte de las plataformas continentales alrededor de los márgenes de las grandes masas de tierra.”
― Lewis Dartnell, Orígenes: Cómo la historia de la Tierra determina la historia de la humanidad

“dispose”
― Lewis Dartnell, The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch

“from studying the”
― Lewis Dartnell, Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History

“...the iron in your blood not only links you to the ancient stars that created it in their nuclear forge but also to the magnetic shield around our world that protects life on Earth.”
― Lewis Dartnell, Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History

“During the ice age around 425,000 years ago (five ice ages before the most recent glaciation) a vast lake of water became trapped between the Scottish and Scandinavian ice sheets and the 30-kilometre-wide ridge of rock then still linking England and France. This lake was filled with meltwater from the ice sheets as well as the discharge from rivers like the Thames and Rhine. And with no outlet to escape through, the water rose and rose, until inevitably it began to spill over the top of the land bridge. These colossal waterfalls scooped out vast plunge pools on the channel floor and gouged backwards through the barrier until this natural dam collapsed. The entire trapped lake emptied itself as a catastrophic megaflood, widening the gaping breach in the barrier and carving the landforms on the floor of the Channel we can see with sonar today. This first megaflood 425,000 years ago”
― Lewis Dartnell, Origins: How the Earth Shaped Human History

“Sedimentary rocks are formed by the deposition and then cementation together of material which either eroded from older rocks or was produced biologically – sandstone, limestone and chalk are all examples. Igneous rocks such as granite, on the other hand, solidify from volcanic lava or magma still deep underground. And when sedimentary or igneous rocks are subjected to high temperatures and pressures – caught in the crunch of continental collisions or when magma intrudes up into them – they are transformed physically and chemically, becoming a metamorphic rock like marble or slate.”
― Lewis Dartnell, Origins: How the Earth Shaped Human History

“So if you were a survivor with an entire supermarket all to yourself, for how long could you subsist on its contents? Your best strategy would be to consume perishable goods for the first few weeks, and then turn to the dried pasta and rice, as well as the more resilient tuber vegetables, before finally resorting to the most reliable reserve of canned produce. Assuming also that you are careful to keep a balanced diet with the necessary intake of vitamins and fiber (the health supplements aisle will help you here), your body will need 2,000 to 3,000 calories a day, depending on your size, gender, and how active you are. A single average-size supermarket should be able to sustain you for around 55 years—63 if you eat the canned cat and dog food as well.”
― Lewis Dartnell, The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch

“The carbon dioxide released by the combustion of fossil fuels has been rapidly increasing its level in the atmosphere, which is now 45 per cent higher that prior to the Industrial Revolution.”
― Lewis Dartnell, Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History

“Might cells survive even in outer space? Could life itself be transferred between planets in our solar system or even between the stars, like a cosmic infection spreading through the galaxy?”
― Lewis Dartnell, Life in the Universe: A Beginner's Guide

“15 million years ago ice sheets began forming over Greenland, and by the beginning of the Quaternary the cooling had passed the threshold for the North Pole’s ice cap to begin expanding. We entered the current phase of pulsing ice ages.23 It seems the Earth has been committed to a concerted effort towards cooling down. What grand-scale planetary processes have been conspiring to drive this global chilling? Gases like carbon dioxide and methane, as well as water vapour, in the atmosphere act like the panes of glass in a greenhouse: they allow the short-wavelength visible sunlight to shine right through and heat the Earth, but block the longer-wavelength infrared light given off by the warm planet surface. The effect of these greenhouse gases is to trap heat energy from escaping back into space, and so insulate the planet, leading to higher temperatures. Any mechanism that reduces the amount of these greenhouse gases in the air will therefore drive a global cooling.”
― Lewis Dartnell, Origins: How the Earth Shaped Human History

“Pretty much the entire wind pattern on Earth can therefore be explained by three simple facts: the equator is hotter than the poles, warm air rises, and the world spins.”
― Lewis Dartnell, Origins: How the Earth Shaped Human History

“as the world warmed again after the last glacial maximum and sea levels rose, the Bering land bridge once again disappeared beneath the waves. The connection between Alaska and Siberia was severed, and the Eastern and Western hemispheres were cut off from each other. Lasting contact was not made again between the peoples of the Old World and the New for another 16,000 years, until Columbus set foot on the Caribbean islands in 1492. Genetically similar, but living in different landscapes with access to different plants and animals, these two isolated populations of humanity formed civilisations independently from each other but remarkably similar in their domestication of crops and livestock and the development of agriculture.”
― Lewis Dartnell, Origins: How the Earth Shaped Human History

“Environmental changes over a much longer timescale can be met by evolution adopting the body or physiology of a species over the generations (such as the camel adopting to constantly arid conditions). Intelligence on the other hand is the evolutionary solution to the problem of an environment that shifts faster than natural selection can adapt the body.”
― Lewis Dartnell, Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History

“Since the early seventeenth century we’ve been fervently digging up this buried ancient carbon that cook tens of millions of years for the Earth to slowly stockpile, and we burned a great deal of it in just a few centuries. While there are concerns over peak oil and the diminishing supply of crude, there is plenty of accessible coal still underground – certainly another few centuries’ worth at current consumption rates. In this sense, then, we’re not currently facing another energy crisis but a climate crisis, born as a result of our past solution to our energy hunger”
― Lewis Dartnell, Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History

“the best way for the world to end would be at the hands of a fast-spreading pandemic”
― Lewis Dartnell, The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch

“For 90 per cent of the planet’s history there has been no fire on Earth. While there were volcanic eruptions, there was not enough oxygen in the atmosphere to sustain combustion.”
― Lewis Dartnell, Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History

“We are as utterly reliant on fire today as were our Paleolithic ancestors who huddled around a campfire; we've just hidden it behind the scenes of the modern world.”
― Lewis Dartnell, Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History

“ploughshares,”
― Lewis Dartnell, The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch

“Orogeny is a geological term for the building of a mountain range from subduction or collision of tectonic plates, although disappointingly the adjectival form is 'orogenic' not 'orogenous'.”
― Lewis Dartnell

“La inteligencia, por otra parte, es la solución evolutiva al problema de un ambiente que cambia con mayor rapidez de lo que la selección natural puede adaptar el cuerpo.”
― Lewis Dartnell, Orígenes: Cómo la historia de la Tierra determina la historia de la humanidad