Quotes About Origins

Lima beans, watermelons, potatoes, eggplants, and cabbages are among the many other familiar crops whose wild ancestors were bitter or poisonous, and

human genetic diversity is highest in Africa; perhaps more-diverse humans would collectively produce more-diverse inventions.

The first human ancestor to spread beyond Africa was Homo erectus, as is attested by fossils discovered on the Southeast Asian island of Java and conventionally known as Java man

We thereby know that states arose around 3700 B.C. in Mesopotamia and around 300 B.C. in Mesoamerica, over 2,000 years ago in the Andes, China, and Southeast Asia, and over 1,000 years ago in West Africa.

An example of a much more difficult invention is writing, which does not suggest itself by observation of any natural material. As we saw in Chapter 12, it had only a few independent origins, and the alphabet arose apparently only once in world history.

A typical American fast-food restaurant meal would include chicken (first domesticated in China) and potatoes (from the Andes) or corn (from Mexico), seasoned with black pepper (from India) and washed down with a cup of coffee (of Ethiopian origin).

explanation of causes

Our modern acorn squashes and summer squashes are derived from those American squashes domesticated thousands of years ago.

Thus, questions of the animal origins of human disease lie behind the broadest pattern of human history, and behind some of the most important issues in human health today. (Think of AIDS, an explosively spreading human disease that appears to have evolved from a virus resident in wild African monkeys.) This

If you would like to imagine the birth of the mighty National Security Agency, please visualize two men in a small room, one with a pug nose, pecking at a typewriter, the other a dandy in a suit and bow tie, smoking a pipe, wondering what his wife was up to at home, and if she was missing him.

Segmentar la historia es realizar un ejercicio arbitrario; en rigor, es imposible precisar el origen exacto de un acontecimiento histórico, igual que es imposible precisar su exacto final: todo acontecimiento tiene su origen en un acontecimiento anterior, y éste en otro anterior, y éste en otro anterior, y así hasta el infinito, porque la historia es como la materia y en ella nada se crea ni se destruye: sólo se transforma.

Let us turn our gaze towards the Southern lands, where only the melancholy light of origins shines.

What is it that you contain? The dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia opening in your gut. Every minute, in each of you, a few million potassium atoms succumb to radioactive decay. The energy that powers these tiny atomic events has been locked inside potassium atoms ever since a star-sized bomb exploded nothing into being. Potassium, like uranium and radium, is a long-lived radioactive nuclear waste of the supernova bang that accounts for you. Your first parent was a star.

Where you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.

My mother called me Silver. I was born part precious metal part pirate. I have no father. There's nothing unusual about that -even children who do have fathers are often surprised to see them. My own father came out of the sea and went back that way. He was crew on a fishing boat that harboured with us one night when the waves were crashing like dark glass. His splintered hulll shored him for long enough to drop anchor inside my mother. Shoals of babies vied for life. I won.

I never wanted to find my birth parents - if one set of parents felt like a misfortune, two sets would be self-destructive... I had no idea that you could like your parents or that they could love you enough to let you be yourself.

Donde naces — en lo que naces, el lugar, la historia del lugar, cómo esa historia se imbrica con la tuya— deja una impronta en quién eres, por mucho que digan los expertos en globalización.

Los niños adoptados nos autoinventamos porque no tenemos otra salida; hay una ausencia, un vacío, un signo de interrogación justo al principio de nuestras vidas. Una parte crucial se ha ido, y de forma violenta, como una bomba en el útero materno.

When I was born I became the visible corner of a folded map.

Perhaps I wasn't a child of God at all, but the daughter of a Frenchman.

I know nothing of my biological parents. They live on a lost continent of DNA. Like Atlantis, all record of them is sunk. They are guesswork, speculation, mythology. The only proof I have of them is myself, and what proof is that, so many times written over? Written on the body is a secret code, only visible in certain lights. I do not know my time of birth. I am not entirely sure of the date. Having brought no world with me, I made one.

Hay quien se cría en una colina y quien se cría en el valle. La mayoria lo hace en el llano. Yo vine a la vida inclinada, y así es como he vivido desde entonces.

My own father came out of the sea and went back that way... His splintered hull shored him long enough to drop anchor inside my mother. Shoals of babies vied for life. I won.

The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.