Word: anciently
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...cited wonders of Shakespeare's plays is their remarkable ability to transcend time and location, granting directors the privilege of transposing medieval Denmark to modern New York or ancient Athens to the foothills of 19th-century Italy. The privilege, however, can be abused. When the decision was made to stage Twelfth Night in the California redwoods during the Beat Generation of the 1950's, there may have been a good reason to do so. It appears, however, that that reason parted from the production sometime between the formation of the concept and opening night. Thus was the audience left...
...north, though, it's a different story. Digs at dozens of ancient Inuit sites in the eastern Canadian Arctic and western Greenland have turned up a wealth of Norse artifacts, indicating that the Europeans and Arctic natives interacted long after Leif Eriksson and his mates left. Says Sutherland: "The contact was more extensive and more complex than we suspected even a couple of months...
...fighting word. Prefaced with "maternal," it's often deployed as a warm-up for the old "barefoot and pregnant" prescription for feminine fulfillment. In fact, if motherhood is a mindlessly instinct-driven occupation, why bother with feet at all? In their zeal to reduce women to reproductive devices, the ancient Chinese eliminated the female foot, at least as a means of locomotion. More recently, in 1981, a male biologist implied in the esteemed journal Science that human females evolved to stand upright long after males did because what did females have to do anyway, except root around in the cave...
...surviving hunting-gathering societies like the !Kung, infrequent births mean that each baby can be cherished and, of course, fed. It is this script--not some commandment to multiply nonstop--that has been violated by human societies for the past few thousand years. By the time of the ancient Mediterranean civilizations, women were already having far more babies than they could care for--as evidenced by the widespread practice of infanticide and abandonment...
...maybe we're finally waking up from our species' 10,000-year-long mistake. Perhaps family planning, working moms and child-care centers aren't bizarre modernist digressions from the "natural" but the hallmarks of ancient primate family values. After all, the female primate's goal has never been hordes of offspring--just a few good kids. And if there's anything unique about our species compared with most other primates, it's that human males are so often motivated to serve as hands-on parents too. Thanks to contraceptive technology and, yes, feminism, we may have a chance...