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Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 23 Jun 2022

Taken: 23 Jun 2022

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this photo by Dinesh

Highland Peru, captured in this image of the Inka ruin Winay Wayna by the indigenous Andean photographer Martin Chambi (1891-1973), is o\the only place on earth where people living at such inhospitable altitudes repeatedly created materially sophisticated societies

Erhard Bernstein, Paolo Tanino have particularly liked this photo

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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
Highland Peru is an extraordinary as the Inka themselves. It is the only place on earth, the Cornell anthropologist John Murra wrote, “where millions [of people] insist, against the apparent logic, on living at 10,000 or even 14,000 feet above sea level. Nowhere else have people lived for so many thousands of years in such visibly vulnerable circumstances.” And nowhere else people living at such hights -- in place where most crops won’t grow, earthquakes and landslides are frequent, and extremes of weather are the norm -- repeatedly created technically advanced, long lasting civilization. The Inka homeland, uniquely high, was also uniquely steep, with slopes of more than sixty five degrees from the horizontal. (The steepest Street in San Francisco, famed for its nearly undrivable hills, is thirty-one-and-half degrees.) And it was uniquely narrow: the distance from the Pacific shore to the mountaintops is n more places less than seventy five miles and in many less than fifty. Ecologists postulate that the first large scale human societies tended to arise where, as Jared Diamond of the University of California at Los Angeles put it, geography provided “a wise range of altitudes and topographies within a short distance.” One such place is the Fertile Crescent, where the mountains of western Iran and Dead Sea, the lowest place on earth, brackets the Tigris and Euphrates river systems. Another is Peru. In the short traverse from mountains to ocean, travelers pass through twenty of the worlds thirty four principal types of environment. ~ Page 77

1491
3 years ago. Edited 3 years ago.

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