I know I'm late to the party, but sign me up!
The research paper doesn't get into that detail in their definition of "lake," but the authors do seem okay with including lakes that occasionally dry up. They mention in the paper that, "Lake Victoria, presently the world’s largest tropical lake, desiccated during the late Pleistocene (Stager et al. 2011)."
Regions like Persia, China, and the eastern Mediterranean got a head start because their climate, plants, and animals allowed agriculture to begin. Agriculture allowed major cultural developments: written text, math, astronomy, etc. These things then slowly spread to Europe via trade and wars of conquest.
Europe took all this imported knowledge and added another detail: developing better weapons and militaries. Wars happen everywhere, but Europe took it to a new level with centuries of near-constant fighting. This created big incentives to develop better weapons, better tactics, to travel and trade to find new resources, etc. All that military development led to improvements in metallurgy, shipbuilding, ocean navigation, etc. They leapfrogged all the cultures that came before them.
Why does it start in Europe?
You should read Guns, Germs, and Steel. The author argues that humans in certain regions of the world benefitted from particular environmental factors: better climate, better geography for trade, the availability of plants and animals that will tolerate being domesticated, etc. Many small advantages combine over centuries to create huge differences in technological advancement.
Maybe this community should be locked and abandoned? There are plenty of other active "ask" communities across Lemmy.
I empathize with your situation. I'm in the same boat. Even with hundreds of subscribers, if everyone's lurking then the community gets stale and withers. Becoming a one-person content machine isn't sustainable.
Though on a brighter note, with this post you just gained a subscriber to your community. Browsing through it reminded me of how fun geocaching was. I just dusted off my old geocaching.com account from a decade ago. I'll have to take my kids out and see what we can find!
It's a community treasure hunting game. A person hides something, then posts GPS coordinates and/or clues to lead you there. Often the hidden item is a sealed container so people can leave log books or unique trinkets. Some of the trinkets have serial numbers you can use to see where they've traveled.
I haven't done it in years, but I remember it being a lot of fun. Hunting for caches led me to a bunch of interesting new places that I would never have explored otherwise.
Exactly. Per the zoo's page:
The name 'Nils Olav' and his ranks have been passed down through three generations of king penguins since 1972, with the current holder being Sir Nils Olav III.
Dropping a comment here so I can switch my moderator credentials over to my lemmy.world alt. I have been using an account on sh.itjust.works, which means I cannot see reports generated on a lemmy.world community. (It's a known Lemmy bug.)
Dropping a comment here so I can switch my moderator credentials over to my lemmy.world alt. I have been using an account on sh.itjust.works, which means I cannot see reports generated on a lemmy.world community. (It's a known Lemmy bug.)
Dropping a comment here so I can switch my moderator credentials over to my lemmy.world alt. I have been using an account on sh.itjust.works, which means I cannot see reports generated on a lemmy.world community. (It's a known Lemmy bug.)