Greetings everyone,
I’m Jessie Lydia Henshaw, from New York, a physicist, architect, natural systems scientist, a very long-time ISSS observer of the extraordinary times we are in, looking into the need for all of us to rise to the occasion today, and with a great story to tell.
It’s full of familiar faces and circumstances we’ve both known forever and never quite seen in this new light.
On A New Language of History,
On Meeting Humanity’s Greatest Challenges
It’s a story retold repeatedly, as every day is, here regarding what every human civilization has had to face in its days of extraordinary challenges, to write its own original language of history. In this case, the focus is on Western Civilization’s rise from the late Stone Age, led by the recurring great creativity of the leading regional cultures, first faced with the challenge of a global climate change, the Younger Dryas of 12 to 13,000 years ago, a sudden chill that forced people to rethink.
Our story focuses on how the people of the Northern and Southern Levant regions of the Middle East were forced to change from skilled hunter-gatherers to invent new ways of living, becoming true masters of their realms, though having to do so repeatedly, as it turned out, the complex story our current complex world descends from. The emergence of modern civilization, our home on earth now, needed to be restarted repeatedly due to a small error in the original design for managing success, overlooking one of nature’s most firm laws, the need to change design at peaks of success.
Each emergence of new ways of living shared around the greater Levant began with successful collaborative innovation to redesign how our cultural tribes lived, but failed to make the natural turn for healthy growth systems, of slowing their creativive innovation, and instead begin perfecting their new ways of living at their peaks, so… solutions keep expanding and multiplying, in confusion, ending in tumultuous collapses, followed by multi-century Dark Ages, again and again – our living history.
So, this is the story of the recurrent growth and failure of our heritage to produce a stable civilization, humanity’s six leading civilizations, one about every 2,000 years for the past 12,000 years, that failed from success, the story of
- The emergent northern and southern Natufian Levant cultures, as the first organizers of their homes on earth
- The great northern spread of that first managed great world economy of the Fertile Crescent, a) It’s demise in the Mesopotamian collapse of Bable and b) The following Dark Age
- the revival of a second great world growth economy, the Mediterranean Bronze Age, exceptionally prosperous and creative, much like our own today, a) its tragic collapse and b) following Dark Age
- Then that of Classical Greece, and a) its Dark Age
- Then Rome, and a) its Dark Age
- And now what I’ll call EU/US, the leaders of the present world growth economy, a) presently destabilizing.
in total – in 12,000 years, a quick primer on who we are and what we’ve been doing!
So, dear reader, the above is my introduction to my Plenary talk for the ISSS.org 2026 Annual meeting, this year in Cyprus, my talk on Thursday, June 2025, with support materials on my project materials website Jessie’s backups and resources
Please leave questions and comments below if you like. I may be slow in replying but I hope to respond to all of interest.
Below is the first slide from the talk.
On a New Language of History – Meeting Humanity’s Greatest Challenges slide set.