fossil word

Guns, germs, and steel: the fates of human societies
by Jared M. Diamond
Published 15 Jul 2005

The concentration of three out of the four Austrone- sian subfamilies on Taiwan suggests that, within the present Austronesian realm, Taiwan is the homeland where Austronesian languages have been spoken for the most millennia and have consequently had the longest time in which to diverge. All other Austronesian languages, from those on Mad- agascar to those on Easter Island, would then stem from a population expansion out of Taiwan. WE CAN NOW turn to archaeological evidence. While the debris of ancient village sites does not include fossilized words along with bones and pottery, it does reveal movements of people and cultural artifacts that could be associated with languages. Like the rest of the world, most of the present Austronesian realmTaiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and many Pacific islandswas originally occupied by hunter-gatherers lacking pottery, polished stone tools, domestic animals, and crops.

The Ministry for the Future: A Novel
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Published 5 Oct 2020

Invisible revolutions, technical revolutions, legal revolutions. Quite possibly one could claim the benefits of a revolution without having to go through one. But doesn’t already-existing power resist revolutionary changes? Of course, but they fail! Because who holds power? No one knows anymore. Political power is itself one of those fossil words, behind which lies an unknown. I would have thought oligarchies were pretty known. Oligarchic power is the usual answer given, but if it exists at all, it’s so concentrated that it’s weak. How so? I must say you amaze me. Brittle. Fragile. Susceptible to decapitation. By which I mean not the guillotine type of decapitation, but the systemic kind, the removal from power of a small elite.

Red Mars
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Published 23 Oct 1992

We are all the consciousness that Mars has ever had.Now everybody knows the history of Mars in the human mind: how for all the generations of prehistory it was one of the chief lights in the sky, because of its redness and fluctuating intensity, and the way it stalled in its wandering course through the stars, and sometimes even reversed direction. It seemed to be saying something with all that. So perhaps it is not surprising that all the oldest names for Mars have a peculiar weight on the tongue— Nirgal, Mangala, Auqakuh, Harmakhis— they sound as if they were even older than the ancient languages we find them in, as if they were fossil words from the Ice Age or before. Yes, for thousands of years Mars was a sacred power in human affairs; and its color made it a dangerous power, representing blood, anger, war and the heart. Then the first telescopes gave us a closer look, and we saw the little orange disk, with its white poles and dark patches spreading and shrinking as the long seasons passed.