title: Alexander Pushkin

text: Pushkin's works also provided fertile ground for Russian composers. Glinka's "Ruslan and Lyudmila" is the earliest important Pushkin-inspired opera, and a landmark in the tradition of Russian music. Tchaikovsky's operas "Eugene Onegin" (1879) and "The Queen of Spades" ("Pikovaya Dama", 1890) became perhaps better known outside of Russia than Pushkin's own works of the same name.


title: Alexander Pushkin

text: Mussorgsky's monumental "Boris Godunov" (two versions, 1868–9 and 1871–2) ranks as one of the very finest and most original of Russian operas.


title: Alexander Pushkin

text: Other Russian operas based on Pushkin include Dargomyzhsky's "Rusalka" and "The Stone Guest"; Rimsky-Korsakov's "Mozart and Salieri", "Tale of Tsar Saltan", and "The Golden Cockerel"; Cui's "Prisoner of the Caucasus", "Feast in Time of Plague", and "The Captain's Daughter"; Tchaikovsky's "Mazeppa"; Rachmaninoff's one-act operas "Aleko" (based on "The Gypsies") and "The Miserly Knight"; Stravinsky's "Mavra", and Nápravník's "Dubrovsky".


title: Alexander Pushkin

text: Additionally, ballets and cantatas, as well as innumerable songs, have been set to Pushkin's verse (including even his French-language poems, in Isabelle Aboulker's song cycle "Caprice étrange"). Suppé, Leoncavallo and Malipiero have also based operas on his works. Composers Galina Konstantinovna Smirnova, Yevgania Yosifovna Yakhina, Maria Semyonovna Zavalishina, Zinaida Petrovna Ziberova composed folk songs using Pushkin's text.


title: Alexander Pushkin

text: "The Desire of Glory", which has been dedicated to Elizaveta Vorontsova, was set to music by David Tukhmanov ), as well as "Keep Me, Mine Talisman" – by Alexander Barykin ) and later by Tukhmanov.


title: Alexander Pushkin

text: Pushkin is considered by many to be the central representative of Romanticism in Russian literature although he was not unequivocally known as a Romantic. Russian critics have traditionally argued that his works represent a path from Neoclassicism through Romanticism to Realism. An alternative assessment suggests that "he had an ability to entertain contrarities which may seem Romantic in origin, but are ultimately subversive of all fixed points of view, all single outlooks, including the Romantic" and that "he is simultaneously Romantic and not Romantic".


title: Alexander Pushkin

text: Pushkin is usually credited with developing Russian literature. He is seen as having originated the highly nuanced level of language which characterizes Russian literature after him, and he is also credited with substantially augmenting the Russian lexicon. Whenever he found gaps in the Russian vocabulary, he devised calques. His rich vocabulary and highly-sensitive style are the foundation for modern Russian literature. His accomplishments set new records for development of the Russian language and culture. He became the father of Russian literature in the 19th century, marking the highest achievements of the 18th century and the beginning of literary process of the 19th century. He introduced Russia to all the European literary genres as well as a great number of West European writers. He brought natural speech and foreign influences to create modern poetic Russian. Though his life was brief, he left examples of nearly every literary genre of his day: lyric poetry, narrative poetry, the novel, the short story, the drama, the critical essay and even the personal letter.


title: Alexander Pushkin

text: According to Vladimir Nabokov, Pushkin's idiom combined all the contemporaneous elements of Russian with all he had learned from Derzhavin, Zhukovsky, Batyushkov, Karamzin and Krylov:


title: Alexander Pushkin

text: His work as a critic and as a journalist marked the birth of Russian magazine culture which included him devising and contributing heavily to one of the most influential literary magazines of the 19th century, the "Sovremennik" ("The Contemporary", or "Современник"). Pushkin inspired the folk tales and genre pieces of other authors: Leskov, Yesenin and Gorky. His use of Russian formed the basis of the style of novelists Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Goncharov and Leo Tolstoy, as well as that of subsequent lyric poets such as Mikhail Lermontov. Pushkin was analysed by Nikolai Gogol, his successor and pupil, and the great Russian critic Vissarion Belinsky, who produced the fullest and deepest critical study of Pushkin's work, which still retains much of its relevance.


title: Alexander Pushkin

text: The centennial year of Pushkin's death, 1937, was one of the most significant Soviet-era literary centennials in Stalinist Russia, rivaled only by the 1928 centennial commemorating Leo Tolstoy's birth. Despite the public display of visage on ever present billboards and candy wrappers, Pushkin's "image" conflicted with that of the ideal Soviet (he was reputed as a libertine with unrepentant aristocratic tendencies) and was subject to a repressive revisionism, similar to the Stalinist state's clean up of Tolstoy's Christian anarchism.


title: Alexander Pushkin

text: Following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine monuments dedicated to Pushkin in Ukraine were demolished and Pushkin streets were renamed.


title: 2003 NBA draft

text: The 2003 NBA draft was held on June 26, 2003, at The Theater at Madison Square Garden in New York City, New York. The NBA announced that 41 college and high school players and a record 31 international players had filed as early-entry candidates for the 2003 NBA draft. The Cleveland Cavaliers, who had a 22.50 percent probability of obtaining the first selection, won the NBA draft lottery on May 22, and Cleveland chairman Gordon Gund said afterward his team would select LeBron James. The Detroit Pistons and the Denver Nuggets were second and third, respectively. This draft was the first draft to be aired on ESPN after they picked up the license from TNT.


title: 2003 NBA draft

text: The 2003 draft is known for having one of the deepest talent pools in NBA history. The draft contained 15 players who combined for 26 championships. Four of the top five picks are NBA All-Stars and "Redeem Team" Olympic Gold Medalists: Carmelo Anthony, Chris Bosh, Dwyane Wade, and LeBron James. Many players have been in the starting line-ups of their respective teams; nine have participated in an All-Star Game, Dwyane Wade was named NBA Finals MVP in 2006 and won NBA championship with the Miami Heat in 2006, 2012 and 2013, as well as the NBA All Star Game MVP in 2010. Boris Diaw won the Most Improved Player Award in 2006, Jason Kapono won the three point shootout back-to-back years in 2007 and 2008, James Jones won the three point shootout in 2011, Leandro Barbosa won the Sixth Man Award in 2007, Kyle Korver set the NBA record for three point shooting percentage in 2010 (53.6%), and in the 2009, 2010, 2012, and 2013 seasons, LeBron James won the NBA Most Valuable Player Award, and the NBA Finals MVP in 2012, 2013, 2016, and 2020. Carmelo Anthony won the 2013 NBA Scoring Title and was the only player in NBA history to win at least three Olympic gold medals until Kevin Durant won his third one in 2021. Zaza Pachulia and David West won NBA championships with the Golden State Warriors in 2017 and 2018. Matt Bonner won NBA championships with the San Antonio Spurs in 2007 and 2014. Dahntay Jones and Mo Williams won the NBA championship in 2016 with the Cleveland Cavaliers. Luke Walton won three NBA championships, two as a player with the Los Angeles Lakers in 2009 and 2010 and one as an assistant coach with the Warriors in 2015. Chris Bosh left the Toronto Raptors in 2010 as its all-time leader in points, rebounds, blocks, double doubles, free throws made and attempted, and minutes played; he went on to win championships with the Miami Heat in 2012 and 2013.


title: 2003 NBA draft

text: The 2003 draft class has drawn comparisons to the 1984 and 1996 NBA draft classes but is also known for the Detroit Pistons' selection of Darko Miličić with the second overall pick over other prospects who went on to have much more success in the league. Only one player from this draft, Nick Collison, played his entire career for the team that drafted him. As of the 2022-'23 season, James and Anthony are the last remaining active players from the 2003 draft class; Udonis Haslem entered the NBA in 2003 as a free agent after going undrafted the previous year.


title: 2003 NBA draft

text: Eleven of the players selected in this draft never played in an NBA game throughout their professional basketball careers. Two of those players were the sole selection of the draft by their respective teams: Malick Badiane (Houston's only pick) and Paccelis Morlende (Philadelphia's only pick).


title: Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan

text: Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan (; 6 May 1918 – 2 November 2004) was an Emirati politician, statesman, and philanthropist who served as the first president of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) from 1971 until his death in 2004. He is credited as the founding father and the principal driving force behind the formation of the UAE, uniting seven emirates. He was also the ruler of Abu Dhabi from 1966 until his death.


title: Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan

text: Zayed replaced his older brother Sheikh Shakhbut bin Sultan as the ruler of Abu Dhabi on 6 August 1966 after Shakhbut was deposed through a bloodless coup by members of the ruling family with British support.


title: Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan

text: Zayed was the youngest of four sons of Sheikh Sultan bin Khalifa Al Nahyan. His father was the ruler of Abu Dhabi from 1922 until his death in 1926. Zayed was the youngest of his four brothers. His eldest brother, Sheikh Shakhbut bin Sultan Al Nahyan, became ruler of Abu Dhabi after their uncle, Saqr bin Zayed Al Nahyan. His mother was Sheikha Salama bint Butti. She extracted a promise from her sons not to use violence against each other, a promise which they kept. Sheikh Zayed was named after his grandfather, Sheikh Zayed bin Khalifa Al Nahyan ("Zayed the Great"), who ruled the emirate from 1855 to 1909. At the time of Sheikh Zayed's birth, the sheikhdom of Abu Dhabi was one of seven Trucial States along the lower coast of the Persian Gulf. He also showed interest in falconry.


title: Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan

text: It is normally held that he was born at Qasr al-Hosn in Abu Dhabi, with some sources stating that he was born in Al Ain, particularly at Sultan Bin Zayed Fort on the edge of Al Ain Oasis. He is at least known to have moved from Abu Dhabi to Al Ain in 1927, after the death of his father. As Zayed was growing up in Al-Ain, there were no modern schools anywhere along the coast. He only received a basic instruction in the principles of Islam, and lived in the desert with Bedouin tribesmen, familiarising himself with the life of the people, their traditional skills and their ability to survive under the harsh climatic conditions.


title: Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan

text: Zayed was appointed the governor of the Eastern Region of Abu Dhabi in 1946, and was based in the Muwaiji fort in Al Ain. At this time, the area was poor and prone to outbreaks of disease. When parties from Petroleum Development (Trucial Coast) began exploring for oil in the area, Zayed assisted them.


title: Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan

text: In 1952, a small Saudi Arabian force led by Turki bin Abdullah Al-Otaishan occupied the village of Hamasa in the Buraimi Oasis (the 'Buraimi Dispute'). Zayed was prominent in his opposition to Saudi territorial claims and reportedly rejected a bribe of about £30 million to allow Aramco to explore for oil in the disputed territory. As part of this dispute, Zayed and his brother Hazza attended the Buraimi arbitration tribunal in Geneva in September 1955 and gave evidence to tribunal members. When the tribunal was abandoned amid allegations of Saudi bribery, the British initiated the reoccupation of the Buraimi Oasis through a local military force, the Trucial Oman Levies. A period of stability followed during which Zayed helped to develop the region and took a particular interest in the restoration of the "falaj" system, a network of water channels which kept the plantations of the Buraimi Oasis irrigated and fertile.


title: Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan

text: The discovery of oil in 1958, and the start of oil exports in 1962, led to frustration among members of the ruling family about the lack of progress under Sheikh Shakhbut's rule. Shakhbut was seen as averse to spending revenue from oil money to develop the emirate by other members of Al Nahyan and hence they requested British help to install Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan as the ruler of Abu Dhabi in his stead through a bloodless coup. On 6 August 1966, Shakhbut was deposed in a bloodless palace coup. The move to replace Shakhbut with Zayed had the unanimous backing of the Al Nahyan family. The news was conveyed to Shakhbut by British Acting Resident Glen Balfour-Paul who added the support of the British to the consensus of the family. Shakhbut finally accepted the decision and, with the Trucial Oman Scouts providing safe transport, left for Bahrain. He subsequently lived in Khorramshahr, Iran before returning to live in Buraimi.


title: Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan

text: In the late 1960s, Zayed hired Katsuhiko Takahashi, a Japanese architect, to design and plan the city of Abu Dhabi. Takahashi, working to instructions from Zayed, often marked out in sand with a camel stick, was responsible for a number of key buildings, while also introducing wide roads, the construction of corniches and also greening the city. Another architect, Egyptian Abdulrahman Makhlouf, also worked to render Zayed's instructions into city plans and infrastructural projects following Takahashi's departure.


title: Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan

text: Between 8–11 January 1968, the UK's Foreign Office Minister Goronwy Roberts visited the Trucial States and announced to its shocked rulers that the United Kingdom would abrogate its treaties with them and intended to withdraw from the area. In a seminal meeting on 18 February 1968 at a desert highland on the border between Dubai and Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Zayed and Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum of Dubai shook hands on the principle of founding a Federation and attempting to invite other trucial rulers to join in order that a viable nation be formed in the wake of the British withdrawal.


title: Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan

text: In 1971, after occasionally difficult negotiations with the other six rulers of the Trucial States, the United Arab Emirates was formed. Zayed was appointed to the presidency of the UAE in 1971 and was reappointed on four more occasions: 1976, 1981, 1986, and 1991.


title: Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan

text: In 1974, Zayed settled the outstanding border dispute with Saudi Arabia by the Treaty of Jeddah by which Saudi Arabia received the output of the Shaybah oilfield and access to the lower Persian Gulf in return for recognising the UAE.


title: Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan

text: In 1976 he founded the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, which grew to be the world's third-largest sovereign investment fund by 2020, with nearly a trillion US dollars' worth of assets under management.


title: Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan

text: Sheikh Zayed was determined to unite the Emirates into federation. His calls for cooperation extended across the Persian Gulf to Iran. He advocated dialogue as the means to settle the row with Tehran over three strategic Persian Gulf islands which Iran seized from the (future) UAE Emirate of Sharjah in 1971. The islands remain in Iranian hands, despite over three decades of UAE diplomatic initiatives.


title: Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan

text: The attitude of Zayed towards his neighbors can best be seen in his position regarding the "Umm al Zamul" dispute (1964), when he expressed a genuine wish that his brother Sheikh Shakhbut would accept "the Sultan's proposal for a neutral zone". He said in that regard: "... it was ridiculous to squabble over a [water] well so bitter that few bedouin could stomach its waters, or to split hairs over a tiny area of barren, almost totally unfrequented desert. And even if there happened to be oil in the area, Abu Dhabi had so much already that she could well afford to spare some for her less fortunate neighbours".


title: Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan

text: Furthermore, during the negotiations between Abu Dhabi and Dubai that resulted in forming the Abu Dhabi — Dubai Union (which preceded the formation of the United Arab Emirates), Sheikh Zayed was extremely generous with the Sheikh Rashid of Dubai. Kemal Hamza, Sheikh Rashid's envoy to the meeting between Sheikh Zayed and Sheikh Rashid in Sumeih remarked that "Zayed was extremely 'karim' (generous) throughout the negotiations and seemed prepared to give Rashid whatever he wanted". This amounted to Zayed giving Rashid "oil rights in the sea-bed that might be worth milions a year" even at the risk of criticism "at home for giving so much..." It also gave rise to comments that such concessions constituted "an alienation of territory by Abu Dhabi". But the future course of events proved, none of these arguments stood the test of judgment in light of the much higher goal that Sheikh Zayed had in mind, and which in the ultimate analysis amply justified the sacrifices incurred by him. Such concessions are rare in the records of history and news of this generosity travelled far and wide.


title: Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan

text: He was considered a relatively liberal ruler, and permitted private media. However, they were expected to practice self-censorship and avoid criticism of Zayed or the ruling families. Freedom of worship was permitted, and to a certain extent allowances were made for expatriate cultures, but this did not always sit comfortably in the eyes of the wider Arab world with Zayed's role as a Muslim head of state.


title: Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan

text: Zayed did not shy away from controversy when it came to expressing his opinions on current events in the Arab world. Troubled by the suffering of Iraqi civilians, he took the lead in calling for the lifting of economic sanctions on Iraq imposed by the United Nations in the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, despite Kuwaiti displeasure and opposition.


title: Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan

text: Zayed was one of the wealthiest men in the world. A "Forbes" estimate put his fortune at around US$20 billion in 2004. The source of this wealth was almost exclusively due to the immense oil wealth of Abu Dhabi and the Emirates, which sit on a pool of a tenth of the world's proven oil reserves. In 1988, he purchased, for £5m, Tittenhurst Park at Sunninghill, Berkshire as his English home.


title: Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan

text: At the time the British withdrew from the Persian Gulf in 1971, Zayed oversaw the establishment of the Abu Dhabi Fund for Arab Economic Development; some of its oil riches were channeled to some forty less fortunate Islamic nations in Asia and Africa during the decades that followed.


title: Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan

text: Using the country's enormous oil revenues, Zayed built institutions such as hospitals, schools and universities and made it possible for UAE citizens to enjoy free access to them. He was also known for making donations to the tune of millions [pounds sterling] for worthy causes around the Arab World as well as in the neighbouring countries and in the world at large.


title: Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan

text: When asked by "The New York Times" in April 1997 why there is no elected legislature, Zayed replied, Why should we abandon a system that satisfies our people in order to introduce a system that seems to engender dissent and confrontation? Our system of government is based upon our religion and that is what our people want. Should they seek alternatives, we are ready to listen to them.


title: Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan

text: We have always said that our people should voice their demands openly. We are all in the same boat, and they are both the captain and the crew. Our doors are open for any opinion to be expressed, and this well known by all our citizens. It is our deep conviction that Allah has created people free, and has prescribed that each individual must enjoy freedom of choice. No one should act as if they own others.


title: Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan

text: Those in the position of leadership should deal with their subjects with compassion and understanding, because this is the duty enjoined upon them by Allah, who enjoins upon us to treat all living creatures with dignity. How can there be anything less for mankind, created as Allah's successors on earth? Our system of government does not derive its authority from man, but is enshrined in our religion and is based on Allah's Book, the Quran. What need have we of what others have conjured up? Its teachings are eternal and complete, while the systems conjured up by man are transitory and incomplete.


title: Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan

text: Land was also often distributed "gratis" (free). However, while this policy benefited many landless families, enormously wealthy clans and individuals were given free land grants in proportion to their status and influence with the royal family. His majlis (a traditional Arab consultation council) was open to the public. He allowed non-Muslim religious buildings, such as churches and a temple, to be built. Zayed was also in favour of certain rights for women, such as access to education and women's labour rights, within traditional parameters. His views regarding women's rights were considerably more liberal than his counterparts in the GCC nations.


title: Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan

text: Zayed was one of the founders of the Dar Al Maal Al Islami Trust which was initiated by Saudi royal Mohammed bin Faisal Al Saud, King Faisal's son, in 1981. After floods ravaged Yemen's Ma'rib Governorate in 1982, Zayed financed the construction of the current dam of Ma'rib in 1984. This was to replace the historical one that was damaged in antiquity, and support the country's agriculture and economy. The area of Ma'rib is reportedly from where his ancestors migrated to what is now the UAE.


title: Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan

text: Controversy over the opinions of the Zayed Centre caused the Harvard Divinity School to return Sheikh Zayed's $2.5 million gift to the institution in 2000 as "tainted money." Former United States president Jimmy Carter accepted the Zayed International Prize for the Environment in 2001. The award included a monetary prize of $500,000 from the Zayed Centre, and Carter stated in his acceptance speech that the award carried extra significance to him, since it was named after his personal friend.


title: Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan

text: There was similar controversy when the London School of Economics accepted a large donation by the Zayed Centre, to build a new lecture theatre in the New Academic Building in 2008. Despite student protests, the gift was accepted with the Sheikh Zayed Theatre being the second largest lecture hall on the campus.


title: Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan

text: Harvard's equivocation, the Carter controversy, and the engendering negative publicity, prompted Sheikh Zayed to shut down the centre in August 2003, stating that the Zayed Centre "had engaged in a discourse that starkly contradicted the principles of interfaith tolerance."


title: Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan

text: On 2 November 2004, Zayed died at the age of 86. He had been suffering from diabetes and kidney problems. He was buried in the courtyard of the new Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi. His eldest son, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, took an increasing role in government beginning in the 1980s. Directly after his father's death, he became the Ruler of Abu Dhabi, and was ratified as the president of the United Arab Emirates by his fellow rulers in the Supreme Council.


title: Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan

text: In 2018, a year dedicated in the UAE to the celebration of Zayed's life and legacy, the Founder's Memorial was opened in Abu Dhabi. The memorial consists of an open Heritage Garden and Sanctuary Garden at the centre of which is a cubic pavilion housing The Constellation, an artwork dedicated to Zayed's memory.


title: Aokigahara

text: Aokigahara (), also known as the , is a forest on the northwestern flank of Mount Fuji on the island of Honshu in Japan, thriving on of hardened lava laid down by the last major eruption of Mount Fuji in 864 CE. The western edge of Aokigahara, where there are several caves that fill with ice in winter, is a popular destination for tourists and school trips. Parts of Aokigahara are very dense, and the porous lava rock absorbs sound, contributing to a sense of solitude that some visitors attribute to the forest.


title: Aokigahara

text: The forest has a historical reputation as a home to "yūrei": ghosts of the dead in Japanese mythology. At least since the 1960s, Aokigahara has become associated with suicide, eventually becoming known in English by the nickname "Suicide Forest" and gaining a reputation as one of the world's most-used suicide sites. Because of this, signs at the head of some trails urge suicidal visitors to think of their families and contact a suicide prevention association.


title: Aokigahara

text: The forest floor mostly consists of volcanic rock. Designated trails lead to several tourist attractions such as the Narusawa Ice Cave, Fugaku Wind Cave and Lake Sai Bat Cave which are three larger lava caves near Mount Fuji, the ice cave being frozen year-round.


title: Aokigahara

text: Aokigahara has been falsely portrayed as a place where navigational compasses go haywire. Needles of magnetic compasses will move if placed directly on the lava, aligning with the rock's natural magnetism, which varies in iron content and strength by location. However, a compass behaves as expected when held at a normal height. The Japan Ground Self-Defense Force has conducted its ranger courses including navigation training in the forest since 1956.


title: Aokigahara

text: Mammals include the Asian black bear, small Japanese mole, bats, mice, deer, fox, boar, wild rabbit, Japanese mink and Japanese squirrel. Birds include great tit, willow tit, long-tailed tit, great spotted woodpecker, pygmy woodpecker, bush warbler, Eurasian jay, Japanese white-eye, Japanese thrush, brown-headed thrush, Siberian thrush, Hodgson's hawk-cuckoo, Japanese grosbeak, lesser cuckoo, black-faced bunting, oriental turtle dove, and common cuckoo.


title: Aokigahara

text: There are ground beetles and other insects, including many species of butterflies, even in the forest interior "Argynnis paphia", "Chrysozephyrus smaragdinus", "Celastrina argiolus", "Celastrina sugitanii", "Curetis acuta", "Favonius jezoensis", "Neptis sappho", "Parantica sita" and "Polygonia c-album" are found.


title: Aokigahara

text: The forest has a variety of conifers and broadleaf trees and shrubs including: "Chamaecyparis obtusa", "Cryptomeria japonica", "Pinus densiflora", "Pinus parviflora", "Tsuga sieboldii", "Acer distylum", "Acer micranthum", "Acer sieboldianum", "Acer tschonoskii", "Betula grossa", "Chengiopanax sciadophylloides" (as "Acanthopanax sciadophylloides" a.k.a. "Eleutherococcus sciadophylloides"), "Clethra barbinervis", "Enkianthus campanulatus", "Euonymus macropterus", "Ilex pedunculosa", "Ilex macropoda", "Pieris japonica", "Prunus jamasakura", "Quercus mongolica" var. "crispula", "Rhododendron dilatatum", "Skimmia japonica" f. "repens", "Sorbus commixta" (as "Sorbus americana" ssp. "japonica") and "Toxicodendron trichocarpum" (as "Rhus trichocarpa"). The dominant tree species between 1,000 and 1,800 metres of altitude is "Tsuga diversifolia" and from 1,800 to 2,200 metres is "Abies veitchii".


title: Aokigahara

text: Deeper in the forest there are many herbaceous flowering plants including "Artemisia princeps", "Cirsium nipponicum" var. "incomptum", "Corydalis incisa", "Erigeron annuus", "Geranium nepalense", "Kalimeris pinnatifida", "Maianthemum dilatatum", "Oplismenus undulatifolius" and "Reynoutria japonica" (syn. "Polygonum cuspidatum"). There are also the myco-heterotrophic "Monotropastrum humile", frequent liverworts, many mosses and many ferns. The forest edges have many more species.


title: Aokigahara

text: Aokigahara is sometimes referred to as the most popular site for suicide in Japan. In 2003, 105 bodies were found in the forest, exceeding the previous record of 78 in 2002. In 2010, the police recorded more than 200 people having attempted suicide in the forest, of whom 54 completed the act. Suicides are said to increase during March, the end of the fiscal year in Japan. As of 2011, the most common means of suicide in the forest were hanging or drug overdose. In recent years, local officials have stopped publicizing the numbers in an attempt to decrease Aokigahara's association with suicide.


title: Aokigahara

text: The rate of suicide has led officials to place a sign at the forest's entry urging suicidal visitors to seek help and not take their own lives. Annual body searches have been conducted by police, volunteers, and journalists since 1970.


title: Aokigahara

text: The site's popularity has been attributed to Seichō Matsumoto's 1961 novel "Nami no Tō" ("Tower of Waves"). However, the history of suicide in Aokigahara predates the novel's publication, and the place has long been associated with death; "ubasute" may have been practiced there into the nineteenth century, and the forest is reputedly haunted by the "yūrei" of those left to die.


title: Aokigahara

text: Aokigahara has been referred to in several media, including anime and manga, films, literature, music, and video games.


title: Aokigahara

text: The 2015 film "The Sea of Trees" with Matthew McConaughey, Ken Watanabe and Naomi Watts also tells a story happening there, as does the 2016 horror film "The Forest".


title: Aokigahara

text: During late 2017 and early 2018, the began with a YouTube video showing the Aokigahara forest, in which Paul showed the body of a suicide victim on camera, that shocked many viewers and brought widespread condemnation.


title: Aokigahara

text: It was the subject of a BBC Radio 4 production (first broadcast 10 September 2018) in which four poets traveled to Aokigahara to write and record poetry in the forest.


title: Aokigahara

text: The poets Arai Takako, Jordan A. Y. Smith, Osaki Sayaka, and Yotsumoto Yasuhiro co-authored a bilingual (Japanese/English) anthology of the poems and short writings on Aokigahara, titled "Sea of Trees: Poetic Gateways to Aokigahara" (ToPoJo Excursions, 2019).


title: Aokigahara

text: An , Kristine Haruna Lee, wrote and staged a play, "Suicide Forest", in New York City in March 2019. It addressed suicide in America and Japan, referencing the Aokigahara Forest.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: Samuel Barclay Beckett (; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish novelist, dramatist, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. His literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal and tragicomic experiences of life, often coupled with black comedy and nonsense. It became increasingly minimalist as his career progressed, involving more aesthetic and linguistic experimentation, with techniques of repetition and self-reference. He is considered one of the last modernist writers, and one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin called the Theatre of the Absurd.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: A resident of Paris for most of his adult life, Beckett wrote in both French and English. During the Second World War, Beckett was a member of the French Resistance group Gloria SMH (Réseau Gloria). Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation". He was the first person to be elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: Samuel Barclay Beckett was born in the Foxrock suburb of Dublin on 13 April 1906, the son of William Frank Beckett (18711933), a quantity surveyor of Huguenot descent, and Maria Jones Roe, a nurse. His parents were both 35 when he was born, and had married in 1901. Beckett had one older brother named Frank Edward (1902–1954). At the age of five, he attended a local playschool in Dublin, where he started to learn music, and then moved to Earlsfort House School near Harcourt Street in Dublin. The Becketts were members of the Church of Ireland; raised as an Anglican, Beckett later became agnostic, a perspective which informed his writing.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: Beckett's family home, Cooldrinagh, was a large house and garden complete with tennis court built in 1903 by Beckett's father. The house and garden, its surrounding countryside where he often went walking with his father, the nearby Leopardstown Racecourse, the Foxrock railway station, and Harcourt Street station would all feature in his prose and plays. Around 1919 or 1920, he went to Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, which Oscar Wilde had also attended. He left in 1923 and entered Trinity College Dublin, where he studied modern literature and Romance languages, and received his bachelor's degree in 1927. A natural athlete, he excelled at cricket as a left-handed batsman and a left-arm medium-pace bowler. Later, he played for Dublin University and played two first-class games against Northamptonshire. As a result, he became the only Nobel literature laureate to have played first-class cricket.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: Beckett studied French, Italian, and English at Trinity College Dublin from 1923 to 1927 (one of his tutors was the Berkeley scholar A. A. Luce, who introduced him to the work of Henri Bergson). He was elected a Scholar in Modern Languages in 1926. Beckett graduated with a BA and, after teaching briefly at Campbell College in Belfast, took up the post of "lecteur d'anglais" at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris from November 1928 to 1930. While there, he was introduced to renowned Irish author James Joyce by Thomas MacGreevy, a poet and close confidant of Beckett who also worked there. This meeting had a profound effect on the young man. Beckett assisted Joyce in various ways, one of which was research towards the book that became "Finnegans Wake".


title: Samuel Beckett

text: In 1929, Beckett published his first work, a critical essay titled "Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce". The essay defends Joyce's work and method, chiefly from allegations of wanton obscurity and dimness, and was Beckett's contribution to "Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress" (a book of essays on Joyce which also included contributions by Eugene Jolas, Robert McAlmon, and William Carlos Williams). Beckett's close relationship with Joyce and his family cooled, however, when he rejected the advances of Joyce's daughter Lucia. Beckett's first short story, "Assumption", was published in Jolas's periodical "transition". The next year he won a small literary prize for his hastily composed poem "Whoroscope", which draws on a biography of René Descartes that Beckett happened to be reading when he was encouraged to submit.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: In 1930, Beckett returned to Trinity College as a lecturer. In November 1930, he presented a paper in French to the Modern Languages Society of Trinity on the Toulouse poet Jean du Chas, founder of a movement called "le Concentrisme". It was a literary parody, for Beckett had in fact invented the poet and his movement that claimed to be "at odds with all that is clear and distinct in Descartes". Beckett later insisted that he had not intended to fool his audience. When Beckett resigned from Trinity at the end of 1931, his brief academic career was at an end. He commemorated it with the poem "Gnome", which was inspired by his reading of Johann Wolfgang Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship" and eventually published in "The Dublin Magazine" in 1934:


title: Samuel Beckett

text: Beckett travelled throughout Europe. He spent some time in London, where in 1931 he published "Proust", his critical study of French author Marcel Proust. Two years later, following his father's death, he began two years' treatment with Tavistock Clinic psychoanalyst Dr. Wilfred Bion. Aspects of it became evident in Beckett's later works, such as "Watt" and "Waiting for Godot". In 1932, he wrote his first novel, "Dream of Fair to Middling Women", but after many rejections from publishers decided to abandon it (it was eventually published in 1992). Despite his inability to get it published, however, the novel served as a source for many of Beckett's early poems, as well as for his first full-length book, the 1933 short-story collection "More Pricks Than Kicks".


title: Samuel Beckett

text: Beckett published essays and reviews, including "Recent Irish Poetry" (in "The Bookman", August 1934) and "Humanistic Quietism", a review of his friend Thomas MacGreevy's "Poems" (in "The Dublin Magazine", July–September 1934). They focused on the work of MacGreevy, Brian Coffey, Denis Devlin and Blanaid Salkeld, despite their slender achievements at the time, comparing them favourably with their Celtic Revival contemporaries and invoking Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and the French symbolists as their precursors. In describing these poets as forming "the nucleus of a living poetic in Ireland", Beckett was tracing the outlines of an Irish poetic modernist canon.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: In 1935—the year that he successfully published a book of his poetry, "Echo's Bones and Other Precipitates"—Beckett worked on his novel "Murphy". In May, he wrote to MacGreevy that he had been reading about film and wished to go to Moscow to study with Sergei Eisenstein at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography. In mid-1936 he wrote to Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin to offer himself as their apprentice. Nothing came of this, however, as Beckett's letter was lost owing to Eisenstein's quarantine during the smallpox outbreak, as well as his focus on a script re-write of his postponed film production. In 1936, a friend had suggested he look up the works of Arnold Geulincx, which Beckett did and he took many notes. The philosopher's name is mentioned in "Murphy" and the reading apparently left a strong impression. "Murphy" was finished in 1936 and Beckett departed for extensive travel around Germany, during which time he filled several notebooks with lists of noteworthy artwork that he had seen and noted his distaste for the Nazi savagery that was overtaking the country. Returning to Ireland briefly in 1937, he oversaw the publication of "Murphy" (1938), which he translated into French the following year. He fell out with his mother, which contributed to his decision to settle permanently in Paris. Beckett remained in Paris following the outbreak of World War II in 1939, preferring, in his own words, "France at war to Ireland at peace". His was soon a known face in and around Left Bank cafés, where he strengthened his allegiance with Joyce and forged new ones with artists Alberto Giacometti and Marcel Duchamp, with whom he regularly played chess. Sometime around December 1937, Beckett had a brief affair with Peggy Guggenheim, who nicknamed him "Oblomov" (after the character in Ivan Goncharov's novel).


title: Samuel Beckett

text: In January 1938 in Paris, Beckett was stabbed in the chest and nearly killed when he refused the solicitations of a notorious pimp (who went by the name of Prudent). Joyce arranged a private room for Beckett at the hospital. The publicity surrounding the stabbing attracted the attention of Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil, who knew Beckett slightly from his first stay in Paris. This time, however, the two would begin a lifelong companionship. At a preliminary hearing, Beckett asked his attacker for the motive behind the stabbing. Prudent replied: "Je ne sais pas, Monsieur. Je m'excuse" ["I do not know, sir. I'm sorry"]. Beckett eventually dropped the charges against his attacker—partially to avoid further formalities, partly because he found Prudent likeable and well-mannered.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: After the Nazi German occupation of France in 1940, Beckett joined the French Resistance, in which he worked as a courier. On several occasions over the next two years he was nearly caught by the Gestapo. In August 1942, his unit was betrayed and he and Suzanne fled south on foot to the safety of the small village of Roussillon, in the Vaucluse "département" in Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur. During the two years that Beckett stayed in Roussillon he indirectly helped the Maquis sabotage the German army in the Vaucluse mountains, though he rarely spoke about his wartime work in later life. He was awarded the Croix de guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance by the French government for his efforts in fighting the German occupation; to the end of his life, however, Beckett would refer to his work with the French Resistance as "boy scout stuff".


title: Samuel Beckett

text: While in hiding in Roussillon, Beckett continued work on the novel "Watt". He started the novel in 1941 and completed it in 1945, but it was not published until 1953; however, an extract had appeared in the Dublin literary periodical "Envoy". After the war, he returned to France in 1946 where he worked as a stores manager at the Irish Red Cross Hospital based in Saint-Lô. Beckett described his experiences in an untransmitted radio script, "The Capital of the Ruins".


title: Samuel Beckett

text: In 1945, Beckett returned to Dublin for a brief visit. During his stay, he had a revelation in his mother's room: his entire future direction in literature appeared to him. Beckett had felt that he would remain forever in the shadow of Joyce, certain to never beat him at his own game. His revelation prompted him to change direction and to acknowledge both his own stupidity and his interest in ignorance and impotence:


title: Samuel Beckett

text: "I realised that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one's material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realised that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding."


title: Samuel Beckett

text: Knowlson argues that "Beckett was rejecting the Joycean principle that knowing more was a way of creatively understanding the world and controlling it ... In future, his work would focus on poverty, failure, exile and loss – as he put it, on man as a 'non-knower' and as a 'non-can-er.'" The revelation "has rightly been regarded as a pivotal moment in his entire career". Beckett fictionalised the experience in his play "Krapp's Last Tape" (1958). While listening to a tape he made earlier in his life, Krapp hears his younger self say "clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most...", at which point Krapp fast-forwards the tape (before the audience can hear the complete revelation). Beckett later explained to Knowlson that the missing words on the tape are "precious ally".


title: Samuel Beckett

text: In 1946, Jean-Paul Sartre’s magazine published the first part of Beckett's short story ""Suite"" (later to be called "", or "The End"), not realising that Beckett had only submitted the first half of the story; Simone de Beauvoir refused to publish the second part. Beckett also began to write his fourth novel, "Mercier et Camier", which was not published until 1970. The novel presaged his most famous work, the play "Waiting for Godot", which was written not long afterwards. More importantly, the novel was Beckett's first long work that he wrote in French, the language of most of his subsequent works which were strongly supported by Jérôme Lindon, director of his Parisian publishing house , including the poioumenon "trilogy" of novels: "Molloy" (1951); (1951), "Malone Dies" (1958); (1953), "The Unnamable" (1960). Despite being a native English speaker, Beckett wrote in French because—as he himself claimed—it was easier for him thus to write "without style".


title: Samuel Beckett

text: Beckett is most famous for his play ("Waiting for Godot"; 1953). Like most of his works after 1947, the play was first written in French. Beckett worked on the play between October 1948 and January 1949. His partner, Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil, was integral to its success. Dechevaux-Dumesnil became his agent and sent the manuscript to multiple producers until they met Roger Blin, the soon-to-be director of the play.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: Blin's knowledge of French theatre and vision alongside Beckett knowing what he wanted the play to represent contributed greatly to its success. In a much-quoted article, the critic Vivian Mercier wrote that Beckett "has achieved a theoretical impossibility—a play in which nothing happens, that yet keeps audiences glued to their seats. What's more, since the second act is a subtly different reprise of the first, he has written a play in which nothing happens, twice." The play was published in 1952 and premièred in 1953 in Paris; an English translation was performed two years later. The play was a critical, popular, and controversial success in Paris. It opened in London in 1955 to mainly negative reviews, but the tide turned with positive reactions from Harold Hobson in "The Sunday Times" and, later, Kenneth Tynan. After the showing in Miami, the play became extremely popular, with highly successful performances in the US and Germany. The play is a favourite: it is not only performed frequently but has globally inspired playwrights to emulate it. This is the sole play the manuscript of which Beckett never sold, donated or gave away. He refused to allow the play to be translated into film but did allow it to be played on television.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: During this time in the 1950s, Beckett became one of several adults who sometimes drove local children to school; one such child was André Roussimoff, who would later become a famous professional wrestler under the name André the Giant. They had a surprising amount of common ground and bonded over their love of cricket, with Roussimoff later recalling that the two rarely talked about anything else. Beckett translated all of his works into English himself, with the exception of "Molloy", for which he collaborated with Patrick Bowles. The success of "Waiting for Godot" opened up a career in theatre for its author. Beckett went on to write successful full-length plays, including ("Endgame") (1957), "Krapp's Last Tape" (1958, written in English), "Happy Days" (1961, also written in English), and "Play" (1963). In 1961, Beckett received the International Publishers' Formentor Prize in recognition of his work, which he shared that year with Jorge Luis Borges.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: The 1960s were a time of change for Beckett, both on a personal level and as a writer. In 1961, he married Suzanne in a secret civil ceremony in England (its secrecy due to reasons relating to French inheritance law). The success of his plays led to invitations to attend rehearsals and productions around the world, leading eventually to a new career as a theatre director. In 1957, he had his first commission from the BBC Third Programme for a radio play, "All That Fall." He continued writing sporadically for radio and extended his scope to include cinema and television. He began to write in English again, although he also wrote in French until the end of his life. He bought some land in 1953 near a hamlet about northeast of Paris and built a cottage for himself with the help of some locals.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: From the late 1950s until his death, Beckett had a relationship with Barbara Bray, a widow who worked as a script editor for the BBC. Knowlson wrote of them: "She was small and attractive, but, above all, keenly intelligent and well-read. Beckett seems to have been immediately attracted by her and she to him. Their encounter was highly significant for them both, for it represented the beginning of a relationship that was to last, in parallel with that with Suzanne, for the rest of his life." Barbara Bray died in Edinburgh on 25 February 2010.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: In 1969 the avant-garde filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim shot an experimental short film portrait about Beckett, which he named after the writer.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: In October 1969 while on holiday in Tunis with Suzanne, Beckett heard that he had won the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature. Anticipating that her intensely private husband would be saddled with fame from that moment on, Suzanne called the award a "catastrophe". While Beckett did not devote much time to interviews, he sometimes met the artists, scholars, and admirers who sought him out in the anonymous lobby of the Hotel PLM Saint-Jacques in Paris – where he gave his appointments and took frequently his lunches – near his Montparnasse home. Although Beckett was an intensely private man, a review of the second volume of his letters by Roy Foster on 15 December 2011 issue of "The New Republic" reveals Beckett to be not only unexpectedly amiable but frequently prepared to talk about his work and the process behind it.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: Suzanne died on 17 July 1989. Confined to a nursing home and suffering from emphysema and possibly Parkinson's disease, Beckett died on 22 December. The two were interred together in the cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris and share a simple granite gravestone that follows Beckett's directive that it should be "any colour, so long as it's grey".


title: Samuel Beckett

text: Beckett's career as a writer can be roughly divided into three periods: his early works, up until the end of World War II in 1945; his middle period, stretching from 1945 until the early 1960s, during which he wrote what are probably his best-known works; and his late period, from the early 1960s until Beckett's death in 1989, during which his works tended to become shorter and his style more minimalist.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: Beckett's earliest works are generally considered to have been strongly influenced by the work of his friend James Joyce. They are erudite and seem to display the author's learning merely for its own sake, resulting in several obscure passages. The opening phrases of the short-story collection "More Pricks than Kicks" (1934) affords a representative sample of this style:


title: Samuel Beckett

text: It was morning and Belacqua was stuck in the first of the canti in the moon. He was so bogged that he could move neither backward nor forward. Blissful Beatrice was there, Dante also, and she explained the spots on the moon to him. She shewed him in the first place where he was at fault, then she put up her own explanation. She had it from God, therefore he could rely on its being accurate in every particular.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: The passage makes reference to Dante's "Commedia", which can serve to confuse readers not familiar with that work. It also anticipates aspects of Beckett's later work: the physical inactivity of the character Belacqua; the character's immersion in his own head and thoughts; the somewhat irreverent comedy of the final sentence.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: Similar elements are present in Beckett's first published novel, "Murphy" (1938), which also explores the themes of insanity and chess (both of which would be recurrent elements in Beckett's later works). The novel's opening sentence hints at the somewhat pessimistic undertones and black humour that animate many of Beckett's works: "The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new". "Watt", written while Beckett was in hiding in Roussillon during World War II, is similar in terms of themes but less exuberant in its style. It explores human movement as if it were a mathematical permutation, presaging Beckett's later preoccupation—in both his novels and dramatic works—with precise movement.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: Beckett's 1930 essay "Proust" was strongly influenced by Schopenhauer's pessimism and laudatory descriptions of saintly asceticism. At this time Beckett began to write creatively in the French language. In the late 1930s, he wrote a number of short poems in that language and their sparseness—in contrast to the density of his English poems of roughly the same period, collected in "Echo's Bones and Other Precipitates" (1935)—seems to show that Beckett, albeit through the medium of another language, was in process of simplifying his style, a change also evidenced in "Watt".


title: Samuel Beckett

text: After World War II, Beckett turned definitively to the French language as a vehicle. It was this, together with the "revelation" experienced in his mother's room in Dublin—in which he realised that his art must be subjective and drawn wholly from his own inner world—that would result in the works for which Beckett is best remembered today.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: During the 15 years following the war, Beckett produced four major full-length stage plays: "En attendant Godot" (written 1948–1949; "Waiting for Godot"), "Fin de partie" (1955–1957; "Endgame"), "Krapp's Last Tape" (1958), and "Happy Days" (1961). These plays—which are often considered, rightly or wrongly, to have been instrumental in the so-called "Theatre of the Absurd"—deal in a darkly humorous way with themes similar to those of the roughly contemporary existentialist thinkers. The term "Theatre of the Absurd" was coined by Martin Esslin in a book of the same name; Beckett and "Godot" were centrepieces of the book. Esslin argued these plays were the fulfilment of Albert Camus's concept of "the absurd"; this is one reason Beckett is often falsely labelled as an existentialist (this is based on the assumption that Camus was an existentialist, though he in fact broke off from the existentialist movement and founded his own philosophy). Though many of the themes are similar, Beckett had little affinity for existentialism as a whole.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: Broadly speaking, the plays deal with the subject of despair and the will to survive in spite of that despair, in the face of an uncomprehending and incomprehensible world. The words of Nell—one of the two characters in "Endgame" who are trapped in ashbins, from which they occasionally peek their heads to speak—can best summarise the themes of the plays of Beckett's middle period: "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. ... Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh any more."


title: Samuel Beckett

text: Beckett's outstanding achievements in prose during the period were the three novels "Molloy" (1951), "Malone meurt" (1951; "Malone Dies") and "L'innommable" (1953: "The Unnamable"). In these novels—sometimes referred to as a "trilogy", though this is against the author's own explicit wishes—the prose becomes increasingly bare and stripped down. "Molloy", for instance, still retains many of the characteristics of a conventional novel (time, place, movement, and plot) and it makes use of the structure of a detective novel. In "Malone Dies", movement and plot are largely dispensed with, though there is still some indication of place and the passage of time; the "action" of the book takes the form of an interior monologue. Finally, in "The Unnamable", almost all sense of place and time are abolished, and the essential theme seems to be the conflict between the voice's drive to continue speaking so as to continue existing, and its almost equally strong urge towards silence and oblivion. Despite the widely held view that Beckett's work, as exemplified by the novels of this period, is essentially pessimistic, the will to live seems to win out in the end; witness, for instance, the famous final phrase of "The Unnamable": 'I can't go on, I'll go on'.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: After these three novels, Beckett struggled for many years to produce a sustained work of prose, a struggle evidenced by the brief "stories" later collected as "Texts for Nothing". In the late 1950s, however, he created one of his most radical prose works, "Comment c'est" (1961; "How It Is"). An early variant version of "Comment c'est", "L'Image", was published in the British arts review, "X: A Quarterly Review" (1959), and is the first appearance of the novel in any form. This work relates the adventures of an unnamed narrator crawling through the mud while dragging a sack of canned food. It was written as a sequence of unpunctuated paragraphs in a style approaching telegraphese: "You are there somewhere alive somewhere vast stretch of time then it's over you are there no more alive no more than again you are there again alive again it wasn't over an error you begin again all over more or less in the same place or in another as when another image above in the light you come to in hospital in the dark" Following this work, it was almost another decade before Beckett produced a work of non-dramatic prose. "How It Is" is generally considered to mark the end of his middle period as a writer.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: Throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, Beckett's works exhibited an increasing tendency—already evident in much of his work of the 1950s—towards compactness. This has led to his work sometimes being described as minimalist. The extreme example of this, among his dramatic works, is the 1969 piece "Breath", which lasts for only 35 seconds and has no characters (though it was likely intended to offer ironic comment on "Oh! Calcutta!", the theatrical revue for which it served as an introductory piece).


title: Samuel Beckett

text: In his theatre of the late period, Beckett's characters—already few in number in the earlier plays—are whittled down to essential elements. The ironically titled "Play" (1962), for instance, consists of three characters immersed up to their necks in large funeral urns. The television drama "Eh Joe" (1963), which was written for the actor Jack MacGowran, is animated by a camera that steadily closes in to a tight focus upon the face of the title character. The play "Not I" (1972) consists almost solely of, in Beckett's words, "a moving mouth with the rest of the stage in darkness". Following from "Krapp's Last Tape", many of these later plays explore memory, often in the form of a forced recollection of haunting past events in a moment of stillness in the present. They also deal with the theme of the self-confined and observed, with a voice that either comes from outside into the protagonist's head (as in "Eh Joe") or else another character comments on the protagonist silently, by means of gesture (as in "Not I"). Beckett's most politically charged play, "Catastrophe" (1982), which was dedicated to Václav Havel, deals relatively explicitly with the idea of dictatorship. After a long period of inactivity, Beckett's poetry experienced a revival during this period in the ultra-terse French poems of "mirlitonnades", with some as short as six words long. These defied Beckett's usual scrupulous concern to translate his work from its original into the other of his two languages; several writers, including Derek Mahon, have attempted translations, but no complete version of the sequence has been published in English.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: Beckett's prose pieces during the late period were not so prolific as his theatre, as suggested by the title of the 1976 collection of short prose texts "Fizzles" (which the American artist Jasper Johns illustrated). Beckett experienced something of a renaissance with the novella "Company" (1980), which continued with "Ill Seen Ill Said" (1982) and "Worstward Ho" (1983), later collected in "Nohow On". In these three "'closed space' stories," Beckett continued his pre-occupation with memory and its effect on the confined and observed self, as well as with the positioning of bodies in space, as the opening phrases of "Company" make clear: "A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine." "To one on his back in the dark. This he can tell by the pressure on his hind parts and by how the dark changes when he shuts his eyes and again when he opens them again. Only a small part of what is said can be verified. As for example when he hears, You are on your back in the dark. Then he must acknowledge the truth of what is said." Themes of aloneness and the doomed desire to successfully connect with other human beings are expressed in several late pieces, including "Company" and "Rockaby".


title: Samuel Beckett

text: In the hospital and nursing home where he spent his final days, Beckett wrote his last work, the 1988 poem "What is the Word" ("Comment dire"). The poem grapples with an inability to find words to express oneself, a theme echoing Beckett's earlier work, though possibly amplified by the sickness he experienced late in life.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: Jack MacGowran was the first actor to do a one-man show based on the works of Beckett. He debuted "End of Day" in Dublin in 1962, revising it as "Beginning To End" (1965). The show went through further revisions before Beckett directed it in Paris in 1970; MacGowran won the 1970–1971 Obie for Best Performance By an Actor when he performed the show off-Broadway as "Jack MacGowran in the Works of Samuel Beckett." Beckett wrote the radio play "Embers" and the teleplay "Eh Joe" specifically for MacGowran. The actor also appeared in various productions of "Waiting for Godot" and "Endgame," and did several readings of Beckett's plays and poems on BBC Radio; he also recorded the LP, "MacGowran Speaking Beckett" for Claddagh Records in 1966.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: Billie Whitelaw worked with Beckett for 25 years on such plays as "Not I", "Eh Joe", "Footfalls" and "Rockaby." She first met Beckett in 1963. In her autobiography "Billie Whitelaw... Who He?," she describes their first meeting in 1963 as "trust at first sight". Beckett went on to write many of his experimental theatre works for her. She came to be regarded as his muse, the "supreme interpreter of his work", perhaps most famous for her role as the mouth in "Not I". She said of the play "Rockaby": "I put the tape in my head. And I sort of look in a particular way, but not at the audience. Sometimes as a director Beckett comes out with absolute gems and I use them a lot in other areas. We were doing "Happy Days" and I just did not know where in the theatre to look during this particular section. And I asked, and he thought for a bit and then said, 'Inward' ". She said of her role in "Footfalls": "I felt like a moving, musical Edvard Munch painting and, in fact, when Beckett was directing "Footfalls" he was not only using me to play the notes but I almost felt that he did have the paintbrush out and was painting." "Sam knew that I would turn myself inside out to give him what he wanted", she explained. "With all of Sam's work, the scream was there, my task was to try to get it out." She stopped performing his plays in 1989 when he died.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: The English stage designer Jocelyn Herbert was a close friend and influence on Beckett until his death. She worked with him on such plays as "Happy Days" (their third project) and "Krapp's Last Tape" at the Royal Court Theatre. Beckett said that Herbert became his closest friend in England: "She has a great feeling for the work and is very sensitive and doesn't want to bang the nail on the head. Generally speaking, there is a tendency on the part of designers to overstate, and this has never been the case with Jocelyn."


title: Samuel Beckett

text: The German director Walter D. Asmus began his working relationship with Beckett in the Schiller Theatre in Berlin in 1974 and continued until 1989, the year of the playwright's death. Asmus has directed all of Beckett's plays internationally.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: Of all the English-language modernists, Beckett's work represents the most sustained attack on the realist tradition. He opened up the possibility of theatre and fiction that dispense with conventional plot and the unities of time and place to focus on essential components of the human condition. Václav Havel, John Banville, Aidan Higgins, Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter and Jon Fosse have publicly stated their indebtedness to Beckett's example. He has had a wider influence on experimental writing since the 1950s, from the Beat generation to the happenings of the 1960s and after. In an Irish context, he has exerted great influence on poets such as Derek Mahon and Thomas Kinsella, as well as writers like Trevor Joyce and Catherine Walsh who proclaim their adherence to the modernist tradition as an alternative to the dominant realist mainstream.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: Many major 20th-century composers including Luciano Berio, György Kurtág, Morton Feldman, Pascal Dusapin, Philip Glass, Roman Haubenstock-Ramati and Heinz Holliger have created musical works based on Beckett's texts. His work has also influenced numerous international writers, artists and filmmakers including Edward Albee, Avigdor Arikha, Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee, Richard Kalich, Douglas Gordon, Bruce Nauman, Anthony Minghella, Damian Pettigrew, Charlie Kaufman and Brian Patrick Butler.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: Beckett is one of the most widely discussed and highly prized of 20th-century authors, inspiring a critical industry to rival that which has sprung up around James Joyce. He has divided critical opinion. Some early philosophical critics, such as Sartre and Theodor Adorno, praised him, one for his revelation of absurdity, the other for his works' critical refusal of simplicities; others such as Georg Lukács condemned him for 'decadent' lack of realism.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: Since Beckett's death, all rights for performance of his plays are handled by the Beckett estate, currently managed by Edward Beckett (the author's nephew). The estate has a controversial reputation for maintaining firm control over how Beckett's plays are performed and does not grant licences to productions that do not adhere to the writer's stage directions.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: Historians interested in tracing Beckett's blood line were, in 2004, granted access to confirmed trace samples of his DNA to conduct molecular genealogical studies to facilitate precise lineage determination.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: Some of the best-known pictures of Beckett were taken by photographer John Minihan, who photographed him between 1980 and 1985 and developed such a good relationship with the writer that he became, in effect, his official photographer. Some consider one of these to be among the top three photographs of the 20th century. It was the theatre photographer John Haynes, however, who took possibly the most widely reproduced image of Beckett: it is used on the cover of the Knowlson biography, for instance. This portrait was taken during rehearsals of the San Quentin Drama Workshop at the Royal Court Theatre in London, where Haynes photographed many productions of Beckett's work.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: The Central Bank of Ireland launched two Samuel Beckett Centenary commemorative coins on 26 April 2006: €10 Silver Coin and €20 Gold Coin.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: On 10 December 2009, the new bridge across the River Liffey in Dublin was opened and named the Samuel Beckett Bridge in his honour. Reminiscent of a harp on its side, it was designed by the celebrated Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, who had also designed the James Joyce Bridge situated further upstream and opened on Bloomsday (16 June) 2003. Attendees at the official opening ceremony included Beckett's niece Caroline Murphy, his nephew Edward Beckett, poet Seamus Heaney and Barry McGovern.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: A ship of the Irish Naval Service, the LÉ "Samuel Beckett" (P61), is named for Beckett. An Ulster History Circle blue plaque in his memory is located at Portora Royal School, Enniskillen, County Fermanagh.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: In La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, the town where Beckett had a cottage, the public library and one of the local high schools bear his name.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festival is an annual multi-arts festival celebrating the work and influence of Beckett. The festival, founded in 2011, is held at Enniskillen, Northern Ireland where Beckett spent his formative years studying at Portora Royal School.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: In 1983, the Samuel Beckett Award was established for writers who, in the opinion of a committee of critics, producers and publishers, showed innovation and excellence in writing for the performing arts. In 2003, The Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust was formed to support the showcasing of new innovative theatre at the Barbican Centre in the City of London.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: Music for three Samuel Beckett plays ("Words and Music", "Cascando", and "...but the clouds..."), was composed by Martin Pearlman which was commissioned by the 92nd Street Y in New York for the Beckett centennial and produced there and at Harvard University.


title: Samuel Beckett

text: Samuel Beckett's prolific career is spread across archives around the world. Significant collections include those at the Harry Ransom Center, Washington University, the University of Reading, Trinity College Dublin, and Houghton Library. Given the scattered nature of these collections, an effort has been made to create a digital repository through the University of Antwerp.


title: Stone Age

text: The Stone Age was a broad prehistoric period during which stone was widely used to make tools with an edge, a point, or a percussion surface. The period lasted for roughly 3.4 million years, and ended between 4,000 BC and 2,000 BC, with the advent of metalworking. Though some simple metalworking of malleable metals, particularly the use of gold and copper for purposes of ornamentation, was known in the Stone Age, it is the melting and smelting of copper that marks the end of the Stone Age. In Western Asia, this occurred by about 3,000 BC, when bronze became widespread. The term Bronze Age is used to describe the period that followed the Stone Age, as well as to describe cultures that had developed techniques and technologies for working copper alloys (bronze: originally copper and arsenic, later copper and tin) into tools, supplanting stone in many uses.


title: Stone Age

text: Stone Age artifacts that have been discovered include tools used by modern humans, by their predecessor species in the genus "Homo", and possibly by the earlier partly contemporaneous genera "Australopithecus" and "Paranthropus". Bone tools have been discovered that were used during this period as well but these are rarely preserved in the archaeological record. The Stone Age is further subdivided by the types of stone tools in use.


title: Stone Age

text: The Stone Age is the first period in the three-age system frequently used in archaeology to divide the timeline of human technological prehistory into functional periods, with the next two being the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, respectively. The Stone Age is also commonly divided into three distinct periods: the earliest and most primitive being the Paleolithic era; a transitional period with finer tools known as the Mesolithic era; and the final stage known as the Neolithic era. Neolithic peoples were the first to transition away from hunter-gatherer societies into the settled lifestyle of inhabiting towns and villages as agriculture became widespread. In the chronology of prehistory, the Neolithic era usually overlaps with the Chalcolithic ("Copper") era preceding the Bronze Age.


title: Stone Age

text: The Stone Age is contemporaneous with the evolution of the genus "Homo", with the possible exception of the early Stone Age, when species prior to "Homo" may have manufactured tools. According to the age and location of the current evidence, the cradle of the genus is the East African Rift System, especially toward the north in Ethiopia, where it is bordered by grasslands. The closest relative among the other living primates, the genus "Pan", represents a branch that continued on in the deep forest, where the primates evolved. The rift served as a conduit for movement into southern Africa and also north down the Nile into North Africa and through the continuation of the rift in the Levant to the vast grasslands of Asia.


title: Stone Age

text: Starting from about 4 million years ago (mya) a single biome established itself from South Africa through the rift, North Africa, and across Asia to modern China. This has been called "transcontinental 'savannahstan'" recently. Starting in the grasslands of the rift, "Homo erectus", the predecessor of modern humans, found an ecological niche as a tool-maker and developed a dependence on it, becoming a "tool-equipped savanna dweller".


title: Stone Age

text: The oldest indirect evidence found of stone tool use is fossilised animal bones with tool marks; these are 3.4 million years old and were found in the Lower Awash Valley in Ethiopia. Archaeological discoveries in Kenya in 2015, identifying what may be the oldest evidence of hominin use of tools known to date, have indicated that "Kenyanthropus platyops" (a 3.2 to 3.5-million-year-old Pliocene hominin fossil discovered in Lake Turkana, Kenya in 1999) may have been the earliest tool-users known.


title: Stone Age

text: The oldest stone tools were excavated from the site of Lomekwi 3 in West Turkana, northwestern Kenya, and date to 3.3 million years old. Prior to the discovery of these "Lomekwian" tools, the oldest known stone tools had been found at several sites at Gona, Ethiopia, on sediments of the paleo-Awash River, which serve to date them. All the tools come from the Busidama Formation, which lies above a disconformity, or missing layer, which would have been from 2.9 to 2.7 mya. The oldest sites discovered to contain tools are dated to 2.6–2.55 mya. One of the most striking circumstances about these sites is that they are from the Late Pliocene, where prior to their discovery tools were thought to have evolved only in the Pleistocene. Excavators at the locality point out that:


title: Stone Age

text: The species who made the Pliocene tools remains unknown. Fragments of "Australopithecus garhi", "Australopithecus aethiopicus", and "Homo", possibly "Homo habilis", have been found in sites near the age of the Gona tools.


title: Stone Age

text: In July 2018, scientists reported the discovery in China of the known oldest stone tools outside Africa, estimated at 2.12 million years old.


title: Stone Age

text: Innovation of the technique of smelting ore is regarded as ending the Stone Age and beginning the Bronze Age. The first highly significant metal manufactured was bronze, an alloy of copper and tin or arsenic, each of which was smelted separately. The transition from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age was a period during which modern people could smelt copper, but did not yet manufacture bronze, a time known as the Copper Age (or more technically the Chalcolithic or Eneolithic, both meaning 'copper–stone'). The Chalcolithic by convention is the initial period of the Bronze Age. The Bronze Age was followed by the Iron Age.


title: Stone Age

text: The transition out of the Stone Age occurred between 6000 and 2500 BC for much of humanity living in North Africa and Eurasia.


title: Stone Age

text: The first evidence of human metallurgy dates to between the 6th and 5th millennia BC in the archaeological sites of the Vinča culture, including Majdanpek, Jarmovac, Pločnik, Rudna Glava in modern-day Serbia.


title: Stone Age

text: In some regions, such as Sub-Saharan Africa, the Stone Age was followed directly by the Iron Age. The Middle East and Southeast Asian regions progressed past Stone Age technology around 6000 BC. Europe, and the rest of Asia became post-Stone Age societies by about 4000 BC. The proto-Inca cultures of South America continued at a Stone Age level until around 2000 BC, when gold, copper, and silver made their entrance. The peoples of the Americas notably did not develop a widespread behavior of smelting bronze or iron after the Stone Age period, although the technology existed. Stone-tool manufacture continued even after the Stone Age ended in a given area. In Europe and North America, millstones were in use until well into the 20th century, and still are in many parts of the world.


title: Stone Age

text: The terms "Stone Age", "Bronze Age", and "Iron Age" are not intended to suggest that advancements and time periods in prehistory are only measured by the type of tool material, rather than, for example, social organization, food sources exploited, adaptation to climate, adoption of agriculture, cooking, settlement, and religion. Like pottery, the typology of the stone tools combined with the relative sequence of the types in various regions provide a chronological framework for the evolution of humanity and society. They serve as diagnostics of date, rather than characterizing the people or the society.


title: Stone Age

text: Lithic analysis is a major and specialised form of archaeological investigation. It involves measurement of stone tools to determine their typology, function and technologies involved. It includes scientific study of the lithic reduction of the raw materials and methods used to make the prehistoric artifacts that are discovered. Much of this study takes place in the laboratory in the presence of various specialists. In experimental archaeology, researchers attempt to create replica tools, to understand how they were made. Flintknappers are craftsmen who use sharp tools to reduce flintstone to flint tool.


title: Stone Age

text: In addition to lithic analysis, field prehistorians use a wide range of techniques derived from multiple fields. The work of archaeologists in determining the paleocontext and relative sequence of the layers is supplemented by the efforts of geologic specialists in identifying layers of rock developed or deposited over geologic time; of paleontological specialists in identifying bones and animals; of palynologists in discovering and identifying pollen, spores and plant species; of physicists and chemists in laboratories determining ages of materials by carbon-14, potassium-argon and other methods. Study of the Stone Age has never been limited to stone tools and archaeology, even though they are important forms of evidence. The chief focus of study has always been on the society and the living people who belonged to it.


title: Stone Age

text: Useful as it has been, the concept of the Stone Age has its limitations. The date range of this period is ambiguous, disputed, and variable, depending upon the region in question. While it is possible to speak of a general 'Stone Age' period for the whole of humanity, some groups never developed metal-smelting technology, and so remained in the so-called 'Stone Age' until they encountered technologically developed cultures. The term was innovated to describe the archaeological cultures of Europe. It may not always be the best in relation to regions such as some parts of the Indies and Oceania, where farmers or hunter-gatherers used stone for tools until European colonisation began.


title: Stone Age

text: Archaeologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries CE, who adapted the three-age system to their ideas, hoped to combine cultural anthropology and archaeology in such a way that a specific contemporaneous tribe can be used to illustrate the way of life and beliefs of the people exercising a particular Stone-Age technology. As a description of people living today, the term "Stone Age" is controversial. The Association of Social Anthropologists discourages this use, asserting:To describe any living group as 'primitive' or 'Stone Age' inevitably implies that they are living representatives of some earlier stage of human development that the majority of humankind has left behind.


title: Stone Age

text: In the 1920s, South African archaeologists organizing the stone tool collections of that country observed that they did not fit the newly detailed Three-Age System. In the words of J. Desmond Clark,


title: Stone Age

text: It was early realized that the threefold division of culture into Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages adopted in the nineteenth century for Europe had no validity in Africa outside the Nile valley.


title: Stone Age

text: Consequently, they proposed a new system for Africa, the Three-stage System. Clark regarded the Three-age System as valid for North Africa; in sub-Saharan Africa, the Three-stage System was best. In practice, the failure of African archaeologists either to keep this distinction in mind, or to explain which one they mean, contributes to the considerable equivocation already present in the literature. There are in effect two Stone Ages, one part of the Three-age and the other constituting the Three-stage. They refer to one and the same artifacts and the same technologies, but vary by locality and time.


title: Stone Age

text: The three-stage system was proposed in 1929 by Astley John Hilary Goodwin, a professional archaeologist, and Clarence van Riet Lowe, a civil engineer and amateur archaeologist, in an article titled "Stone Age Cultures of South Africa" in the journal "Annals of the South African Museum". By then, the dates of the Early Stone Age, or Paleolithic, and Late Stone Age, or Neolithic ("neo" = new), were fairly solid and were regarded by Goodwin as absolute. He therefore proposed a relative chronology of periods with floating dates, to be called the Earlier and Later Stone Age. The Middle Stone Age would not change its name, but it would not mean Mesolithic.


title: Stone Age

text: The duo thus reinvented the Stone Age. In Sub-Saharan Africa, however, iron-working technologies were either invented independently or came across the Sahara from the north (see "iron metallurgy in Africa"). The Neolithic was characterized primarily by herding societies rather than large agricultural societies, and although there was copper metallurgy in Africa as well as bronze smelting, archaeologists do not currently recognize a separate Copper Age or Bronze Age. Moreover, the technologies included in those 'stages', as Goodwin called them, were not exactly the same. Since then, the original relative terms have become identified with the technologies of the Paleolithic and Mesolithic, so that they are no longer relative. Moreover, there has been a tendency to drop the comparative degree in favor of the positive: resulting in two sets of Early, Middle and Late Stone Ages of quite different content and chronologies.


title: Stone Age

text: By voluntary agreement, archaeologists respect the decisions of the Pan-African Congress on Prehistory, which meets every four years to resolve archaeological business brought before it. Delegates are actually international; the organization takes its name from the topic. Louis Leakey hosted the first one in Nairobi in 1947. It adopted Goodwin and Lowe's 3-stage system at that time, the stages to be called Early, Middle and Later.


title: Stone Age

text: The problem of the transitions in archaeology is a branch of the general philosophic continuity problem, which examines how discrete objects of any sort that are contiguous in any way can be presumed to have a relationship of any sort. In archaeology, the relationship is one of causality. If Period B can be presumed to descend from Period A, there must be a boundary between A and B, the A–B boundary. The problem is in the nature of this boundary. If there is no distinct boundary, then the population of A suddenly stopped using the customs characteristic of A and suddenly started using those of B, an unlikely scenario in the process of evolution. More realistically, a distinct border period, the A/B transition, existed, in which the customs of A were gradually dropped and those of B acquired. If transitions do not exist, then there is no proof of any continuity between A and B.


title: Stone Age

text: The Stone Age of Europe is characteristically in deficit of known transitions. The 19th and early 20th-century innovators of the modern three-age system recognized the problem of the initial transition, the "gap" between the Paleolithic and the Neolithic. Louis Leakey provided something of an answer by proving that man evolved in Africa. The Stone Age must have begun there to be carried repeatedly to Europe by migrant populations. The different phases of the Stone Age thus could appear there without transitions. The burden on African archaeologists became all the greater, because now they must find the missing transitions in Africa. The problem is difficult and ongoing.


title: Stone Age

text: After its adoption by the First Pan African Congress in 1947, the Three-Stage Chronology was amended by the Third Congress in 1955 to include a First Intermediate Period between Early and Middle, to encompass the Fauresmith and Sangoan technologies, and the Second Intermediate Period between Middle and Later, to encompass the Magosian technology and others. The chronologic basis for definition was entirely relative. With the arrival of scientific means of finding an absolute chronology, the two intermediates turned out to be will-of-the-wisps. They were in fact Middle and Lower Paleolithic. Fauresmith is now considered to be a facies of Acheulean, while Sangoan is a facies of Lupemban. Magosian is "an artificial mix of two different periods".


title: Stone Age

text: Once seriously questioned, the intermediates did not wait for the next Pan African Congress two years hence, but were officially rejected in 1965 (again on an advisory basis) by Burg Wartenstein Conference #29, "Systematic Investigation of the African Later Tertiary and Quaternary", a conference in anthropology held by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, at Burg Wartenstein Castle, which it then owned in Austria, attended by the same scholars that attended the Pan African Congress, including Louis Leakey and Mary Leakey, who was delivering a pilot presentation of her typological analysis of Early Stone Age tools, to be included in her 1971 contribution to "Olduvai Gorge", "Excavations in Beds I and II, 1960–1963."


title: Stone Age

text: In 1859 Jens Jacob Worsaae first proposed a division of the Stone Age into older and younger parts based on his work with Danish kitchen middens that began in 1851. In the subsequent decades this simple distinction developed into the archaeological periods of today. The major subdivisions of the Three-age Stone Age cross two epoch boundaries on the geologic time scale:


title: Stone Age

text: The Paleolithic or Palaeolithic (from Greek: παλαιός, "palaios", "old"; and λίθος, "lithos", "stone" lit. "old stone", coined by archaeologist John Lubbock and published in 1865) is the earliest division of the Stone Age. It covers the greatest portion of humanity's time (roughly 99% of "human technological history", where "human" and "humanity" are interpreted to mean the genus "Homo"), extending from 2.5 or 2.6 million years ago, with the first documented use of stone tools by hominans such as "Homo habilis", to the end of the Pleistocene around 10,000 BC. The Paleolithic era ended with the Mesolithic, or in areas with an early neolithisation, the Epipaleolithic.


title: Stone Age

text: At sites dating from the Lower Paleolithic Period (about 2,500,000 to 200,000 years ago), simple pebble tools have been found in association with the remains of what may have been the earliest human ancestors. A somewhat more sophisticated Lower Paleolithic tradition, known as the Chopper chopping-tool industry, is widely distributed in the Eastern Hemisphere. This tradition is thought to have been the work of the hominin species named Homo erectus. Although no such fossil tools have yet been found, it is believed that H. erectus probably made tools of wood and bone as well as stone.


title: Stone Age

text: About 700,000 years ago, a new Lower Paleolithic tool, the hand ax, appeared. The earliest European hand axes are assigned to the Abbevillian industry, which developed in northern France in the valley of the Somme River; a later, more refined hand-axe tradition is seen in the Acheulian industry, evidence of which has been found in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Some of the earliest known hand axes were found at Olduvai Gorge (Tanzania) in association with remains of H. erectus. Alongside the hand-axe tradition there developed a distinct and very different stone-tool industry, based on flakes of stone: special tools were made from worked (carefully shaped) flakes of flint. In Europe, the Clactonian industry is one example of a flake tradition. The early flake industries probably contributed to the development of the Middle Paleolithic flake tools of the Mousterian industry, which is associated with the remains of Neanderthal man.


title: Stone Age

text: The earliest documented stone tools have been found in eastern Africa, manufacturers unknown, at the 3.3 million year old site of Lomekwi 3 in Kenya. Better known are the later tools belonging to an industry known as Oldowan, after the type site of Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania.


title: Stone Age

text: The tools were formed by knocking pieces off a river pebble, or stones like it, with a hammerstone to obtain large and small pieces with one or more sharp edges. The original stone is called a core; the resultant pieces, flakes. Typically, but not necessarily, small pieces are detached from a larger piece, in which case the larger piece may be called the core and the smaller pieces the flakes. The prevalent usage, however, is to call all the results flakes, which can be confusing. A split in half is called bipolar flaking.


title: Stone Age

text: Consequently, the method is often called "core-and-flake". More recently, the tradition has been called "small flake" since the flakes were small compared to subsequent Acheulean tools.The essence of the Oldowan is the making and often immediate use of small flakes.


title: Stone Age

text: Another naming scheme is "Pebble Core Technology (PBC)":Pebble cores are … artifacts that have been shaped by varying amounts of hard-hammer percussion.


title: Stone Age

text: Various refinements in the shape have been called choppers, discoids, polyhedrons, subspheroid, etc. To date no reasons for the variants have been ascertained:From a functional standpoint, pebble cores seem designed for no specific purpose.


title: Stone Age

text: However, they would not have been manufactured for no purpose:Pebble cores can be useful in many cutting, scraping or chopping tasks, but … they are not particularly more efficient in such tasks than a sharp-edged rock.


title: Stone Age

text: The whole point of their utility is that each is a "sharp-edged rock" in locations where nature has not provided any. There is additional evidence that Oldowan, or Mode 1, tools were used in "percussion technology"; that is, they were designed to be gripped at the blunt end and strike something with the edge, from which use they were given the name of choppers. Modern science has been able to detect mammalian blood cells on Mode 1 tools at Sterkfontein, Member 5 East, in South Africa. As the blood must have come from a fresh kill, the tool users are likely to have done the killing and used the tools for butchering. Plant residues bonded to the silicon of some tools confirm the use to chop plants.


title: Stone Age

text: Although the exact species authoring the tools remains unknown, Mode 1 tools in Africa were manufactured and used predominantly by "Homo habilis". They cannot be said to have developed these tools or to have contributed the tradition to technology. They continued a tradition of yet unknown origin. As chimpanzees sometimes naturally use percussion to extract or prepare food in the wild, and may use either unmodified stones or stones that they have split, creating an Oldowan tool, the tradition may well be far older than its current record.


title: Stone Age

text: Towards the end of Oldowan in Africa a new species appeared over the range of "Homo habilis": "Homo erectus". The earliest "unambiguous" evidence is a whole cranium, KNM-ER 3733 (a find identifier) from Koobi Fora in Kenya, dated to 1.78 mya. An early skull fragment, KNM-ER 2598, dated to 1.9 mya, is considered a good candidate also. Transitions in paleoanthropology are always hard to find, if not impossible, but based on the "long-legged" limb morphology shared by "H. habilis" and "H. rudolfensis" in East Africa, an evolution from one of those two has been suggested.


title: Stone Age

text: The most immediate cause of the new adjustments appears to have been an increasing aridity in the region and consequent contraction of parkland savanna, interspersed with trees and groves, in favor of open grassland, dated 1.8–1.7 mya. During that transitional period the percentage of grazers among the fossil species increased from around 15–25% to 45%, dispersing the food supply and requiring a facility among the hunters to travel longer distances comfortably, which "H. erectus" obviously had. The ultimate proof is the "dispersal" of "H. erectus" "across much of Africa and Asia, substantially before the development of the Mode 2 technology and use of fire ..." "H. erectus" carried Mode 1 tools over Eurasia.


title: Stone Age

text: According to the current evidence (which may change at any time) Mode 1 tools are documented from about 2.6 mya to about 1.5 mya in Africa, and to 0.5 mya outside of it. The genus Homo is known from "H. habilis" and "H. rudolfensis" from 2.3 to 2.0 mya, with the latest habilis being an upper jaw from Koobi Fora, Kenya, from 1.4 mya. "H. erectus" is dated 1.8–0.6 mya.


title: Stone Age

text: According to this chronology Mode 1 was inherited by "Homo" from unknown Hominans, probably "Australopithecus" and "Paranthropus", who must have continued on with Mode 1 and then with Mode 2 until their extinction no later than 1.1 mya. Meanwhile, living contemporaneously in the same regions "H. habilis" inherited the tools around 2.3 mya. At about 1.9 mya "H. erectus" came on stage and lived contemporaneously with the others. Mode 1 was now being shared by a number of Hominans over the same ranges, presumably subsisting in different niches, but the archaeology is not precise enough to say which.


title: Stone Age

text: Tools of the Oldowan tradition first came to archaeological attention in Europe, where, being intrusive and not well defined, compared to the Acheulean, they were puzzling to archaeologists. The mystery would be elucidated by African archaeology at Olduvai, but meanwhile, in the early 20th century, the term "Pre-Acheulean" came into use in climatology. C.E.P, Brooks, a British climatologist working in the United States, used the term to describe a "chalky boulder clay" underlying a layer of gravel at Hoxne, central England, where Acheulean tools had been found. Whether any tools would be found in it and what type was not known. Hugo Obermaier, a contemporary German archaeologist working in Spain, quipped:Unfortunately, the stage of human industry which corresponds to these deposits cannot be positively identified. All we can say is that it is pre-Acheulean. This uncertainty was clarified by the subsequent excavations at Olduvai; nevertheless, the term is still in use for pre-Acheulean contexts, mainly across Eurasia, that are yet unspecified or uncertain but with the understanding that they are or will turn out to be pebble-tool.


title: Stone Age

text: There are ample associations of Mode 2 with "H. erectus" in Eurasia. "H. erectus" – Mode 1 associations are scantier but they do exist, especially in the Far East. One strong piece of evidence prevents the conclusion that only "H. erectus" reached Eurasia: at Yiron, Israel, Mode 1 tools have been found dating to 2.4 mya, about 0.5 my earlier than the known "H. erectus" finds. If the date is correct, either another Hominan preceded "H. erectus" out of Africa or the earliest "H. erectus" has yet to be found.


title: Stone Age

text: After the initial appearance at Gona in Ethiopia at 2.7 mya, pebble tools date from 2.0 mya at Sterkfontein, Member 5, South Africa, and from 1.8 mya at El Kherba, Algeria, North Africa. The manufacturers had already left pebble tools at Yiron, Israel, at 2.4 mya, Riwat, Pakistan, at 2.0 mya, and Renzidong, South China, at over 2 mya. The identification of a fossil skull at Mojokerta, Pernung Peninsula on Java, dated to 1.8 mya, as "H. erectus", suggests that the African finds are not the earliest to be found in Africa, or that, in fact, erectus did not originate in Africa after all but on the plains of Asia. The outcome of the issue waits for more substantial evidence. Erectus was found also at Dmanisi, Georgia, from 1.75 mya in association with pebble tools.


title: Stone Age

text: Pebble tools are found the latest first in southern Europe and then in northern. They begin in the open areas of Italy and Spain, the earliest dated to 1.6 mya at Pirro Nord, Italy. The mountains of Italy are rising at a rapid rate in the framework of geologic time; at 1.6 mya they were lower and covered with grassland (as much of the highlands still are). Europe was otherwise mountainous and covered over with dense forest, a formidable terrain for warm-weather savanna dwellers. Similarly there is no evidence that the Mediterranean was passable at Gibraltar or anywhere else to "H. erectus" or earlier hominans. They might have reached Italy and Spain along the coasts.


title: Stone Age

text: In northern Europe pebble tools are found earliest at Happisburgh, United Kingdom, from 0.8 mya. The last traces are from Kent's Cavern, dated 0.5 mya. By that time "H. erectus" is regarded as having been extinct; however, a more modern version apparently had evolved, "Homo heidelbergensis", who must have inherited the tools. He also explains the last of the Acheulean in Germany at 0.4 mya.


title: Stone Age

text: In the late 19th and early 20th centuries archaeologists worked on the assumptions that a succession of Hominans and cultures prevailed, that one replaced another. Today the presence of multiple hominans living contemporaneously near each other for long periods is accepted as proved true; moreover, by the time the previously assumed "earliest" culture arrived in northern Europe, the rest of Africa and Eurasia had progressed to the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic, so that across the earth all three were for a time contemporaneous. In any given region there was a progression from Oldowan to Acheulean, Lower to Upper, no doubt.