What I learned from a TED Talk by Latif Nasser
Continuing from last week, today I will cover a TED talk by Latif Nasser. If you have about 13 minutes, you can listen to this talk on Ted by clicking here. Else please read the following few lines to get the gist of it.
We are just “one shard of bone” away from a new understanding.
We all know that camels are suited to desserts and that they are best suited to walk on sand and live in hot and dry lands. That they can survive without water for long and so on.. What if this was all wrong? What if they got these features from another environment? Can you ever imagine that they started in ice cold, snow covered lands? That they could be perhaps the most adaptable species on earth?
All the history and all the stories about the camels were put to test and completely upended by this one “shard of bone”, which was 3.5 million years old was found close to arctic by Natalia, who is a paleontologist. One shard of bone, a lot of curiosity and multiple visits resulted into a collection of multiple fragments. With modern day technology of 3D surface scanners and collagen printing, she was able to discover that it was bone of a camel and a huge one, 1.5 times the size of a modern desert camel.
They could piece it all together and a logical explanation seems that the camels started their existence from ice cold snow covered zones of North America millions of years back and then as climate started getting colder, migrated to different parts of the world including South America, Asia etc.
The reason Latif loves this story is not for the facts about camel but that any time a “shard of bone”, curiosity and modern day science can help us discover a completely new world view which might be contrary to all that we believe.
Leaders will benefit from not being “so sure of themselves” and being open to discovering these “shards” that will help us create new world views. I wish we can all learn from this talk and be amenable to be challenged and contradicted.
Stay tuned for more next week.