Sitting in the middle of a fertile plain, the ruined Roman city of Volubilis is the best-preserved archaeological site in Morocco. Its most amazing features are its many beautiful mosaics preserved in situ, pushing it to be declared a Unesco World Heritage site in 1997.

Research on Stone Age tombs throughout Europe offers a new answer to an old debate on where and when the iconic stone works were first built.

All rather disappointing.

Tens of thousands of Londoners died of cholera from the 1830s to the 1860s. The causes were simple: mass quantities of human waste and industrial contaminants were pouring into the Thames, the central waterway of a city at the center of a rapidly industrializing world.

Dozens of newly discovered mummies from the Ptolemaic era were unveiled at an Egyptian burial site this weekend, one of a number of sites the country plans to disclose this year, according to Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities.

So it seems to me that we have to do something about our core way of being. Minimalism, the lifestyle of living with less, and other recent movements that criticize consumerism are an important step in the right direction.

But we need to do more at a global scale to bring about significant change. We need to seek social, economic and political solutions that lessen our headlong drive toward material accumulation.