Translated from French with ChatGPT (please notify us of errors) A question for sharp minds: who invented the “Swiss Army knife”? Counterintuitively, the answer is not in the question, and Swiss expertise in this area was preceded. By Roman predecessors, no less. But let’s first define what we’re talking about. What makes the so-called “Swiss” […]
Silphium: The First Victim of Overexploitation
Translated from french with claude.ai (please notify us of errors) The Libyan tribes discovered it, the Greeks made it legendary, the Romans drove it to extinction. According to Pliny the Elder, it was “a precious gift of nature”[1]. Here, in three acts, is the story of an extraordinary plant that vanished 2,000 years ago, but […]