Planting their orchards for millennia, the first Amazonians slowly transformed large swaths of the river basin into something more pleasing to human beings. In the country inhabited by the Ka’apor, on...
On Columbus’s later voyages, his crew happily accepted godhood—until the Taino began empirically testing their divinity by forcing their heads underwater for long periods to see if the Spanish were, a...
In Mesoamerica, timekeeping provided the stimulus that accounting gave to the Middle East. Like contemporary astrologers, the Olmec, Maya, and Zapotec believed that celestial phenomena like the phases...
Humans are no different, Margulis believed. The implication of evolutionary theory is that Homo sapiens is just one creature among many, no different at base than P. vulgaris. We and they are controll...
Europeans won military victories in New England, historians say, partly because they were divided among themselves. Indians were unwilling, too, to match the English tactic of massacring whole village...
Before Columbus, Holmberg believed, both the people and the land had no real history. Stated so baldly, this notion-that the indigenous peoples of the Americas floated changelessly through the milleni...
Agricultural losses are costly to prevent. Most irrigation is deployed through canals. They lose water because it seeps through the bottom, evaporates during transmission, and spills out at junctions;...
A milpa is a field, usually but not always recently cleared, in which farmers plant a dozen crops at once, including maize, avocados, multiple varieties of squash and bean, melon, tomatoes, chilis, sw...
Who held title to all the land and its produce, could vote down decisions by the male leaders of the League and demand that an issue be reconsidered. Under this regime women were so much better off th...
Of bacteria, algae, and other truly important creatures. The third was that species, like sullen teenagers, don’t pick up after themselves. Cyanobacteria sprayed their oxygen garbage all over Earth wi...
Glottochronology,
Cost and technical difficulty are not the primary reason so many modern cities have been unable to provide water to their inhabitants. Again and again, the biggest obstacle has been what social scient...
The parallels between Borlaug and Vogt are inexact. Borlaug never wrote a manifesto and mostly declined the roles of theorist and exponent. Instead he became, by the example of his life, the emblem of...
Smoke rose into the sky in great, juddering pillars. In
Roughly speaking, two peoples’ genomes differ in only about one out of every thousand bases. This is like having two pages in two different books differ by a single letter.
Humans weren’t always human in this third sense, as far as we can tell. In the beginning, Homo sapiens seems not to have created art, played music, invented new tools, worked out the motions of the pl...
Augustin Mouchot was far from the first to realize that the sun’s energy could be tapped. For more than two thousand years Chinese architects had been aligning windows and doors with the southern sky...
The destruction of Indian societies by European epidemics both decreased native burning and increased tree growth. Each subtracted carbon dioxide from the air. In 2010 a research team led by Robert A....
His tract The Road to Survival (1948), the first modern we’re-all-going-to-hell book. Road was meant as a warning bell, based on objective science, but it was also an implicit vision of how we should...
Virgin-soil death rates for smallpox are hard to establish because for the last century most potential research subjects have been vaccinated. But a study in the early 1960s of seven thousand unvaccin...