Think of the fruitful impact on Europe and its descendants from contacting Asia. Imagine the effect on these places and people from a second Asia. Along with the unparalleled loss of life, that is wha...
The chronological list of rulers differs on different lists, some lists do not include known kings, and some include kings who probably were mythological—as if a tally of English rulers matter-of-fact...
Recounted in numberless articles and books, the Maya collapse has become an ecological parable for green activists; along with Pleistocene overkill, it is a favorite cautionary tale about surpassing t...
Rare is the human spirit that remains buoyant in a holocaust.
Rapid urbanization is a hallmark of our age. In 1950 fewer than one out of three of the world’s people lived in cities. By 2050, according to United Nations projections, the figure will be almost two...
Propelled by the oil shock, fears of scarcity wafted across the nation like a bad smell. Rumors of shortages in any number of goods—gasoline, salmon, cheese, onions, raisins—caused brief, unwarranted...
In this way the sacred mission of the Triple Alliance became translated into a secular mission: to obtain prisoners to sacrifice for the sun, the Alliance had to take over the world.
After 1492 the world’s ecosystems collided and mixed as European vessels carried thousands of species to new homes across the oceans.
The belief that human life will continue, even if we ourselves die, is one of the underpinnings of society.
Puebla shopkeepers complained that the country was fighting an invasion of counterfeits from China—a Chinese imitation of a Chinese-made Mexican imitation of a Chinese original.
Pilgrim writers universally reported that Wampanoag families were close and loving—more so than English families, some thought. Europeans in those days tended to view children as moving straight from...
Perversely, the most enduring consequence of the 1970s belief that energy supplies were running out was not to use less, but to look for more. In this quest, Jimmy Carter, arguably the most ecological...
Mesoamerica would deserve its place in the human pantheon if its inhabitants had only created maize, in terms of harvest weight the world’s most important crop. But the inhabitants of Mexico and north...
Israel provided incentives for farmers to switch to drip irrigation, in which pipes with tiny holes provide small, precisely adjusted flows of water. Ideally, drip irrigation provides water at just th...
In the Norte Chico, in other words, Homo sapiens experienced a phenomenon that at that time had occurred only once before, in Mesopotamia: the emergence, for better or worse, of leaders with enough pr...
In Mesopotamia, the wheel dates back to at least the time of Sumer. It was a basic part of life throughout Eurasia. Chariot wheels, water wheels, potter’s wheels, millstone wheels—one can’t imagine Eu...
Fuller and Pearson placed a thin layer of the first type of doped silicon (extra electrons) atop a layer of the second type (extra holes). The two Bell researchers attached the little assembly to a ci...
Energy from the sun today is responsible for about 1 percent of India’s electricity; even in Gujarat, it amounts to just 5 percent. Optimistic scenarios show its share rising to 10 percent by 2022.
As schoolchildren learn, the sun washes Earth with every imaginable type of light wave—X-rays, ultraviolet light, visible light, infrared radiation, microwaves, radio waves, you name it. About a third...
Visitors to Andean history note certain ways of doing things that recur in ways striking to the outsider, sometimes in one variant, sometimes in another, like the themes in a jazz improvisation.