It invites a search for ultimate causes: why were Europeans, rather than Africans or Native Americans, the ones to end up with guns, the nastiest germs, and steel?
ONLY a few areas of the world developed food production independently, and they did so at widely differing times. From those nuclear areas, hunter-gatherers of some neighboring areas learned food prod...
Still later, after the invention of saddles and stirrups, horses allowed the Huns and successive waves of other peoples from the Asian steppes to terrorize the Roman Empire and its successor states, c...
The U.S. has so many rules and regulations, because of fear of being sued, that kids give up on the opportunity for personal exploration. A pool has to be fenced so that it’s not an ‘attractive nuisan...
The difference between a kleptocrat and a wise statesman, between a robber baron and a public benefactor, is merely one of degree: a matter of just how large a percentage of the tribute extracted from...
The table gives major crops, of five crop classes, from early agricultural sites in various parts of the world. Square brackets enclose names of crops first domesticated elsewhere; names not enclosed...
Thus, Sumerian writing came to consist of a complex mixture of three types of signs: logograms, referring to a whole word or name; phonetic signs, used in effect for spelling syllables, letters, gramm...
Thus, immigrants from Korea really did make a big contribution to the modern Japanese, though we cannot yet say whether that was because of massive immigration or else modest immigration amplified by...
We know from our recent history that English did not come to replace U.S. Indian languages merely because English sounded musical to Indians' ears. Instead, the replacement entailed English-speaking i...
The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss put it, ancient writing’s main function was to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings.
Transhumance—i.e., moving livestock seasonally between different altitudes in order to follow the growth of grass at higher elevations as the season advances.
Als ik niet meer zou kunnen vissen, zou ik een grote voorraad morfine aanleggen en diep het bos intrekken. Ik zou een afgelegen plek kiezen waar niemand ooit mijn lijk zou vinden en van waaruit ik een...
Archaeologists often distinguish calibrated from uncalibrated dates by writing the former in upper-case letters and the latter in lower-case letters (for example, 3000 B.C. vs. 3000 B.C., respectively...
Hunter-gatherer societies tend to be relatively egalitarian, to lack full-time bureaucrats and hereditary chiefs, and to have small-scale political organization at the level of the band or tribe. That...
It’s the exclusive home of 1,000 of the world’s approximately 7,000 languages. It holds the largest number of societies that even in modern times still lay beyond the control of state government or we...
Pleistocene
The past was still a Golden Age, of ignorance, while the present is an Iron Age of willful bliss.
Thus, Norse society’s structure created a conflict between the short-term interests of those in power, and the long-term interests of the society as a whole.
As on Easter Island and at Chaco Canyon, Maya peak population numbers were followed swiftly by political and social collapse. Paralleling the eventual extension of agriculture from Easter Island's coa...
History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves
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