Twelve thousand years ago, everybody on earth was a hunter-gatherer; now almost all of us are farmers or else are fed by farmers. The spread of farming from those few sites of origin usually did not o...
The daddy-at-home theory posits that concealed ovulation evolved to promote monogamy, to force the man to stay home, and thus to bolster his certainty about his paternity of his wife's children. The m...
Climate. Perhaps
Take air quality in the United States today: It's about 30 percent better than it was 25 years ago, even though there are now more people driving more cars.
Plant domestication is not a matter of hunter-gatherers’ domesticating a single plant and otherwise carrying on unchanged with their nomadic lifestyle.
He waited until 1896 to build the first truck.
That need for police and laws and moral commandments to be nice to strangers doesn’t arise in tiny societies, in which everyone knows everyone else.
Thanks to this availability of suitable wild mammals and plants, early peoples of the Fertile Crescent could quickly assemble a potent and balanced biological package for intensive food production. Th...
Stored food can also feed priests, who provide religious justification for wars of conquest;
Science is often misrepresented as ‘the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory.’ Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliab...
One way to explain the complexity and unpredictability of historical systems, despite their ultimate determinacy, is to note that long chains of causation may separate final effects from ultimate caus...
Not until the beginning of the 20th century did Europe's urban populations finally become self-sustaining: before then, constant immigration of healthy peasants from the countryside was necessary to m...
But the Semitic names did possess meaning in Semitic languages: they were the words for familiar objects (’aleph = ox, beth = house, gimel = camel, daleth = door, and so on). These Semitic words were...
Before the spread of alphabetic writing, systems making much use of logograms were more common and included Egyptian hieroglyphs, Maya glyphs, and Sumerian cuneiform.
Клептократ і мудрий державний діяч, барон-грабіжник і громадський доброчинець відрізняються лише мірою: тобто тим, яку частку стягненої із виробників данини утримує еліта і наскільки простолюду подоба...
Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents? Those disparate rates constitute history’s broadest pattern and my book’s subject. While this book is thus ultimately
Writers find it tempting to draw analogies between those trajectories of human societies and the trajectories of individual human lives – to talk of a society's birth, growth, peak, senescence, and de...
Perhaps the most important single step in the whole history of writing was the Sumerians’ introduction of phonetic representation, initially by writing an abstract noun (which could not be readily dra...
Naturally, what makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fanatics themselves, but their willingness to accept the deaths of a fraction of their number i...
Every time that an animal eats a plant or another animal, the conversion of food biomass into the consumer’s biomass involves an efficiency of much less than 100 percent: typically around 10 percent....