The statesman’s task is to hear God’s footsteps marching through history, and to try to catch on to His coattails as He marches past.
The humans who domesticated animals were the first to fall victim to the newly evolved germs, but those humans then evolved substantial resistance to the new diseases. When such partly immune people c...
That is, natural selection promoting genes for intelligence has probably been far more ruthless in New Guinea than in more densely populated, politically complex societies, where natural selection for...
Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited us from outer space were trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings. The visitor might illustrate the results of his digs by a twenty-four-h...
Still another factor is compatibility with vested interests. This book, like probably every other typed document you have ever read, was typed with a QWERTY keyboard, named for the left-most six lette...
Only after about 20 years did Edison reluctantly concede that the main use of his phonograph was to record and play music.
New signs were created by combining old signs to produce new meanings: for example, the sign for head was combined with the sign for bread in order to produce a sign signifying eat.
Nations and individuals accept national and individual responsibility to take action to solve the problem, or else deny responsibility by self-pity, blaming others, and assuming the role of victim.
Knowledge brings power. Hence writing brings power to modern societies, by making it possible to transmit knowledge with far greater accuracy and in far greater quantity and detail, from more distant...
Besides Sumerian cuneiform, the other certain instance of independent origins of writing in human history comes from Native American societies of Mesoamerica, probably southern Mexico. Mesoamerican
The Viking expansion is a good example of what is termed an auto-catalytic process. In chemistry the term catalysis means the speeding-up of a chemical reaction by an added ingredient, such as an enzy...
Tasmanian history is a study of human isolation unprecedented except in science fiction - namely, complete isolation from other humans for 10,000 years.
The shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu concluded that Europeans and Christianity posed a threat to the stability of the shogunate and Japan. (In retrospect, when one considers how European military intervention f...
Tests of cognitive ability (like IQ tests) tend to measure cultural learning and not pure innate intelligence, whatever that is.
History is not just one damn fact after another, as a cynic put it. There really are broad patterns to history, and the search for their explanation is as productive as it is fascinating.
Food production was indirectly a prerequisite for the development of guns, germs, and steel. Hence geographic variation in whether, or when, the peoples of different continents became farmers and herd...
Bonobo).
Yet we promise developing countries that, if they will only adopt good policies, like honest government and free market economies, they too can become like the First World today. That promise is utter...
The near-simultaneous disappearance of so many large species raises an obvious question: what caused it? An obvious possible answer is that they were killed off or else eliminated indirectly by the fi...
New Guinea’s laughing sickness, transmitted by cannibalism and caused by a slow-acting virus from which no one has ever recovered. Kuru was on its way to exterminating New Guinea’s Foré tribe of 20,00...