With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them.
Polynesians and Aztecs developed dog breeds specifically raised for food.
Despite being depicted in innumerable cartoons as apelike brutes living in caves, Neanderthals had brains slightly larger than our own.
DOMESTICABLE ANIMALS ARE ALL ALIKE; EVERY UNDOMESTICABLE animal is undomesticable in its own way.
By selecting and growing those few species of plants and animals that we can eat, so that they constitute 90 percent rather than 0.1 percent of the biomass on an acre of land, we obtain far more edibl...
African and European skulls of half a million years ago were sufficiently similar to skulls of us moderns that they are classified in our species, Homo sapiens, instead
在我年轻时，同辈人都准备过上20年苦日子，如果幸运的话，晚年也许会宽裕些。现在的年轻人一早就想过好日子，谈到工作，第一个问题就是‘薪水多少？工作时间多长？有没有假期？’每一个我认识的蒙大拿农民不是担忧自己...
Throughout human history farmers have tended to despise hunter-gatherers as primitive, hunter-gatherers have despised farmers as ignorant, and herders have despised both.
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.
Our cognitive abilities as adults are heavily influenced by the social environment that we experienced during childhood, making it hard to discern any influence of preexisting genetic differences.
Or just inventing a new letter (as our medieval ancestors did when they created the new letters j, u, and w).
Literacy made the Spaniards heirs to a huge body of knowledge about human behavior and history.
Large societies cannot function with band organization and instead are complex kleptocracies.
Thus, Fertile Crescent and eastern Mediterranean societies had the misfortune to arise in an ecologically fragile environment. They committed ecological suicide by destroying their own resource base.
Those parasites pass to a person from an eaten animal, but the virus causing laughing sickness (kuru) in the New Guinea highlands used to pass to a person from another person who was eaten. It was tra...
Technology causes problems as well as solves problems. Nobody has figured out a way to ensure that, as of tomorrow, technology won't create problems. Technology simply means increased power, which is...
THE IMPORTANCE OF lethal microbes in human history is well illustrated by Europeans’ conquest and depopulation of the New World. Far more Native Americans died in bed from Eurasian germs than on the b...
Severe problems of overpopulation, environmental impact, and climate change cannot persist indefinitely: sooner or later they are likely to resolve themselves, whether in the manner of Rwanda or in so...
Recent discoveries about apes suggest, however, that a gorilla or common chimp stands at least as good a chance of being murdered as the average human.
Pizarro captured Atahuallpa within a few minutes after the two leaders first set eyes on each other. Pizarro proceeded to hold his prisoner for eight months, while extracting history’s largest ransom...