Neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.
Invokes the supposed stimulatory effects of their homeland's cold climate and the inhibitory effects of hot, humid, tropical climates on human creativity and energy. Perhaps the seasonally variable cl...
The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss put it, ancient writing’s main function was to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings.
Thus, Taiwan Strait may have served as the training ground where mainland Chinese developed the open-water maritime skills that would permit them to expand over the Pacific.
The whole modern world has been shaped by lopsided outcomes.
I have often asked myself, What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it? Like modern loggers, did he shout Jobs, not trees!? Or: Technology will solve our pro...
Anna Karenina: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Almost all studies of child development emphasize the role of childhood stimulation and activity in promoting mental development, and stress the irreversible mental stunting associated with reduced ch...
All these adoptions of European styles make it obvious that the Greenlanders paid very close attention to European fashions and followed them in detail. The adoptions carry the unconscious message, We...
All of these parallels between Mesoamerican and ancient western Eurasian writing testify to the underlying universality of human creativity. While Sumerian and Mesoamerican languages bear no special r...
The main thing that gives me hope is the media. We have radio, TV, magazines, and books, so we have the possibility of learning from societies that are remote from us, like Somalia. We turn on the TV...
Transhumance—i.e., moving livestock seasonally between different altitudes in order to follow the growth of grass at higher elevations as the season advances.
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
Montana would have been better off in the long run if it had never mined copper at all but had just imported it from Chile, leaving the resulting problems to the Chileans! It