Many modern alphabets, including ours, retain with minor modifications that original sequence (and, in the case of Greek, even the letters’ original names: alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and so on) over 3...
Anna Karenina: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.
The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss put it, ancient writing’s main function was to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings.
Globalization makes it impossible for modern societies to collapse in isolation, as did Easter Island and the Greenland Norse in the past. Any society in turmoil today, no matter how remote ... can ca...
For example, missionary linguists are working on modified Roman alphabets for hundreds of New Guinea and Native American languages. Government linguists devised the modified Roman alphabet adopted in...
Finland’s crisis (Chapter 2) exploded with the Soviet Union’s massive attack upon Finland on November 30, 1939. In the resulting Winter War, Finland was virtually abandoned by all of its potential all...
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...
1885 did engines improve to the point that Gottfried Daimler got around to installing one on a bicycle to create the first motorcycle;
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...
Transhumance—i.e., moving livestock seasonally between different altitudes in order to follow the growth of grass at higher elevations as the season advances.
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 past was still a Golden Age, of ignorance, while the present is an Iron Age of willful bliss.
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...
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...
In short, plant and animal domestication meant much more food and hence much denser human populations. The resulting food surpluses, and (in some areas) the animal-based means of transporting those su...
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...
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...
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...