I’ve come to the conclusion—and some of you may have heard me say this before—that culture is not your friend. That’s the final conclusion. This came to me a few months ago when I had my yearly physical, and as I was buttoning up my doctor said to me, “You know, in the nineteenth century, most people your age were dead.” And I realized that this wa... See more

Whichever way it happened, the Neanderthals (and the other human species) pose one of history’s great what ifs. Imagine how things might have turned out had the Neanderthals or Denisovans survived alongside Homo sapiens. What kind of cultures, societies and political structures would have emerged in a world where several different human species coe

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Since man is a moment in astronomic time, a transient guest of the earth, a spore of his species, a scion of his race, a composite of body, character, and mind, a member of a family and a community, a believer or doubter of a faith, a unit in an economy, perhaps a citizen in a state or a soldier in an army, we may ask under the corresponding heads—

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