Sublime

The brain of each and every one of us is built around a reptilian core,

The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history.

An internationally renowned scientist (whom you will meet toward the end of this book) told me that increasing specialization has created a “system of parallel trenches” in the quest for innovation. Everyone is digging deeper into their own trench and rarely standing up to look in the next trench over, even though the solution to their problem happ

Relativity is the understanding of the world not as events but as relations.

Jewish history is a living testimony to the power of ideas,

All our knowledge of the world is a model based on patterns.

As we get to grips with the actual evidence, we always find that the realities of early human social life were far more complex, and a good deal more interesting, than any modern-day State of Nature theorist would ever be likely to guess.

how did humans organise themselves in mass-cooperation networks, when they lacked the biological instincts necessary to sustain such networks? The short answer is that humans created imagined orders and devised scripts. These two inventions filled the gaps left by our biological inheritance.