Sublime

THE EVOLUTION OF MASTERY For three million years we were hunter-gatherers, and it was through the evolutionary pressures of that way of life that a brain so adaptable and creative eventually emerged. Today we stand with the brains of hunter-gatherers in our heads.

Modern archaeology is a science-based humanity that sets out to reveal the way various communities interacted and how this in turn led to their rise, or decline. But you cannot do this simply by studying artefacts. You must also pay close attention to the landscapes where people lived: to changes in the local vegetation, forest cover, crops, livest

A first step towards a more accurate, and hopeful, picture of world history might be to abandon the Garden of Eden once and for all, and simply do away with the notion that for hundreds of thousands of years, everyone on earth shared the same idyllic form of social organization.

All human cultures are at least in part the legacy of empires and imperial civilisations, and no academic or political surgery can cut out the imperial legacies without killing the patient.

On Europe’s Inner Asian frontier, demographic expansion long seemed as hobbled as it was in mainland North America until the 1750s.

In northern areas, it also takes more than one human to raise an infant. No wonder monogamy tends to be a practice of the north, while polygamy is a custom of the prodigal south.

perhaps, Ötzi suiting Pinker’s argument.