Descendants of those societies that achieved centralized government and organized religion earliest ended up dominating the modern world. The combination of government and religion has thus functioned, together with germs, writing, and technology, as one of the four main sets of proximate agents leading to history’s broadest pattern.
Why did wealth and power become distributed as they now are, rather than in some other way?
It’s the exclusive home of 1,000 of the world’s approximately 7,000 languages. It holds the largest number of societies that even in modern times still lay beyond the control of state government or were only recently influenced by state government. Its populations span a range of traditional lifestyles, from nomadic hunter-gatherers, seafarers, and lowland sago specialists to settled Highland farmers, composing groups ranging from a few dozen to 200,000 people.
Maori began to walk through Moriori settlements, announcing that the Moriori were now their slaves, and killing those who objected.
One common response of ours to infection is to develop a fever. Again, we’re used to considering fever as a “symptom of disease,” as if it developed inevitably without serving any function. But regulation of body temperature is under our genetic control and doesn’t just happen by accident. A few microbes are more sensitive to heat than our own bodies are. By raising our body temperature, we in effect try to bake the germs to death before we get baked ourselves.
As a result, over the course of history, human populations repeatedly exposed to a particular pathogen have come to consist of a higher proportion of individuals with those genes for resistance – just because unfortunate individuals without the genes were less likely to survive to pass their genes on to babies.
The near-simultaneous disappearance of so many large species raises an obvious question: what caused it? An obvious possible answer is that they were killed off or else eliminated indirectly by the first arriving humans. Recall.
The greatest single epidemic in human history was the one of influenza that killed 21 million people at the end of the First World War.
Peoples of the Fertile Crescent domesticated local plants much earlier. They domesticated far more species, domesticated far more productive or valuable species, domesticated a much wider range of types of crops, developed intensified food production and dense human populations more rapidly, and as a result entered the modern world with more advanced technology, more complex political organization, and more epidemic diseases with which to infect other peoples.
Not a trace of its use for literature has survived. The Iliad and Odyssey were composed and transmitted by nonliterate bards for nonliterate listeners, and not committed to writing until the development of the Greek alphabet hundreds of years later.
One suggested function of the first gardens of nearly 11,000 years ago was to provide a reliable reserve larder as insurance in case wild food supplies failed.
To sustain themselves, they need a human population that is sufficiently numerous, and sufficiently densely packed, that a numerous new crop of susceptible children is available for infection by the time the disease would otherwise be waning. Hence measles and similar diseases are also known as crowd diseases.
We tend to seek easy, single-factor explanations of success. For most important things, though, success actually requires avoiding many separate possible causes of failure.
For instance, the Karimui Basin of the New Guinea highlands, where I worked in the 1960s, was occupied by an isolated population of a few thousand people, suffering from the world’s highest incidence of leprosy – about 40 percent! Finally, small human populations are also susceptible to nonfatal infections against which we don’t develop immunity, with the result that the same person can become reinfected after recovering. That happens with hookworm and many other parasites.
I am Nestor’s delicious drinking cup. Whoever drinks from this cup swiftly will the desire of fair-crowned Aphrodite seize him.
Why does Japan now dominate the world market for transistorized electronic consumer products, to a degree that damages the United States’s balance of payments with Japan, even though transistors were invented and patented in the United States? Because Sony bought transistor licensing rights from Western Electric at a time when the American electronics consumer industry was churning out vacuum tube models and reluctant to compete with its own products.
Based on such evidence, archaeologists infer that chiefdoms began to arise locally by around 5500 BC.
For example, typhus was initially transmitted between rats by rat fleas, which sufficed for a while to transfer typhus from rats to humans. Eventually, typhus microbes discovered that human body lice offered a much more efficient method of traveling directly between humans. Now that Americans have mostly deloused themselves, typhus has discovered a new route into us: by infecting eastern North American flying squirrels and then transferring to people whose attics harbor flying squirrels.
As a result of that confined distribution, peoples who pride themselves on being civilized have always viewed writing as the sharpest distinction raising them above “barbarians” or “savages.
Different peoples acquired food production at different times in prehistory.