Two million years ago, several proto-human lineages had coexisted side by side until a shake-up left only one. It now appears that a similar shake-up occurred within the last 60,000 years, and that all of us alive in the world today are descended from the winner of that upheaval. What was the last missing ingredient whose acquisition helped our ancestor to win?
From a patent lawyer’s perspective, the ideal invention is one that arises without any precursors, like Athene springing fully formed from the forehead of Zeus. In.
Most peasant farmers and herders, who constitute the great majority of the world’s actual food producers, aren’t necessarily better off than hunter-gatherers. Time budget studies show that they may spend more rather than fewer hours per day at work than hunter-gatherers do.
In reality, Japanese women face many societal barriers to equality. Of course, the barriers that I’ll now describe also exist in countries other than Japan. But those barriers are stronger – and the gender gap in health, education, and participation in the workforce and in politics is greater – in Japan than in any other rich industrialized nation except South Korea.
About 15,000 years ago, the American West looked much as Africa’s Serengeti Plains do today, with herds of elephants and horses pursued by lions and cheetahs, and joined by members of such exotic species as camels and giant ground sloths.
For most important things, though, success actually requires avoiding many separate possible causes of failure. The.
If one defines “big” as “weighing over 100 pounds,” then only 14 such species were domesticated before the twentieth century.
Table 1.2. Factors related to the outcomes of national crises 1. National consensus that one’s nation is in crisis 2. Acceptance of national responsibility to do something 3. Building a fence, to delineate the national problems needing to be solved 4. Getting material and financial help from other nations 5. Using other nations as models of how to solve the problems 6. National identity.
7. Honest national self-appraisal 8. Historical experience of previous national crises 9. Dealing with national failure 10. Situation-specific national flexibility 11. National core values 12. Freedom from geopolitical constraints.
This very unequal distribution of wild ancestral species among the continents became an important reason why Eurasians, rather than peoples of other continents, were the ones to end up with guns, germs, and steel.
Crops starting out as weeds included rye and oats, turnips and radishes, beets and leeks, and lettuce.
But big mammal domestication virtually ended 4,500 years ago. By then, all of the world’s 148 candidate big species must have been tested innumerable times, with the result that only a few passed the test and no other suitable ones remained.
Europeans have never learned to survive in Australia or New Guinea without their inherited Eurasian technology.
IN ALL, OF the world’s 148 big wild terrestrial herbivorous mammals – the candidates for domestication – only 14 passed the test. Why did the other 134 species fail? To which conditions was Francis Galton referring, when he spoke of those other species as “destined to perpetual wildness”?
Similarly, hippos, as four ton vegetarians, would be great barnyard animals if they weren’t so dangerous. They kill more people each year than do any other African mammals, including even lions.
Zebras have the unpleasant habit of biting a person and not letting go. They thereby injure even more American zookeepers each year than do tigers! Zebras are also virtually impossible to lasso with a rope – even for cowboys who win rodeo championships by lassoing horses – because of their unfailing ability to watch the rope noose fly toward them and then to duck their head out of the way.
When supernatural beliefs gained those functions and became institutionalized, they were thereby transformed into what we term a religion.
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Who today remembers that gasoline, the fuel of modern civilization, originated as yet another invention in search of a use?
Humans and most animal species make an unhappy marriage, for one or more of many possible reasons: the animal’s diet, growth rate, mating habits, disposition, tendency to panic, and several distinct features of social organization. Only a small percentage of wild mammal species ended up in happy marriages with humans, by virtue of compatibility on all those separate counts.