Origin Story, page 33
3. Gerhard Roth, The Long Evolution of Brains and Minds (New York: Springer, 2013), 226.
4. It’s an old joke. I came across it in Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (London: Penguin, 1991), 177; Dennett attributes the comparison with tenure to the Colombian-American neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinás.
5. On this last idea, see Michael S. A. Graziano, Consciousness and the Social Brain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
6. The complexities of ape and monkey politics are explored in works by Frans de Waal and Jane Goodall and more recently in a study of baboon communities by Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth, Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
7. See Christopher Seddon, Humans: From the Beginning (New York: Glanville Books, 2014), 42–45.
8. On EQ, see ibid., 225 and following, and Roth, The Long Evolution of Brains and Minds, 232.
9. Roth, The Long Evolution of Brains and Minds, 228.
10. See John Gowlett, Clive Gamble, and Robin Dunbar, “Human Evolution and the Archaeology of the Social Brain,” Current Anthropology 53, no. 6 (December 2012): 695–96, on the correlation of brain size and group size.
11. New Scientist (April 29, 2017): 10.
12. Robin Dunbar, Human Evolution (New York: Penguin, 2014), 163.
13. Gowlett, Gamble, and Dunbar, “Human Evolution,” 695–96.
14. Michael Tomasello, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), loc. 39, Kindle.
15. James R. Hurford, The Origins of Language: A Slim Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 68; Cheney and Seyfarth, Baboon Metaphysics, loc. 2408, Kindle: “Evidence for teaching by nonhuman primates… can be summarized by one word: scant.”
16. Tomasello, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, loc. 5, Kindle: “Faithful social transmission… can work as a ratchet to prevent slippage backward—so that the newly invented artifact or practice preserves its new and improved form at least somewhat faithfully until a further modification or improvement comes along.” Tomasello calls this collaborative learning.
17. Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Penguin, 2015), 110.
18. This idea is suggested by Roth, The Long Evolution of Brains and Minds, 264; on the unique human capacity to remember many words, see Hurford, The Origins of Language, 119.
19. See Terrence Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), and Michael Tomasello, Why We Cooperate (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). For recent surveys of the evolution of language, see W. Tecumseh Fitch, The Evolution of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, “Why Possibly Language Evolved,” Biolinguistics 4, nos. 2/3 (2010): 289–306. Alex Mesoudi, Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture and Synthesize the Social Sciences(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), is a fine recent survey of the rich body of research on cultural change from a Darwinian perspective.
20. Eric R. Kandel, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), loc. 330, Kindle.
21. William H. McNeill, “The Rise of the West After Twenty-Five Years,” Journal of World History l, no. 1 (1990): 2.
22. Sally McBrearty and Alison S. Brooks, “The Revolution That Wasn’t: A New Interpretation of the Origin of Modern Human Behavior,” Journal of Human Evolution 39 (2000): 453–563.
23. The image is from Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 139.
24. Dunbar, Human Evolution, 13.
25. There is a good brief overview in Chris Scarre, ed., The Human Past: World Prehistory and the Development of Human Societies (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005), 143–45.
26. Peter Hiscock, “Colonization and Occupation of Australasia,” in Cambridge World History, vol. 1, ed. Merry Wiesner-Hanks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 452.
27. These migrations are described well in Peter Bellwood, First Migrants: Ancient Migration in Global Perspective (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
28. On the early-dispersal model, see Hiscock, “Colonization and Occupation of Australasia,” 433–38.
29. Figures from Christian, Maps of Time, 143.
30. Marshall Sahlins, “The Original Affluent Society,” Stone Age Economics (London: Tavistock, 1972), 1–39.
Chapter 8. Farming: Threshold 7
1. Vaclav Smil, Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).
2. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (London: Vintage, 1998), develops the idea of a natural experiment in its final chapter.
3. See http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/indigenous/aborigines-were-building-stone-houses-9000-years-ago/news-story/30ef4873a7c8aaa2b80d01a12680df77.
4. A fine recent overview of changing gender roles in human history is Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Gender in History: Global Perspectives, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).
5. Marc Cohen, The Food Crisis in Prehistory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 65: “Groups throughout the world would be forced to adopt agriculture within a few thousand years of one another.”
6. Chris Scarre, ed., The Human Past: World Prehistory and the Development of Human Societies (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005), 214–15.
7. Bruce Pascoe, Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? (Broome, Australia: Magabala Books, 2014), describes many indigenous Australian cultivation techniques; the sickles are described at loc. 456, Kindle.
8. This is a central argument of Jared Diamond’s wonderful Guns, Germs, and Steel.
9. Peter Bellwood, First Migrants: Ancient Migration in Global Perspective (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 124.
10. Smil, Harvesting the Biosphere, loc. 2075, Kindle.
11. Merry Wiesner-Hanks, ed., Cambridge World History, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 221, 224–28.
12. Robin Dunbar, Human Evolution (New York: Penguin, 2014), 77.
Chapter 9. Agrarian Civilizations
1. Richard Lee, “What Hunters Do for a Living, or, How to Make Out on Scarce Resources,” in Man the Hunter, ed. R. Lee and I. DeVore (Chicago: Aldine, 1968).
2. Chris Scarre, ed., The Human Past: World Prehistory and the Development of Human Societies (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005), 403.
3. Cited in Alfred J. Andrea and James H. Overfield, The Human Record: Sources of Global History, vol. 1, 4th ed. (Boston: Wadsworth, 2008), 23–24.
4. Cited in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 608.
5. Hans J. Nissen, “Urbanization and the Techniques of Communication: The Mesopotamian City of Uruk During the Fourth Millennium BCE,” in Cambridge World History, vol. 3, Merry Wiesner-Hanks, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 115–16.
6. Mark McClish and Patrick Olivelle, eds., The Arthasastra: Selections from the Classic Indian Work on Statecraft (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2012), sections 1.4.13–15, Kindle.
7. Ibid., sections 1.4.1–1.4.4, 1.5.1.
8. Ibid., section 2.36.3.
9. Ibid., section 2.35.4.
10. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 270, and see page 258, table 7.2.
Chapter 10. On the Verge of Today’s World
1. Grace Karskens, The Colony: A History of Early Sydney (New South Wales: Allen and Unwin, 2009), loc. 756–79, Kindle.
2. The intensifying global hunt for new resources is described superbly in John Richards, The Unending Frontier: Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
3. Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
4. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 161 and following.
5. David Wootton, The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2015), 68.
6. Cited in Steven J. Harris, “Long-Distance Corporations, Big Sciences, and the Geography of Knowledge,” Configurations 6 (1998): 269.
7. Wootton, The Invention of Science, 37.
8. Ibid., 54.
9. Ibid., 35.
10. Ibid., 5–6, 8–9.
11. Margaret Jacob and Larry Stewart, Practical Matter; Newton’s Science in the Service of Industry and Empire, 1687–1851 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 16.
12. David Christian, “Living Water”: Vodka and Russian Society on the Eve of Emancipation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
13. E. A. Wrigley, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), loc. 298–306, Kindle. Malthus, Jevons, Ricardo, and Mill also accepted that the natural world set limits to growth; see the discussion in Donald Worster, Shrinking the Earth: The Rise and Decline of American Abundance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 44–49.
14. Alfred W. Crosby, Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity’s Unappeasable Appetite for Energy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 60.
15. Wrigley, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution, loc. 2112, Kindle.
16. On the history of the Newcomen engine and its links to the scientific revolution, see Wootton, The Invention of Science, chapter 14.
17. Wrigley, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution, loc. 2112, Kindle.
18. Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Free Press, 1991), chapter 1.
19. Ibid., 16.
Chapter 11. The Anthropocene: Threshold 8
1. Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 1999), 271.
2. Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, 2001), 127.
3. Tim Lenton, Earth Systems Science: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 82.
4. Ha-Joon Chang, Economics: The User’s Guide (New York: Pelican, 2014), 429, based on figures from the World Bank.
5. Lenton, Earth Systems Science, 82, 96–97.
6. The scientist was Wally Broecker. Cited in David Christian, “Anthropocene Epoch,” in The Berkshire Encyclopedia of Sustainability, Vol. 10: The Future of Sustainability, ed. Ray Anderson et al. (Barrington, MA: Berkshire Publishing, 2012), 22.
7. Jan Zalasiewicz and Colin Waters, “The Anthropocene,” in The Oxford Research Encyclopedia, Environmental Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 4–5.
Chapter 12. Where Is It All Going?
1. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy—Red Mars (1993), Green Mars (1994), Blue Mars (1996)—offers a rich and vivid science-fictional account of what the colonization of Mars might look like.
2. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 46.
3. J. S. Mill, “Of the ‘Stationary State,’” in The Principles of Political Economy, Google Books, http://www.efm.bris.ac.uk/het/mill/book4/bk4ch06.
4. Johan Rockström et al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Nature 461 (September 24, 2009): 472–75; updated in Will Steffen et al., “Planetary Boundaries: Guiding Human Development on a Changing Planet,” Science (January 2015): 1–15.
5. Steffen et al., “Planetary Boundaries,” 1.
6. The idea of a mature Anthropocene is explored in David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet’s Future (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2016). I have borrowed some of the ideas in this section from Paul Raskin, Journey to Earthland: The Great Transition to Planetary Civilization (Boston: Tellus Institute, 2016).
7. I’ve taken details of the following account from Sean Carroll’s wonderful book The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (New York: Dutton, 2016), loc. 878, Kindle.
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David Christian, Origin Story
