Discipline
Anthropology
Lessons across the journey that lean on anthropology, in the order they appear in the story.
- 6.1 Primates and homininsDraft
Where we branch off, and why standing up came before big brains.
- 6.2 From habilis to sapiensDraft
How many kinds of human there were, and why only one is left.
- 6.3 Fire, tools and cookingDraft
How an outside stomach paid for an expensive brain.
- 6.4 Language and symbolic thoughtDraft
The one thing that leaves no fossils, and how we look for it anyway.
- 6.5 Collective learningDraft
The threshold: why a species that forgets nothing beats a species that thinks faster.
- 6.6 Out of Africa, into IndiaDraft
How our species spread across the world, and what the genetics of the subcontinent actually show.
- 6.7 Foraging lifewaysDraft
How people lived for ninety-five percent of human history, and why we keep getting it wrong.
- 7.6 Empires and exchangeDraft
Why agrarian states kept growing, kept collapsing, and kept connecting.
- 8.1 The Columbian ExchangeDraft
Two worlds meet, and the deadliest thing that crosses is invisible.
- 8.2 The Scientific RevolutionDraft
Not a discovery but a method, and not invented anywhere in particular.
- 8.3 Fossil Fuels and IndustryDraft
Digging up three hundred million years of sunlight, and what it did to everyone who did not.
- 8.4 The Great AccelerationDraft
Twenty-four graphs that all bend at the same moment, and what that moment cost.