Discipline
Archaeology
Lessons across the journey that lean on archaeology, 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.
- 7.1 Why farm?Draft
The worst decision anyone ever made, taken independently at least eleven times.
- 7.2 DomesticationDraft
What we did to plants and animals, and what they did to us.
- 7.3 Villages to citiesDraft
How a pile of grain becomes a temple, a scribe, a tax and a king.
- 7.4 The Indus Valley civilisationDraft
The largest of the ancient civilisations by area, with no palaces, no royal tombs, and a script nobody can read.
- 7.5 The price of farmingDraft
The bill for cities: disease, inequality, patriarchy, slavery and soil.
- 7.6 Empires and exchangeDraft
Why agrarian states kept growing, kept collapsing, and kept connecting.