Great Throughts Treasury

"I've always been interested in a lot of things, and a lot of things at the same time, and I always tried to explain them to myself. I ask a lot of questions."

"It's striking that Native Americans evolved no devastating epidemic diseases to give to Europeans, in return for the many devastating epidemic diseases that Indians received from the Old World."

"I've worked very hard in this book to keep the lines of communication open. I don't want to turn someone away from this information for partisan political reasons."

"Many of our problems are broadly similar to those that undermined ... Norse Greenland, and that many other past societies also struggled to solve. Some of those past societies failed (like the Greenland Norse) and others succeeded ... The past offers us a rich database from which we can learn in order that we may keep on succeeding."

"Lest those islands still seem to you too remote in space and time to be relevant to our modern societies, just think about the risks... of our increasing globalization and increasing worldwide economic interdependence."

"Livestock adopted in Africa were Eurasian species that came in from the north. Africa's long axis, like that of the Americas, is north/south rather than east/west. Those Eurasian domestic mammals spread southward very slowly in Africa, because they had to adapt to different climate zones and different animal diseases."

"Much of human history has consisted of unequal conflicts between the haves and the have-nots."

"Measles and TB evolved from diseases of our cattle, influenza from a disease of pigs, and smallpox possibly from a disease of camels. The Americas had very few native domesticated animal species from which humans could acquire such diseases."

"Most people are explicitly racists. In parts of the world - so called educated, so-called western society - we've learned that it is not polite to be racist, and so often we don't express racist views, but... Racism is one of the big issues in the world today. Racism is the big social problem in the United States."

"Native Americans had only stone and wooden weapons and no animals that could be ridden. Those military advantages repeatedly enabled troops of a few dozen mounted Spaniards to defeat Indian armies numbering in the thousands."

"No government is here forever. And there are other forces - the most potent force in our society, in fact, big business - doing good for the environment."

"Neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency."

"Not until the beginning of the 20th century did Europe's urban populations finally become self-sustaining: before then, constant immigration of healthy peasants from the countryside was necessary to make up for the constant deaths of city dwellers from crowd diseases."

"Of the Cro-Magnons? products that have been preserved, the best known are their artworks: their magnificent cave paintings, statues and musical instruments, which we still appreciate as art today. Obviously, some momentous change took place in our ancestors capabilities between about 100 000 and 50 000 years ago. That Great Leap Forward poses two major unresolved questions, regarding its triggering causes and its geographic location. As for its cause, I argued in my book The Third Chimpanzee for the perfection of the voice box and hence the anatomical basis of modern language, on which the exercise of human creativity is so dependent. Others have suggested instead that a change in brain organization around that time, without a change in brain size, made modern language possible. As for the site of the Great Leap Forward, did it take place primarily in one geographic area, in one group of humans, who were thereby enabled to expand and replace the former human populations of other parts of the world? Or did it occur parallel in different regions, in each of which the human populations living there today would be descendants of the populations living there before the leap?"

"One way to explain the complexity and unpredictability of historical systems, despite their ultimate determinacy, is to note that long chains of causation may separate final effects from ultimate causes lying outside the domain of that field of science."

"One could say that Patagonia is radically environmentalist, a company that's founded on those principles. But there are other examples, too. I spoke at a World Wildlife Fund dinner fundraiser last October hosted and funded by Starbucks."

"People are not helpless in the face of big business. It's up to the public to say what it wants. Only when the public bans single-hulled oil tankers from American waters, only when the public says no more selling wood logged from old-growth forests, will companies... come up with other solutions."

"People are responding so well to the book - it's really an upper."

"Our closest living relatives are the three surviving species of great ape: the gorilla, the common chimpanzee and the pygmy chimpanzee (bonobo). Their confinement to Africa, along with abundant fossil evidence, indicates that the earliest stages of human evolution were also played out in Africa. Around seven million years ago, a population of African apes broke up into several populations, of which one evolved into modern gorillas, second into the two modern chimps and the third into humans. Fossils indicate that the evolutionary line leading to us had achieved a substantially upright posture by around four million years ago, then began to increase in body size and in relative brain size around 2.5 million years ago. These proto-humans are generally known as Australopithecus Africanus, Homo Habilis and Homo Erectus, which apparently evolved into each other in that sequence. Although Homo erectus, the stage reached around 1.7 million years ago, was close to us modern humans in body size, its brain size was still barely half of ours."

"Perhaps our greatest distinction as a species is our capacity, unique among animals, to make counter-evolutionary choices."

"Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops could have overthrown the Roman Empire. It never happened."

"People often ask, "What is the single most important environmental population problem facing the world today?" A flip answer would be, "The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!"

"Science is often misrepresented as the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory. Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world."

"Population densities of farmers and herders are typically 10 to 100 times greater than those of hunter/gatherers. That fact alone explains why farmers and herders everywhere in the world have been able to push hunter/gatherers out of land suitable for farming and herding."

"Starbucks goes to a great effort, and pays twice as much for its coffee as its competitors do, and is very careful to help coffee producers in developing countries grow coffee without pesticides and in ways that preserve forest structure."

"Some people have much more pull than other people. But when I say that the public has ultimate responsibility, I'm not saying it in a moral sense. I'm just saying it in the sense of what is it that's really going to bring change."

"Tasmania lies 130 miles southeast of Australia. When it was first visited by Europeans in 1642, Tasmania was occupied by 4,000 hunter-gatherers related to mainland Australians, but with the simplest technology of any recent people on Earth. Unlike mainland Aboriginal Australians, Tasmanians couldn't start a fire."

"Tasmanian history is a study of human isolation unprecedented except in science fiction - namely, complete isolation from other humans for 10,000 years."

"Styles of sculpture, music, and dance used to vary greatly from village to village within New Guinea. Some villagers along the Sepik River and in the Asmat swamps produced carvings that are now world-famous because of their quality. But New Guinea villagers have been increasing coerced or seduced into abandoning their artistic traditions. When I visited an isolated triblet of 578 people at Bomai in 1965, the missionary controlling the only store had just manipulated the people into burning all their art. Centuries of unique cultural development ("heathen artifacts," as the missionary put it) had thus been destroyed in one morning."

"Take air quality in the United States today: It's about 30 percent better than it was 25 years ago, even though there are now more people driving more cars."

"Tasmanians actually abandoned some technologies that they brought with them from Australia and that persisted on the Australian mainland. For example, bone tools and the practice of fishing were both present in Tasmania at the time that the land bridge was severed, and both disappeared from Tasmania by around 1500 B.C."

"Technology causes problems as well as solves problems. Nobody has figured out a way to ensure that, as of tomorrow, technology won't create problems. Technology simply means increased power, which is why we have the global problems we face today."

"Thanks to this availability of suitable wild mammals and plants, early peoples of the Fertile Crescent could quickly assemble a potent and balanced biological package for intensive food production. That package comprised three cereals, as the main carbohydrate sources; four pulses, with 20?25 percent protein, and four domestic animals, as the main protein sources, supplemented by the generous protein content of wheat; and flax as a source of fiber and oil (termed linseed oil: flax seeds are about 40 percent oil). Eventually, thousands of years after the beginnings of animal domestication and food production, the animals also began to be used for milk, wool, plowing, and transport. Thus, the crops and animals of the Fertile Crescent's first farmers came to meet humanity's basic economic needs: carbohydrate, protein, fat, clothing, traction, and transport."

"Technology has to be invented or adopted."

"The Anasazi did manage to construct in stone the largest and tallest buildings erected in North America until the Chicago steel girder skyscrapers of the 1880s."

"The evidence for a localized origin of modern humans, followed by their spread and then their replacement of other types of humans elsewhere, seems strongest for Europe. Some 40 000 years ago, into Europe came the Cro-Magnons, with their modern skeletons, superior weapons and advanced cultural traits. Within a few thousand years there were no more Neanderthals, who had been evolving as the sole occupants of Europe for hundreds of thousands of years."

"The broadest pattern of history - namely, the differences between human societies on different continents - seems to me to be attributable to differences among continental environments, and not to biological differences among peoples themselves."

"The Great Leap Forward coincides with the first proven major extension of human geographic range since our ancestors? colonization of Eurasia. That extension consisted of the occupation of Australia and New Guinea, joined at that time into a single continent. Many radiocarbon dated sites attest to human presence in Australia/New Guinea between 40 000 and 30 000 years ago. Within a short time of that initial peopling, humans had expanded over the whole continent and adapted to its diverse habitats."

"The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down after many centuries, and that are actively continuing in some of the world?s most troubled areas."

"The few preserved African skeletal fragments contemporary with the Neanderthals are more similar to our modern skeletons than to Neanderthal skeletons. Even fewer preserved East Asian sketal fragments are known, but they appear different again from both Africans and Neanderthals."

"The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean ? once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There were no other people from whom they could get help. In the same way that we on Planet Earth, if we ruin our own [world], we won't be able to get help."

"The Indian civilizations of Central and North America remained entirely without pack animals; and it took thousands of years for the corn that evolved in Mexico's climate to become modified into a corn adapted to the short growing season and seasonally changing day-length of North America."

"The Norse held values that would not allow them to deal with... pagans and certainly would not let them eat fish and hunt ringed seals the way these pagans did. So here is a case where the values that sustained them for 450 years ultimately killed them. The United States faces similar agonizing reappraisals today."

"The main thing that gives me hope is the media. We have radio, TV, magazines, and books, so we have the possibility of learning from societies that are remote from us, like Somalia. We turn on the TV and see what blew up in Iraq or we see conditions in Afghanistan."

"The past was still a Golden Age, of ignorance, while the present is an Iron Age of willful bliss."

"The official religions and patriotic fervor of many states make their troops willing to fight suicidally. The latter willingness is one so strongly programmed into us citizens of modern states, by our schools and churches and governments, that we forget what a radical break it makes with previous human history... Naturally, what makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fanatics themselves, but their willingness to accept the deaths of a fraction of their number in order to annihilate or crush their infidel enemy. Fanaticism in war, of the type that drove recorded Christian and Islamic conquests, was probably unknown on Earth until chiefdoms and especially states emerged within the last 6,000 years."

"The rate of human invention is faster, and the rate of cultural loss is slower, in areas occupied by many competing societies with many individuals and in contact with societies elsewhere."

"The problem is that only a tiny minority of wild plants and animals lend themselves to domestication, and those few are concentrated in about half a dozen parts of the world."

"The rather modern looking human skulls from Africa around 100 000 years ago have been taken to support the former view, with the leap occurring specifically in Africa. On the other hand, skulls of humans living in China and Indonesia hundreds of thousands of years ago are considered by some physical anthropologists to exhibit features still found in modern Chinese and in Aboriginal Australians respectively. If true, that finding would suggest parallel evolution and multiregional origins of modern humans, rather than origins in a single garden of eden. The issue remains unresolved."

"The southward advance of native African farmers with Central African crops halted in Natal, beyond which Central African crops couldn't grow - with enormous consequences for the recent history of South Africa."