Quotes from Brian M. Fagan

at a seminal yet still little known moment in history, Homo sapiens developed the full battery of cognitive skills that we ourselves possess. After a surprisingly short time, perhaps a mere five thousand years, their descendants moved northward into Eurasia and Europe.

The heyday of the Norse, which lasted roughly from A.D. 800 to about 1200, was not only a byproduct of such social factors as technology, overpopulation and opportunism. Their great conquests and explorations took place during a period of unusually mild and stable weather in northern Europe called the Medieval Warm Period-some of the warmest four centuries of the previous 8,000 years.

We know of major floods from at least three violent storm surges that hit the German and Dutch coasts in about 1200, 1219, and 1287.14 The surge of January 16, 1219, the feast day of St. Marcellus, killed at least thirty-six thousand people. By bizarre coincidence, one of the greatest and best known medieval surges, known as the Grote Mandrenke (the Great Killing of Men) of 1362, struck on the same day as the 1219 cataclysm:

A cubic meter of hazelnuts is sufficient to provide 10 percent of the annual energy needs of a mixed population of twenty people.

As the late Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould once memorably remarked, we humans are all descendants from the same African twig.

In the eighth century, the Catholic Church created a huge market for salted cod and herring by allowing the devout to consume fish on Fridays, the day of Christ's crucifixion, during the forty days of Lent and on major feast days.

To hunt successfully and survive, they had to know the habits of their quarry as well as they knew their own kin. Success depended as much on stalking as it did on weapons.

Self aggrandizement is the most worthy and agreeable of sovereigns' occupations," the king wrote to the Marquis de Villars in 1688.7

About 90 percent of the past five hundred thousand years have been colder than today, and the world's climate has been in transition from cold to warm or back again for about three quarters of that time.

A French general, Pierre Bosquet, famously remarked, "It is magnificent, but it is not war: it is madness.

Let us hope it is not true," cried one horrified lady upon hearing that humans were descended from apes, "but if it is, let us pray it will not become generally known.

A minimum of twenty-five thousand people, certainly many more, perished in the Great Drowning. Storm surges were even more frequent between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, such as the apocalyptic St.

Like the Norse conquests, cathedrals too are a consequence of a global climatic phenomenon, an enduring legacy of the Medieval Warm Period.