Quotes from Charles C. Mann

The Olmec, Maya, and other Mesoamerican societies were world pioneers in mathematics and astronomy—but they did not use the wheel. Amazingly, they had invented the wheel but did not employ it for any purpose other than children's toys. Those looking for a tale of cultural superiority can find it in zero; those looking for failure can find it in the wheel.

But a central element was the power of ideas—the voices and actions of suffragists, who through decades of ridicule and harassment pressed their case. In recent years something similar may have occurred with gay rights: first a few lonely advocates, censured and mocked; then victories in the social and legal sphere; finally, perhaps, a slow movement to equality.

Flush with wealth, Tiwanaku city swelled into a marvel of terraced pyramids and grand monuments. Stone breakwaters extended far out into Lake Titicaca, thronged with long-prowed boats made of reeds. With its running water, closed sewers, and gaudily painted walls, Tiwanaku was among the world's most impressive cities.

Having grown separately for millennia, the Americas were a boundless sea of novel ideas, dreams, stories, philosophies, religions, moralities, discoveries, and all the other products of the mind. Few things are more sublime or characteristically human than the cross-fertilization of cultures. The simple discovery by Europe of the existence of the Americas caused an intellectual ferment. How much grander would have been the tumult if Indian societies had survived in full splendor!

As many as one out of every ten people met a violent death in the first millennium A.D., the archaeologist Ian Morris has estimated. Ever since, violence has declined—gradually, then suddenly. In the decades after the Second World War, rates of violent death plunged to the lowest levels ever seen.

Alan L. Kolata excavated at Tiwanaku during the 1980s and early 1990s. He has written that by 1000 A.D. the city had a population of as much as 115,000, with another quarter million in the surrounding countryside—numbers that Paris would not reach for another five centuries.

Multiple causes for this turnaround have been suggested. But Goldstein, a leading scholar in this field, argues that the most important is the emergence of multinational institutions like the United Nations, which owe their origins to peace activists from the last century.

Beavers the size of armchairs; turtles that weighed almost as much as cars; sloths able to reach tree branches twenty feet high; huge, flightless, predatory birds like rapacious ostriches—the tally of Pleistocene monsters is long and alluring.

who held title to all the land and its produce, could vote down decisions by the male leaders of the League and demand that an issue be reconsidered. Under this regime women were so much better off than their counterparts in Europe that nineteenth-century U.S. feminists like Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, all of whom lived in Haudenosaunee country, drew inspiration from their lot.

Preventing Homo sapiens from destroying itself à la Gause would require a still greater transformation, to Margulis's way of thinking, because we would be pushing against Nature itself. Success would be unprecedented, biologically speaking. It would be a reverse Copernican Revolution, showing that humankind is exempt from natural processes that govern all other species. But might we be able to do exactly that? Might Margulis have got this one wrong? Might we indeed be special?

Both men are dead now, but their disciples have continued the hostilities. Indeed, the dispute between Wizards and Prophets has, if anything, become more vehement. Wizards view the Prophets' emphasis on cutting back as intellectually dishonest, indifferent to the poor, even racist

In other words, as one mother-culture advocate put it, I am "swallowing Marcus's [nonsense] whole.

Prophets sneer that the Wizards' faith in human resourcefulness is unthinking, scientifically ignorant, even driven by greed (because remaining within ecological limits will cut into corporate profits).

You must have an education! he told the boy. Your knowledge is the only protection you have in this world! Fill your head now to fill your belly later!

Chattel slavery on colonial plantations, by contrast, made slaves anonymous—they were, so to speak, something bought in a store, selected purely on physical characteristics, like so many cans of soup. (In account books, slavers called their human cargo "pieces," a revealing term.)

the essayist Montaigne had noted... Indians who visited France... noticed among us some men gorged to the full with things of every sort while their other halves were beggars at their doors, emaciated with hunger and poverty. They found it strange that these poverty-stricken halves should suffer [that is, tolerate] such injustice, and that they did not take the others by the throat or set fire to their houses.

Vogt and Osborn were also the first to bring to a wide public a belief that would become a foundation of environmental thought: consumption driven by capitalism and rising human numbers is the ultimate cause of most of the world's ecological problems, and only dramatic reductions in human fertility and economic activity will prevent a worldwide calamity.

Passenger pigeons were greedy eaters with terrible manners; if they found some food they liked just after finishing a meal, they would vomit what they had previously eaten and dig in. Gobbling their chow, they sometimes twittered in tones musical enough that people mistook them for little girls. They gorged on so many beechnuts and acorns that they sometimes fell off their perches and burst apart when they hit the ground.

what scientists call zoonotic disease was little known in the Americas.

Every society, big or little, misses out on "obvious" technologies. The lacunae have enormous impact on people's lives—imagine Europe with efficient plows or the Maya with iron tools—but not much effect on the scale of a civilization's endeavors, as shown by both European and Maya history.

At Marajó, Meggers and Evans soon noticed an oddity: the earliest traces of Marajóara culture were the most elaborate. As the centuries advanced, the quality of the ceramics inexorably declined.

By mining the forests upstream for firewood and floating the logs downriver to the city, they were removing ground cover and increasing the likelihood of catastrophic floods.

By 1000 A.D., trade relationships had covered the continent for more than a thousand years; mother-of-pearl from the Gulf of Mexico has been found in Manitoba, and Lake Superior copper in Louisiana.

The Haudenosaunee thus would have the second oldest continuously existing representative parliaments on earth. Only Iceland's Althing, founded in 930 A.D., is older.