Quotes About History

The hunter-gatherer lifestyle worked at least tolerably well for the nearly 100,000-year history of behaviorally modern humans. Everybody in the world was a hunter-gatherer until the local origins of agriculture around 11,000 years ago, and nobody in the world lived under a state government until 5,400 years ago. The lessons from all those experiments in child-rearing that lasted for such a long time are worth considering seriously.

Besides Sumerian cuneiform, the other certain instance of independent origins of writing in human history comes from Native American societies of Mesoamerica, probably southern Mexico. Mesoamerican

or just inventing a new letter (as our medieval ancestors did when they created the new letters j, u, and w).

I am thus optimistic that historical studies of human societies can be pursued as scientifically as studies of dinosaurs—and with profit to our own society today, by teaching us what shaped the modern world, and what might shape our future.

Veddoid Negritos of Sri Lanka

Fueron muchos más los indígenas americanos que murieron en la cama por gérmenes euroasiáticos que en los campos de batalla por las armas y las espadas europeas.

WHAT CAN ARCHAEOLOGY can tell us

The major killers of humanity throughout our recent history—smallpox, flu, tuberculosis, malaria, plague, measles, and cholera—are infectious diseases that evolved from diseases of animals, even though most of the microbes responsible for our own epidemic illnesses are paradoxically now almost confined to humans.

Jared Diamond

After the arrival of Europeans, the Big Island's King Kamehameha I rapidly proceeded with the consolidation of the largest islands by purchasing European guns and ships to invade and conquer first Maui and then Oahu.

The earliest preserved examples of the Etruscan and Roman alphabets are also inscriptions on drinking cups and wine containers.

Lima beans, watermelons, potatoes, eggplants, and cabbages are among the many other familiar crops whose wild ancestors were bitter or poisonous, and

the north–south axes and ecological barriers within Africa and the Americas retarded the diffusion of crops and domestic animals. The history of writing illustrates strikingly the similar ways in which geography and ecology influenced the spread of human inventions.

Yes, world history is indeed such an onion! But that peeling back of the onion's layers is fascinating, challenging—and of overwhelming importance to us today, as we seek to grasp our past's lessons for our future.

why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents? Those disparate rates constitute history's broadest pattern and my book's subject. While this book is thus ultimately

The greatest single epidemic in human history was the one of influenza that killed 21 million people at the end of the First World War.

Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed for us a stage where we made one of the most crucial decisions in human history. Forced to choose between limiting population growth or trying to increase food production, we opted for the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny. The same choice faces us today, with the difference that we now can learn from the past.

History is just one damn fact after another

But the line most familiar to European and American readers is the one that led via the Phoenicians to the Greeks by the early eighth century B.C., thence to the Etruscans in the same century, and in the next century to the Romans, whose alphabet with slight modifications is the one used to print this book.

Jared Diamond

La historia de las interacciones de los pueblos distintos es lo que configuró el mundo moderno mediante la conquista, las epidemias y el genocidio.

Similarly, throughout human history farmers have tended to despise hunter-gatherers as primitive, hunter-gatherers have despised farmers as ignorant, and herders have despised both.

When such partly immune people came into contact with others who had had no previous exposure to the germs, epidemics resulted in which up to 99 percent of the previously unexposed population was killed.

The famous Java Homo erectus fossils prove that humans have occupied at least western Indonesia for a million years.