Quotes About History

Every decade archaeologists discover another few forgotten scripts. Some of them might prove to be even older than the Sumerian scratches in clay. But most of them remain curiosities because those who invented them failed to invent efficient ways of cataloguing and retrieving data. What set apart Sumer, as well as pharaonic Egypt, ancient China and the Inca Empire, is that these cultures developed good techniques of archiving, cataloguing and retrieving written records.

It's common today to explain anything and everything as the result of climate change, but the truth is that earth's climate never rests. It is in constant flux. Every event in history occurred against the background of some climate change. In particular, our planet has experienced numerous cycles of cooling and warming. During the last million years, there has been an ice age on average every 100,000 years. The last one ran from about 75,000 to 15,000 years ago.

Thirdly, mass extinctions akin to the archetypal Australian decimation occurred again and again in the ensuing millennia – whenever people settled another part of the Outer World.

Previous seekers of empire tended to assume that they already understood the world. Conquest merely utilised and spread their view of the world.

The earth of a hundred millennia ago was walked by at least six different species of man.

When Kushim's neighbours called out to him, they might really have shouted 'Kushim!' It is telling that the first recorded name in history belongs to an accountant, rather than a prophet, a poet or a great conqueror.

Una de las pocas leyes rigurosas de la historia

The mammoths of Wrangel continued to prosper for a few more millennia, then suddenly disappeared about 4,000 years ago, just when the first humans reached the island. Were the Australian extinction an isolated event, we could grant humans the benefit of the doubt. But the historical record makes Homo sapiens look like an ecological serial killer.

Today, the global average is only 1.5 per cent, taking war and crime together. During the twentieth century, only 5 per cent of human deaths resulted from human violence – and this in a century that saw the bloodiest wars

SEVENTY THOUSAND YEARS AGO, HOMO sapiens was still an insignificant animal minding its own business in a corner of Africa. In the following millennia it transformed itself into the master of the entire planet and the terror of the ecosystem.

Esta es la mejor razón para aprender historia: no para predecir el futuro, sino para desprendernos del pasado e imaginar destinos alternativos. Desde luego, esto no supone la libertad total: no podemos evitar estar moldeados por el pasado. Pero algo de libertad es mejor que ninguna.

For thousands of years the answer to this question remained unchanged. The same three problems preoccupied the people of twentieth-century China, of medieval India and of ancient Egypt. Famine, plague and war were always at the top of the list.

Like a child thinking that his parents are fighting because of him, the monotheist is convinced that the Persians are fighting the Babylonians because of him.

Assim, o monoteísmo explica a ordem, mas não o mal. O dualismo oferece uma explicação para o mal, mas não para a questão da ordem. Há uma maneira lógica de resolver essa charada: afirmar que há um único Deus onipotente que criou o universo inteiro – e Ele é um Deus maligno. Mas ninguém, em toda a história, teve estômago para tal crença.

Those who resent the mutilation of Indian culture by the British Raj inadvertently sanctify the legacies of the Mughal Empire and the conquering sultanate of Delhi.

When examining the history of any human network, it is therefore advisable to stop from time to time and look at things from the perspective of some real entity. How do you know if an entity is real? Very simple – just ask yourself, 'Can it suffer?' When people burn down the temple of Zeus, Zeus doesn't suffer.

Yet it is an iron rule of history that every imagined hierarchy disavows its fictional origins and claims to be natural and inevitable. For

Leyendas, mitos, dioses y religiones aparecieron por primera vez con la revolución cognitiva.

Una reconstrucción especulativa de un niño neandertal. Las pruebas genéticas indican que al menos algunos neandertales pudieron haber tenido la piel y el pelo claros.

if humankind doesn't annihilate itself meanwhile – the Scientific Revolution might prove itself far greater than a mere historical revolution. It may turn out to be the most important biological revolution since the appearance of life on earth.

Australia is one of the most important events in history, at least as important as Columbus' journey to America or the Apollo II expedition to the moon. It was the first time any human had managed to leave the Afro-Asian ecological system – indeed, the first time any large terrestrial mammal had managed to cross from Afro-Asia to Australia.

In 1700 the world was home to some 700 million humans. In 1800 there were 950 million of us. By 1900 we almost doubled our numbers to 1.6 billion. And by 2000 that quadrupled to 6 billion. Today there are just shy of 7 billion Sapiens

Si nuestra mente es la de los cazadores-recolectores, nuestra cocina es la de los antiguos agricultores.

Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth.