Quotes About History

the polytheistic Romans killed no more than a few thousand Christians.

It seems that about 50,000 years ago, Sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans were at that borderline point. They were almost, but not quite, entirely separate species.

The humanities, in contrast, emphasise the crucial importance of intersubjective entities, which cannot be reduced to hormones and neurons. To think historically means to ascribe real power to the contents of our imaginary stories.

What happened in the Cognitive Revolution?

At the time of the Cognitive Revolution, the planet was home to about 200 genera of large terrestrial mammals weighing over 100 pounds. At the time of the Agricultural Revolution, only about a hundred remained. Homo sapiens drove to extinction about half of the planet's big beasts long before humans invented the wheel, writing, or iron tools.

The best-known religions of history, such as Islam and Buddhism, are universal and missionary. Consequently

sistema de procesamiento de datos que los sumerios inventaron se llama «escritura».

Studying history aims to loosen the grip of the past. It enables us to turn our head this way and that, and begin to notice possibilities that our ancestors could not imagine, or didn't want us to imagine. By observing the accidental chain of events that led us here, we realise how our very thoughts and dreams took shape – and we can begin to think and dream differently. Studying history will not tell us what to choose, but at least it gives us more options.

Officials kept writing scrolls, collecting taxes, sending orders and oiling the gears of the pharaonic machine.

There is absolutely no proof that human well-being inevitably improves as history rolls along. There is no proof that cultures that are beneficial to humans must inexorably succeed and spread, while less beneficial cultures disappear

The last one ran from about 75,000 to 15,000 years ago.

the numbers from 0 to 9. Confusingly, these signs are known as Arabic numerals even though they were first invented by the Hindus (even more confusingly, modern Arabs use a set of digits that look quite different from Western ones). But the Arabs get the credit because when they invaded India they encountered the system, understood its usefulness, refined it, and spread it through the Middle East and then to Europe.

A la mañana siguiente de la batalla de Waterloo (1815), junto a los hospitales de campaña podían verse montones de manos y piernas serrados. En aquellos tiempos, a los carpinteros y carniceros que se alistaban en el ejército se les solía destinar a servir en el cuerpo médico, porque la cirugía requería poca cosa más que saberse manejar con cuchillos y sierras.

Of the thousands of species that our ancestors hunted and gathered, only a few were suitable candidates for farming and herding. Those few species lived in particular places, and those are the places where agricultural revolutions occurred. Scholars once proclaimed that the agricultural revolution was a great leap forward for humanity.

Un imperio que no puede aguantar un golpe y seguir de pie no es realmente un imperio.

There was just one exception to this general rule: the dog. The dog was the first animal domesticated by Homo sapiens, and this occurred before the Agricultural Revolution. Experts disagree about the exact date, but we have incontrovertible evidence of domesticated dogs from about 15,000 years ago. They may have joined the human pack thousands of years earlier.

History has still not decided where we will end up, and a string of coincidences might yet send us rolling in either direction.

Most nations argue that they are a natural and eternal entity, created in some primordial epoch by mixing the soil of the motherland with the blood of the people.

Within a few thousand years, virtually all of these giants vanished. Of the twenty-four Australian animal species weighing fifty kilograms or more, twenty-three became extinct.2

Throughout history, religions and ideologies did not sanctify life itself. They always sanctified something above or beyond earthly existence, and were consequently quite tolerant of death.

Los que una vez fueron víctimas de la historia es probable que vuelvan a serlo otra vez. Y aquellos a los que la historia ha concedido privilegios tienen más probabilidades de obtenerlos de nuevo.

History's Biggest Fraud

Around 10,000 BC, before the transition to agriculture, earth was home to about 5–8 million nomadic foragers. By the first century AD, only 1–2 million foragers remained (mainly in Australia, America and Africa), but their numbers were dwarfed by the world's 250 million farmers.1

In contrast, over the course of the next 1,500 years, Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion.