Quotes About History

It is the oldest depiction of the human body.

such as Huns and Bulgars and the unexcitingly named Alans.

They may have shaped the lands and defined and defended borders, and given us the days of the week (and hundreds of other words: "a berserk freckly husband is a blundering guest in hell"), but they don't appear to have left any distinctive DNA.

on a long enough timeline we're all inbred.

We know that some early humans migrated into Asia and Europe within the last quarter of a million years, but their dominion outside of Africa was temporary, and they probably leave no descendants today. Around seventy thousand years ago another group of people drifted away from Africa, and the process of setting down new roots all over this planet began.

A thousand years ago, we Europeans share all of our ancestry. Triple that time and we share all our ancestry with everyone on Earth.

We have good evidence that Homo erectus, that highly successful human who walked all over the Earth from 1.9 million years ago until around 140,000 years ago, was a fire user in some capacity. The dates when they first utilised fire remain disputed.

everyone alive of European descent would be able to select a line that would cross everyone else's around the time of Richard II.

No matter the languages we speak or the colour of our skin, we share ancestors who planted rice on the banks of the Yangtze, who first domesticated horses on the steppes of the Ukraine, who hunted giant sloths in the forests of North and South America, and who laboured to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu.

On the beautiful Norfolk coast, there's Happisburgh (pronounced Hays-bruh), a small village with a lighthouse, a church, a superb pub, and not much else, apart from almost a million years of human occupation.

Something on the order of 107 billion modern humans have existed, though this number depends on when exactly you start counting.

Pedigree is a word derived from the middle French phrase pied de grue—the crane's foot—as the digits and hallux spread from a single joint at the bottom of the tibia, roughly equivalent to our ankle. This branching describes one or a few generations of a family tree

One fifth of people alive a millennium ago in Europe are the ancestors of no one alive today. Their lines of descent petered out at some point, when they or one of their progeny did not leave any of their own.

The key finding was that the sequences of DNA generated implied that the human that led to us diverged from those who led to the Neanderthals around 500,000 years ago.

Nevertheless, every Nazi has Jewish ancestors. Every White supremacist has Middle Eastern ancestors. Every racist has African, Indian, Chinese, American Indian, and Aboriginal Australian ancestors, as does everyone else, and not just in the sense that humankind is an African species in deep prehistory, but at a minimum from classical times, and probably much more recently. Racial purity is a pure fantasy.

according to the genetics, there wasn't a point where a group of genetically similar people spread into the extremities of the British Isles and settled into a culture that we now call Celtic. That word is a modern invention of a presumed people that isn't reflected in Britain's DNA.

Of all the attempts over the centuries to place humans in distinct races, none succeeds.

Nobodies from the past are being elevated to some of the most important people who ever lived.

In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches … Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.' 'Chapter 14: Recapitulation and Conclusion' in The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, 1859

There's no trace of genetic fair skin between those two dates.

life has existed on Earth for about 3.9 billion years. The species Homo sapiens, of which you are a member, emerged a mere 300,000 years ago as far as we know, in pockets in east and north Africa. Writing began about 6,000 years ago, in Mesopotamia, somewhere in what we now call the Middle East.

Following the footnotes of a Lincoln book can drive you towards madness. But it also gives you the chance to spend days trying to determine whether Lincoln might have actually taken a ride on a flying piano, and that's a damned interesting way to spend one's working life.

The discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind.

It was only in 1893 that Britain had seen fit to upgrade its legation in the American capital to the status of a full embassy. Now, less than a generation later, European history seemed to hang on the posture that Washington would adopt towards the war.