When humans Nearly Vanished: The Catastrophic Explosion of the Toba Volcano, Donald R. Prothero, 2018, 198 pages, ISBN 9781588346353, Dewey 551.210959When humans Nearly Vanished: The Catastrophic Explosion of the Toba Volcano, Donald R. Prothero, 2018, 198 pages, ISBN 9781588346353, Dewey 551.210959812
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" but "That's funny."--Isaac Asimov, 1987. p. 7.
Current atmospheric carbon dioxide, 410 parts per million, is the highest in 50 million years. p. 13.
PREHISTORY
Humans diverged from chimps 5 million to 7 million years ago. p. 103.
Australopithecines lived from 4 million to 2 million years ago. pp. 91, 122-129.
Homo erectus left Africa 1.8 million years ago. p. 130. Or 1 million years ago p. 142.
Neanderthals diverged from Homo sapiens 588,000 years ago p. 88 or 300,000 years ago p. 141. [but remained able to interbreed--still the same species].
Homo sapiens appeared in southern Africa 100,000 to 300,000 years ago. pp. 1, 141. Or 1.2 million years ago p. 131.
Y-CHROMOSOME ADAM
All human Y chromosomes descend from one African man who lived 200,00 to 300,000 years ago. p. 88.
MITOCHONDRIAL EVE
All human mitochondrial DNA comes from a woman who lived in Africa between 140,000 and 200,000 years ago. p. 86.
TOBA CATASTROPHE
About 74,000 years ago: Humans lived in Africa, Asia, and Europe, but not Australia nor the Americas. p. 1.
Mount Toba (in northwestern Sumatra, Indonesia, west of Malaysia, northwest of Singapore) erupted: the largest eruption in 28 million years. pp. 2, 6, 48. It spewed 720 cubic miles of ash into the atmosphere. p. 4. Global air temperatures fell 5°F to 9°F; it took 10 years to rewarm. p. 5. Or began a 1,000-year or 57,000-year ice age p. 147. The tree line and snow line descended 10,000 vertical feet. pp. 5, 146-147.
VOLCANIC EXPLOSIVITY INDEX pp. 47-49
VEI 0-1 most Hawaiian flows 4 Pelée (Martinique) 1902, > 0.1 km³ or 0.024 mi³ 5 Mount Saint Helens (Washington) 1980, 1 km³ or 0.24 mi³ 5 Vesuvius (Italy) 79 CE, > 1 km³ or 0.24 mi³ 5-6 Pinatubo (Philippines) 1991, 5 to 10 km³ or 1.2 to 2.4 mi³ 6 Krakatau (Indonesia) 1883, 20 km³ or 4.8 mi³. Global air temperatures fell 1°C to 2°C, stayed low for 5 years. 7 Tambora (Indonesia) 1815, > 100 km³ or 24 mi³. Largest in recorded history p. 59. Sulfuric acid and fine ash stayed in the atmosphere for several years. 1816 no summer. Global average air temperature fell 0.7°C. p. 61. Crop failures caused a European famine. p. 63. 8 Yellowstone (Idaho, Montana, Wyoming) 640,000 years ago, 1,000 km³ or 240 mi³ pp. 178-179. 8 Toba (Indonesia) 74,000 years ago, 3,000 km³ or 720 mi³ 8 La Garita (Colorado) 27.8 million years ago, 5,000 km³ or 1,300 mi³ p. 177.
EFFECTS
Only about 5,000 people survived to have now-living descendents. pp. 5, 91.
Several other large-animal species also suffered genetic bottlenecks at about that time. pp. 144-145.
All humans on Earth (except a few of the still-surviving ancient African lineages) are extremely closely-related. p. 183. [?? There are more than a few people in Africa, and everyone's lineage is equally ancient.]
OUT-OF-AFRICA II
Ancestors of native peoples in Eurasia and the Americas left Africa 71,000 to 77,000 years ago. They reached Europe 55,000 years ago, Australia 50,000 years ago, the Americas 13,000 to 16,000, or maybe 30,000, years ago. All living Native Americans descend from 70 individuals who lived 11,000 to 13,000 years ago. pp. 88-89, 91.
HOW WE KNOW
Sulfur dioxide in bubbles trapped in ice from 74,000 years ago was off the scale. p. 14.
Water containing oxygen-16 evaporates more readily than water containing oxygen-18. Polar ice thus has mostly the lighter oxygen isotope. The more polar ice, the higher the oxygen-18 concentration in seawater, and thus in shells of zooplankton in sediments. Minerals in 74,000-year-old sediments had enough oxygen-18 to indicate global air temperatures more than 10°F cooler in just a few hundred years. There was ash at that layer too. pp. 19-20, 148.
UGLY SPIN
Published by Smithsonian Books. Brought to us by our friends the U.S. Government. With a friendly reminder that U.S. military spending is a Good Thing! We let geologists sample the ice we drilled, trying to hide nuclear missiles in Greenland glaciers.
The author is a geologist and a military buff. pp. 14-15, 36.
ERRORS
All human mitochondrial DNA comes from a woman who lived between 140,000 and 200,000 years ago. "In other words, most human fossils more than 200,000 years old are not closely related to anyone living today." p. 86. No, they could be Eve's ancestors.
"All modern humans descend from African ancestors who left that continent less than 100,000 years ago." pp. 87, 183. No, modern Africans descend from African ancestors who never left that continent.
"All of us descend from a common ancestor who left Africa less than 70,000 years ago." p. 183. He had said that we [non-Africans] descend from a /population/ that left around that time. This wording contradicts what he said earlier about Adam and Eve.
Gives metric and English measurements for everything--which often contradict each other: sloppy number-work.
Claims 200,000 dead in 1816-1817 was the worst European famine of the 19th Century, p. 63. To the contrary, 1.1 million Irish starved to death in 1845 and 1846. --Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849, Christopher Clark, 2023, pp. 44-45.
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming, David Wallace-Wells, 2023 edition adapted for young adults, 157 pages, ISBN 9780593483572, Dewey 304.28 WThe Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming, David Wallace-Wells, 2023 edition adapted for young adults, 157 pages, ISBN 9780593483572, Dewey 304.28 W155un new teen collection
mya = million years ago
Extinction events: 450 mya 86% of species dead 380 mya 75% of species dead 255 mya 96% of species dead 205 mya 80% of species dead 70 mya 75% of species dead
All but one of these involved greenhouse-gas-produced climate change. p. 3.
The worst, 255 mya, 96% of species dead, was caused by carbon dioxide raising global air temperature 5°C, leading to methane release. p. 3.
We are now adding carbon to the atmosphere at more than 10 times the rate of 255 mya. p. 4.
We're going to
bake, starve, drown, burn, parch, lose ocean life, choke, sicken, be impoverished, go to war, and worse.
Yet the author says he's optimistic because, "we remain in command."
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming, David Wallace-Wells, 2023 edition adapted for young adults, 157 pages, ISBN 9780593483572, Dewey 304.28 WThe Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming, David Wallace-Wells, 2023 edition adapted for young adults, 157 pages, ISBN 9780593483572, Dewey 304.28 W155un new teen collection
mya = million years ago
Extinction events: 450 mya 86% of species dead 380 mya 75% of species dead 255 mya 96% of species dead 205 mya 80% of species dead 70 mya 75% of species dead
All but one of these involved greenhouse-gas-produced climate change. p. 3.
The worst, 255 mya, 96% of species dead, was caused by carbon dioxide raising global air temperature 5°C, leading to methane release. p. 3.
We are now adding carbon to the atmosphere at more than 10 times the rate of 255 mya. p. 4.
We're going to
bake, starve, drown, burn, parch, lose ocean life, choke, sicken, be impoverished, go to war, and worse.
Yet the author says he's optimistic because, "we remain in command."
Best American Magazine Writing 2018, Sid Holt, ed., 2019, ISBN 9780231189996, Dewey 814.608
A celebrated sexual-harassment case. ["Sexual harassment" cBest American Magazine Writing 2018, Sid Holt, ed., 2019, ISBN 9780231189996, Dewey 814.608
A celebrated sexual-harassment case. ["Sexual harassment" could mean anything from a comment about her appearance, to rape. The authors do the reader the disservice of flogging this coy, meaningless phrase, refusing to say what they're talking about.] pp. 1-119.
900 mothers each year die in childbirth in the U.S., and 65,000 nearly die. There are 4 million births per year in the U.S. U.S. maternal deaths are 3 times the Canadian rate, 6 times the Scandinavian rate. pp. 120, 123, 144. The fragmented medical system makes it harder for new mothers, especially those without good insurance, to get the care they need. p. 124. Medicaid pays the medical costs of 45% of births in the U.S. The House of Representatives in 2018 passed a bill to gut Medicaid [the Senate did not]. p. 125. As recently as 2012, you could become an OB-GYN M.D. in the U.S. without learning to care for birthing mothers. p. 126. pp. 120-149.
Unintended victims of U.S. wars in the Mideast, 2003-2017. pp. 150-185.
2011.03 massacre of townspeople in Allende, Mexico, by the Zetas drug cartel, after the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency told the Zetas' pet cops that someone snitched. pp. 186-219.
Russian revolutions, 1825- . Published in /Smithsonian/ magazine. [U.S.-Government-funded.] pp. 220-269.
The Uninhabitable Earth. David Wallace-Wells. The imminent climate catastrophe. pp. 270-292. In January 2018, the North Pole was 70° warmer than normal. p. 271. The last time the Earth was 4°C warmer, sea level was hundreds of feet higher. p. 274. --Peter Brannen, /The Ends of the World/. Four of the five previous mass extinctions were caused by climate change produced by greenhouse gas. 252 million years ago, 5°C of warming released the arctic methane and killed 97% of life on Earth. p. 287. We are now adding carbon to the atmosphere at 10 times the rate then. No plausible emissions reduction can avert disaster. pp. 274-275. Humans can't live in 105°F at 90% humidity. p. 276. The European 2003 heat wave killed 2,000 people a day. p. 277. A heat index of 163°F was seen in 2015 in the Mideast. Salvadoran sugar-cane workers have chronic kidney disease from heat. In June 2018, it's 121°F in Southern California. pp. 277-278. Food-growing regions are desertifying. p. 279. Unfrozen arctic animal remains release the diseases they died of into today's populations. p. 280. Tropical diseases spread as tropical heat expands. p. 281. Five billion people will be exposed to malaria by 2050. p. 281. One-third of deaths in China in 2013 were from smog. p. 283. [I'm sure he's right about all this, though it often seems he's overstating his case.]
"My President Was Black," Ta-Nehisi Coates. pp. 294-344. [Yes, but he was a servant of Wall Street.]
National Football League, 2017-2018 season. pp. 346-377.
Race and "culture" [the Oscars, television talk shows, pro sports]. pp. 378-407
The Aerodynamics of Heavy Vehicles: Trucks, Buses, and Trains
ISBN 9783540220886 is the 2004 compilation of the papers of the first, 2002, conference, The Aerodynamics of Heavy Vehicles: Trucks, Buses, and Trains
ISBN 9783540220886 is the 2004 compilation of the papers of the first, 2002, conference, edited by Rose McCallen, Fred Browand, and James Ross.
Includes "Aerodynamics and Other Efficiencies in Transporting Goods," Paul MacCready (1925-2007)
Cited by Yanis Varoufakis in Modern Political Economics, pp. 72-73, 466, 509:
MacCready calculated that, as of 1999, humans plus our livestock and domestic animals compose 98% of the mass of all land vertebrates. And rapidly rising! (Most of that is cattle.)
Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death, Nick Lane, 2022, 390 pages, Dewey 572, ISBN 9780393651485
The book is largely about the Krebs cycle,Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death, Nick Lane, 2022, 390 pages, Dewey 572, ISBN 9780393651485
The book is largely about the Krebs cycle, which provides energy and organic molecules inside cells. He gives us not just what's known, but also a sense of how amazing it is that anything /can/ be known of details of chemical reactions deep within cells. None of it is visible. Experimenters had to be very clever. Science is not a collection of dusty facts but a way of exploring the unknown. p. 273. We learn how some of the findings were made; he touches on the origins of life, and on metabolic causes of cancer. A page-turner despite the biochemical details.
Cells rarely live alone, but collaborate in the most intimate ways to optimize the driving forces of each other's metabolism. p. 171.
GEOCHEMISTRY BIRTHS BIOCHEMISTRY
Life could begin only in an oxygen-poor environment: hydrogen must react with carbon dioxide to form organic molecules. But hydrogen reacts instead with oxygen where available. p. 157.
At hydrothermal vents on the floors of alkaline seas, hydrogen and carbon dioxide flowed through porous metallic rock, which catalyzed organic-compound formation. Fatty acids spontaneously form enclosed membranes. At pH eleven, 70ºC, and ocean salinity, protocells self-assemble. Acetyl phosphate forms adenosine triphosphate, ATP, the energy supply of mitochondria. Ferric iron (Fe3+) catalyzes its formation. pp. 132-154.
Life began 4 billion years ago. Photosynthesis (in cyanobacteria from at least 2.3 billion years ago p. 176, which evolved into chloroplasts p. 221), produced O2 as waste. When O2 levels were high enough, animals developed that could reverse the Krebs cycle—burning organic compounds in oxygen, rather than assembling them from carbon dioxide. This enabled the Cambrian explosion of animal species, 640 million years ago. p. 158.
When people say that life on earth is "carbon-based," carboxylic acids are your basic hand of cards. p. 41. Five occur in all life: acetate (C2), pyruvate (C3), oxaloacetate (C4), succinate (C4) and alpha-ketoglutarate (C5). p. 123.
CANCER AND AGEING
When succinate accumulates in a cell, as it would if disease reduced oxygen delivery, genes switch on to promote inflammation and cell growth—as might be required in the event of illness or injury. If these genes stay switched on too long, cancer can result. pp. 209-213.
"Ageing reminds me of that absurd scene in Monty Python's /The Life of Brian/, where Brian admonishes the crowd that they don't need to follow anyone—they're all individuals. The crowd chants back, 'Yes, we're all individuals!' apart from one lone, doleful voice who says, 'I'm not.' " p. 263.
All your cells have the same genes. Epigenetics—which genes are switched on or off—make the difference between, say, kidney cells and nerve cells. Epigenetic changes cause us to age. The state of a cell results from one billion to 30 billion metabolic reactions per second. You comprise at least 30 trillion cells: in the last second you were sustained by 10^23 reactions. "In my mid-fifties, my wrinkles and aches and pains are the product of about 10^32 reactions, roughly 10^9 times the number of stars in the known universe. How many didn't work properly? It's astonishing I'm alive at all." p. 269.
CONSCIOUSNESS
Almost the only thing we know about consciousness is that it is, so to speak, soluble in ether, chloroform and a variety of other solvents. While it is not known to what extent fruit flies are conscious, they are most definitely unconscious when exposed to chloroform or ether. —Luca Turin. p. 276.
Every dogma has its day. p. 77. What if they were barking up the wrong tree? p. 83. Problems dogged them from the beginning. p. 84.
And yet—the finding that citrate synthase can run backward, threw the cat among the pigeons. p. 111.
Animals hasten the heat death of the universe, by turning free energy into heat energy. p. 32. (Don't worry. On the timescale of its heat death, the current age of the universe is minuscule.)
"Probably only a tenth of the material I wanted to write about actually made it into the book." p. 228.
Some of the "books that have most influenced me:"
Erwin Schrödinger, /What Is Life?/. Wrong on plenty of details, but an unparalleled example of how far vision and clear thinking can take you in science. p. 306.
Philip Ball, /Molecules: A Very Short Introduction/, 2003. Briefly covers the Krebs cycle and some basic metabolic biochemistry as part of a wider canvas. p. 309.
Eric Smith and Harold J. Morowitz, /The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth: The Emergence of the Fourth Geosphere/, 2016. Clearly presents new ideas. Balanced. Exhaustive. pp. 330-331.
Nick Lane, /Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution/, 2009. p. 340.
Tim Lenton and Andrew Watson, /Revolutions that Made the Earth/, 2013. p. 340.
Ron Milo and Rob Phillips, /Cell Biology by the Numbers/, 2016. p. 363.
Otherlands: A Journey through Earth's Extinct Worlds, Thomas Haliday, 2022, 385 pages, ISBN 9780593132883, Dewey 560.
Views of the past (in reverse ordOtherlands: A Journey through Earth's Extinct Worlds, Thomas Haliday, 2022, 385 pages, ISBN 9780593132883, Dewey 560.
Views of the past (in reverse order, recent to long ago), presented in fictional accounts of individual families of animals, in flowery prose.
The Mediterranean filled, from the Atlantic, 5.33 million years ago. It took over a year to fill. The African tectonic plate is pushing north: Millions of years from now, Gibraltar will again close, and the sea will evaporate in 1000 years....more
Tales of the Greek Heroes, Roger Lancelyn Green, 1958, 275 pages, Dewey 292.13, ISBN 0140366830
Compact, direct recitation of tales of Prometheus, DionTales of the Greek Heroes, Roger Lancelyn Green, 1958, 275 pages, Dewey 292.13, ISBN 0140366830
Compact, direct recitation of tales of Prometheus, Dionysus, Perseus, Heracles, Theseus, Daedalus, Jason. Told as a single, whole tale. Very accessible, quick.
"Then he ruled Athens for some time, bringing peace and order to the country; though he was careful to kill any of his cousins he could catch, in case they should try to seize the throne." p. 198, Theseus.
"You cannot win what is glorious and excellent in the world without care and labour: the gods give no real good, no true happiness to men on any other terms." p. 117, Heracles.
"Zeus was busy on a surer punishment for Man: he was making the first Woman." p. 40, Prometheus.
Some of these stories are also retold in outstanding books by:
xviii Extreme weather events that were once seen as acts of God can now be seen as acts of humankind.
xxi A bipartisan effort to do nothing has been wildly successful. The Clinton-Gore administration oversaw the conversion of the American vehicle fleet from cars to semimilitary vehicles, with 15% more heat-trapping emissions. [If manufacturers build cars, they must meet high corporate-average fuel-economy standards. If they build vehicles on truck chassis, they need meet only low CAFE standards. In either case, to earn the right to sell a large, safe vehicle to a wealthy anti-environmentalist, they must sell a smaller, less-safe vehicle to a poorer person or to an environmentalist. Corporate-average fuel-economy standards began in 1975; they've been revised several times, but the above has always been true.]
xxii Our crusade, if we ever mount it, will be on behalf of a relatively-livable world: not on behalf of the world we were born into. There's no getting it back.
He wrote the introduction, above, in 2005. His 1989 book follows, with my updates from 2021 NASA, NOAA, & other websites.
4 Evolution has taken billions of years to create us from slime. [Progress? Or not?]
8-9 Scientists have known since the 1800s that increasing heat-trapping gasses in the atmosphere, as we were even then doing, could dramatically warm Earth's atmosphere. They've known since 1957 that the ocean can absorb very little excess CO2.
15 Atmospheric methane concentration has increased from 1630 ppb in 1983 to 1995 ppb in 2021. In the past 160,000 years, levels fluctuated from 300 ppb to 700 ppb. The rate of increase has increased to 15 ppb per year. https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends_ch4/ Due to melting permafrost, deliberate burning of Amazonia, rice paddies, cattle, termites, forest fires. Methane (CH4) traps much more heat per unit weight or per molecule than CO2 traps.
16 Warmer air holds more water vapor, itself a potent greenhouse gas.
30 Heat, drought, storms, insects and fungi are killing forests. Germany: https://www.deutschland.de/en/topic/e... United States: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti... (The German file is a straight, "here are the facts." The U.S. researchers focus on themselves, to emphasize their value and their need for continued funding.)
35 The vision of underarm-deodorizing our way to destruction led to a U.S. ban on chlorofluorocarbons as aerosol propellant.
38 If ozone levels fall 20%, 2 hours in the sun will blister exposed skin.
39 The Roman Empire meant nothing to the Arctic or the Amazon. Now, we alter every inch of the globe.
49 Cattle graze 70% of Western federal land, producing 3% of America's beef. The leasing program doesn't pay for itself; it's tax-subsidized. The cattle destroy the natural plants and wildlife, and erode the soil. [And turn dry grassland to desert.]
60 In 1890, the American frontier closed, with the extirpation of the last free Native Americans. --Frederick Jackson Turner. https://www.goodreads.com/author/list...
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, David Graeber (1961-2020) and David Wengrow (1972- ), 2021, 692 pages, Dewey 901, ISBN 978037415735The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, David Graeber (1961-2020) and David Wengrow (1972- ), 2021, 692 pages, Dewey 901, ISBN 9780374157357
The authors set out to write a history of inequality. They learned that there was never an original natural state of human society. People have been organizing themselves in a variety of political ways for 200,000 years. The current organization into states can't be thought of as inevitable.
Homo sapiens 200,000 BCE- p. 1.
No better way to get anthropologists denouncing each other than to mention Napoleon Chagnon. p. 16. (Chagnon said the Yanomami of Amazonia are violent, and that their case may indicate that so are we all. According to Steven Pinker, if not for Voltaire and police, academics would be actually stabbing each other in this debate.)
European missionaries to Native Americans in the 1600s struggled to translate concepts like "lord," "commandment," or "obedience" into indegenous languages. p. 44.
Native Americans said, Europeans wouldn't need to coerce each other to behave well, if not for their system of money and property rights, that encourages them to behave badly. p. 54.
The political "right" and "left" originally referred to seating positions of aristocratic and popular factions in the French National Assembly of 1789. p. 69. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natio...
A few powerful people are wrecking the world. How'd that happen? p. 76.
Egalitarianism can exist only if there's no possibility of accumulating any sort of surplus.--anthropologist James Woodburn p. 128. https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
Americans are free from having to obey the arbitrary orders of superiors--unless, of course, they have to get a job. p. 131.
When someone else's purpose in life is to interfere with you, he must be stopped, lest you become his slave, his pet. --an indigenous Californian, 1800s. p. 203.
We make our own history, but not under conditions of our own choosing. --Karl Marx. p. 206.
Çatalhöyük, Turkey, was first settled c. 7400 BCE. 13 hectares (32 acres, .05 sq mi, .13 sq km), 5,000 population. (100,000/sq mi, 156/acre). p. 212. https://www.google.com/maps/place/K%C... Practised flood-retreat farming. p. 235.
Harvesting wild plants and turning them into food, medicine and complex structures like baskets or clothing is almost everywhere a female activity. p. 237.
Settlements inhabited by tens of thousands of people make their first appearance in human history around 6000 years ago, on almost every continent, at first in isolation. p. 283. The largest early cities were in Mesoamerica. p. 285. Teotihuacan reached 100,000 largely of refugees of volcanic and seismic disasters, 100 BCE to 600 CE. pp. 286, 329, 336, 341-344. River floodplains settled in their courses, and sea level stabilized, around 7,000 years ago.
Ukrainian and Moldovan cities of over 1,000 500-square-foot houses, in a 750-acre built area, were inhabited 4100 - 3300 BCE. pp. 290-291. No evidence of social stratification.
From around 2800 BCE onward, monarchy starts popping up everywhere. p. 298.
Uruk is the first city for which we have extensive written records. p. 306.
Aristocracies, and maybe monarchy, first arose in opposition to the egalitarian cities of the Mesopotamian plains. Compare Alaric vs. Rome, Genghis Khan vs. Samarkand, Timur vs. Delhi. p. 313. Argives vs. Troy, Attila vs. Europe p. 445, Vikings vs. Europe, whoever brought the war chariot there vs. India. p. 311. [Let's continue the list: British East India Company vs. India. British Petroleum vs. Mosaddegh. Chiquita vs. Árbenz. Michelin vs. Vietnam. Allen Dulles vs. JFK. Kennecott Copper vs. Allende. Al-Qaeda vs. US. Putin vs. Ukraine.]
At Taosi, China, 2000 BCE, aristocracy was apparently overthrown; the city then increased in size over the next 200-300 years. pp. 325-326.
At least 100,000 people lived in Teotihuacan, which covered 8 square miles, 100 BCE to 600 CE. pp. 286, 329, 336, 341-344. No overlords nor kings.
Cortés in 1519 found no kings in Tlaxcala, a city of 150,000. p. 348. Governed by consensus of a city council. p. 353.
Elections often choose charismatic leaders with tyrannical pretensions. p. 356.
Control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma are the three possible bases of social power. p. 365.
As late as the 1780s, as Max Weber liked to point out, Frederick the Great of Prussia found that his repeated efforts to free the country's serfs came to nothing because bureaucrats would simply ignore the decrees or, if challenged by his legates, insisted the words of the decree should be interpreted as saying the exact opposite of what was obviously intended. p. 394.
People have an unfortunate tendency to see the successful prosecution of arbitrary violence as in some sense divine. p. 395.
Three freedoms: to relocate, to disobey, to make and break social alliances. p. 426, 503.
Minoan Crete, 1700-1450 BCE. No evidence of monarchy. Female political rule. Palaces unfortified. [The eruption of Thera (Santorini) has been estimated at around 1642 BCE, from Greenland ice cores.] Linear A writing hasn't been deciphered. p. 434-438. Greek mainland: walled citadels 1400 BCE, soon overtook Crete. p. 436. Linear B is Greek. p. 437.
3000 BCE - 1600 CE: miserable for farmers, great for barbarians. --James C. Scott. p. 445.
Karl Jaspers' "Axial Age," 800-201 BCE, Greek/Indian/Chinese philosophy appears in the wake of coinage. p. 450. Also the spread of chattel slavery. Which then declined as axial empires dissolved.
Cahokia, Illinois, 1050-1350 CE. City of 15,000, 6 square miles. Ritual mass killings and burials. Entire area abandoned. pp. 452, 465, 481-482.
Hopewell Interaction Sphere, 100 BCE to 500 CE, network tying nearly all parts of North America together, centered near Chillicothe, Ohio. p. 457.
Osage Missouri River trading empire, 1678-1803. p.476.
To get a sense of a society's values, see what they consider the worst behavior. For the Haudenosaunee (League Iroquois: Seneca, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Mohawk), giving orders is almost as bad as cannibalism. pp. 483, 485.
1230 - 1375, Iroquois began to give up seasonal mobility, settle in palisaded towns of up to 2,000. p. 487.
Patriarchic rule may have originated as orphans, widows, and others in need relied on the hospitality of the chief. pp. 520-521.
Societies lacking both slavery and war were common outside the Eurasian Iron Age. p. 523. [1300 BCE, Caucasus foothills, Hittites first used iron weapons, so says Isaac Asimov, Asimov's Chronology of the World, p. 43. "Iron has been discovered for the evil of mankind." --Lichas the Lacedemonian, quoted in Herodotus' History, Volume 1.]
New truths replace old when old theorists die. --Max Planck. p. 525.
Thomas Ray
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Books:
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