I’m trying to emphasize the presence of the past, how the dead live in us. Research by Alberto Alesina, Paola Giuliano, and Nathan Nunn found that people who are descended from those who practiced plow-heavy agriculture tend to live in cultures that have strongly defined gender roles, because it was mostly men who drove the plow. On the other hand,

The walls split humanity itself into two fundamentally distinct groups: hunter-gatherers and settlers. Hunting and gathering might have remained the majority mode of life across the world until as recently as the 1600s, but those who pursued it have never held the pen of history; it was those inside the walls who would dictate the terms.

First, the economies of early civilizations were highly variable and reflected the process of local adaptation to the specific environments in which each emerged. Second, the political organizations of early civilizations also varied, falling into one of two basic types: city-states, where a large number of farmers lived with elites in urban center

To be clear, it’s not that we consider the fact that princes, judges, overseers or hereditary priests – or for that matter, writing, cities and farming – only emerge at a certain point in human history to be uninteresting or insignificant. Quite on the contrary: in order to understand our current predicament as a species, it is absolutely crucial t