Sublime

the game, the

There is, I believe, a long period, measured not in centuries but in millennia—between the earliest appearance of states and lasting until perhaps only four centuries ago—that might be called a “golden age for barbarians” and for nonstate peoples in general. For much of this long epoch, the political enclosure movement represented by the modern nat

The great dispersal from Africa, and migrations of modern humans across the planet, culminated in the birth of permanent settlements in dispersed villages and the so-called Neolithic revolution—the advent of farming around eleven thousand years ago. Initially, a small proportion of humanity took up the permanent cultivation of crops. Over time, mor

With modern technology, the stock‐to‐flow ratio for Rai stones decreased drastically: it was possible to produce far more of these stones every year, significantly devaluing the island's existing stock. It became increasingly unwise for anyone to use these stones as a store of value, and thus they lost their salability across time, and with it, the

Already in Paleolithic times, people had driven plenty of species—woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos, mastodons, glyptodons, and North American camels—into oblivion. Later, as the Polynesians settled the islands of the Pacific, they wiped out creatures like the moa and the moa-nalo. (The latter were goose-like ducks that lived in Hawaii.) When the Euro

the web, of course) a study conducted by some very clever researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.

Farming, after all, replaces natural ecosystems with human-made ecosystems that are engineered to yield far more foodstuffs per unit area. The plant and animal species not cultivated on farms are the sure losers, as humanity encroaches on the habitats of other species that are not directly conducive to food production or that compete directly with

Europeans were constantly squabbling for advantage; societies of the Northeast Woodlands, by contrast, guaranteed one another the means to an autonomous life – or at least ensured no man or woman was subordinated to any other.