Sublime

At Mammen in Denmark, one of the richest chamber graves of the whole Viking Age was made c. 970 for a man whose clothing has enabled us to reconstruct the dress of society’s highest echelons. The chamber itself resembled a hall and even had a pitched roof, all concealed under a great mound. The man was interred with a magnificent axe decorated in a

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Crucial to the long success and ultimate failure of hunting-and-gathering bands is the fact that they had to operate on a very small scale over a very wide area. Foragers could survive only where population densities were light. To see why, think of the problems that larger groups would have posed. For one thing, a thousand hunters parading togethe

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Field archaeologists record, with increasing confidence, transitions in space and time at all scales, from the remodelling and repair of individual artefacts and buildings to broad trends in settlement pattern and form: fine dinner plates broken and not replaced but mended, held together with copper wire; villas inhabited long into the fifth centur

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The past 200 years, during which ever increasing numbers of Sapiens have obtained their daily bread as urban labourers and office workers, and the preceding 10,000 years, during which most Sapiens lived as farmers and herders, are the blink of an eye compared to the tens of thousands of years during which our ancestors hunted and gathered.

Why do large systems disintegrate? The process seems to occur in three steps, the first two of which are controllable and the third of which is a direct result of our homomorphism. First, the realization by the initial designers that the system will be large, together with certain pressures in their organization, make irresistible the temptation to

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The human animal now lives in a strange and unfamiliar world. Our bodies, sculpted by millions of years of evolution, are not just ancient. They are prehistorical. Our anatomy, physiology, and psychology are adapted to life in a wild, outdoor environment. At our core, we are hunters and gatherers, primed for life in natural habitat. But today we’re

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