history-society

Everything You Learned About Civilization Is Wrong The story goes like this: Humans were nomadic hunter-gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years. Then we invented agriculture around 10,000 BCE. Agriculture meant surplus. Surplus meant specialization. Specialization meant hierarchy. Hierarchy meant states. States meant civilization. A straight line from wandering

In 1994, a German archaeologist named Klaus Schmidt arrived at a site in southeastern Turkey that local farmers had known about for decades. They called it "Potbelly Hill"—Göbekli Tepe in Turkish. It was covered with worked flint and limestone fragments. Previous archaeologists had dismissed it as a

You have 847 Facebook friends. You follow 1,200 people on Twitter. Your LinkedIn network claims 500+ connections. Your company has 10,000 employees. But how many people do you actually know? Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist, proposed an answer in the 1990s: about 150. That's the number

You've probably heard this story: Before money, people bartered. I have fish, you have wheat, we trade. But what if I want wheat and you don't want fish? Inconvenient. So we invented money—a universal medium of exchange that solved the "coincidence of wants"

In 1985, the Soviet Union was the world's largest wheat producer. By 1991, the country that had fed itself for decades couldn't keep bread on the shelves. What happened wasn't a drought or a plague. It was an information problem—and understanding it explains

Why Groups Can Be Smarter Than Experts—And Why They Usually Aren't In 1906, Francis Galton went to a county fair and discovered something that should have been impossible. A crowd of 800 people guessed the weight of an ox. Individually, their guesses were all over the map—