history-society

Göbekli Tepe: The Temple Before the Farm 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.

Dunbar's Number: The 150 Problem 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:

Debt: The First 5,000 Years 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

Seeing Like a State: Why Institutions Fail 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

The Dawn of Everything: Graeber and Wengrow's New History David Graeber died in September 2020, three weeks after completing The Dawn of Everything with archaeologist David Wengrow. It was the culmination of a decade of collaboration—an anthropologist and an archaeologist trying to answer a simple question: What

Everything You Learned About Civilization's Origins Is Wrong In 1651, Thomas Hobbes described the life of prehistoric humans: "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." They wandered in small bands, constantly on the edge of starvation, fighting over scraps. Then agriculture arrived like a miracle—surplus, specialization,