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human-meaning

The Dawn of Everything: Graeber and Wengrow's New History

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 actually happened in human prehistory? The answer they found upends nearly

Everything You Learned About Civilization's Origins Is Wrong

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, cities, law, art. Civilization. This story is still taught in

The Anthropology of Institutions

The Anthropology of Institutions

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

Building Your Mental Immune System

Building Your Mental Immune System

You've now studied the technology of influence: Bernays showed how to engineer desire. Chomsky mapped how institutions filter information. Nudge theory revealed how choice architecture shapes decisions. Inoculation research proved you can vaccinate against manipulation. Misinformation studies documented how lies outcompete truth. Computational propaganda demonstrated influence operations at

Göbekli Tepe: The Temple Before the Farm

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. Previous archaeologists had dismissed it as a

Dunbar's Number: The 150 Problem

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: about 150. That's the number

Debt: The First 5,000 Years

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 the "coincidence of wants"