The Origins of the British
by Stephen Oppenheimer · 1 Jul 2007 · 852pp · 157,181 words
use of microliths – very small, multipurpose stone tools which had already been in use in Africa and India for 20,000 years – and preceded the Neolithic agricultural revolution. Quite a bit is known about how Mesolithic hunter-gatherers lived, and one major feature in the evolution of their lifestyle in north-west Europe
Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity
by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson · 15 May 2023 · 619pp · 177,548 words
everyone else.” —Kurt Andersen, author of Evil Geniuses “One powerful thread runs through this breathtaking tour of the history and future of technology, from the Neolithic agricultural revolution to the ascent of artificial intelligence: Technology is not destiny, nothing is pre-ordained. Humans, despite their imperfect institutions and often-contradictory impulses, remain in
The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century
by Ronald Bailey · 20 Jul 2015 · 417pp · 109,367 words
, MIT economist Daron Acemoğlu and Harvard economist James Robinson largely concur with the analysis of North and his colleagues. They too find that since the Neolithic agricultural revolution, most societies have been organized around “extractive” political and economic institutions that funnel resources from the mass of people to small but powerful elites. The
Growth: A Reckoning
by Daniel Susskind · 16 Apr 2024 · 358pp · 109,930 words
Property during the Early Holocene’, Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences, 110:22 (2013), 8830–35; Samuel Bowles and Jung-Kyoo Choi, ‘The Neolithic Agricultural Revolution and the Origins of Private Property’, Journal of Political Economy, 127:5 (2019). The argument is actually more subtle: that farming required property rights, but
2312
by Kim Stanley Robinson · 22 May 2012 · 561pp · 167,631 words
cultures in recorded history, since the first agrarian and urban civilizations.” “They’ve all been class systems?” “There might have been classless societies before the Neolithic agricultural revolution, but the record makes our understanding of those cultures very speculative. All we can say for sure is that in the post–ice age agricultural