Chris's History Blog

Agriculture by far is the one human innovation that has propelled us to where we are today.  Without discovering the ability to cultivate foods and domesticate animals societies would not have been able to form, populations would not have been able to grow as they have and we would most likely still be living in small movable encampments.  This new innovation brought the end to the paleolithic era and was the dawn of the Neolithic age.  When clans began to increase in population and it became much more difficult to move whole communities.  I found some points made in this chapter very interesting and I really enjoyed Stayer's alternate views that he presents, such as the fact that women were in charge of the gathering so the innovation of agriculture must have certainly been invented by women.  Also, I find it fascinating that agriculture took such a long time for mankind to discover and yet areas all across the globe discovered this new method of cultivati...

Reading the prologue of ways of the world really allowed me to feel like I understood the author's intentions in writing this book.  The author discusses the earth's timeline in one calendar year and it blows my mind how the Existence of the United States would rank just in the last few seconds of December 31st.  This means that in the grand scale of the universe, our nation has barely existed.  Also, I really do appreciate how the author describes a more globalized history.  I think it is important that we learn how we all originated and how we all got to where we are today from a species perspective.  As we get into the part one section I am astounded by the fact that before homo sapiens there were 30 other homininae species.  It is interesting that the paleolithic period is covered so little in our education and yet it makes up 95% of the time homo sapiens have existed on the earth. As we get into the Agricultural era when man k...

YAY! IM DONE!