Word: ands
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Still, even back then, the social brain, through positive feedback, was maturing. With each advance in subsistence technology, survival grew more secure, hastening population growth; and as population grew, the advances came more quickly. By the Mesolithic Age, around 10,000 B.C., with the neuronal population up to around 4...
It was around this time that, as the economist Michael Kremer has noted, Mother Nature happened to conduct an experiment that underscored the value of large social brains. Melting polar ice caps severed Tasmania from Australia and the New World from the Old World. Thereafter, just as you would expect...
Farming, which took shape in the Old World around 8,000 B.C. and in the New World a few millenniums later, is a much misunderstood meme. Anthropologists sometimes call it an "energy technology," since food does, after all, energize us; but farming may have originally mattered more as a kind...
The results were epoch making. In both the New World and the Old World, within a mere 5,000 years of the inception of farming, there were dazzling technological advances, including monumental temples, big dams and, above all, a whole new information technology: writing.
Early writing didn't spur invention the way writing does now. There were no technical journals to convey news of inventions, no patents to file. No, the main service of writing, like that of farming, was to permit bigger, faster social brains; to allow neurons to be packed more densely...