In much of the rest of the world, rich people live in gated communities and drink bottled water. That's increasingly the case in Los Angeles where I ….

Two types of choices seem to me to have been crucial in tipping the outcomes [of the various societies' histories] towards success or failure: long-t….

History as well as life itself is complicated -- neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency..

Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home..

History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences am….

Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and ty….

I personally am not conscious of my accent..

A blueprint for disaster in any society is when the elite are capable of insulating themselves..

One person making a wrong decision affects the whole country..

I decided that now is the time to start doing the things that really interest me and I find important. It was in the 10 years of the MacArthur grant ….

The rate of human invention is faster, and the rate of cultural loss is slower, in areas occupied by many competing societies with many individuals a….

Livestock adopted in Africa were Eurasian species that came in from the north. Africa's long axis, like that of the Americas, is north/south rather t….

Technology has to be invented or adopted..

What did the last Easter Islander say as he chopped down the last tree? The Easter Islanders didnt have anthropologists..

Australia is the most isolated continent..

In contrast [to trees and fish], oil, metals, and coal are not renewable; they don't reproduce, sprout, or have sex to produce baby oil droplets or c….

Infectious diseases introduced with Europeans, like smallpox and measles, spread from one Indian tribe to another, far in advance of Europeans themse….

Native Americans had only stone and wooden weapons and no animals that could be ridden. Those military advantages repeatedly enabled troops of a few ….

People often ask, "What is the single most important environmental population problem facing the world today?" A flip answer would be, "The single mo….

Introspection and preserved writings give us far more insight into the ways of past humans than we have into the ways of past dinosaurs. For that rea….

We're uncomfortable about considering history as a science. It's classified as a social science, which is considered not quite scientific..