Big History: The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Humanity

the genus that includes us because they made simple stone tools, they are now thought to have been much closer to australopithec ...

Glossary kin-ordered societies: A term used by Eric Wolf to describe all human societies in which kinship systems are the most i ...

megafaunal extinctions: The extinction of large animal species in the Paleolithic era, probably as a result of overhunting by hu ...

Glossary culture suggests some of the transitional stages between afÀ uent foraging and early forms of agriculture. natural sele ...

nucleotides: Basic chemical constituents of the genetic material of all living organisms. obsidian: A hard, glass-like substance ...

Glossary Pangaea: The vast supercontinent formed more than 200 million years ago as plate tectonics joined most of the major con ...

planetesimals: Objects formed by accretion during the formation of the solar system; protoplanets. planets: Chemically complex o ...

Glossary prokaryotes: Simple, single-celled organisms in which the genetic material is not bound within a nucleus. proletarians: ...

red shift: In the 1920s, Edwin Hubble observed that the light from many distant galaxies appeared to be shifted toward the red e ...

Glossary sedentism: Living in one place for most of the year; sedentism was rare in foraging societies but became widespread wit ...

synergy: Processes in which causal factors mutually enhance their combined impact so as to have a greater effect than they might ...

Glossary world systems theories: Pioneered by Immanuel Wallerstein, world systems theories explore large networks of interaction ...

Bibliography .................................................................................... “Big history” is a new discipl ...

Bibliography Anderson, J. L. Explaining Long-Term Economic Change. Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1991. A brief and highly acc ...

Bulliet, Richard W., Pamela Crossley, and Daniel R. Headrick. The Earth and its Peoples: A Global History. 2 vols. Boston: Hough ...

Bibliography geology and biology, in order to create a uni¿ ed modern account of the past. It proposed the light-hearted label “ ...

Coles, Peter. Cosmology: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. The Oxford “Very Short Introductions” ...

Bibliography reading, but one of the most interesting recent attempts to explain the origins and signi¿ cance of human language. ...

Elvin, Mark. The Pattern of the Chinese Past. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1973. An inÀ uential analysis of the asto ...

Bibliography Gould, Stephen Jay, ed. The Book of Life: An Illustrated History of the Evolution of Life on Earth. New York: W. W. ...