a variety of statistical series on long-term economic change over the
last millennium.
Mann, Charles C. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. A highly readable and up to date account
of the archaeology of the Americas before 1492.
Margulis, Lynn and Dorion Sagan. Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of
Microbial Evolution. London: Allen and Unwin, 1987. A rich and highly
readable account of the world of micro-organizations, which makes it
clear how vital that world is to life in general. Margulis pioneered the
idea that eukaryotic cells emerged from a symbiosis between simpler,
prokaryotic cells.
Maynard Smith, John, and Eörs Szathmáry. The Origins of Life: From the
Birth of Life to the Origins of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
- Not always easy for the nonspecialist reader, this is a wonderful survey
by two distinguished biologists of the increasing complexity in the biological
realm, which argues powerfully for the importance of a number of distinct
thresholds of increasing complexity in the history of life.
Mayr, Ernst. One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of
Modern Evolutionary Thought. London: Penguin, 1991. A powerful and
readable summary of the logic behind Darwin’s thought by one of the
foremost late-20th-century Darwinian thinkers.
McBrearty, Sally, and Alison S. Brooks. “The Revolution That Wasn’t: A
New Interpretation of the Origin of Modern Human Behaviour.” Journal of
Human Evolution 39 (2000): 453–563. A pioneering article that assembles
evidence for the claim that our species originated in Africa between 200,000
and 300,000 years ago.
McNeill, John. Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History
of the Twentieth-Century World. New York and London: Norton, 2000. A
brilliant survey of the revolutionary transformations in the human relationship
to the biosphere during the 20th century.