in the “domesticated” species. Agriculture is vastly more productive than
foraging technologies. Its appearance marks a revolutionary transformation
in human history.
allopatric speciation: An evolutionary pattern in which members of a
population become separated from other members of their species long
enough to diverge genetically, until eventually they can no longer breed with
their parent species, and they form a separate species.
amino acids: Basic chemical constituents of all proteins, the basic building
blocks of living organisms.
antimatter: Particles of matter with the opposite charge to the dominant
forms of matter; thus, positrons are identical to electrons except that they
have a positive charge. When particles of matter and antimatter meet, they
annihilate each other. It is speculated that during the big bang vast amounts
of matter were annihilated in this way, leaving a tiny residue from which our
Universe was constructed.
apes: Large, tailless African monkeys, a group that includes humans;
members of the primate superfamily of Hominoidea.
australopithecines: A group of hominine species with brains about the size
of those of chimpanzees that À ourished in Africa between 4 million and 1
million years ago.
axial age: A term ¿ rst used by the philosopher and historian Karl Jaspers
to refer to the era during the ¿ rst millennium B.C.E. and early in the ¿ rst
millennium C.E. when most of the major “universal” religions emerged
in Afro-Eurasia.
B.C.E.: Before the Common Era; the equivalent of “B.C.”
big bang cosmology: The modern understanding of the origins of the
Universe; ¿ rst proposed in the 1930s but became the central idea (paradigm)
of modern cosmology from the 1960s.