There is evidence that many hunter and gatherer society's resisted the transformation into permanent society's, often associating them with disease and state controlled society's.
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- Oct 2025
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drive.google.com drive.google.com
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“Domestication” changed the genetic makeup and mor- phology of both crops and animals around the domus. The
assemblage of plants, animals, and humans in agricultural settlements created a new and largely artificial environment in which Darwinian selection pressure worked to promote new adaptations.
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All states were surrounded by nonstate peoples, but owing to their dispersal, we know precious little about their coming and going, their shifting relationship to states, and their political structures. When a city is burned to the ground, it is often hard to tell whether it was an accidental
fire such as plagued all ancient cities built of combustible ma- terials, a civil war or uprising, or a raid from outside.
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The author states that state funded archeology often leads to bias in the work.
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The author explains homo sapiens have inhabited the earth for 200,000 years in and around Africa first. The first tax collecting society was around 3,100 BCE 4 millennia after the first crop domestication society's.
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Its interesting how only the last 5 percent of our history as a species on this planet agrarian society's have been around.
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‘anthropogenic’ earths called terra preta de índio (‘black earth of the Indians’), with levels of fertility far in excess of ordinary tropical soils. Scientists now believe that between 10,000 and 20,000 large-scale sites remain to be discovered across Amazonia. Similarly startling finds are emerging from Southeast Asia, and we might reasonably expect them from the forested parts of the African continent too.
Even places where archeologist thought humans couldn't have had a massive civilization at are being seen to have sites.
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archaeologists working in the inland delta of the Middle Niger revealed evidence for a prosperous urban civilisation with no discernible signs of rulership or central authority, focused on the site of Jenne-jeno, and preceding the empires of Ghana, Mali and Songhai by some centuries. China, too, has gained a long history of cities before empire, from the lower reaches of the Yellow River to the Fen Valley of Shanxi province, and the ‘Liangzhu culture’ of Jiangsu and Zhejiang. The same is true for the coastlands of Peru, where archaeologists have uncovered huge settlements with sunken plazas and grand platforms, four millennia older than the Inca Empire. In Ukraine, before the Russian invasion, archaeological work on the grasslands north of the Black Sea
New sites are being found all of the time, disproving and revolutionizing what we know about the timeline of humans.
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Let’s come back to the figures in the Atlas of World Population History. It estimates 46 million Roman subjects and 50 million Han subjects. Let’s assume, for a moment, this is OK. Supposedly – if we combine it with statistics for other empires of the same era – this amounts to ‘between two-thirds and three-quarters of all people alive at the time’
Its very interesting that three-quarters of all humans on earth lived in inly 2 empires during this time.
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‘3,500 years ago, when state-level polities covered perhaps not more than 1 per cent of the earth’s terrestrial surface (excluding Antarctica), they already laid claim to up to half of our species.’
This is very interesting.
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Even experienced scholars of empirically grounded disciplines may find themselves advancing such arguments based on the flimsiest of sources.
Its hard for experienced modern scholars to not fall for sources coming from bias points of views.
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It is from such sources that we get, not just our notion of empire as handmaiden to civilisation, but also our contemporary image of life before and beyond empire as being small-scale, chaotic and largely unproductive.
The source that history comes from, in most cases is portrayed in favor of the writers origins and beliefs.
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