## Metadata - Author: [[J M Roberts, Odd Arne Westad]] - Full Title: The Penguin History of the World - Category: #books ## Highlights - An upright stance and the capacity to move easily on two feet make it possible to carry burdens, among them food. The dangerous open savannah could then be explored and its resources withdrawn from it to a safer home base. Most animals consume their food where they find it; man does not. ([Location 339](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ADNPDEM&location=339)) - A site at the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania has provided the traces of the first identified building, a windbreak of stones which has been dated 1.9 million years ago, as well as evidence that its inhabitants were meat-eaters, in the form of bones smashed to enable the marrow and brains to be got at and eaten raw. Olduvai prompts a tempting speculation. The bringing of stones and meat to the site combines with other evidence to suggest that the children of early hominins could not easily cling to their mother for long foraging expeditions as do the offspring of other primates. It may be that this is the first trace of the human institution of the home base. Among primates, only humans have them: places where females and children normally stay while the males search for food to bring back to them. ([Location 380](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ADNPDEM&location=380)) - Man is the only animal in which the mechanism of the oestrus (the restriction of the female’s sexual attractiveness and receptivity to the limited periods in which she is on heat) has entirely disappeared. ([Location 439](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ADNPDEM&location=439)) - After the Neanderthal genome was mapped, it became clear that some of the most important disease-fighting genes that humans now have originate from outside our own species. Some researchers think that the very fact that we could interbreed with other human groups contributed massively to the peopling of the earth, because it provided the ‘hybrid vigour’ that helped us become ubiquitous on all continents save Antarctica. ([Location 606](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ADNPDEM&location=606)) - be: his genetic inheritance not only enables Homo sapiens to make conscious change, to undertake an unprecedented kind of evolution, but also controls and limits him. The irrationalities of the twentieth century show the narrow limits of our capacity for conscious control of our destiny. To this extent, we are still determined, still unfree, still a part of a nature which produced our unique qualities in the first place only by evolutionary selection. It is not easy to separate this part of our inheritance, either, from the emotional shaping the human psyche has received from the processes through which it has evolved. That shaping still lies deep at the heart of all our aesthetic and affective life. Man must live with an in-built dualism. To deal with it has been the aim of most of the great philosophies and religions and the mythologies by which we still live, but they are themselves moulded by it. As we move from prehistory to history it is important not to forget that its determining effect still proves much more resistant to control than those blind prehistoric forces of geography and climate which were so quickly overcome. Nevertheless, at the edge of an opening history we already encounter a creature we know – Man the change-maker. ([Location 949](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ADNPDEM&location=949)) - Civilization is the name we give to the interaction of human beings in a very creative way, when, as it were, a critical mass of cultural potential and a certain surplus of resources have been built up. In civilization this releases human capacities for development at quite a new level and in large measure the development which follows is self-sustaining. ([Location 998](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ADNPDEM&location=998)) - (history is often the discovery of what people did not know about themselves). ([Location 1060](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ADNPDEM&location=1060)) - At the beginning comes the invention of writing, possibly the only invention of comparable importance to the invention of agriculture before the age of steam. Most of it was done on clay for nearly half the time mankind has possessed the skill. ([Location 1152](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ADNPDEM&location=1152)) - A fair amount is therefore known about the Sumerian language. A few of its words have survived to this day; one of them is the original form of the word ‘alcohol’ (and the first recipe for beer), which is suggestive. ([Location 1162](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ADNPDEM&location=1162)) - the invention of writing opens more of the past to the historian in another way. He can at last begin to deal in hard currency when talking about mentality. This is because writing preserves literature. ([Location 1171](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ADNPDEM&location=1171)) - Though later to be lost until rediscovery in modern times, Gilgamesh was for 2,000 years or so a name to which literature in many languages could knowingly refer, somewhat in the way that European authors could until recently take it for granted that an allusion to classical Greece would be understood by their readers. ([Location 1197](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ADNPDEM&location=1197)) - Sumerians, too, laid the foundations of mathematics, establishing the technique of expressing number by position as well as by sign (as we, for example, can reckon the figure 1 as one, one-tenth, ten or several other values, according to its relation to the decimal point), and they arrived at a method of dividing the circle into six equal segments. They knew about the decimal system too, though they did not exploit it, and we first encounter the seven-day week in the Gilgamesh Epic. ([Location 1270](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ADNPDEM&location=1270)) - For fifteen centuries or so Sumer had built up the subsoil of civilization in Mesopotamia, just as its pre-civilized forerunners had built up the physical subsoil on which it itself rested. It left behind writing, monumental buildings, an idea of justice and legalism, the beginning of mathematics and a great religious tradition. It is a considerable record and the seed of much else. The Mesopotamian tradition had a long life ahead of it and every side of it was touched by the Sumerian legacy. ([Location 1337](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00ADNPDEM&location=1337))