Continuing yesterday’s post: What accounts for the differences between classical Greek and early Chinese intellectual traditions? Below are a few things that might be involved; this is hardly a complete list. Non-degenerate limit random variables Here’s a nice little puzzle involving probability: Take a bag with two marbles in it, one red and one green. Draw […]| Logarithmic History
Over the course of the mid to late first millennium BCE, Greeks and Chinese developed impressive intellectual traditions that would profoundly influence later civilization. These traditions differed a lot. In content: The fundamental concepts at play in Greece and China were strikingly dissimilar. The Greeks focused on nature and on elements, concepts that seem familiar […]| Logarithmic History
The period leading up to historical times saw the rise of patrilineal descent groups across Eurasia. Different civilizations found different ways of accommodating these groups. In China, patrilineal clans go as far back as we have any historical records, back to the Shang dynasty. Confucius (551-479 BCE) in some ways represented a break with this past. […]| Logarithmic History
815 – 669 BCE The association of particular plaid patterns (tartans) with particular Scottish highland clans is a phenomenon of the last several centuries. But the Celt-plaid connection goes back a lot farther than that. This picture shows a scrap of fabric associated with the Iron Age Hallstatt culture of central Europe. The culture lasted […]| Logarithmic History
Here’s a quick look at the world around 1000 BCE The world population is about 50 million. The Bantu expansion is just beginning, from a homeland on the present Nigeria/Cameroon border. It will eventually cover most of Africa south of the equator. The expansion is sometimes told as a story of first farmers replacing hunter-gatherers. […]| Logarithmic History
I … present the Iliad as the tragedy of Achilles … Agamemnon, Achilles’ commander, betrays “what is right” by wrongfully seizing his prize of honor; indignant rage shrinks Achilles’ social and moral horizon until he cares about no one but a small group of combat-proven comrades; his closest friend in that circle, his second-in-command and […]| Logarithmic History
“Slash fiction” has nothing to do with slashers or serial killers. It’s a genre of fan fiction, depicting romances between male characters. The “slash” is a “/”. For example, a Kirk / Spock story will be about Kirk and Spock coming to realize that they are more than just friends, and consummating a sexual relationship. Interestingly, […]| Logarithmic History
Homer’s Iliad records 240 battlefield deaths, 188 Trojans and 52 Achaeans. Those who had dreamed that force, thanks to progress, belonged only to the past, have been able to see in the Iliad a historical document; those who know how to see force, today as yesterday, at the center of all human history, can find […]| Logarithmic History
1351 – 1165 BCE Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, by Laura Spinney, is a well-written popular account of the origin and spread of Indo-European and its branches, synthesizing historical linguistics and recent findings in genetics. I learned a lot from it. But inevitably, given the range of topics and disciplines covered, it makes […]| Logarithmic History
1547 – 1350 BCE The Lapita culture (defined based on pottery) starts showing up on the islands of Melanesia around this time. The culture was almost certainly brought from outside, by mariners spea…| Logarithmic History
8 posts published by logarithmichistory during September 2025| Logarithmic History
You’ve probably heard the news – by now it’s pretty old news – that there is more genetic variation within human populations than between them. More specifically, we can say that, averaging across …| Logarithmic History
35.9 – 34.0 thousand years ago I just posted a tweet about population structure in people thirty four thousand years ago. Like modern hunter-gatherers, people back then apparently managed to distri…| Logarithmic History
Arms races have been a big engine of evolutionary progress, both in biological evolution and in the evolution of human societies. Another big driver has been improvements in the fidelity of inherit…| Logarithmic History
Paleontologists and paleoanthropologists are busy sorting out what was special about the climate and ecology of Africa, especially East Africa, that contributed to various phases of hominin evoluti…| Logarithmic History
44.9 – 42.6 thousand years ago Like “Talk Like a Pirate Day,” but more scientific! Human language is probably more than One Weird Trick. It’s multiple weird tricks. We’ve already posted about…| Logarithmic History
5 posts published by logarithmichistory during August 2025| Logarithmic History
A followup to Talk Like a Neanderthal Day Thinking about how Neanderthals might have talked is one way to get at language evolution and how language works. Another way to do this is through science…| Logarithmic History
50.2 – 47.6 thousand years ago Darwin was a liberal but his theories had consequences in some degrees inimical to traditional liberalism. The doctrine that all men are born equal … was incompatible…| Logarithmic History
… that humans use, and now you can too! There are people who think that human beings are nothing special. Sure (the argument goes) people have uniquely large brains. But all sorts of creatures have…| Logarithmic History
Australia can seem like the Land That Time Forgot. Australian marsupials were largely isolated from competition with placental mammals from other continents. (Although humans seem to have done in a…| Logarithmic History
I’m an anthropologist, and I like inflicting kinship on people. Last post was Australian language history; here’s Australian kinship. Claude Lévi-Strauss thought that the complexities of kinship sy…| Logarithmic History
2213 – 1980 BCE Australia can seem like the Land That Time Forgot. Australian marsupials were largely isolated from competition with placental mammals from other continents. (Although humans …| Logarithmic History
10 posts published by logarithmichistory during September 2021| Logarithmic History
325 – 417 In the first decades after the crucifixion of Jesus, the number of those who worshiped him as a resurrected savior was at most a few thousand, and probably many fewer. In 313, when …| Logarithmic History
1929-1713 BCE The time of the Biblical Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is sometimes called the Patriarchal Age. If there is a kernel of truth to the Biblical stories, the Patriarchal Age pro…| Logarithmic History
I’m an anthropologist, and I like inflicting kinship on people. Last post was Australian language history; here’s Australian kinship. Claude Lévi-Strauss thought that the complexities of kinship sy…| Logarithmic History
Like the traditional poetry of other peoples, the traditional poetry of the Greeks celebrated the Heroic Age. This was the time when men were bigger and stronger, and they performed marvelous feats…| Logarithmic History
“And slime had they for mortar” Genesis 11:3 The last post was about a major transition in evolution, the origin of social insect colonies, in which individual ants and bees work together to make u…| Logarithmic History
10 posts published by logarithmichistory during October 2020| Logarithmic History
311 – 295 thousand years ago Our picture of human evolution in Africa around 300 thousand years ago has changed dramatically in just the last few years. Here’s something we already knew. This skull…| Logarithmic History
1,043 – 986 thousand years ago By today’s date, Acheulean tools are well developed in Africa, and found in India too. Sophisticated tools like the Acheulean hand axe probably tell us somethin…| Logarithmic History
368 – 349 thousand years ago Part of the challenge of language is coming up with some way to distinguish thousands or tens of thousands of words from one another. It would be hard to come up with t…| Logarithmic History
833 – 789 thousand years ago Around today’s date, there was a shift in the nature of glacial cycles. But let’s back up a bit. Earth’s climate took a turn toward cool in the transition from Eocene t…| Logarithmic History
900 thousand years ago A common way of demeaning another group is to call them cannibals. Roman pagans sometimes accused early Christians of cannibalizing infants during their secret ceremonies (a …| Logarithmic History
The time of the Biblical Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is sometimes called the Patriarchal Age. If there is a kernel of truth to the Biblical stories, the Patriarchal Age probably goes bac…| Logarithmic History
590-668 The major civilizations of Eurasia found different ways to integrate (a) systems of kinship and descent, with roots stretching back into the deep history of Neolithic demic expansions, (b) …| Logarithmic History
In 390 BCE an army of Gauls, 30 thousand strong, marched out of northern Italy into Latium, an area that included Rome. They defeated a Roman army, sacked and burned Rome, and left only after being…| Logarithmic History
Sometimes I interrupt the normal day-by-day progression of Logarithmic History to cover my own work. Here I introduce a just-published paper, “Kin selection and ethnic group selection.” It’s about …| Logarithmic History
“And slime had they for mortar” Genesis 11:3 The last blog post was about a major transition in evolution, the origin of social insect colonies, in which individual ants and bees work together to m…| Logarithmic History
Like the traditional poetry of other peoples, the traditional poetry of the Greeks celebrated the Heroic Age. This was the time when men were bigger and stronger, and they performed marvelous feats…| Logarithmic History
1117 – 1166 CE Logarithmic History now unfolds at 50 years a day. The innovations which make their appearance in East Asia round about the year 1000 … form such a coherent and extensive whole that …| Logarithmic History
The fall of Rome involved the disintegration of the Roman state; the collapse of long-distance trade; the disappearance of mass-produced pottery, coinage, and monumental architecture over larg…| Logarithmic History
747 – 817 CE Charlemagne was crowned emperor on Christmas Day in the year 800, a collaboration between Church and State. A particular division of power between secular and religious authorities wou…| Logarithmic History
329 – 421 In the first decades after the crucifixion of Jesus, the number of those who worshiped him as a resurrected savior was at most a few thousand, and probably many fewer. In 313, when Consta…| Logarithmic History
230 – 328 Every day on Logarithmic History we cover an interval 5.46% shorter than the preceding day. From covering the first 754 million years after the Big Bang on January 1, we’re…| Logarithmic History
16 BCE – 125 CE (posted one day late) The historical Jesus will be to our time a stranger and an enigma. The study of the Life of Jesus has had a curious history. It set out in quest of the histori…| Logarithmic History
In 390 BCE an army of Gauls, 30 thousand strong, marched out of northern Italy into Latium, an area that included Rome. They defeated a Roman army, sacked and burned Rome, and left only after being…| Logarithmic History
August 1941 – November 1946 We’re now dividing time finely enough to include months as well as years. For most of the later nineteenth century after the publication of On the Origin of Species…| Logarithmic History