In July and August, this blog covered one of the great revolutions in information transmission, the evolution of language. And as we move into September, we will consider another, the invention of writing. But in between these two great revolutions, there are tantalizing hints that people were experimenting with other techniques for enhancing social memory. In this tweet I […]| Logarithmic History
17.3 – 16.4 thousand years ago We’re now taking in history a millennium per day. Lascaux cave paintings, Southwest France, discovered in 1940. (Some analyses push the dates back before 18 thousand years ago, earlier than the previously accepted 16 – 15 thousand.) Below, from Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering how the Brain Codes Our Thoughts (an […]| Logarithmic History
For a long time the Clovis culture, associated with these spear points found across North America, looked like the earliest evidence of human occupation of the Americas. Clovis people are often thought to have entered the continent through an ice-free corridor that opened up between glaciers in Western Canada (although there are other possibilities). But […]| Logarithmic History
19.3 – 18.3 thousand years ago Only in the last half century or so, with the discovery of the Big Bang, has it been possible to do something like Logarithmic History. But human beings have been speculating for far longer than that on the origins of the universe, and we’ll have plenty of occasions here […]| Logarithmic History
What song the sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture. Thomas Browne. Urn Burial In the mid-twentieth century, Soviet archeologists excavated a site at Mal’ta near Lake Baikal that included the remains of of a 3-4 year old boy. Recent ancient […]| Logarithmic History
21.6 – 20.6 thousand years ago Glacial periods within the present Ice Age start gradually and end rapidly. The last glacial period began around 90 thousand years ago, and reached its peak, the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), around 20 thousand years ago. During the LGM most of Northern Europe and northern North America were under […]| Logarithmic History
28,000 years ago The Venus of Willendorf, from Austria, is one of a number of “Venus figurines” from the European Upper Paleolithic. The statuette is realistic, except for the attenuated/missing hands and feet, and the absence of facial features. Obviously she’s nude, and fat. But not entirely unclothed. The pattern on her head is not […]| 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
40.4 – 38.2 thousand years ago “The Inheritors” is a novel by William Golding about the encounter between Neanderthals and modern humans. Like “Lord of the Flies,” it is written with a mid-twentieth century awareness that advanced societies don’t leave behind the potential for cruelty. The novel isn’t all that scientifically accurate, though: Golding’s early humans […]| Logarithmic History
We have been treating Neanderthals here as a species, Homo neanderthalensis, distinct from our own species, Homo sapiens. Some researchers elect to call Neanderthals a subspecies, Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, and classify modern humans as another subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens. The line between subspecies and species is not clear cut, nor – given the way evolution works – should we […]| 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
10 posts published by logarithmichistory during June 2025| Logarithmic History
722 – 684 thousand years ago We’re getting to a time on the blog when Homo erectus (and Homo ergaster, if we accept that erectus-like African specimens are another species) give way …| 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 history of the universe -- from the Big Bang to the end of the year -- day by day| Logarithmic History
10 posts published by logarithmichistory during January 2018| 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
