Plagues and peoples | Logarithmic History
212 – 311 CE 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…| Logarithmic History
212 – 311 CE 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…| Logarithmic History
4 BCE – 107 CE 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 historical Jesus, believing th…| 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 Eoc…| Logarithmic History
10 posts published by logarithmichistory during October 2025| Logarithmic History
The Rajatrangini (River of Kings) is a history of Kashmir, dating to about 1150. A striking thing about it is that it is pretty much the only work in Sanskrit that clearly qualifies as history. Other material about the past in traditional Hindu India is heavily mythological, or limited to genealogies and chronicles, and contains virtually no […]| Logarithmic History
1110 – 1160 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 we have to yield to the evidence: at this period, the Chinese world experienced a real transformation. … The […]| Logarithmic History
1056 – 1109 Bedouins can acquire royal authority only by making use of religious coloring, such as prophethood or sainthood, or some great religious event in general. The reason is because of their savagery, the Bedouins are the least willing of all nations to subordinate themselves to each other, as they are rude, proud, ambitious, […]| Logarithmic History
939 – 998 CE Toward the year 1000, the Scandinavians, under Leif Eriksson, reached the coast of America. No one bothered them, but one morning (as Erik the Red’s Saga tells it) many men disembarked from canoes made of leather and stared at them in a kind of stupor. “They were dark and very ill-looking, and the […]| Logarithmic History
875 – 939 CE 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 large areas; declining literacy among commoners and elites; great insecurity of life and property, and demographic collapse. The process was drawn out and played out differently […]| Logarithmic History
807 – 874 A.D. 191 – 260 A.H. Muslims were initially a small minority in the lands they conquered. But over the course of centuries they came to be a large majority of the population in the Middle East and North Africa. Strikingly, it may be possible to quantify, at least roughly, the progress of […]| Logarithmic History
736 – 807 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 would define European society for many centuries. On this blog I pay particular attention to kinship systems. They deserve this attention: the study of […]| Logarithmic History
581 – 660 CE 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) states and state formation, especially along meta-ethnic frontiers, and (c) major world religions. In Classical Greece and Rome, devotion to patrilineal descent groups was edged out by wider […]| Logarithmic History
496 – 580 We’re now taking history less than one century per day. Something major happened to Earth’s atmosphere in 535. We have reports from around the world of the sun being darkened or blotted out for more than a year, and evidence from tree rings and ice cores of an extreme cold spell. The culprit […]| Logarithmic History
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 Constantine issu…| Logarithmic History
Short version: It looks like most mammals, at least most large mammals, have the brains they need, while primates, especially large primates, have the brains they can afford. Longer versi…| Logarithmic History
Or the Preparation of Favorite Dishes in the Struggle for Dinner. 567 – 537 million years ago The Cambrian explosion — shells and skeletons, and all the major animal phyla of today — is one o…| Logarithmic History
2.06 – 1.95 Gya Eukaryotic cells (Domain Eucaryota, which includes multicellular life, like plants, animals, and fungi) are, on average, much larger and more complex than the earlier evolved p…| Logarithmic History
The Earth has been through a number of mass extinctions. On Logarithmic History, we covered the five greatest mass extinctions during the month of March, and into early April. March 3. Ordovician/S…| Logarithmic History
10 posts published by logarithmichistory during September 2019| Logarithmic History
10 posts published by logarithmichistory during June 2021| Logarithmic History
5 posts published by logarithmichistory during July 2025| 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
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
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
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
