Migrations and Intensification: Crash Course Big History #7

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Migrations and Intensification: Crash Course Big History #7


In which Hank and John Green teach you about humanity conquering the Earth. Or at least moving from Africa into the rest of the Earth. As human beings spread out across the world and populations grew, humanity reached a critical mass of innovators, and collective learning took off! All these innovations were great for lots of human endeavors,…

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43 Comments

  1. I think this is a good episode but I wish it acknowledged more theories of private property after Rousseau or the conditions and lifestyle of currently existing hunter gatherer peoples instead of just our theoretical understanding of past hunter gatherer societies. It just feels like this episode more or less makes a false binary and only kind of entertains the possibility of alternative organizations of property despite acknowledging that both ends of the argument are reductionist and extreme

  2. 9:02
    What if we add a major tweak in the above-referenced:
    "…the quest for sufficient matter and energy not to survive and reproduce but merely *to expand one's power and strength*… Has been the overriding theme"?

    Like where is the strive to "survive and reproduce" in the Nanjing Massacre? Or perhaps in Louis' 14th policy that warfare was the pivot point of everything? Or in our deep urge to become an interplanetary species (the idea of survival in this sense seems petty as its hard for us to think of such remote associations. Further, take our indifference to global warming as a counterargument)? Or in the scientific impulse? Does the joy of research stem from a drive to survive and reproduce? Or a rather a drive to expand and conquer the unknown?

  3. Studies have shown that, although hunter-gatherers would only spend 6-ish hours a day hunting and gathering, they would spend considerably more time processing what was gathered than agrarian societies. Domesticated crops are selected for, in part, by how easy they are to make edible. It takes a lot more time to process (say) wild acorns than it does to process domesticated wheat.

  4. Is it conceivable or any evidence that the humans dwelling in Caves 1st were originally dominant but eventually conquered by agrarians?

    The "weaker"/disadvantaged left out set of people resorted to open prairie dwelling, eventually surpassed the "stronger" cave dwellers and conquered them?

    Who else likes my hypothesis?