A Story of Us

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

It is about the evolution of us, starting from where we separated from the other apes. It is fun and engaging and tries to make stories of how premodern people are behaving.

🎨 Impressions

It was a good book that was easily read. Some of the "stories" where a bit boring but it was extremely interesting reading about the social patterns and how pre-modern humans were grouped and behaved.

How I Discovered It

I cannot remember

Who Should Read It?

People who like to understand pre-modern humans. It was particularly interesting as it looked into behavior and social patterns.

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

✍️ My Top Quotes

The same method of genetic reckoning reveals that the common ancestor of humans and dogs lived about 100 million years ago, and of humans and insects about 500 million years ago.
It is generally observed in nonhuman mammals that when the males grow to be larger and stronger than the females, the males compete to mate with as many females as possible.
Undoubtedly humans can be violently aggressive and capable of great brutality, but during our day-to-day interactions, we tend to be more docile and compliant than almost any other large animal.
In our definition, “humans” are ape-like animals with a brain that is larger than the brain of a chimpanzee.
Although the ways we process food can destroy or remove some of the nutrients it contains, it can also destroy and remove the toxins and indigestible stuff that food often contains. As a result, our digestive system handles food that contains, weight for weight, considerably more calories and nutrients than the food that runs through an ape digestive system.
Traces of ancient fires have been found near human remains dating back beyond 1.5 million years, but it’s impossible to conclude from this that humans made the fires.
This sort of evidence has been found, but so far only in archaeological sites of a much more recent date. The oldest sites are about 300,000 to 400,000 years old.
The body of modern humans has adaptations that allow us to be more mobile than other large animals. Even though we aren’t fast runners compared to horses, lions, and chimpanzees, we can walk for miles without tiring, and we can, with training, become better at running long distances than any other mammal.
During the ice age that occurred around 1.9 million years ago, the sea level was 200 feet lower than it is today. The islands of Java and Sumatra were attached to the mainland at that time, and early humans could have simply walked to them.
Inside our brain’s large prefrontal cortex, a vast amount of information is integrated and processed in ways that can’t happen in other animals.
Experiments have shown that working with others affects children’s behavior. Afterward, they’re more generous in sharing any goodies the experimenters give them—as if working with others has put them in a better mood.
Over the course of human evolutionary history, there may have been some independent-minded women who thought things through and decided to avoid the pain and risks of motherhood. These women are not our ancestors.
If marriage was a recent invention, you’d expect to find at least a few cultures with no idea of it. But you don’t. The basic belief that it’s important to know who fathered a child likely began hundreds of thousands of years ago when our ancestors lived in Africa.
Human males have the much smaller testes typical of mammals in which females only mate with a single male each time they ovulate.
It’s normal for women to carry more fat than men, and women’s bodies function well even if fat makes up over a third of their body mass.
Many mammals that live in seasonal habitats put on fat during the times when food is most plentiful, but the amount of fat in human bodies, particularly woman’s bodies, is extraordinary. It’s many times greater than that seen in any other land animal.
Measurements have shown that a five-year-old’s brain absorbs energy at nearly double the rate of an adult’s brain.
The period between about 60,000 and 12,000 years ago seems to have been the most highly variable of all the ice ages.
By 40,000 years ago, humans that looked similar to us had spread out of Africa, and by 30,000 years ago the other kinds of humans were probably extinct. No evidence has so far been found of Neanderthal or Denisovan humans surviving beyond about 37,000 years ago.
Archaeologists have become expert at recognizing the signs of death by violence. They have dug up and inspected many bodies from sites of battles and massacres.
The genetic similarity of all humans alive today suggests that during at least one point in our history, the population of Homo sapiens was very low, perhaps only a few thousand people. Genetic evidence suggests that everyone alive today is descended from humans who were living in Africa 60,000 years ago,
The archaeological evidence suggests that warfare was rare before about 8,000 years ago.
Culture also provides some pretty spectacular curiosities—the pyramids of Egypt for example. Why did people living in the Nile Valley about 4,500 years ago spend so much time building these massive tombs for the pharaoh who ruled them? The answer may be a similar runaway mechanism. Positive feedback loops are also created as cultures evolve, particularly in the evolution of social tools.
By the age of five a child has learned over 2,000 words, but the word sounds that children make aren’t precise copies of the ones made by their parents.
Of the more than 7,000 languages spoken today, a few dozen are known as “isolates,” unrelated to any language so far discovered
The Chinese languages are part of “Sino-Tibetan” family, which has more than 450 members. Arabic is one of the 350 plus languages of the “Afro-Asiatic” family. And over half the world speaks at least one of the 430 or so languages belonging to the “Indo-European” family, which includes the languages spoken from Iceland to Sri Lanka, from Vladivostok to Spain.
Many archaeologists and historians thought it most likely that PIE was spoken by early cereal farmers who migrated into Europe from the Near East. The historical linguists disagreed. They pointed out that PIE speakers didn’t have the vocabulary of a Near Eastern farmer. They didn’t have words for palm tree, olive, or monkey, which would surely be familiar to people living in the Near East. On the other hand, PIE did have words for birch tree, salmon, and beaver, which people in the Near East would never see.
The “Black Death” plague pandemic, which sickened Eurasia and northern Africa during the middle years of 1300s, probably killed over a 100 million people at a time when the entire human population was only about 500 million. Entire towns and villages were wiped out.
In the premodern European family-based system, it was families that had rights.
In 1979, China began to strongly discourage most of its population from having more than one child. Many Westerners believe this policy caused Chinese fertility to decline, but the evidence clearly shows this isn’t true—the decline was already well underway.
Some of the rules members of Haredi communities follow give members a characteristic appearance. For example, married women must not allow their hair to be seen in public, and males aren’t allowed to cut the hair on either side of their face.
The word “patriotism” comes from the Latin word pater, which means “father.”
The fertility of the English-speaking people at a key stage of modernization goes a long way to explaining why English is currently the main language of diplomacy, science, and global business.