Apparently gender differences personality are stronger in plough societies and richer societies, richer is surprising
Edenic transition = neolithic revolution. The patriarchy, primogeniture, distance from nature. Primitive man had no need to invemt monsters like the minotaur, nature was everywhere and terrifying. Did the move away from animism and equality precipitate or follow from the neolithic revolution?
Eric Hoels idea of the gossip trap as what we escaped as we exceeded Dunbars number in 10’000BC, and what we’re returning to now with social media.
Question of why 10k BC (the sapient paradox) might be because of the end of the last ice age or because we ran out of frontiers (though surely this would imply civ starting in southern africa, since that area would run out of frontiers first.
Mid east had easiest to profitably domesticate flora and fauna
Easier for europe to sail west than china
Why not go east?
This made intellectual work more profitable in europe, and encouraged both liberality from rulers and focus on practicalish questions from researchers
Production of niches in evolution is relevant to coevolution of culture and geography?
War either leads to the creation of strong unified states, disincentivising violence, or to the breakdown of such states, incentivising violence. As the world becomes more full of states, war reduces violence.
Big history doesnt make event by event predictions, but it does make predictions about the relative frequency of events, e.g. Likelihood of great power war in europe post 1870, profitability of voyages to the americas from europe vs china
Important to consider what stage of farming economy a society was at to see how malthusian it would have been, was land or labor the limit on productivity for exampe? Relevant to voluntariness of hunter-gatherer transition, proto-feminism. See black death in europe, which drove labor costs up bc labor scarcity, until most of europe hit the malthusian ceiling again as land became the limiting factor once the population recovered (to benefit of landowners)
Supply and demand post-AGI