Earth Epochs Earth Epochs (2024)

From moments to millennia: theorising scale and change in human history

2019 A PORTRAIT OF CIVILIZATION VOL. 1

A PORTRAIT OF CIVILIZATION VOL.1, 2019

Normative Statement Since my first publication in 2000, human behaviour has always remained my focus because I am intrigued and fascinated by this phenomenon. As an Author, Cultural Practitioner, Media Arts Specialist, and Publisher who spent more than thirty years studying Media Arts, I have decided to utilize the character Job featured in the text Job 38. In this space Job appears to be comparing1 God’s eternity with his own time, God’s omniscience with his own ignorance, and God’s omnipotence with his own inability will be applied as a pretext to frame this conversation in a figurative, metaphorical, philosophical, and symbolical context. 1 https://www.biblestudytools.com/commentaries/matthew-henry-complete/job/38.html 2 of 245 My lens will be use to focus and encourage this conversation since it can be characterized as a word picture, which is also applied as a cultural, social, and a theoretical construct namely Civilization. This construct when activated has caused different groups to learn from one another. For example, in this space “Civilization " was already staged so that human beings could act as conduits to practice or live out the same. Fernand Braudel2 makes the telling point that in varying degrees; the present is the outcome of other experiences much longer ago. It is the fruit of past centuries, and even of 'the whole historical evolution of humanity until now'. That the present involves so vast a stretch of the past should by no means seem absurd - although all of us naturally tend to think of the world around us only in the context of our own brief existence. FernandBraudel3 furtherexplainsthatseeingitshistoryasaspeeded-upfilm in which everything happens pell-mell: wars, battles, summit meetings, 2file:///C:/Users/devgro/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/INetCache/IE/I38WY8NJ/braudel_civ.pdf 3file:///C:/Users/devgro/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/INetCache/IE/I38WY8NJ/braudel_civ.pdf 3 of 245 political crises, coups d'etat, revolutions, economic upsets, ideas, intellectual and artistic fashions, and so on4 In addition, the text Genesis puts Adam and Eve together in the Garden of Eden5, but geneticists6’ version of the duo — the ancestors to whom the Y chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA of today’s humans can be traced — were thought to have lived tens of thousands of years apart. Now, two major studies of modern humans’ Y chromosomes suggest that ‘Y- chromosome Adam’ and ‘mitochondrial Eve’ may have lived around the same time after all. After much deliberation, it is my intention to share the views of anthropologist, authors, ethnographers, theorist, and experts on the subject “Civilization” in light of the aforementioned statements. William Anderson Gittens ISBN 978-976-96220-9-8 4file:///C:/Users/devgro/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/INetCache/IE/I38WY8NJ/braudel_civ.pdf 5 https://www.nature.com/news/genetic-adam-and-eve-did-not-live-too-far-apart-in-time-1.13478 6 Poznik, G. D. et al. Science 341, 562–565 (2013).ArticlePubMedISIChemPort 2.Francalacci, P. et al. Science 341, 565–569 (2013).

The Big History of Humanity: A Macrohistory, Macrosociology and Metahistory of Humankind

Social Science Research Network, 2022

Review of "The Fifth Beginning: What Six Million Years of Human History can Tell us about our Future" by Robert L. Kelly

The Axial Ages of World History: Lessons for the 21st Century. Litchfield Park, AZ: Emergent Publications, 2014.

“Throughout human history, perhaps even pre-human, there has been a tension between the need for order and the forces that cause change. That tension is greater now than ever, because, in our increasingly globalized world, the rate of change is also increasing. This book finally explains how we can cope: we have stories. We live our narratives.” Brian Spooner, University of Pennsylvania, is editor of Globalization: The Crucial Phase and Literacy in the Persianate World: Writing and the Social Order "The idea that Axial Ages occurred, and that they provide warnings/opportunities for us today, seems both new and useful. But the value of this book is additional to this stance, in that it looks at cultural change - civilizations - from a complexity viewpoint. These changes are certainly complicated, but the pressures are interwoven and therefore need to be understood as complex. The book does a good job of explaining our present cultural difficulties - our prospective emergencies social, ecological and physical - in a wholly new way. Perhaps we'll get new answers..." Jack Cohen, evolutionary biologist, is co-author of The Collapse of Chaos, with Ian Steward. "This is a challenging and creative tour de force on comparative, global, world history and cross-cultural, complex societal dynamics. Without doubt one of the most stimulating works in the tradition of big history and macro analysis.” Claudio Cioffi-Revilla, George Mason University, is author of Power Laws in the Social Sciences: Discovering Non-equilibrium Dynamics in the Social Universe. “In this book, Dmitri Bondarenko (Russia) and Ken Baskin (USA) compare Modernity with the period historians know as the Axial Age (800-200 BCE) as times of transformation, responding to rapidly increasing social complexity. In doing so, they try to apply the experience of the earlier period, and the time of cultural achievement that followed it, to our time of ideological tension among civilizations. The great achievement of this relatively small book is the lucid way in which the co-authors present a picture of complex worldwide developments, based upon their mastery of recent and older literature, and their efforts to point to a way out of the hopelessly divided socio-political situation of today.” Henri J.M. Claessen, Emeritus Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Leiden University, is author of Structural Change; Evolution and Evolutionism in Cultural Anthropology. “With a lens of great magnification, the authors search through the intricacies of history, selecting its most important threads to weave together. What emerges is a rich tapestry in which the underlying trajectory of history, not clearly visible to the untutored eye, is brought boldly to the surface. And far from being couched in academic jargon—as one might have supposed—the book is a rare combination of brilliant analysis and beautifully crafted prose. Moreover, it ends on a hopeful note with the authors prescribing what they think societies must do if they are to confront and surmount the challenges that lie ahead.” Robert L. Carneiro, Curator Emeritus of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History, is author of Evolutionism in Cultural Anthropology: A Critical History. "I find this a very insightful book, that will help readers to place current cultural developments within the framework of our common past, while contemplating what the future may bring." Fred Spier, University of Amsterdam, is President, International Big History Association, and author of Big History and the Future of Humanity.

Introduction. From the History of Humankind to Big History

History & Mathematics: Big History Aspects, 2019

2019.10.24 The global history of mankind from the beginning of settlement BC.

2019.10.24 The global history of mankind from the beginning of settlement BC., 2019

The sequence of the resettlement of peoples and the movement of haplogroups from 65,000 years BC is shown. A new view on the origin of the Mongoloids, Russians and other peoples is substantiated.

HISTORY AND POLITICS AS IF WE STILL LIVED IN THE HOLOCENE

History and Theory , 2023

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021), by David Graeber and David Wengrow, is a monumental, boldly revisionist study of the human past from the last ice age to the present. It is geared explicitly toward the present in political terms and seeks to explain how primordial forms of human freedom were lost in ways that resulted in our current structures of violence and domination. The authors explore a vast range of prehistoric, ancient, and non-Western peoples to undermine (neo)evolutionist, stadial theories of long-term human development, particularly any that imply determinism, inevitability, or teleology. If so many peoples in the past were so much freer than we are today, how is it that we got stuck? And are we really as stuck as we think? Graeber and Wengrow successfully undermine the social scientific template of stage-based human development from hunter-gatherers to modern capitalist nation-states, but their book suffers from two major omissions. First, they ignore almost entirely the Anthropocene epoch and show no grasp of its implications for their analysis of the present or prospects for the future. Second, their "new history of humanity" ignores the history that is most relevant to answering their own questions about how we have arrived globally in our current structures of violence and domination: the early modern and modern history of expansionist, colonialist, capitalist, belligerent, imperialist Western European nations and their extensions since the fifteenth century. These two omissions are connected: it is disproportionately the history of the (early) modern West before and after the Industrial Revolution that explains how the planet arrived in the Anthropocene with the "Great Acceleration" around the mid-twentieth century. But heeding this history and its consequences would have undermined the authors' upbeat political vision about our prospects for the future-essentially, a recycled Enlightenment vision about human self-determination and individual freedom that depends on environmental exploitation as if we still lived in the Holocene. For all its undoubted achievement, The Dawn of Everything neglects the history that is most salient to answering the main questions its own authors pose. What matters most about that history is not that it was inevitable but that it was actual-and that its cumulative consequences remain with us.

Rethinking the Human Revolution

UNCOVERING THE LAWS OF GLOBAL HISTORY

2000