Logarithmic History

1000 – 1056 CE Toward the year 1000, the Scandinavians, under Leif Eriksson, reached the coast of America.

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 el…

808 – 875 A.D. 192 – 261 A.H.

808 – 875 Charlemagne was crowned emperor on Christmas Day in the year 800, a collaboration between Church and State.

582 – 661 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-eth…

497 – 581 We’re now taking history less than one century per day.

313 – 417 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.

213 – 312 CE Every day on Logarithmic History we cover an interval 5.46% shorter than the preceding day.

108 – 212 CE If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian [96 CE] to the ac…

3 BCE – 107 CE The historical Jesus will be to our time a stranger and an enigma.

After centuries of division into warring states, China was united in 221 BCE, under the short-lived Qin and then the long-lived Han dynasties.

247 – 122 BCE 103,049 Here’s where this number comes from: Take a sequence of symbols, (a b c d e f g h i j), say.

Continuing yesterday’s post: What accounts for the differences between classical Greek and early Chinese intellectual traditions?

Over the course of the mid to late first millennium BCE, Greeks and Chinese developed impressive intellectual traditions that would profoundly influence later civilization.

The period leading up to historical times saw the rise of patrilineal descent groups across Eurasia.

824 – 668 BCE The association of particular plaid patterns (tartans) with particular Scottish highland clans is a phenomenon of the last several centuries.

Here’s a quick look at the world around 1000 BCE The world population is about 50 million.

I … present the Iliad as the tragedy of Achilles … Agamemnon, Achilles’ commander, betrays “what is right” by wrongfully seizing his prize of honor; indignant rage shrinks Achilles’ social and moral horizon until he cares about no one but a small group of…

Homer’s Iliad records 240 battlefield deaths, 188 Trojans and 52 Achaeans.

1350 – 1166 BCE Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, by Laura Spinney, is a well-written popular account of the origin and spread of Indo-European and its branches, synthesizing historical linguistics and recent findings in genetics.

1547 – 1350 BCE The Lapita culture (defined based on pottery) starts showing up on the islands of Melanesia around this time.

1628 BCE, and later.

You’re reading this in a version of the Roman alphabet.

The time of the Biblical Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is sometimes called the Patriarchal Age.

Writing greatly facilitates the storage and transmission of information.

You might think that with the Egyptian pyramids being famous for thousands of years (they’re the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World still standing) there wouldn’t be much new to say about them.

Perhaps the most important contribution of the Aryans to later civilization was the establishment of the aristocratic pattern which survived in Europe until recent times. … An aristocrat from one [European] nation could understand the attitudes and values…

Here’s one account of the origin of the first system of writing in Mesopotamia: The immediate precursor of cuneiform writing was a system of tokens.

3275 – 2986 BCE By today’s date, the speakers of Proto-Indo-European are probably well-ensconced in their homeland, either Anatolia/the Caucasus/Northern Iran or the steppes north of the Black Sea.

3582 – 3276 BCE The story of the evolution of civilization in Mesopotamia used to go like this.

… specifically 4004 BCE, God created the heavens and the earth.

7.03 – 6.65 thousand years ago The economist Robin Hanson suggests that human population history can be seen as a succession of growth modes, where each mode has a characteristic doubling time.

7,700 years ago This has proven my most popular post!

17.3 – 16.4 thousand years ago In July and August, this blog covered one of the great revolutions in information transmission, the evolution of language.

18.3 – 17.4 thousand years ago We’re now taking in history a millennium per day.

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.

20.6 – 19.4 thousand years ago Only in the last half century or so, with the discovery of the Big Bang, has it been possible to do something like Logarithmic History.

21.6 – 20.6 thousand years ago Glacial periods within the present Ice Age start gradually and end rapidly.

24 thousand years ago What song the sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture.

28,000 years ago The Venus of Willendorf, from Austria, is one of a number of “Venus figurines” from the European Upper Paleolithic.

27.1 – 25.7 thousand years ago I just posted a tweet about population structure in people thirty four thousand years ago.

40.1 – 38.0 thousand years ago “The Inheritors” is a novel by William Golding about the encounter between Neanderthals and modern humans.

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.