Writing the deep past means building a world with no writing, no money and no institutions in it. This tag collects reviews, books and posts on prehistory, the Paleolithic, and getting the period right.
Book ReviewsJared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel rewrote how we think about why some societies developed steel and ships while others didn't, and his answer was simple: geography and animals, not the people themselves. The book changed a generation's thinking on…
Critical ThinkingSeventy-four thousand years ago a mountain in Sumatra came apart and took the sky with it. Sunlight fell, the cold held for years, and the human population may have dropped to fewer than ten thousand. This is what that winter…
Character DevelopmentDeliberate human burial goes back at least a hundred thousand years. At Sungir, two children were buried with ten thousand ivory beads, each about an hour of work, by people living at the edge of their food supply.
PhilosophyGrim began with one scene at the crucifixion and grew into a novel about a reaper who attends death across all of history. Here is the story behind it.
Historical FictionI wanted to write prehistoric people as they were, not as primitives. Here is how the real Toba supervolcano and a single family became Family on Ice.
Book ReviewsThe whole story of our species, from the Cognitive Revolution through the Agricultural and Scientific Revolutions, built on the bold idea that shared fictions, money, religion, nations, are what let humans cooperate at scale. Engaging and thought-provoking, though its broad-brush…
2010sThe production received exceptional access to the otherwise sealed cave, with Herzog's small crew filming the paintings using lightweight equipment that conventional documentary could not deploy. Cave of Forgotten Dreams shows how documentary could function through treatment of material whose…
Fantasy FictionGrim has assessed the dead since before there was a word for death. Forty thousand years of the same job, and a functionary who starts watching where the dead actually go.
FamilyThe Toba eruption cut sunlight across Eurasia seventy-four thousand years ago. A family group tries to stay alive through it, in prose with no quotation marks and no comfort.
AI AdoptionBen the Automator returns to Leaders and Their Stories to explain digital transformation done right: what it really means, why it starts with people, the scratchpad and higher-order thinking techniques, and why it is a business project not an IT…
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