So happy I found this series. I always learn something from his lectures. Would have enjoyed the class as student at Columbia having available the reading material and the break out sessions with the TAs for discussion. Don't let the negative comments dissuade you from listening.

Still loving this series. I now have the rhythm of the outside world of this class: about 3/4 of the way through, sirens. About 1/4 of the way through, clicking heels and a crowd of people.

Great!

You try to give the video more brightness it will be great if you do

it seems to me that fear of humans most definitely can be passed on to generations, as human-fearing animals are more likely to survive. when backbacking in the Sierra Nevada, I discovered that swatting flies was very easy, whereas back in SanFrancisco it was quite difficult. In the city, flies who are natually skittish are the ones that pass along their genes.

The Aztecs and Mayans were a fair distance outside of the equatorial zones. The Inca were the closest but escaped the equatorial heat due to the altitude of the mountains. It was downright cold at Machu Picchu. There is something to the theory because in the tropics the heat just sucks all the energy out of you. No way you are keen on building cities when in that heat. Another thing I noticed, the lazy factor in humans increases when in the heat.

The Andean coastal people farmed for cotton which they used for fishing nets. This hints at the necessity for social complexity to glean resources from the environment, and is a wholly novel compared to other centres where agriculture arose in that unlike other places, in the Andes coastal region agriculture wasn’t based on calorie-rich food stuffs. Similar to one of the previous classes, where getting mills necessitated complex mills in Europe but simple animal based mills in the arid regions of Eurasia. The other issue facing peoples in Eurasia was nomadic horse-riding peoples. For instance, Old European societies were based in river valleys but seem to have built fortifications to defend against horse rider incursions. The competition between peoples themselves seems to have been a factor. Something similar happens in Mesopotamia: environmental degradation and the necessity of irrigation practices (which themselves led to degradation in the form of salination) necessitated more complex social adaptations such as centralization.

There were a lot more rivers than the one's the first river valley civilizations inhabited.

Well, if say more about extinction of big mammals - what I always see as mistake in that debate is that people ignore differences between different soecirs

21:30 Well, really non-human species can actually pass skills to offsprings through cultural means. But it's not the direct teaching, it's imitation. Offsprings watch behavior of parents and simply imitate it. That animals cannot say something to their offsprings, doesn't mean that offspring cannot imitate

1:05:40 Really I don't think that humans all over the world through all the thousands of years found the idea that one species can turn into another as impossible as Chistians found it. Ancient mythologies, many of them, say for example, something like: "our tribe descent from bears, their tribe descend from wolves" etc. Maybe ancient people with polytheistic myths didnt really found what we now call evolution as impossible as later people who had monotheistic religions

I have also read about domestication of foxes in Siberia well ove r 40 years - USSR and later. The DID change - adrenalin, ears, shape of face, etc. Even the color of the fur!

30 mim

So this is how far I've made it into this lecture series. The dwindling views correlating which ascending lecture numbers suggests I should've abandoned ship earlier. Still, the concept behind the class is good, and I'm grateful for what I've learned. But the meandering arrogance of Dr. Bulliet has finally got to me. I wish the best to those who continue.

Seems to me that every teacher/instructor/professor I have heard.....has a bit of arrogance. :>) Always like to listen to people who 'Know' something of what they are talking about. I liked his distinction between historian, archeologist, and anthropologists. He's done a lot of teaching, researching, reading.....last lecture he told about cataloguing rare coins.....he knows a lot!