Big History: The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Humanity

Subtopic Topic Civilization “Pure intellectual stimulation that can be popped into History & Culture the [audio or video player] anytime.” —Harvard Magazine B Big History: “Passionate, erudite, living legend lecturers. Academia’s i g best lecturers are being captured on tape.” H —The Los Angeles Times i The Big Bang, Life on Earth, s t o “A serious force in American education.” ry and the Rise of Humanity —The Wall Street Journal Course Guidebook Professor David Christian San Diego State University Professor David Christian, formerly Professor of History at San Diego State University, is one of the pioneers of the field of big history. Currently he is Professor of History at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, which won the 2005 World History Association Book Prize, and This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity. He is coeditor of the Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History. THE GREAT COURSES® Corporate Headquarters 4840 Westfields Boulevard, Suite 500 Chantilly, VA 20151-2299 G USA u Phone: 1-800-832-2412 id www.thegreatcourses.com e b o Cover Image: © Dmitriy Karelin/Shutterstock. o Course No. 8050 © 2008 The Teaching Company. PB8050A k PUBLISHED BY: THE GREAT COURSES Corporate Headquarters 4840 West? elds Boulevard, Suite 500 Chantilly, Virginia 20151-2299 Phone: 1-800-832-2412 Fax: 703-378-3819 www.thegreatcourses.com Copyright © The Teaching Company, 2008 Printed in the United States of America This book is in copyright. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of The Teaching Company. David Christian, D.Phil. Professor of History San Diego State University P rofessor David Christian is Professor of History at San Diego State University, where he teaches courses on big history, world environmental history, Russian history, and the history of Inner Eurasia. From 1975 to 2000, he taught Russian history, European history, and world history at Macquarie University in Sydney. Professor Christian was born in New York and grew up in Nigeria and Britain. He completed his B.A. in History at Oxford University, his M.A. in Russian History at The University of Western Ontario, and his D.Phil. in 19th-Century Russian History at Oxford University. As a graduate student, he spent a year in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) during the Brezhnev era. In the late 1980s, Professor Christian developed an interest in understanding the past on very large scales. With the help of colleagues in astronomy, geology, biology, anthropology, and prehistory, he began an experimental history course that started with the origins of the Universe and ended in the present day. Within two years, after his students persuaded him that it was a shame not to deal with the future after studying 13 billion years of history in 13 weeks, he introduced a (cid:191) nal lecture on prospects for the future. In 1992, he wrote an article describing this approach as “big history.” The label seems to have stuck, as similar courses have independently appeared elsewhere, and there are now several courses in big history at European, Russian, Australian, and North American universities. In addition, Professor Christian has written on the social and material history of 19th-century Russian peasantry, in particular on aspects of diet and the role of alcohol. In 1990, he completed a study of the role of vodka in Russian social, political, and economic life. Professor Christian’s recent publications include: Imperial and Soviet Russia: Power, Privilege and the Challenge of i Modernity (Macmillan/St. Martin’s, 1997); A History of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia, Vol. 1: Inner Eurasia from Prehistory to the Mongol Empire in The Blackwell History of the World (Blackwell, 1998); Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (University of California Press, 2004), which won the 2005 World History Association Book Prize and has been translated into Spanish and Chinese; and This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity (Berkshire Publishing, 2007). Professor Christian is a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities. He is Af(cid:191) liates Chair for the World History Association and was one of the editors of the Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History. He also participated in the creation of the world history website World History for Us All (http:// worldhistoryforusall.sdsu.edu/dev/default.htm). (cid:374) ii Table of Contents INTRODUCTION Professor Biography ............................................................................i Course Scope .....................................................................................1 LLEECCTTUURREE GGUUIIDDEESS LECTURE 1 What Is Big History? ...........................................................................5 LECTURE 2 Moving across Multiple Scales .........................................................10 LECTURE 3 Simplicity and Complexity.................................................................14 LECTURE 4 Evidence and the Nature of Science ................................................19 LECTURE 5 Threshold 1—Origins of Big Bang Cosmology ................................23 LECTURE 6 How Did Everything Begin? ..............................................................28 LECTURE 7 Threshold 2—The First Stars and Galaxies ....................................32 LECTURE 8 Threshold 3—Making Chemical Elements .......................................37 LECTURE 9 Threshold 4—The Earth and the Solar System ................................41 LECTURE 10 The Early Earth—A Short History .....................................................45 iii Table of Contents LECTURE 11 Plate Tectonics and the Earth’s Geography .....................................49 LECTURE 12 Threshold 5—Life .............................................................................54 LECTURE 13 Darwin and Natural Selection ...........................................................59 LECTURE 14 The Evidence for Natural Selection ..................................................63 LECTURE 15 The Origins of Life ............................................................................67 LECTURE 16 Life on Earth—Single-celled Organisms...........................................72 LECTURE 17 Life on Earth—Multi-celled Organisms .............................................76 LECTURE 18 Hominines.........................................................................................81 LECTURE 19 Evidence on Hominine Evolution ......................................................85 LECTURE 20 Threshold 6—What Makes Humans Different? ................................89 LECTURE 21 Homo sapiens—The First Humans ..................................................94 LECTURE 22 Paleolithic Lifeways ..........................................................................99 LECTURE 23 Change in the Paleolithic Era .........................................................103 iv Table of Contents LECTURE 24 Threshold 7—Agriculture ................................................................108 LECTURE 25 The Origins of Agriculture ...............................................................113 LECTURE 26 The First Agrarian Societies ...........................................................118 LECTURE 27 Power and Its Origins .....................................................................123 LECTURE 28 Early Power Structures ...................................................................127 LECTURE 29 From Villages to Cities ....................................................................132 LECTURE 30 Sumer—The First Agrarian Civilization...........................................137 LECTURE 31 Agrarian Civilizations in Other Regions ..........................................142 LECTURE 32 The World That Agrarian Civilizations Made ..................................146 LECTURE 33 Long Trends—Expansion and State Power....................................150 LECTURE 34 Long Trends—Rates of Innovation .................................................155 LECTURE 35 Long Trends—Disease and Malthusian Cycles ..............................160 LECTURE 36 Comparing the World Zones ...........................................................165 v Table of Contents LECTURE 37 The Americas in the Later Agrarian Era..........................................170 LECTURE 38 Threshold 8—The Modern Revolution............................................175 LECTURE 39 The Medieval Malthusian Cycle, 500–1350....................................180 LECTURE 40 The Early Modern Cycle, 1350–1700 .............................................185 LECTURE 41 Breakthrough—The Industrial Revolution.......................................189 LECTURE 42 Spread of the Industrial Revolution to 1900 ...................................194 LECTURE 43 The 20th Century .............................................................................199 LECTURE 44 The World That the Modern Revolution Made ................................204 LECTURE 45 Human History and the Biosphere..................................................209 LECTURE 46 The Next 100 Years ........................................................................214 LECTURE 47 The Next Millennium and the Remote Future .................................219 LECTURE 48 Big History—Humans in the Cosmos .............................................223 vi Table of Contents SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL Timeline 1—The Scale of the Cosmos ...........................................228 Timeline 2—The Scale of the Earth ................................................229 Timeline 3—The Scale of Multi-cellular Organisms ........................230 Timeline 4—The Scale of Mammalian Evolution ............................231 Timeline 5—The Scale of Human Evolution ...................................232 Timeline 6—The Scale of Human History ......................................233 Timeline 7—The Scale of Agrarian Societies .................................234 Timeline 8—The Scale of Modernity ..............................................235 Summary Timeline ..........................................................................236 Glossary .........................................................................................240 Bibliography ....................................................................................263 Permissions Acknowledgments ......................................................279 vii viii