There is a strong intuition that coordinated group movement requires coordination — something issuing instructions, or at minimum some shared signal that everybody is responding to.
That intuition is wrong,…
There is a tendency to think of agricultural history as a matter of which crops were grown, and the tools receive far less attention than the plants.
That gets the…
Source: Wikipedia
There is a class of invention that is invisible because it is too small to notice, and fastenings are the clearest example on any person's body right now.
The…
There is a particular kind of historical blindness that comes from something becoming cheap.
Salt now costs almost nothing, is available everywhere, and is thought about mainly as a seasoning.…
Face recognition feels like a single ability that everybody has, working roughly the same way in everybody.
That impression is wrong in the way most impressions about internal experience are…
There is a fact about the past that is difficult to hold onto because it contradicts something we do daily without thinking.
For most of human history, almost nobody had…