two things in particular failed to satisfy me. The first was this: It was universally agreed that “human history” was basically the same as “our history”—the history that began about ten thousand years ago with the agricultural revolution. In the three million years of human life that came before that, nothing of importance had occurred (except perhaps the domestication of fire and the invention of the wheel). The lives lived during that time were of no interest or importance, were in fact completely meaningless, and undeserving of any attention. This made no sense to me. That 150,000
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