Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age

by Annalee Newitz

Domestic animals like dogs, sheep, goats, and pigs changed during thousands of years of domestication, too. Perhaps the most obvious change is called neoteny, or the process of becoming more childlike. Domestic animals tend to be smaller, developing softer facial features like floppy ears and short snouts. Other changes are more dramatic: domestic pigs have an extra pair of rib bones. Humans weren’t exempt from this process. We also domesticated ourselves.

There were even shops that sold hot water, in case you didn’t want to boil your own.

When regions are hit repeatedly by storms, he told me, “no matter how wealthy a country is … they never quite make it back to baseline GDP.” Repairing the infrastructure is so expensive that it’s impossible to return to their previous economic baseline. And with each subsequent storm, their GDP is eroded even more. He calls this “sandcastle depreciation,”13 and noted that any civilization, no matter what level it is at, will slowly melt away under this repeated onslaught.