Цитаты из книги A Short History of Progress

The Old Stone Age now seems so remote that we seldom give it a thought, (...) Yet it ended so recently — only six times further back than the birth of Christ and the Roman Empire — that the big changes since we left the cave have all been cultural, not physical. A long-lived species like ours can’t evolve significantly over so short an interval. This means that while culture and technology are cumulative, innate intelligence is not.

(...) To use a computer analogy, we are running twenty-first-century software on hardware last upgraded 50,000 years ago or more. This may explain quite a lot of what we see in the news.

(...) imperial expansion of the United States across her continent in the nineteenth century.

American national mythology sees this as “pioneering” and “settlement,” but the conquest and dispossession of one Indian people after another, including organized native states such as the Cherokee and Iroquois, was clearly imperial, a forerunner in deed if not in name of Germany’s Lebensraum.

(...) There is no clearer fact in American history than the fact of conquest. In North America, just as in South America … Europeans invaded a land fully occupied by natives.

Nowadays we have reached such a pass that the skills and mores we learn in childhood are outdated by the time we’re thirty, and few people past fifty can keep up with their culture — whether in idiom, attitudes, taste, or technology — even if they try. But I am getting ahead in the story. Most people living in the Old Stone Age would not have noticed any cultural change at all. The human world that individuals entered at birth was the same as the one they left at death. There was variation in events, of course — feasts, famines, local triumphs and disasters — but the patterns within each society must have seemed immutable. There was just one way to do things, one mythology, one vocabulary, one set of stories; things were just the way they were.