Lange-termijnprocessen in de mensheidsgeschiedenis

Samenvatting

Long-Term Processes in the History of Humanity. ‘Humanity’ is no longer an ideal but a reality. Its history does not date back to a few hundreds of generations, as was still thought in the 18th century; it includes many tens of thousands of generations. A synthesis of historical, sociological, anthropological, archaeological and biological approaches is now possible. An attempt in this direction is made here in the form of a few simple over-all ‘process models’. The three major ecological transformations brought about by humans serve as bench-marks; the domestication of fire, the rise of agriculture, and the ‘industrial revolution’. Each new stage in control over nature signalled a simultaneous increase in dependency on that which was being controlled. Against this background, secular trends of growth, concentration, specialization, organization and stratification of human populations can be shown to have been dominant over the last ten millennia.