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Paleoclimatic records show clearly that the past 10,000 years, the Holocene, is a remarkably stable period in which we went from being a few hunters and gatherers to become more sedentary agriculture-based civilizations, which then moved us to the current populated modern era.

Humans have lived for much, much longer than the approximately 10,000 years of settled agricultural civilization.

Starting as a few bands of hunter-gatherers, humanity expanded the food resources afforded by the land a thousandfold through the development of agriculture.

The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years.

What makes us human depends on what place on our evolutionary path we're talking about. If you go back six million years ago, what makes us human is that we were walking upright. That's all. If you go to 2.6 million years ago, it's the fact that we're designing and making stone tools.

Each day as I travel through downtown Tucson, I am amazed at how quickly the most ancient of human behaviors have changed. For as long as there have been Homo sapiens - roughly 200,000 years - people have filled their lives principally with two activities: talking directly with other people, and doing physical things.

By 3000 B.C. the art of Egypt was so ripe and so far advanced that it is surprising to find any student of early culture proposing that the crude contemporary art of the early Babylonians is the product of a civilization earlier than that of the Nile.

I don't worry whether the period is contemporary or three hundred years ago. Human beings are all alike.

Once humans traded their hunter-gatherer existences for more settled communities, we began a quest to make our lives better and more comfortable, but we've also been sucking precious finite resources from our environment ever since.

Before the discovery of agriculture mankind was everywhere so divided, the size of each group being determined by the natural fertility of its locality.