Practice question · Multiple choice
Farming spread despite making individual lives measurably worse, shorter, sicker, harder. Why does that undercut the idea of history as steady ascent?
Hints
- Ask what "successful" means for a way of life competing with another.
- Population and welfare are different measures.
Show the answer
C. Because a change can spread without improving anyone's life
Why
Agriculture won on numbers, not on quality of life. Progress narratives assume the two track together, and this is the clearest case where they do not.
Practise Synthesis: The Human Journey
The app has 4 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on Synthesis: The Human Journey
- Prehistory accounts for roughly 95% of the human story.
- Order the whole human journey, oldest first.
- Sort each claim: a habit of thought the course teaches, or a trap it warns against?
- Why does the long view make the present look contingent?
- Complete the course’s closing argument.
- Which habits of thought has this course been building?
- In what sense is the prehistory/history line "drawn behind" people rather than crossed by them?
- Prehistory covers 99.9% of the human past and is studied almost entirely without texts. What does that…