Practice question · Multiple choice
Why does the long view make the present look contingent?
Hints
- Contingent means "it could have gone otherwise."
- What does watching seven independent agricultures do to the idea of one inevitable path?
Show the answer
D. One species produced seven agricultures
Why
The state, the calendar, the alphabet you are reading, the idea that a ruler needs to look just, all built by people improvising with what they had. Which means none of it had to turn out this way, and it does not have to stay this way. That is not a moral; it is what six million years of evidence says.
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.
- Farming spread despite making individual lives measurably worse, shorter, sicker, harder. Why does that…
- Sort each claim: a habit of thought the course teaches, or a trap it warns against?
- 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…