ANIMAL FARM

• Printing and Writing
  • How a printing press works
  • The history and importance of printing (part 1)
  • The history and importance of printing (part 2)
  • Scenes in a traditional printing press
• The long history of mankind
• Different attitudes to nature and machinery in east and west
  • In America
    • The impact of settlers on north America
    • The importance of guns and germs in history
    • The Jared Diamond thesis on the role of animals
    • Why did Europeans conquer the New World and not the other way round?
    • The start of settled agriculture and writing
    • The link between animals and writing
    • The most significant developments over the last ten thousand years
    • Why did advanced material civilizations not first develop in Africa?
    • The contrast between industrial and industrious developments
    • The comparative efficiency of different animals
  • In Nepal
    • Thoughts in a buffalo shed
    • The future of humankind
    • Markets and money
    • Neolithic and industrial revolutions
    • Neolithic to settled civilizations
  • In Japan
    • Discussion with a Buddhist monk
  • In Australia
    • The development of the human species
    • The effects of writing and printing on human imagination
    • The reasons for the rapid development of human technologies
    • The contradictory character of human beings; predation and co-operation
    • The destruction of Australian aboriginal societies
    • The normal stages of history and the Australian exception
    • The effects of climate on civilizations
    • The destruction of the hunter-gatherer way of life
    • The effects of European diseases on the native peoples of Australia
    • Why Australia remained a hunter-gatherer society
    • The normal tendencies of human civilizations towards stasis
    • The spread of European agriculture
    • Why some societies did not develop agriculture

 

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