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A History of Humanity is the definitive symbolic history of the world. The methods of symbolic history revolve around (1) an account of the human endowment taking up thought, feeling, and behavior from fruitful new perspectives, and (2) a correspondingly new account of global history from the point of view of the degrees of retention, surrender, and deformation of fundamental elements of the human endowment over time.

Among the new perspectives informing the account of the human endowment are semiotics, neuroscience, and palaeoethnobotany. They combine the classical modes of analysis: social anthropology and social history, political anthropology and political history, economic anthropology and economic history, and cultural anthropology and cultural history, that are gathered and unfolded under the aegis of symbolic history, bringing to the narrative a unique clarity.

Original source materials from the Neolithic world and from South Asian, East Asian, Middle Eastern, and Western civilizations illustrate and challenge the narrative, which is unbroken but not dogmatic. Both the narrative and original sources are accompanied by a two-level marginal commentary: the first keeps the reader located in time and space, while the second brings insights from other observers of the world to the reader's attention. The aim of the commentary is to help the reader think about the human world, without, however, closing the question of the nature of the human world.