The Invention of Yesterday

A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection
A sweeping global human history that describes the separate beginnings of the world's major civilizations and cultural movements-Confucianism, Islam, Judeo-Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism and Nomadism-and the dramatic, sometimes ruinous, sometimes transformative effects of their ever closer intertwinement that has brought us to where we are today.

In this "terrific" (San Francisco Chronicle) book, an award-winning author tells the story of how humans invented history, from the Stone Age to the Virtual Age

Traveling across millennia and cultures, The Invention of Yesterday argues that world history is a narrative we're constantly inventing. Fifty thousand years ago, we roamed the world as countless autonomous bands of hunter-gatherers, each one telling itself a story of the world with itself at the center. We used narratives to organize for survival and explain the unfathomable, and these stories evolved into the bases for cultures, empires, and civilizations. When disparate narratives collided, the encounters produced everything from confusion, chaos, and war to cultural efflorescence, religious awakenings, and intellectual breakthroughs.

In this updated edition with a new postscript, Tamim Ansary uses insightful, vivid stories to illuminate how our propensity to invent a shared symbolic universe has shaped our journey from the Stone Age to the Virtual Age.

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