Goliath’s Curse

A radical retelling of human history through collapse – from the dawn of our species to the urgent existential threats of the twentieth-first century and beyond – based on the latest research and a database of more than 440 societal lifespans over the last 5,000 years.

Why do civilisations collapse?

For the first 200,000 years of human history, hunter-gathering Homo sapiens lived in fluid, eg