The great divide: nature and human nature in the Old World and the New

Peter Watson, the acclaimed author of Ideas and The German Genius, offers a groundbreaking new exploration of the progress of human history. Watson’s The Great Divide compares and contrasts the development of humankind between the “Old World” and the “New”—between 15,000 B.C. and 1,500 A.D—and, like Jarod Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, Watson’s remarkable book offers a fascinating, all-encompassing, highly readable overview of how human civilization has grown and expanded. Combining the most up-to-date findings in archaeology, anthropology, geology, meteorology, cosmology and mythology, this unprecedented, masterful study offers uniquely revealing insights into what it means to be human.

This appendix, which explores the similarities between the civilizations of the Old World and the New, is available here.