200,000 Years of Humans. How Many Resets?

The model of human civilization as a steady, upward arc of progress is, according to Randall, fundamentally wrong - and the science to challenge it has been building for decades. Stephen Jay Gould's concept of punctuated equilibrium was developed to describe interruptions in the history of life itself, but Randall argues the model applies with equal force to the history of human civilization. Progress is not linear. It is periodically reset by events of extraordinary severity.

What makes this reframing significant is the timescale Randall places it against. Modern humans - Homo sapiens sapiens - go back conservatively 150,000 years, with some skeletal remains now dating close to 200,000. Against that backdrop, the civilization we can account for represents a fraction of the time our species has existed on this planet. Randall’s point is that once you understand the true extent of past catastrophic events and the degree to which this planetary surface has been physically remodeled within the human timeline, the question is no longer whether previous civilizations were interrupted. It is how many times - and what was lost each time the reset came.