Human-Earth System Dynamics

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xviii

   PDF

2. Win-Stay, Lose-Shift: A Survival Rule

   • Rongxing Guo

   Pages 1-21

3. Human Thermodynamics and Culture (I)

   • Rongxing Guo

   Pages 23-51

4. Human Thermodynamics and Culture (II)

   • Rongxing Guo

   Pages 53-77

5. Environment Matters, But Not the Way You Think (I)

   • Rongxing Guo

   Pages 79-104

6. Environment Matters, But Not the Way You Think (II)

   • Rongxing Guo

   Pages 105-123

7. Civilization as Responses to Cyclical Challenges

   • Rongxing Guo

   Pages 125-147

8. Studying Civilizations: Retrospect and Prospect

   • Rongxing Guo

   Pages 149-173

9. Back Matter

   Pages 175-199

   PDF

This book explores the factors and mechanisms that may have influenced the dynamic behaviors of earliest civilizations, focusing on both environmental (geographic) factors on which traditional historic analyses are based and human (behavioral) factors on which anthropological analyses are usually based. It also resurrects a number of common ancestral terms to help readers understand the complicated process of human and cultural evolution around the globe. Specifically, in almost all indigenous languages, the words ‘wa’ and any variants of it were originally associated with the sound of crying of – and certainly were selected as the common ancestral word with the meanings of “house, home, homeland, motherland, and so on” by – early humans living in different parts of the world.
This book provides many neglected but still crucial environmental and biological clues about the rise and fall of civilizations – ones that have largely resulted from mankind’s long-lasting “Win-Stay Lose-Shift” games throughout the world. The narratives and findings presented at this book are unexpected but reasonable – and are what every student of anthropology or history needs to know and doesn't get in the usual text.




“Professor Guo explores the dynamics of civilizations from the beginnings to our perplexingly complex world. There are lots of thought-provoking ideas here on the rise and decline of civilizations and nations... Anyone wishing to understand global developments should give this book serious consideration.” 
                                                      ----John Komlos, University of Munich, Germany, and Duke University, USA




“It is interesting to see a Chinese perspective on the questions of deep history that have engaged Jared Diamond, Yuval Harari and David Christian. Guo argues that understanding cyclical threats has been the key to human progress, which is driven by the dialectic of material privation and human ingenuity.” 
                                                     ----Peter Rutland, Wesleyan University, USA

• Human evolution
• Civilization
• Environmental threat
• Global history
• River valley
• Human Thermodynamics
• River flood
• Writing system

• Capital University of Economics and Business, Beijing, China

  Rongxing Guo

Rongxing Guo is an expert who is among the very few scholars to publish in six major disciplines of economics, geography, political science, management science, archaeology, and anthropology. He has had extensive publishing experiences with many world-leading publishing houses, which include John Wiley and Sons (USA), Elsevier (including its editorial offices in Amsterdam and Oxford/UK and its imprint “Academic Press” in San Diego/USA); Routledge (including its editorial offices in London and Singapore), Springer (including its editorial offices in New York, Heidelberg/Germany, Singapore, and Beijing), Palgrave-Macmillan (including its editorial offices in London and New York). He has published more than 30 monographs and edited books. In 2017, he was awarded by the Beijing Municipal Government under the “High Talent Support Program.”

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