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Perspectives: Past, Present, and Future, by Patrick Wyman

Patrick Wyman · 5 May 2026

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Patrick Wyman did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

  1. Our reading

    The transition from hunter-gatherer societies to civilization was not an orderly, logical process of progress.

    Their wordsBut the orderly story no longer holds. We've learned too much about the distant past, thanks largely to extraordinary new archaeological methods that give us access to aspects of the ancient world we could only imagine, for us to see any sort of clear, neat global march of progress.

  2. Our reading

    The major driver of human history is contingency rather than inevitability.

    Their wordsThe major driver in this story is not inevitability, but contingency: how people made choices that made sense to them in the context of their own world.

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