Authorised by Academic Registrar, April 1996
Synopsis A history of planet earth and its human societies from the `big bang' to the present. The subject offers students a coherent vision of the past on the largest possible scale, with particular attention to environmental change and its related issues, population and disease, ecology and technology. Is there a pattern in planetary life, a direction to human history? Does our modern account of origins parallel the creation myths of other societies? Topics will include ideas of historical time, the origins of the universe and the earth, continental drift, the beginnings of life, the evolution of human beings, hunter-gatherer societies, the emergence of agriculture and of city-based civilisations, the history of disease, ecological imperialism, and the emergence of the modern capitalist world.