ABSTRACT
What has made us as we are? This is history’s most puzzling question. In order to answer it, we need to discover the driving force in human society together with the process by which it has been transformed over the past 100,000 years. Many scholars-natural scientists, social scientists, historians, and philosophers-have, as discovered in Chapter 5, attempted to answer this question of questions. Because of its complexity, most scholars have resorted to an almost endless list of factors that appear to have a reasonably persuasive claim to at least some influence. Few have attempted to build a general model to explain human dynamics throughout time, and there has been no consensus about either the pattern or the process involved. Most see the fortunes of human society as being determined by forces outside the ambit of man.
