Brian M. Fagan > Quotes

“Everyone in England ate mutton, but not horse meat, especially as influential people considered horses they had ridden both noble and too close to humans for either clerics or lords to consume.”
― Brian M. Fagan, The Intimate Bond: How Animals Shaped Human History

“The heyday of the Norse, which lasted roughly from A.D. 800 to about 1200, was not only a byproduct of such social factors as technology, overpopulation and opportunism. Their great conquests and explorations took place during a period of unusually mild and stable weather in northern Europe called the Medieval Warm Period-some of the warmest four centuries of the previous 8,000 years.”
― Brian M. Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850

“at a seminal yet still little known moment in history, Homo sapiens developed the full battery of cognitive skills that we ourselves possess. After a surprisingly short time, perhaps a mere five thousand years, their descendants moved northward into Eurasia and Europe.”
― Brian M. Fagan, Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans

“A cubic meter of hazelnuts is sufficient to provide 10 percent of the annual energy needs of a mixed population of twenty people.”
― Brian M. Fagan, The Attacking Ocean: The Past, Present, and Future of Rising Sea Levels

“As the late Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould once memorably remarked, we humans are all descendants from the same African twig.”
― Brian M. Fagan, Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans

“In the eighth century, the Catholic Church created a huge market for salted cod and herring by allowing the devout to consume fish on Fridays, the day of Christ's crucifixion, during the forty days of Lent and on major feast days.”
― Brian M. Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850

“We know of major floods from at least three violent storm surges that hit the German and Dutch coasts in about 1200, 1219, and 1287.14 The surge of January 16, 1219, the feast day of St. Marcellus, killed at least thirty-six thousand people. By bizarre coincidence, one of the greatest and best known medieval surges, known as the Grote Mandrenke (the Great Killing of Men) of 1362, struck on the same day as the 1219 cataclysm:”
― Brian M. Fagan, The Attacking Ocean: The Past, Present, and Future of Rising Sea Levels

“Today, our ecological sits seem to have overtaken our spiritual transgressions as the cause of climatic change.”
― Brian Fagan

“To hunt successfully and survive, they had to know the habits of their quarry as well as they knew their own kin. Success depended as much on stalking as it did on weapons.”
― Brian M. Fagan, Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans

“A minimum of twenty-five thousand people, certainly many more, perished in the Great Drowning. Storm surges were even more frequent between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, such as the apocalyptic St.”
― Brian M. Fagan, The Attacking Ocean: The Past, Present, and Future of Rising Sea Levels

“A French general, Pierre Bosquet, famously remarked, “It is magnificent, but it is not war: it is madness.”
― Brian M. Fagan, The Intimate Bond: How Animals Shaped Human History

“About 90 percent of the past five hundred thousand years have been colder than today, and the world’s climate has been in transition from cold to warm or back again for about three quarters of that time.”
― Brian M. Fagan, Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans

“Let us hope it is not true,” cried one horrified lady upon hearing that humans were descended from apes, “but if it is, let us pray it will not become generally known.”
― Brian M. Fagan, Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans

“The Gulf Stream is part of a vast global conveyor belt of moving water that has the power to change climate and alter human lives....

The Atlantic conveyor system has power equivalent to one hundred Amazon Rivers and is one of the great drivers of global climate.”
― Brian Fagan

“Like the Norse conquests, cathedrals too are a consequence of a global climatic phenomenon, an enduring legacy of the Medieval Warm Period.”
― Brian M. Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850

“The artificial hills and plazas of even small centers were symbolic depictions of the sacred landscape of mountains, hills, trees, and lakes, material replicas of the Maya cosmos designed as the settings for elaborate public rituals that sanctified Maya life—and water management. Tikal, Belize's Caracol, and other centers were giant water catchments, their pyramids "water mountains.”
― Brian Murray Fagan

“Self aggrandizement is the most worthy and agreeable of sovereigns' occupations," the king wrote to the Marquis de Villars in 1688.7”
― Brian M. Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850