According to Historical Understanding, no Single Individual "Made" Humans Civil

(1)   Michael has been making groundbreaking discoveries about a vanished ancient civilization at the southern tip of Africa. His continued efforts and analytical scientific approach have produced stunning new evidence that will force us to rethink our origins and rewrite our history books.

(2)    According to historical understanding, no single individual "gave" humans civilization, but rather the concept of civilization developed gradually over time as early human societies in regions like Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) began to establish complex systems of agriculture, urban living, writing, and social structures, with the Sumerians being considered the first known civilization around 4000 BCE; essentially, civilization arose from the collective advancements of these early human communities.

(3)     Counting the Dead: Estimating the Loss of Life in the Indigenous Holocaust, 1492-Present David Michael Smith University of Houston-Downtown During the past century, researchers have learned a great deal about the nature and scope of what Russell Thornton has called the demographic collapse of the Indigenous population in the Western Hemisphere after 1492.1 As David Stannard has explained, the almost inconceivable number of deaths caused by the invasion and conquest of these lands by Europeans and their descendants constitute “the worst human holocaust the world had ever witnessed.”2 Scholars have long had reliable information on the size of the Indigenous population in this hemisphere and this country at its nadir around the turn of the twentieth century. And in recent decades, investigators have developed a range of estimates of the Native population in the Western Hemisphere before 1492.