Introduction

This chapter is an introduction to the rest of the book. It describes the background setting with major scientific breakthroughs in archaeology, paleogenetics, and paleoclimatology and then relates this to economics and the growing interest in very long-run development. I give a brief outline of the central theoretical framework of this book in terms of the co-evolution of factors of production and the Climate Pulse Model of human development. An overview of key related works in the literature is then given. Lastly, I present the basic outline of the book’s 15 chapters.