* Here and in the following pages, when speaking about Sapiens language, I refer to the basic linguistic abilities of our species and not to a particular dialect. English, Hindi and Chinese are all variants of Sapiens language. Apparently, even at the time of the Cognitive Revolution, different Sapiens groups had different dialects.

* A ‘horizon of possibilities’ means the entire spectrum of beliefs, practices and experiences that are open before a particular society, given its ecological, technological and cultural limitations. Each society and each individual usually explore only a tiny fraction of their horizon of possibilities.

* It might be argued that not all eighteen ancient Danubians actually died from the violence whose marks can be seen on their remains. Some were only injured. However, this is probably counterbalanced by deaths from trauma to soft tissues and from the invisible deprivations that accompany war.

* Even after Akkadian became the spoken language, Sumerian remained the language of administration and thus the language recorded with writing. Aspiring scribes thus had to speak Sumerian.

* An ‘intimate community’ is a group of people who know one another well and depend on each other for survival.

* Paradoxically, while psychological studies of subjective well-being rely on people’s ability to diagnose their happiness correctly, the basic raison d’être of psychotherapy is that people don’t really know themselves and that they sometimes need professional help to free themselves of self-destructive behaviours.