Blessed with a gift for illuminating "total history" in books like Millennium, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto has become a fixture on the annual New York Times Notables list, time and again proving himself a brilliantly original and accessible historian. Now, with this breakthrough new work, he achieves a masterful resolution to the riddle that has preoccupied centuries of state-of-the-art thinkers: the nature of civilization. To the author, societies become civilized by taming and warping nature. Civilizations can best be studied and ranked in relation to their environments. Exploring seventeen distinct habitats -- including tundra societies of Ice Age Europe, bushmen of South Africa, and island cultures of Polynesia -- Civilizations zooms in on features that will be familiar to any ecologist, but which actually reflect the quality of life and source of survival in civilizations across ten millennia.