This post will collect some of the books I referenced, read, or used to develop Gleba.

It won't be exhaustive and a book being present here doesn't mean that the ideas from it were used directly or that I agree with the authors - they may be here due to being used for verifying citations in other books or offer competing views to the approaches I chose to use in Gleba.

The main purpose of it, though, is just to provide a list of cool "Gleba-adjacent" books  for those who are interested in following the development more closely!

If you're going to read just one book

• The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow - while at times it paints stories that can be too colorful, it's perhaps the most accessible "counter" to the very popular "Germs, Guns, and Steel" by Jared Diamond. Environmental possibilism (rather than environmental determinism) is a crucial part of Gleba's overall design and The Dawn of Everything is a good introduction for people who are short on time but still want to be exposed to the sheer variety of shapes and forms that human societies can take

Special mentions

These books are the ones I return to most frequently, be it as a starting point for further research or as a direct reference

• The Lifeways of Hunter Gatherers, by Robert L. Kelly - Kelly's work is always a pleasure to read and this book is perhaps one of most comprehensive books on the subject, with copious references for further research
• Advanced economics, 5th edition, by David Romer - a pretty standard textbook for economics, very much recommended
• Atmospheric and Oceanic Fluid dynamics: Fundamentals and Large-Scale Circulation, by Geoffrey K. Vallis - another classic in its field, goes through both the theory and the practice of computational climate modelling  

Demography

• An Essay Concerning Mankind's Demographic Evolution, by J. N. Biraben (1980)
• The Lifeways of Hunter Gatherers, by Robert L. Kelly
• Spatiotemporal distribution of the North American Indigenous population prior to European contact, by Robert L. Kelly et al
• The Nganasan: Wild Reindeer Hunters of the Taimyr Peninsula, by Chester S. Chard
• Serpent in Eden: Dispersal of Foreign Diseases Into Pre-Mission California, by William Preston (1996)
• Historic and bioarcheological evidence supports late onset of post-Columbian epidemics in Native California, by Terry L. Jones et al
• Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492, by Alexander Koch et al
• Eastern North American Population at CA. A.D. 1500, by Georgie R. Milner and George Chaplin
• A global dynamic model for the neolithic transition, by Kai W. Wirtz and Carsten Lemmen
• Cultural and natural areas of native North America, by A. L. Kroeber (1939)
• The Human Crop, by Edward S. Deevey, Jr. (1956)
• Historical Estimates of World Population: An Evaluation, by John D. Durand (1977)
• Demographic Archeology, by Fekri A. Hassan
• Global hunter-gatherer population densities constrained by influence of seasonality on diet composition, by Dan Zhu et al
• Hunter-Gatherer Economic Complexity and "Population Pressure": A Cross-Cultural Analysis, by Lawrence H. Keeley (1988)
• Julian Huxley on Population and Human Destiny, by Julian Huxley
• A Concise History of World Population, by Massimo Livi-Bacci (2017)
• English medieval population: reconciling time series and cross sectional evidence, by S. Broadberry et al (2010)
• Portents of Plague from California's Protohistoric Period, by William L. Preston
• Size and Distribution of the Population in Late Bronze Age Messania Some Statistical Approaches, by Joan Carothers and William A. McDonald
• How Many Sumerians per Hectare? - Proving the Anatomy of an Early City, by Nicholas Postgate
• Their Number Become Thinned - Native American population dynamics in eastern North America, by Henry F. Dobyns
• The Names and Locations of Historic Chumash Villages, by Chester King and Thomas Blackburn
• Estimates of Upper Palaeolithic meta-population size in Europe  from archaeological data, by Jean-Pierre Bocquet-Appel et al
• World Population Estimates Interpolated and Averaged, by Scott Manning

Economics

• Advanced economics, 5th edition, by David Romer
• Productivity of pre-modern agriculture in the Cucuteni-Trypillia area, by A. Shukurov et al
• The Great Divergence in European Wages and Prices from the Middle Ages to the First World War, by Robert C. Allen
• Are tariffs bad for growth? Yes, say five decades of data from 150 countries, by Davide Furceri et al
• The prehistoric and preiundustrial deforestation of Europe, by Jed O. Kaplan et al
• From Convergence to Divergence: Portuguese Economic Growth, 1527-1850, by Nuno Palma and Jaime Reis
• The Size of the Economy and the Distribution of Income in the Roman Empire, by Walter Scheidel and Steven J. Friesen
• The Columbian Exchange: A History of Diseases, Food, and Ideas, by Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian

Geology

• Microplate tectonics: A new tectonic paradigm, by Sanzhong Li et al
• De Re Metallica, by Georgius Agricola (1556) - the oldest book on the list as of mid 2026, very insightful when it comes to the level of contemporary knowledge!

Climate

• Vertical Coordinate Formulations for Atmospheric Models, by Christoph Schar
• Vertical Differencing of the Primitive Equations in Sigma Coordinates, by Akio Arakawa and Max J. Suarez
• ExoPlaSim: Extending the Planet Simulator for Exoplanets, by Adiv Paradise et al (2022)
• The Planet Simulator: Towards a user friendly model, by Klaus Fraedrich et al
• qgs: A flexible Python framework of reduced-order multiscale climate models, by Jonathan Demaeyer et al
• Multi-decadal pacemaker simulations with an intermediate-complexity climate model, by Franco Molteni et al
• Atmospheric simulations using a GCM with simplified physical parametrizations. I: model climatology and variability in multi-decadal experiments, by Franco Molteni
• Atmospheric and Oceanic Fluid dynamics: Fundamentals and Large-Scale Circulation, by Geoffrey K. Vallis