5

Homo Sapiens

(195,000–5000 BC)

How a single species of humans, sapiens, became the last to survive on earth

ANY IDEA HOW close we are to midnight on our twenty-four-hour clock of earth history? A few minutes left to go, perhaps? After all, we’ve still got all human ‘recorded’ history to tackle, starting from when the first large-scale human civilizations emerged in the Middle East through to today, with approaching seven billion of us living on the planet.

How about three seconds? That’s it. Imagine how short sitting doing nothing for just three seconds would seem compared to doing nothing for the length of a full day. Anyone attempting that rather daft experiment would get a good impression of how much earth history actually took place before the first Homo sapiens could be heard calling across the hot, dusty African plains.

We now know it was from Africa that Homo sapiens, or modern humans, came. We did not descend from the Neanderthals. The two species lived at the same time for thousands of years, and while there was probably a little interbreeding, recent genetic evidence suggests that there was not much. Red hair, freckles and pale skin are features that may have been handed down from the Neanderthals.

Instead we must look back to Africa – to the descendants of Homo erectus, Turkana Boy’s people (see page 71). Bones from twenty-one sites across Africa have been found, stretching back almost 500,000 years, and they paint a picture that shows how small evolutionary steps along the Homo line led to who we are today.

The oldest Homo sapiens fossils yet found came from southern Ethiopia. In 1967 two human skulls were discovered buried deep in mud at the bottom of the Omo River. They have recently been re-dated, and are now thought to originate from about 195,000 years ago. These skulls, called Omo I and Omo II, certainly look as if they belong to the immediate predecessors of modern humans. They are slightly larger than modern human skulls, but otherwise strikingly similar. They have been classified as a subspecies of Homo sapiens called idaltu. They have flat faces and prominent cheekbones, but not the protruding brow ridge of the earlier Homo erectus and the Neanderthals.

Genetic research supports the idea that all humans alive today emerged from a single evolutionary line in Africa from about this time. But one strange feature remains unsolved. There is surprisingly little genetic variation between people alive today – much less than in most species of mammals. Even our closest cousins, the chimpanzees, show genetic differences ten times greater across the spectrum of their species than we do.

Such a small variation can only mean one thing: at some point Homo sapiens must have shrunk to a very few individuals – perhaps between 1,000 and 10,000 people – all of whom shared a very similar genetic code. This idea has set experts off on another hunt, to find some event that fits in with the idea of Homo sapiens suffering an almost fatal collapse in population early on in its history.

One candidate for such an event is a massive Category 8 volcanic eruption that occurred about 75,000 years ago at Toba, on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. A giant hot spot of molten lava is thought to have burst through the earth’s crust, releasing energy 3,000 times greater than that of the huge eruption of Mount St Helens in Washington State, USA in 1980. One site in India today still has ash deposits from the eruption of Toba that are six metres thick. Such an enormous explosion would have created a blanket of dust in the atmosphere, blocking out the sunlight for months or even years, triggering a sudden drop in global temperatures and possibly even starting an Ice Age all by itself.

Maybe there are other reasons. A virus, perhaps, that wiped out large parts of the human population? At the moment, no one knows. But from a very small stock of African ancestors, Homo sapiens walked its way around the world, copying the migrations of his ancestors, eventually to supplant all other species of humans. The last of these, the Neanderthals, survived until about 24,000 years ago, which is the date of their very last known traces, in Gorham’s Cave, Gibraltar.

Did we kill them? Did we eat them? Or did they die because of climate change or through lack of food during an especially nasty Ice Age snap? It seems that changes in the climate about 30,000 years ago were especially severe in Central Asia and northern Europe, which is where the Neanderthals lived.

The great migration

It was probably a warm interglacial interlude within the Ice Age, between about 130,000 and 90,000 years ago, that initially triggered large-scale Homo sapiens migrations across Africa. Then, from about 70,000 years ago, the climate cooled, causing glaciers to form on the tops of mountain ranges so that parts of north-west and north-east Africa were cut off from each other, as well as from the south. As Charles Darwin discovered, whenever a species is physically separated, small variations begin to creep into its respective gene pools, creating diversity. So it was with modern man, giving us our four main ethnic groups: Khosian (African), Caucasian (European), Mongolian (Chinese and American Indian) and Aboriginal (Australian).

From about 60,000 years ago, these four groups of humans emigrated from Africa separately and in their own time across the world, exporting their small genetic differences with them (see plate 3). Some Homo sapiens swept across Asia, displacing the last of the Neanderthals either by depriving them of food, hunting them or maybe occasionally absorbing them into their own species through limited interbreeding. Some turned south and reached India and China. They learned to build rafts. From about 40,000 years ago, Australia, for many millions of years the preserve of marsupial mammals, became another human hunting ground as the first people paddled ashore.

The first Homo sapiens to arrive in Europe walked eastwards out of Africa about 50,000 years ago, and then came north via the Middle East. They brought with them enormous changes in lifestyles, technology and culture, including the world’s first spears specially designed for flight rather than close-range use, as with Neanderthal-style clubs.

The time from about 50,000 years ago marks the beginning of the final one second to midnight on the twenty-four-hour clock of earth history. It has been described as the ‘Great Leap Forward’ because the complexity of human tools increased dramatically. Bones, tusks and antlers were used for the first time to carve out ornaments as well as to craft useful household items such as needles for sewing, and spoon-like oil lamps that burned animal fats. Jewellery, in the form of necklaces and pendants, has been found buried in the graves of these people. The first ceramic pots date from this period, as do the world’s first known sculptures such as the Venus of Willendorf, a female fertility figure found in Austria in 1908 which is thought to date from about 24,000 years ago. Some of the first known cave paintings date back to the same era. They can be seen to this day in the caves of Lascaux, in the Dordogne region of France.

The earth was far cooler back then. The last of the great ice sheets swept down from the North Pole about 22,000 years ago, to disappear rather quickly 12,000 years later. During this time some people adapted to the changes in climate by developing paler skin, which helped produce sufficient quantities of vitamin D for bone formation despite the weaker sunlight of the Ice Age.

Homo sapiens arrived in Britain about 20,000 years ago. They walked across the Channel from France, since it didn’t flood until the end of the last big Ice Age melt, about 10,000 years ago. But they weren’t the first to arrive. Up to seven previous attempts were made by earlier people to populate the British Isles, starting with Homo erectus some 700,000 years ago. Each time, the populations of humans died out, probably because of the horrendously icy conditions that periodically swept over the islands as far south as present-day London. Even in the very south the cold would sometimes have been too much for any type of human to bear.

About 15,000 years ago giant glaciers still locked up much of the earth’s waters, lowering sea levels so that a massive land bridge the size of Poland, called Beringia, connected the eastern tip of Russia to Alaska across what is now a ninety-five-kilometre-wide stretch of sea called the Bering Strait. In those days people could cross by foot from Asia to North America – a land that until then had probably been free from human habitation, although some scientists think people may have rafted there a few thousand years before from south Asia via the Pacific islands. North and South America were the last of the great habitable continents to be populated by man, and are still appropriately called the New World even today. It was an opportunistic walk all the way across Asia, following big animals, hunting on the move, making the most of nature’s twisting and turning climate changes.

With another land bridge via Panama linking the two great Americas, it wasn’t long before the first people from North America wandered down to the southern American continent, where the climate was warmer and the land rich in vegetation and game.

The arrival of Stone Age humans in this part of the world – as in Australia – came with dramatic consequences for much of the earth’s wildlife. Although a few of nature’s ecosystems lingered on without any human representation – New Zealand and Iceland were untouched by humans until about 800 AD and 1000 AD respectively – many of the world’s living creatures were by now beginning to succumb to mankind’s growing influence as he spread out to envelop the whole of planet earth.

Life in a nomadic state of nature

Until about 10,000 years ago there were few, if any, permanent homes or villages. People moved around all the time from place to place. Men would hunt animals, and women gathered wild fruit and nuts. Sometimes the women helped with the hunting too, especially when trying to catch an animal, like a deer, which needed to be surrounded on all sides to prevent it from escaping.

Living as a traveller, a nomad, meant people had few if any actual possessions. All they had was what they could carry. In cooler climates they wore animal skins and furs; in hotter areas many went around almost naked. Why carry what you don’t need? They took essential provisions with them, such as water inside gourds, vegetables belonging to the pumpkin family which can easily be hollowed out to make bottles. They would also carry spears or bows and arrows for hunting, and flint implements for skinning dead animals and lighting fires.

These people needed little else. The whole idea of owning anything was completely alien to them. Their habit was to share things with each other, because it meant there was less to carry. There was no need for money, because they hunted and gathered whatever and whenever they needed. They had no use for storage areas or farm buildings. They had no property, and there were no signs saying PRIVATE – NO HUNTING HERE because no one owned any land. It was, like the air we breathe today, something common to us all, a resource to be shared between all living things: plants, animals and people.

People lived in this state of nature from the time of their first appearance as Homo habilis, or even as far back as the Australopithecus, Lucy’s people, dating back at least three million years. They hunted when they were hungry, slept when they were tired, and when the land was void of fruit and meat they moved on elsewhere, giving the earth a chance to restore, recover and renew.

Were the people living this wandering, possession-free lifestyle happy with their lot? It is interesting to note that before people started living in towns and making weapons out of metals like copper, bronze and iron there is little evidence of extensive warfare or violence.

A deep regard for all things natural was the basis of the hunter-gatherers’ mythology, or religion. For them the woods were full of magic and wonder. They contained the spirits of their dead ancestors, who returned in the afterlife to protect, guide and comfort the living – or so they thought. The woods were their ultimate source of food, warmth, habitation, medicine and shelter. To them, nothing was more important than looking after nature’s forests. They trusted completely in her abundance and her resources.

Perhaps the biggest long-term strength of the hunter-gatherers’ lifestyle was that it provided an inbuilt control on the overall level of human population. Hunter-gatherers relied on travelling by foot so it was necessary for them to have their children well spaced apart – one every four or five years at most – because it is impossible to carry too many children at once. A stable population of about five million hunter-gathering humans lived on earth for tens of thousands of years. It was a natural limit, a sustainable level, founded on a nomadic way of life.

Adapting to climate change

Dramatic cliffs of ice have repeatedly bulldozed their way down from the ice caps over the last three million years. Sometimes they have covered as much as 30 per cent of the earth’s entire land mass in glaciers and ice sheets more than a mile thick. But because such climate changes happened reasonably slowly, life generally adapted well.

Large animals became furrier, like the woolly mammoth, so they could live in the cold. Humans became smaller and hairier, like the Neanderthals, and some of them even turned white, preserving heat and helping to reflect away dangerous ultraviolet rays. Such natural evolutionary adaptations saw them through the worst of the cold. The last glacial period ended rather suddenly. About 14,000 years ago average temperatures on the earth rose by six degrees, easily enough to flip the climate from severe Ice Age to the much balmier conditions we have today.

Swings in temperature on earth normally happen because the planet veers slightly nearer to or further from the sun during its annual orbits, making the climate hotter or colder. Another factor is the way in which the earth spins on its axis. It actually behaves like a slightly out-of-control spinning top so that over long periods of time its tilt can vary from twenty-one to twenty-seven degrees, making big differences to the temperatures of the poles. Scientists are fairly sure that it was thanks to these orbital variations and spinning-top cycles that, between about 14,000 and 11,000 years ago, temperatures warmed up enough to give a hot spell of a few thousand years in between the bitter conditions of the Ice Age.

Warm episodes within an Ice Age are called interglacials. We are experiencing one now – it began about 14,000 years ago. Thanks to human-induced global warming, this one may last much longer than others, or it may even spin the world’s climate out of its forty-million-year-old Ice Age altogether if the polar ice caps melt completely.

About 18,000 years ago, when the last ice glacial was at its height, the North American landscape, south of the enormous ice sheet that covered the Great Lakes, looked like parkland – a mixture of trees and grasses, a paradise for roaming wild mammals. Large carnivorous mammals such as lions and sabre-toothed cats fed on mastodons and massive woolly mammoths.

Bison roamed across the rich pastures. But these bison were no cows – they were almost as big as elephants. Beavers, which we know as smallish river creatures, grew as large as today’s biggest grizzly bear, and the bears back then were almost twice the size they are now. The earth was full of enormous mammals, known today as megafauna. Big beasts fared better in the bitter climate because their large bodies helped protect their vital organs from the extreme cold.

Upsetting nature’s balance

There have been at least thirty ice-overs and melts in the last two million years – some more severe than others. Each time nature and her living things bounced back as individual species adapted to different climates, hot or cold. The last big melt, which reached its height about 14,000 years ago, should have been just like any other. But for some reason this time something went catastrophically wrong. Scientists and historians are still trying to figure out exactly why. The consequences of this disaster continue to shape human and earth history to this day.

At least eighty mammal families were alive in North America when the ice sheets melted. Some of them had survived tens of millions of years. Yet, suddenly and mysteriously, they died out. Horses, big cats, elephants, mammoths and mastodons, camels, giant beavers, peccaries (American pigs), sloths and the glyptodont, an armadillo the size of a pick-up truck – all of them disappeared. In all, thirty-three out of forty-five families of large mammals became extinct, leaving most of the animals in North America no bigger than a turkey. Even the beavers and bears that survived became dwarves in comparison to their ancestors. Today’s North American bison are the smallest that have ever lived. In all, experts reckon that more than 70 per cent of America’s large-animal population disappeared within about a thousand years.

Pretty much the same thing happened in Australia, which lost thirteen species of large mammals, although the extinctions there started earlier. Victims included the giant kangaroo, the giant horned tortoise, the rhino-sized wombat and its relatives, the diptrodonts, as well as the fierce marsupial lion. In the end, nothing larger than today’s kangaroo survived. Yet in North Africa, Europe and Asia, even as the glaciers retreated and the seas rose, most of the large mammals survived: elephants, horses, camels, wolves, big cats – they all made it through.

What on earth was going on? Why did so many animals in Europe and Asia survive when those in the New World and Australia suffered dramatic and sudden extinctions?

Some experts think that the climate was to blame. As the temperatures rose, large animals were at a disadvantage because their big bodies meant it was harder for them to keep cool. These creatures may have died of heat exhaustion. Yet large mammal species had survived many previous interglacial periods when the temperature was warm, and what about the African elephants, lions and tigers? How did they survive?

Another theory is that some mysterious disease swept over the New World, devastating its animal populations. But how could such a bug target only the big animals, leaving the smaller ones and humans as survivors?

Humanity makes its first major mark

The most popular theory was first put forward by American scientist Paul Martin nearly forty years ago. He put it down to the arrival of Homo sapiens. In both America and Australia these mass mammal extinctions followed shortly after the arrival of the first humans. In Australia they began about 40,000 years ago, in the Americas about 13,000 years ago. According to Martin, because animals in these continents had never come across humans, they were vulnerable. Read the diary of any explorer who encounters a natural habitat where no man has ever been, for example Charles Darwin on the Galapagos Islands, and you will find that they always comment on the lack of timidity of the wildlife. It’s still like this today in the few parts of the world which have no humans living near them.

So when the first human wanderers arrived, flint weapons, bows, arrows and spears in hand, the animals they came across were fearless. They may have looked on with curiosity at these half-hairy, two-legged apes clambering ashore, but chances are that the horses would have just munched on. Even the lions, provided they weren’t too hungry, would probably have just fallen back to sleep. Thus they were easy prey for hunter-gathering man with his sharp spears – so much so that in less than a thousand years most of the big game had been slaughtered, and many species were on the verge of extinction.

The theory also explains why in North Africa, Europe and Asia many similar animals survived the presence of mankind. Animals here had evolved alongside human species for over two million years, and had grown used to their appetite for meat and hunting. The experience of their ancestors had evolved into a well-honed instinct that allowed them to survive in sufficient numbers, avoiding contact with humans by running away and hiding. This meant that the mass extinctions seen in Australia and the Americas simply never occurred.

So, the theory goes, in just a few years Homo sapiens single-handedly deprived nearly half the world’s land masses of all their large creatures by hunting them to oblivion.

Recently this theory, called the Pleistocene Overkill, has itself come under attack. For example, it doesn’t explain why some species not generally eaten by humans, like sloths, became extinct, while others that were hunted, like bison, survived. Mass slaughter by humans also doesn’t explain why beavers, bears and bison all became so small.

The best theory seems to be one that blends the arrival of humans with the effects of natural, cyclical climate change. It goes like this: when humans first arrived on the virgin continents of Australia and the Americas, they indeed found big game easy prey. Many of the key predator species, such as lions, tigers and wolves, were killed off in massive numbers by the two-legged hunter-gatherers. At the same time temperatures rose rapidly, causing the glaciers to melt and the seas to rise. What had once been a rich American landscape of parkland trees and pastures gave way to huge stretches of arid inland savannahs with dried-up waterholes that turned into thick conifer forests near the much wetter coasts.

Because humans killed off so many of the larger, carnivorous predator species, the populations of these animals’ prey – herbivores such as bison, deer, sloths, horses and camels – grew uncontrollably because there was nothing to eat them. They became so numerous that there simply wasn’t enough food to go around. Combined with the changes in vegetation caused by rapid climate change, the effect was catastrophic. Herbivores were wiped out in their millions through starvation because the landscape couldn’t support them any more, and only small species which could endure long periods consuming little food and water survived.

The intensive overgrazing of these huge overpopulations also contributed to climate change, accelerating the transition from parkland to grassland, making the landscape even less suitable for supporting future generations of large animals.

How fragile are nature’s ecosystems. Add a new bit of something over here (humans), and see them remove something else over there (lions and sabre-toothed tigers). Now throw in a bit of random climate change, and devastation sets in on a massive scale. The role of humans in the annihilation of the large herbivorous marsupials and placental mammals of Australia and the Americas between 40,000 and 12,000 years ago – at the beginning of the last second to midnight on the twenty-four-hour clock of earth history – was humanity’s first big impact on the earth’s fragile, changing natural environment. It was not the last.

Artificial selection

Mankind had begun to make its mark. But the reckless slaughter of carnivores, its full consequences yet to play out on the stage of human and earth history, was matched by the start of another revolution that wove together the fate of humans and the earth’s living systems as never before.

Starting from about 12,000 years ago, history begins to reveal the first attempts by people to control and adapt natural evolution to suit their own needs. It starts with the beginning of farming – the artificial breeding of animals and the intensive growing of particular plants, or crops, for food.

Natural selection changed life on earth over billions of years, from simple single-celled microbes into everything from fruiting fungi to jumping jerboas, and slimy slugs to venomous vipers. These changes were caused by small genetic differences between generations that increased a species’ chances of survival in the earth’s many constantly changing environments. But about 12,000 years ago, when humans first started to cultivate the land and tame wild animals, they hijacked the process. They began what is now called artificial selection. Instead of nature selecting the most successful specimens in the wild, humans started to choose, breed, protect and grow those that suited them best.

Artificial selection allowed people to settle – to live permanently in one place – because all the food they needed could be sourced in one spot. They started to build houses and to live in villages all year round, which then grew into towns, which then grew into cities, which grew into states, and which, ultimately, turned into civilizations. With the advent of farming came the first sedentary lifestyles, and with them massive increases in human populations, the re-sculpting of the earth’s landscape to suit food production and the beginnings of modern diseases, almost all of which originate from humans living in close proximity to domesticated animals.

The change to farming also marks the beginnings of all those jobs that aren’t associated with food production because, for the first time ever, there was usually enough food to support people who weren’t directly involved in its provision. Farming also meant that people could have more offspring, as they no longer needed to carry their children with them. They could store their food in granaries and afford to give birth every two years, if not more often. There was the added benefit that living in a village or small town meant that there were more people around to help look after young children, encouraging families to grow.

As the populations of villages and towns increased, those not involved in farming could become artisans – skilled workers – who made artefacts like pottery, jewellery and clothes for settled people. They could also explore new technologies such as wheels, chariots and armour made from pliable raw materials, which they learned to extract from the ground in the form of copper, bronze and iron.

Then there were merchants, who began to trade the products that artisans manufactured, along with any surplus food left over from the farms. Trade meant travel, ships, writing, accounting and money. Other jobs for non-food-producers included making sure that the village or town stayed on the right side of the gods, giving the best possible chance of good harvests and fending off evil events. These early priests or holy men eventually helped give birth to many of the major religions of the world.

Growing numbers of settled populations required new forms of organization and control. The world’s first kings and emperors emerged, with their aristocracies and bureaucrats, whose jobs were to collect taxes, issue laws and administer justice for all to see. Kings could afford to protect their power with armies because, thanks to farming crops and animals, it was now possible to feed thousands of troops using stored grain made into bread, or tamed animals that could be milked, eaten or used for pulling carts or carrying soldiers into battle. Farming permitted campaigns of attack to glorify and expand these new urban cultures, which soon began to spawn all over the ancient world.

An experiment with farming

Common sense suggests that humans didn’t take up farming because they wanted to. Compared to the easy life of the hunter, with plenty of game around, and where one decent kill could feed a family for a week, the lot of a crop farmer was painful and arduous. For a start, crops could be harvested only at certain times of the year, so arable farming was certainly no substitute for the traditional fast-food culture of meat on demand.

Planting, weeding, digging and harvesting were just a few of the miserable tasks that had to be endured long before a single loaf of bread could be baked. Seeds from barley, wheat and rye, which were the first crops cultivated by man, had to be collected by hand from the stalks of the grasses and ground up into flour using the most primitive of food processors, a pestle and mortar.

And these weren’t the seeds we are used to today. They were natural and wild, not the product of generations of artificial selection. For good reason, nature had designed them to be as light as possible, loosely attached to the stalk so that wind power had the best chance of blowing them far and wide, spreading them to other areas, where they could germinate and reproduce in the wild. But, as any arable farmer will tell you, small seeds that fall easily from the stalk are a bread-winner’s nightmare. A large quantity of this type of wheat is needed to make bread, not to mention the back-breaking task of picking up all the loose seeds that tumble irritatingly to the ground. Unpredictable, unpleasant and just plain hard work – that’s what farming crops was like 12,000 years ago. Skeletons of early farmers tell the story: twisted toes, buckled, arthritic knees and in some cases lower backs that are completely deformed due to the exhausting task of grinding grain into flour between slabs of stone.

A single word can explain the reasons for the rise of agriculture: stress. The cause 12,000 years ago was exactly the same as it is in many parts of the world today, and probably will be for many generations to come.

The most recent Ice Age was at its coldest 22,000 years ago. As the glaciers melted over the course of thousands of years, rising sea levels caused massive flooding all over the world. The big melt increased global temperatures by more than 7º C and was probably caused by cyclical changes in the earth’s rotation. It reached its peak about 14,000 years ago. At that point the oceans rose by a massive twenty-five metres in just 500 years after a huge ice shelf collapsed into the rising seas. By about 8,000 years ago the major melting was all but over, and the seas were at nearly the same level as they are today. One of the last areas to flood was the English Channel, cutting off Britain from the rest of Europe for the first time in more than 100,000 years.

Such dramatic and rapid changes in the natural environment were bound to have profound effects on living things. For mankind it meant that many traditional hunting grounds simply sank beneath the oceans. Regions of the world that were once rich forests, ideal for hunting and gathering, were reduced to barren deserts as patterns of rainfall and weather systems rapidly changed. In many parts of the world people were forced to move up into the hills or closer to freshwater lakes and rivers. In some areas the traditional lifestyle of moving from place to place became just too risky. There was either too little good hunting ground, or the land was too dry to sustain sufficient vegetation.

One example of how climate changes forced people into a new lifestyle can been seen in what is called the Fertile Crescent, the area that extends from upper Egypt, down the Nile to lower Egypt, Israel and Syria as far north as central Turkey, and then down towards the Gulf along the Euphrates Valley, through the ancient land of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Iran). Fourteen thousand years ago this was a rich land, with forests of oak and pistachio trees, plentiful rainfall and nutritious vegetation. It wasn’t at all like the dry, barren land we are familiar with today.

At about that time people called the Natufians settled near the water’s edge around modern-day Lebanon, because the sea provided them with a good source of fish for food (see plate 5). Others went higher up into the hills, where the soil was richer and where wild grasses grew. In fact, they found that this land was so rich in resources that it wasn’t necessary to be on the move all the time. In some seasons they would hunt for wild animals, such as gazelles; in others they would settle in small villages, where they lived in round mud and clay huts for some or all of the year. Several Natufian sites have recently been discovered and excavated in Lebanon, Syria and northern Israel.

What happened next was a freak of nature. It’s one that scientists predict could happen again, perhaps soon. Instead of temperatures continuing to rise as they had for the previous 8,000 years, the climate suddenly plunged into another Ice Age. In less than fifty years most of the world reverted to a state of deep freeze. This spell, called the Younger Dryas, lasted for about 1,300 years beginning approximately 12,700 years ago. Such dramatic and rapid climate changes had probably never been experienced in all human history.

A female revolution

The effect, particularly on people in Europe and the Mediterranean, was catastrophic. For those living in the Fertile Crescent, not only had their hunting grounds been drowned by rising sea levels following the Ice Age melt, but now, thanks to this sudden climate change, a severe drought set in and much of their remaining rich and fertile woodland was transformed into barren scrub.

Wild grasses were an important part of the staple Natufian diet, but in the now sweltering scrubland they simply withered away. Some experts think this is what may have led Natufian women to experiment with sowing seeds themselves and deliberately clearing the land to make it suitable for cultivating grasses such as wheat, barley and rye. In the face of starvation, these women stored the best seeds they could find, the biggest, sweetest and most easy to harvest, to sow on specially prepared land as a crop for the following year.

Was it their handiwork – an agricultural insurance policy – that triggered a chain of events that eventually led to the spread of crop farming all over the Middle East, Europe and northern Africa? Seeds are easy to store and transport. Natufian crop cultivation seems to be the earliest known to history. Evidence of their inventiveness comes from the discovery by modern archaeologists of farming tools, in the form of picks and sickle blades used for harvesting cereal crops. Alongside these ancient farming implements are pestles, mortars and bowls, all essential instruments for gathering and grinding seeds.

Archaeologists have painstakingly sifted material excavated from one Natufian site called Abu Hureyra in modern-day Syria (see plate 5). What they have found suggests that here was a culture that had learned to domesticate wild crops by selectively sowing the best-looking seeds. As the wild grasses that people relied on for food died out, they were forced to start cultivating the most easily grown seeds in order to survive. From the location of seed finds, it seems they planted them on slopes where moisture collected naturally. They then actively managed these hillside terraces and slopes by keeping the weeds and scrub at bay, so giving their crops the best possible chance of producing a good yield.

Natufians were also among the first people known to have started domesticating animals – in their case wolves. Choosing the tamest grey wolves, they eventually bred them into domestic dogs which could help them hunt other animals that lived in the regions nearby – in particular wild sheep, boar, goats and horses. With the help of dogs, it was a relatively small step to tame these other wild animals and breed them in one place for their meat and milk.

Natufian people loved their dogs. Graves have been found in which they and their dogs are buried side by side. Their graves also reveal another telltale sign of early animal domestication: a high infant mortality rate. One third of all Natufian graves unearthed so far contain the skeletons of children under the age of eight. Were these victims of the first diseases to mutate from animals and jump across to humans? If so, it points to the beginnings of a new type of human selection – people naturally more vulnerable to these new diseases died more often than those less susceptible. As generations passed, people who lived in close proximity to domesticated animals gained a greater immunity from the diseases they spread (for consequences in human history see page 237).

Once the Younger Dryas period ended, about 11,400 years ago, the climate recovered its previous balminess, and within the space of just a few years people in the Fertile Crescent were once again living in a land of plenty, with enough rainfall to support rich, diverse vegetation. But now there was a big difference. These people were equipped with a raft of potent new technologies, in the form of breeds and seeds, that gave them the opportunity to live in a radically different way of life.

From farms to cities

From about 9000 BC permanent new human settlements began to appear throughout the Middle East. These Neolithic farming people were now able to live in larger communities thanks to an abundance of stored food, gained from a knowledge of farming and the benefits of domesticating animals for their meat, milk and pulling power. Hunting and gathering was for some now becoming a tradition of the past.

Jericho is one of the oldest Neolithic towns (see plate 5). It is up to eight times larger than earlier Natufian sites, and is thought to be one of the first to have protective walls. Excavations have revealed rounded houses, many with more than one room, and open spaces for domestic activities such as cooking and washing. These early buildings have stone foundations, cobbled floors and walls made of mud/clay bricks. Every site has its own stone or clay silo for storing grain and other food, a sure sign that, for these people at least, the days of living on the move were now long gone. Necessity had forced them to adapt nature to their own needs, resulting in a new way of life.

Walls were erected on Jericho’s western side – not, as once believed, to defend the city from attack by jealous neighbours, but as a means of protecting it from mud flows and the flash floods that frequently swept in from the still-rising seas. This was another sign that here the human spirit was newly focused on trying to control and tame nature.

That these people were in touch with other emerging cultures is beyond doubt. Obsidian is a form of natural glass which forms when volcanic lava cools quickly. It was a highly sought-after material because it made the sharpest, most effective arrowheads. Obsidian occurs naturally in the rocky hills of central Turkey, but has been found hundreds of miles away in Neolithic Jericho, showing that long-distance trade routes were already well established. Why not exchange glass for precious seeds, already modified to be excellent to eat and easy to harvest, the fruits of more than a thousand years of special selection and hard graft? It is not difficult to imagine how, once under way in one place, agricultural know-how, seed supplies and domesticated animals quickly diffused throughout Europe, the Middle East and beyond.