The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilisation.
SIGMUND FREUD
Culture is roughly everything we do and monkeys don’t.
FITZROY SOMERSET, 4TH BARON RAGLAN
The human story did not of course finish with the ice ages. The ice spread down from the poles; the ice returned whence it came. Over and over again, ebbing and flowing like a mile-deep white tide. But then, after the ice had retreated and the sea level had risen for the umpteenth time, something changed in the world. The change was so profound that the train of events it set in motion could conceivably prevent the return of the ice. Not for a while. But for ever.
The development was, of course, farming.
For thousands of generations, humans had no choice but to eat what produce nature laid out on its table. As hunters, they had followed the great herds of game. As gatherers, they had picked fruit and berries from bushes and trees. But, around 8500 BC, in the south-west corner of Asia, there appeared something entirely new under the sun: a fresh and innovative way of living.
The Fertile Crescent is a band of biological abundance whose epicentre is the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in present-day Iraq, Syria and Turkey. Among the plants that thrived there were wild grasses with big edible seeds. No doubt people had grazed on these cereals for as long as they had grazed on other berries and fruit. In fact, since the plants often grew in large stands, people might have begun to rely on them for a significant part of their diet.
Around 12,000 BC, the world was still in the grip of intense cold, but the ice age was beginning to falter, and its last millennium was punctuated by spells when the climate warmed just a little. During one of these spells, according to British archaeologist Chris Scarre, people began to do something they had never done before. The details are sketchy. Perhaps they uprooted cereals and replanted them in moist rich soil close to one of the big rivers. Or maybe they simply weeded out competing plants in order to leave a field that was exclusively covered in cereals.
In the beginning, the cereals selected for special treatment were indistinguishable from their wild versions. But something subtle that people did began to change everything. They planted only the wild cereals with the biggest seeds and the easiest-to-remove husks. And, when they harvested their cereals, they replanted only the cereals that had borne the biggest seeds and whose husks popped open most readily. Gradually, because of these actions, the seeds grew bigger and easier to harvest season by season.
Inadvertently, without the slightest idea of what they were doing to the DNA of their crops, the farmers of the Fertile Crescent had become the first genetic engineers, exponents of evolution by human, or artificial, selection. Natural selection was not completely cut out of the equation. The plants that thrived were precisely those that could best tolerate the artificial environments created by humans – plants that grew fast even when exposed to the baking sun in unshaded fields or which grew strong when packed close together in rows. But, whether it was natural selection that was operating or human selection, it was operating to a human agenda. For the first time in history, people were directing the evolution of other species.
By 8500 BC, the cereals had diverged so significantly from their wild cousins that they were a different species. Wheat had become domesticated. And it was not alone. By 8500 BC, people had domesticated pea and olive too. And these were just the first of many domesticated crops that would follow over succeeding millennia. Modern agriculture had begun and nothing in the world of humans, nothing in the world, would be the same again.
An obvious question is why did farming start in the present interglacial and not in the previous one, between 130,000 and 115,000 years ago? A possible answer is that humans at the time had not yet evolved the intellectual capacities and imagination of fully modern humans. The sudden flowering of art across the world around 50,000 BC is often taken as evidence of a profound change in the wiring of human minds.
The changes brought about by the shift to growing food were profound. For the first time in history, people were able to live their whole lives in one location. Instead of brief overnight halts around campfires, they were able to stop for good in permanent settlements. That is not to say that that there had been no settlements before. People might have been able to stay put if, for instance, they were close to an abundant source of food such as a fish-filled lake. Farming, however, made it possible for a lifestyle that had been a rare exception to become widespread.
But the key change was not the creation of settlements but the creation of a food surplus. Farming can typically feed between 10 and 100 times as many people per square kilometre as hunting and gathering. The surplus of food meant more people could be supported, which meant the population could grow. Ironically, this growth inevitably meant that the food was spread ever more thinly, so, in the long term, people might actually have been more badly nourished than their hunter-gatherer ancestors. But, by this time, there were too many people per square kilometre to be supported by the old lifestyle. The point of no return had been passed and there was no going back.
The surplus of food meant not only that more people could be fed; it meant that not everyone needed to be engaged in obtaining food. For the first time it was possible to support non-productive people such as craftsmen who made bricks or pottery or jewellery.1 Of course, craftsmen could not exist without a market for their goods. And here the new developments fed off each other. The sedentary lifestyles permitted people to clutter their homes with belongings. By contrast, hunter-gatherers, continually on the move, were limited to what they could carry – a baby or a handful of spears.
But the food surplus, in addition to supporting craftsmen, could also support soldiers whose job was to defend a settlement and its fields. And not only soldiers but a chief. Hunter-gatherer societies tend to be egalitarian.2 However, settlements of many people are complex. And, just as the myriad functions of a cell need to be orchestrated by a central nucleus, the myriad functions of a village need to be orchestrated by some kind of central government. The control of people by such a ruling elite, with soldiers at its disposal, provided both dangers and opportunities. Inevitably, it would lead to conflicts over land and resources. But it would also spawn cities and, eventually, empires of hundreds of thousands, even millions, of souls.
Such vast accumulations of people were an extraordinary and unprecedented thing. Our great-ape cousins live in small bands and react violently to outsiders. Initially, humans might have shared their xenophobia. But, as communities grew in size, people had to overcome their knee-jerk instinct to lash out at others. Benjamin Franklin spelled out the recipe for living in large communities: ‘Be civil to all; sociable to many; familiar with few.’ The key importance of this was recognised by Sigmund Freud. ‘It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilisation is built up upon a renunciation of instinct,’ he wrote.3
Natural selection was probably operating here too. Those settlements where people were best at living in close proximity to each other without running amok had the lowest death rates and so grew faster than others. Their numerical domination meant that, over time, people became ever more passive and tolerant of each other. This is the view of Canadian-born psychologist Steven Pinker, who argues that, despite millions dying in the world wars of the twentieth century, the human race has shown a marked trend towards becoming less violent and warlike.4 ‘Civilisation is just a slow process of learning to be kind,’ wrote Tennessee Williams.
People might have actually gone so far along the road to getting on with each other that they now choose to flock together in cities where they can interact with many others. ‘People like being with other people,’ says Scarre. Charles Dickens, who found himself living at a unique time when nineteenth-century London was making the transition to a mega-city of many millions, was one of the first to notice the new opportunities for interactions between large numbers of people. It might explain why in his novels chance encounters play such a big role.
The growth of societies and the growth of their complexity eventually triggered another profound development in human history: the invention of writing. This did not happen overnight. At first, the wedge-shaped marks made on clay tablets by the Sumerians around 3400 BC recorded only dull commercial transactions. But basic cuneiform was superseded by written languages that could express non-utilitarian things such as thoughts and feelings. Just as the cooking pot acted as an external stomach, the written word acted as an external memory. Whereas only a small amount of knowledge could be transmitted between people verbally, an enormous amount could be now transmitted in written form. By means of writing, the human race acquired a collective brain. Its full awakening would require widespread literacy, which would take many millennia. But, even in the earliest days, the writing was on the wall (pun intended).
So far, I have not mentioned animals. But, of course, the first genetic engineers did not simply manipulate plants. They captured and tamed large mammals and bred them for passivity or meat content. In the process, animals too diverged from their wild cousins and became domesticated. Not only did they provide food but they provided the motive power to pull ploughs to break up the hard soil and to pull goods on wheeled carts. The first animals to be domesticated, again in the Fertile Crescent, were sheep and goats around 8000 BC. In China, pigs and silkworms were both domesticated by 7500 BC, along with rice and millet.
The importance of animals to humans cannot be overestimated. Everywhere in the world where there are people animals live with them, not just as walking larders but also as pets. The American anthropologist Pat Shipman argues that our relationship with animals is central to understanding the extraordinary success of humans.5 She points out that, from the moment humans first became artists around 50,000 BC, they rarely depicted themselves or their environment. Instead, almost exclusively, they painted prey animals. Their stunningly vivid representations, perfect in every anatomical detail, reveal what fantastically keen observers of animal behaviour they were. And it was this intense studying of animals, Shipman argues, that enabled humans to out-think their prey. It is the key, she believes, to understanding how a puny and insignificant ape, outrun and outgunned by big predators on the African savannah, managed to gain such control over its world.
Controversially, Shipman even believes that language might have arisen in order to exchange knowledge about animals. She believes this explains why humans domesticated an animal such as the dog, which is rarely eaten and which actually competes for the very same food resources with humans. Dogs were domesticated at least 17,000 years ago and possibly as early as 32,000 years ago.6 The fact we keep pets, Shipman believes, reveals a profound important truth: without animals, humans are not humans.
Together, the domestication of plants and animals can be categorised as the invention of food production. This was the post-ice-age revolution that transformed the human race. Everything that has happened since has been a consequence of it. The birth of a sedentary lifestyle, first in villages, then in cities. The birth of specialised jobs. The creation of ruling elites. The birth of writing. The invention of war and creation of empires. In 8500 BC, a ball was set rolling that was unstoppable and that to this day is continuing to gather momentum.
There have been so many milestones along the road to the world of the twenty-first century that it is hard to know what to mention and what to leave out. But some of the most important developments occurred from the late fifteenth century onwards. Very significant was the advent of ships that could cross oceans, connecting Europe to the Americas, Africa, Asia, and finally Australia. This marked the beginning of a truly global civilisation. Later, towards the end of the eighteenth century, world trade was boosted enormously by mechanised factories that could mass-produce goods. This industrial revolution was powered first by water, then by coal, an energy source around 150 times more potent than human muscle power. Having access to such energy sources is one of the reasons that only a few per cent of the population are able to provide food for the overwhelming majority.
A development just before the industrial revolution, however, was also hugely significant. The rise of science, in the seventeenth century, illustrates how the collisions between ideas or technologies can spawn new ideas and new technologies. For thousands of years there had been craftsmen. By getting their hands dirty, they discovered how to make harder swords or better clay pots. But they worked by trial and error and never created a theory of what they were doing to guide them in finding ways to do it better. Besides the craftsmen, there were natural philosophers. Beginning with the Greeks more than two and a half millennia ago, they theorised loftily about the world but did not get their hands dirty in order to test their theories. What changed in the seventeenth century was that these two separate rivers of human expertise flowed together and became an unstoppable flood: science.
Isaac Newton epitomised the merger of the craft and philosophy traditions. He looked at the world, theorised about why it behaved the way it did, then got his hands dirty by carrying out experiments to test his theories against reality. The idea that by observing the world systematically it was possible to gain new knowledge was extraordinarily productive. It has led us to aeroplanes and antibiotics, cars and computers, neutron stars and nuclear reactors.
Science, the industrial revolution, ocean-going ships, and so many other things, were born in Europe. Together, such technologies ensured that it was Europeans who colonised the Americas and Australia and ultimately spawned our modern global society. This prompts a question. It was asked by the American geographer Jared Diamond in his book Guns, Germs and Steel: ‘Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents for the last 13,000 years?’7
Diamond believes it was not because of any intrinsic differences in human beings – people in the Americas and Australia were not more stupid or more lazy than their European counterparts – but because of differences in their circumstances. Together, Europe and Asia – the source of so many of Europe’s innovations – had a far bigger and more diverse population than either the Americas or Australia. Not only were there more societies to interact with each other but there were more individuals within each society interacting with each other. The overall effect was to boost the exchange of ideas and accelerate the rate at which people invented new things.
This, of course, prompts yet another question: why did Europe and Asia have a bigger population than the Americas and Australia? The answer, according to Diamond, was because they had a big head start in food production. This, in turn, was because the Fertile Crescent had a wider range of habitats, from deserts to rich soils to snowy mountaintops, which created a super-abundance of different plant species. At least a dozen of these were candidates for domestication compared with only a couple in, for instance, the Americas. These domesticated species were carried by farmers as they migrated from south-west Asia to Europe. Ultimately, the dominance of European culture comes down not to any intrinsic superiority of Europeans but to a mere accident of birth.
Even with the domestication of animals, Europe and Asia had significant advantages over the Americas and Australia. The ultimate reason for this actually pre-dates even the birth of modern agriculture in the Fertile Crescent. It has to do with the date at which humans arrived on different continents. People flooded into Europe and Asia very early in human history. Consequently, they carried unsophisticated stone tools and were not particularly effective hunters. Animals were able to live alongside them for a long while and learn to be fearful of them. This ensured the survival of the big mammals that one day would be candidates for domestication.
The Americas and Australia, on the other hand, were reached relatively recently by humans – Australia in about 50,000 BC and the Americas only in about 14,000 BC. Consequently, the first colonists were fully modern. Far from being unsophisticated hunters, they were lethal killers. And, sure enough, the arrival of humans in both Australia and the Americas appears to have coincided with the extinction of pretty much all of their giant mammals with the exceptions of the bison in North America and the llamas and alpacas in the Andes. The result of this was that, thousands of years later, when animals were first being domesticated in the Fertile Crescent, there were few suitable candidates for domestication in Australia and the Americas.
The huge disadvantages people in the Americas and Australia faced in domesticating crops and domesticating animals is why their populations did not grow big enough to permit the feverish level of interaction necessary to create novel inventions. And this explains why it was the Spanish who sailed across the ocean to South America and not the Aztecs and Incas who sailed in the opposite direction to Europe. Furthermore, the empires of South America did not have horses, steel armour or guns, which meant that bands of a few dozen mounted Spaniards were able to rout native armies numbered in thousands.
In North America, the Native Americans who met the first Europeans were at an even bigger disadvantage than their cousins in the south of the continent. They possessed only weapons of stone and wood and no animals that could be ridden.
In the human catastrophe that unfolded, something like 95 per cent of the native people of the Americas were wiped out. Although many succumbed to guns, it was not actually superior technology that killed most of the people in the Americas, not to mention Australia. It was diseases such as smallpox and measles brought by the Europeans. This poses yet another puzzle. ‘It’s striking’, says Diamond, ‘that Native Americans evolved no devastating epidemic diseases to give to Europeans, in return for the many devastating epidemic diseases that Indians received from the Old World.’
Yet again, the explanation has to do with the head start Europe and Asia enjoyed in food production. Many human diseases originate in common domestic animals such as pigs and chickens. Over thousands of years, the farming of many more animals, and many more types of animals, had created many more animal diseases. Occasionally, these spread to people and became human diseases. Measles and tuberculosis, for instance, evolved from diseases of cattle, flu from a disease of pigs, and smallpox possibly from a disease of camels. The Americas, by contrast, had very few native domesticated animal species from which humans could catch diseases.
The animal diseases that adapted themselves to humans in Europe and Asia ravaged the large population. Countless millions died but the survivors were left with immunity – immunity that, crucially, the conquered peoples of the Americas and Australia simply did not have. ‘Civilisation is what makes you sick,’ observed artist Paul Gauguin.
The differences between human societies on different continents, according to Diamond, are not down to any biological differences between people but down to differences in continental environments. Mark Twain recognised this even in the nineteenth century. ‘There are many humorous things in the world,’ he wrote, ‘among them the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.’8
Looking back over the past 13,000 years since the end of the last ice age, it is clear what the driving force of most human innovation has been: Interaction. Interaction. Interaction. The settlement of people, first in villages, then cities, boosted the opportunities for people to exchange ideas and ramped up the rate of technological advance. Today, we have a global civilisation with more than 7 billion people and the confluence of computers and telecommunications has spawned the internet, which has exponentially boosted the number of interactions between people. In 2012, the number of text messages sent a year was estimated to be a staggering 8.7 trillion.9
But things are not looking good for the human race. Not only do we have the ability to destroy our global civilisation in a single day with nuclear weapons but our sheer numbers are putting the global environment under creaking strain. The climate is changing, the seas are losing their productivity and the species we share the planet with are suffering a major extinction event. Not since the advent of cyanobacteria, which poisoned the planet with oxygen, has a single species had such a devastating effect on the Earth. All we can hope is that the unprecedented level of interactions between human beings will throw up the solutions we need to head off a catastrophe.
Our extinction now would be a terrible shame because we have come so far and have achieved so much. Perhaps the most extraordinary development occurred on 20 July 1969 when a human being for the first time set foot on another world. In the annals of life on Earth, Neil Armstrong’s ‘one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind’ was the most significant development since the first amphibian crawled out of the ocean onto dry land 350 million years ago. Who would have guessed, when australopithecines left footprints in the Laetoli dust that, 3.6 million years later, their descendants would leave footprints in the dust of the Sea of Crises?
But let us not get carried away. Let us remember why we are here: because our farming ancestors learned the subtle art of genetic engineering. As an anonymous writer observed, ‘Man – despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments – owes his existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains.’
1 See Chapter 10, ‘The invention of time travel: Money’.
2 While today’s hunter-gatherer societies do appear to be egalitarian, they have been pushed by farmers into marginal habitats such as deserts. Ancient hunter-gatherers, by contrast, lived in environments with much more abundant animals and plants. It is possible, therefore, that they may not be directly comparable.
3 Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents.
4 Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity.
5 Pat Shipman, ‘Man’s Best Friends: How Animals Made Us Human’, New Scientist, 31 May 2011, p. 32.
6 According to a detailed analysis of a fossil dog skull carried out by a team led by Mietje Germonpré of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels ( Journal of Archaeological Science, vol. 36 (2009), p. 473).
7 Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel.
8 Mark Twain, Following the Equator.
9 Heather Kelly, ‘OMG, the text message turns 20’, CNN, 3 December 20 12, http://tinyurl.com/cgoakdg.