Human beings used to be hunter-gatherers. There may be a slim chance that you’re still living that way, getting all your food from the natural world around you. I doubt it, though. Instead, you’re a student, an office worker, or perhaps a truck driver. Maybe you write code, or you’re an IT specialist. You perform any of thousands of occupations unimagined by early humankind. You use tools like cellphones and GPS navigation — things hardly dreamed of even when I was born in the middle of the 20th century, let alone at the dawn of civilization. Yet here I am, clacking away on a computer keyboard, checking my meager investments online, and listening to my streaming playlist just like a modern human being.
In a way, here too are the people of 30,000 years ago, my ancestors and yours. They may have thought a lot about berries, seeds, insects and grubs, shellfish, and calorie-rich bone marrow from fresh or scavenged kills. But they were endowed with the same basic biological equipment we have today. They were big-brained, tool-using bipeds with opposable thumbs, and after tens of thousands of years living hand to mouth from what they could find or kill, some of them spread across the world.
Either pushed by circumstance (climate change, for example) or inspired by new opportunities, they traveled from the lush forests, savannahs, and seacoasts of Africa to face the harsh challenges of virtually every environment on Earth, including mountains, deserts, frozen steppes, and remote islands. Eventually, they traded in stone spearheads and scrapers for tools and weapons made of copper, then of bronze, and then of iron … and ultimately built things like microcircuits and Mars rovers. Those people traveled and adapted and innovated all the way to today. They are you and me. In a weird way, then is now.
Around 12,000 years ago, not very long after the last Ice Age ended, some people whose technology consisted largely of sticks and rocks settled down. They were discovering that if they put seeds in the ground, plants would come up, and that this process worked best if they stuck around to tend the plants. This realization eventually led to farming.
Scholars point to an area they call the Fertile Crescent (see Figure 1-1), as a hotbed of early farming. Shaped like a mangled croissant, the Fertile Crescent stretched from what is now western Iran and the Persian Gulf through the river valleys of today’s Iraq and into western Turkey. Then it hooked south along the Mediterranean coast and the Jordan River through Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, and into northern Africa and the Nile Valley of Egypt. The crescent is where archaeologists have found some of the oldest cities in the world.
The chain reaction that starts civilizations goes something like this: Agriculture leads people to stay put in exchange for more food, and ample food enables population growth. When a group’s population reaches a certain size, there’s little chance of going back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, because there wouldn’t be enough food for so many people. Ample food also gives the growing population commodities to trade. Trade leads to more trade, which leads to more goods and wealth. Not everybody works in the fields. Some folks can specialize in hauling goods; others can construct buildings or perhaps concentrate on making weapons, used either to protect their own wealth or to take wealth away from others. Artisans create jewelry and turn mundane objects (arrowheads, pots, baskets) into aesthetic statements. Society gets multilayered. Buildings rise. Villages become towns. Cities rise. Trade necessitates keeping track of quantities and values, which necessitates a way to record information. Number systems get invented. Writing follows. Prehistory becomes history.
Nafsadh / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY SA 4.0
FIGURE 1-1: The Fertile Crescent extended from the Persian Gulf through Iraq and into Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, and into the Nile Valley of Egypt.
Next thing you know, an English-speaking woman in Florida, whose various ancestors spoke Spanish, Irish Celtic, and Japanese, is sitting in her South Korean car, stuck in traffic on the expressway, a style of limited-access road invented in Germany. She’s sipping a cup of coffee harvested in El Salvador, brewed in the Italian style in a machine manufactured in China to Swiss specifications. On her car’s satellite radio, a voice beamed from London is introducing news stories about outbreaks of disease, raging wildfires, floods, and a new tropical storm. The reports come from Greece, Canada, China, and Haiti. She reaches over and switches to a station that features a style of music invented in Jamaica by English-speaking people of African descent.
War! What Is It Good For? Material for History Books, That’s What
A view of history that sees only progress — this advance leads to that terrific advance, which leads to another incredible breakthrough, and so on — doesn’t account for the fact that people can be awful. Some are ruthless, some are destructive, some are stupid, and many are hateful. More often, people are simply thoughtless and careless. Not you, of course. You’re full of compassion and understanding, and capable of doing great things. And we all know or at least know about somebody whose ability to make this world better is off the charts. But the human race also produces bad characters and bad results.
Much of this book deals with war. I wish that weren’t so, but for reasons that anthropologists, psychologists, historians, politicians, economists, and many more have never been able to untangle, there’s always been somebody who’s eager to bash, skewer, shoot, blast, or vaporize somebody else. History is too often an account of how one group of people, under the banner of Persia, Genghis Khan, William of Normandy, imperial Japan, or whatever decided to overrun another group. Many such efforts succeeded, if success can be defined as killing other people and stealing their land, resources, wealth, wives, children, and so on.
Historians cite the 20th century as being perhaps the worst ever in terms of war and its toll — not because people were more warlike, but because the weapons had grown so much deadlier and transportation so much faster. During World War I (1914–18) and even more during World War II (1939–45), the machines of destruction reached farther and did more damage than ever before.
Wars since WWII have been somewhat contained to a region or fought with an understanding that neither side would escalate the weaponry too far. During the Vietnam War, a 1960s-’70s conflict between communist North Vietnam and the nationalist government of South Vietnam, each side had allies with deep pockets and nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union and China provided supplies and arms to the North Vietnamese, while the United States sent military advisers and then, starting in 1965, active troops to fight for South Vietnam. The military conflict spread to Cambodia and Thailand, but not around the world. The Americans, though deeply suspicious of and armed against both the Chinese and the Soviets, avoided all-out war with either.
Human advances have also been influenced by disasters such as volcanic eruptions, floods, droughts, and disease. The bubonic plague of the 14th century, known as the Black Death, changed history in part because it so drastically reduced the populations of Europe and Asia. So many fewer people meant that their labor was worth more, so there was more wealth. More wealth meant more demand for goods, which in Europe spurred a search for better trade routes, which led Westerners