A History of the World (3 page)

Vasily Grossman, the great Russian novelist of the Soviet era, who appears later in this book, wrote in his masterpiece
Life and Fate
:

Wise words from a non-professional historian which, during the writing of this book, have been ringing in my head.

From Seventy Thousand Years Ago to the Early Mediterranean Civilizations

So where should we start? Physics and biology push back so far that our brains struggle. There is the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago (perhaps only one of many) and its consequences – the coming of the elements and the galaxies and the planets. This is deep time, parts of it still visible in the night sky every day of our lives, through which flow mysteries even today’s cleverest humans do not understand, such as dark energy and matter.

We could start more locally, with the early history of Earth, beginning some 4.5 billion years ago and following the growth of life in a thin, fragile membrane wrapped round a whizzing ball of iron and rock. We could begin with carbon capture, and the fifth of Earth’s atmosphere being composed of oxygen, without which this would be just another dead, hot lump of wrinkled geology. This is the Creation story of modern mankind – no feathered serpents, giant turtles or six-day creative explosion by a moral experimenter, but something just as awe-inspiring in its scale and mystery.

We could fast-forward through the first half-billion years of the living rock, when it was water-shrouded (a little over 70 per cent of it still is), and talk about the evolution of life on dry earth.
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We could rehearse our Charles Darwin, telling the story of the first tiny mammals, our ancestors, and how they took advantage of the disappearance of the great lizards, or dinosaurs. More conventionally, we could chart what we know of the complex and delicate family tree of early apes and hominids from which we spring.

Any one of these starting-points would be informative and useful. Our human history, as it is told today, is only a final page after a vast preface of intense astrophysical events, chemical reactions and evolutionary changes. It does not start with a creator moulding men and women from mud or blood with his own hands, nor in the Garden of Eden. What follows here is a history of the social, global human, however:
so let’s begin with a woman, and a birth; to put it poetically, an African Eve.

Mother

She had a different name. No one has known it for around seventy thousand years. She had one; for she lived among talkative and highly social people. ‘Mother’, for reasons that will become obvious, will do. She was probably young, tough, stocky and dark-skinned. She was a traveller, part of a people always on the move. She was also heavily pregnant. Her tribespeople were hunters and expert gleaners of berries, shellfish, roots and herbs. They carried tools and hides and a couple of babies with them, tied with sinews and skins around adult backs, but there were surprisingly few children in the group. Those who didn’t learn early to walk, keep quiet and keep up tended to die, picked off by predators following the group.

In their own way the travellers were, however, formidable, armed with spears and razor-sharp chipped-stone cutting edges that had been developed over around a hundred thousand years of hunting, and (if they were anything like later hunter-gatherers) while fighting rival tribes. Their average age was relatively young, something that would remain true of all human societies until very recent history. But there would have been people in their fifties or sixties. It is now thought that the female menopause may have been a useful evolutionary adaptation to provide grandmothers, who could care for the young while younger women were breeding: tribes with grandmothers would be able to support more children to adulthood, and therefore would grow at the expense of tribes without older women.

The men would have been marked by hunting scars but would be vocal and thoughtful tacticians, experienced in tracking game and exploiting their understanding of other animals. The oldest, the father of this clan, might be in his sixties. Hunters in their thirties or forties may have been the most effective food-gatherers. This group had been moving for years, slowly north through what are now called Kenya and Somalia, towards a strip of water that looked possible to cross. The flow of water was lower than it used to be, leaving dry patches of land. Wading between them would have been a risk worth taking,
because the game and the vegetation around them was getting harder to find. Life would be easier on the other side.

The group would have had no idea they were about to leave one continent where all humans originated; nor any notion of just how far their descendants would walk, working their way along beaches, a mile or two every year, clearing out the shellfish and the crabs in rock pools, gorging on a beached whale, spearing ridiculously incurious goats. All life was a journey. Always, a new track must be made. Ahead of them and behind them, once they had moved on, the easier prey would return, but to stay put in a single place would be unnatural and dangerous. Declare anywhere ‘home’, and you would die of hunger. So though the water was a challenge, and everyone was watching everyone else as they waded – for the group had a language and talked about their plans – this was just another day.

They were probably clothed, in some way: a study of body-lice DNA suggests that they were infesting clothing around a hundred thousand years ago and it is thought humans lost most of their own fur millions of years ago. This group, much larger than a single family, would be accustomed to sharing out tasks; and this was directly related to the problems that started again with Mother’s labour pains. Like all women, she knew the birth would be painful. Ever since anyone could recall, human babies had been born with surprisingly large heads, so big that to force them out through the vagina was agonizing. Mother would give birth standing up, surrounded by her sisters. Her baby would be helpless, a wobbling, vulnerable thing, for far longer than the children of other animals.

It was a puzzle, about which many things would be said during the long nights of storytelling. But the vulnerability of the modern human child was a long-term strength because it forced families and tribal groups to share out work and to cooperate. Today’s hunter-gatherer societies generally have a clear division of labour between male hunters and females gathering plants, and it is likely this was already happening by Mother’s time. It would be many tens of thousands of years before people realized that the big head, the relative helplessness and the consequently painful birth added up to an evolutionary triumph, producing animals able to tell stories.

Historians of human evolution also suspect that our warlike, xenophobic and mutually hostile character likewise evolved in Africa, and for
the same reasons. Tribes, extending beyond family groups, are at an advantage if everyone works together, ‘for the good of the tribe’, even if what they do is dangerous or unpleasant for them at the time. This means that tribal bonding is very important; without a sense of belonging and mutual dependence, the tribe falls apart. The other side of this is that, in a world where human tribes are moving around, searching for game, the tribal bonding is likely to be reinforced by hostility to other tribes. This obviously continues to matter.

Everywhere on the planet, early human societies seem to have worked hard to differentiate themselves from their neighbours, wearing different headdresses, jewellery, clothing and, above all, speaking different languages. The British zoologist Mark Pagel points out that, even today after so much cultural homogenization, there are seven thousand different languages spoken by humans, almost all of which are mutually unintelligible. Why? Other animals are not like this. He argues that our good qualities – our capacity to be kind, generous and friendly, allowing us to evolve cooperative and bigger groups, to ‘get along with each other’ – have to be set against bad qualities, ‘our tendencies to form competing societies often not far from conflict’. In hunter-gathering groups competing for land, conflict is common and tribal war often a fact of life.

We have been hunter-gatherers, we humans, for far, far longer than we have been farmers – at least ten to fifteen times as long. We are only now becoming a species that mainly lives in cities; but if we say we have been dominated by cities for a century or two, then our hunter-gathering trail is a thousand times longer. So it would be literally unnatural if much of our behaviour did not relate in some way to that inheritance; above all in our combination of sociability and mutual suspicion. And so back to Mother.

For she was the mother of almost all of us. (There is another earlier, even mistier, figure: ‘Mitochondrial Eve’, who would be the mother of everyone, Africans included, far earlier in the human story, perhaps some 200,000 years ago; but her story is less well understood.) Our character’s maternal achievement is to be understood literally, rather than as a parable. There are arguments about this, as there are about every aspect of early society, but the balance of probabilities is that she is your super-Mother. If you are a New York lawyer, she is where you came from. If you are an aboriginal Pacific Islander in a
cancer hospital, or a German farmer or a Japanese office-cleaner or a Pakistani Londoner at university – you come from our Eve. Stephen Oppenheimer of Oxford University, a specialist in DNA studies, says: ‘Every non-African in Australia, America, Siberia, Iceland, Europe, China, and India can trace their genetic inheritance back to just one line coming out of Africa.’
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That is, one group. One journey.

This seems now to be the consensus view. At first sight, it also seems impossible. How can one woman giving birth to one child be the mother of most of the human race? The answer goes by the name of ‘matrilineal drift’, and works like this. In each generation, some families do not reproduce successfully. It may be because of disease, a hunting accident, incompatibility – but some maternal lines die out. Over very long periods of time, therefore, almost all do. They have gone, and gone for ever. Imagine the process as a huge scythe, sweeping backwards through thousands of generations, gathering up a dark harvest of never-made-its. As the Darwinian writer Richard Dawkins reminds us, we are the children of survivors.

The seeming paradox is that alongside this scythe there is an ever-widening delta of humans being born and actually surviving. Why? Because for those who do survive long enough to procreate, if they can have child-survivors at just a little above the two-for-two natural replacement rate (and the same applies to those child-survivors, in turn), mathematics decrees a surprisingly fast upwards line of population growth – all of which must therefore be children of the earliest survivors. (There were patrilineal ancestors too, of course; it is just that nobody has yet found a DNA trace that helps us pursue them this far back.) Though hard to grasp and feeling like an optical illusion in heredity, ‘drift’ makes better sense when we recall that this is a period when the overall human population is barely increasing, and when life expectancy is very short. Eve is our universal mother because tigers, snakes, landslides and microbes got the others.

Eve’s tribal group was already a remarkable achievement in survival against the odds, part of a human population of several hundreds of thousands in Africa, which had emerged in competition with other varieties of clever ape. Human history, properly understood, starts when we move from being just another form of prey in the cycle of eat-and-be-eaten, a creature blown about by the natural world, to a creature beginning to shape the world. We move from happens-to, to makes-happen.

But
Homo sapiens
was only one branch of a tree of hominids who were learning how to alter their environment, if only in a minor way. There are almost no historical arguments as complex and heated as those about modern man’s origins. The reason is straightforward: scientific advances in the study of human DNA and in the dating of bone fragments and other material keep challenging, and sometimes overturning, earlier theories. It may be the furthest-back part of human history but it is changing faster than the history of, say, the Second World War. Amateurs must step delicately across an exciting minefield.

One thing that is now widely agreed, however, is that this is a story in which climate plays a pivotal role, more so than we used to realize. The cooling and warming of the planet because of solar activity, meteorite strikes, eruptions or tiny changes in its angle of spin affect the advance and retreat of deserts, the opening or closure of bridges for migration, and thus the story of our storytelling ape. In general, the more complicated the changes in the climate, even when they produce the extinction of other animals, the faster the advance of hominids seems to have been.

Adversity favours the versatile. The first attempts by tree-living African hominids to live on two feet came after cold, dry weather attacked their forests two million years ago. The open grasslands that resulted made it imperative to be able to run and hunt and see into the distance, and scientists believe this eventually resulted in
Homo erectus
, an important early version of humanity, with a brain around two-thirds the size of ours.

There were further changes in brains, as the warm Pliocene epoch gave way to the ice ages of the Pleistocene and to new challenges. Inside Africa, it now seems, a great complexity of hominids evolved. But
Homo erectus
, which ranged far out of Africa, evolved first into the bigger-brained
Homo heidelbergensis
– people who were hunting and making axes in England half a million years ago, and had a brain not so much smaller than ours, around 1,200 grams compared with our 1,500. Modern ‘us-sized brains’, had evolved in Africa around 150–100,000 years ago. This gives modern humans the largest brain for body size of any known animal, about seven times bigger than you might expect for our heft.
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