A History of the World (5 page)

What happened to them? There was no cataclysmic event. Modern humans lived alongside their near-relatives for around thirty thousand years. Scattered archaeological evidence suggests Neanderthals may have copied the new super-hunters, altering their own tools. Biologists fiercely disagree about whether the two groups interbred, and the latest thinking is that probably they did – a little; there is (a little) DNA evidence from some scattered communities. The ‘new people’ clearly enjoyed advantages. The Neanderthals may have used a form of humming or singing communication rather than full-scale language; it has been suggested that because they lived in small groups they did not need to convey complex information, but only emotion.
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So far as we know, though they buried their dead and may even have used makeup, they made no art and did not invent bows, harpoons, needles or jewellery.

They survived well in climatic conditions that we can barely comprehend; the ‘old stone age’ was a time of ice sheets arriving and retreating, testing the flexibility of humans to the utmost. Neanderthals had to rely on the skins of the animals they killed to protect them from the cold, but modern humans had a secret weapon, more important even than their better cutting edges, their spear-throwers or the bows that would allow them to kill from a distance: they had sewing. Many beautifully formed needles have been found, as well as the awls to cut the holes needed for the thread to pass through. As with today’s Inuit people, Cro-Magnon man could dress in clothes that fitted closely and were worn in layers, giving much greater protection and flexibility than bear-hides. Brian Fagan says: ‘The needle allowed women to tailor garments from the fur and skin of different animals, such as wolves, reindeer, and arctic foxes, taking full advantage of each hide or pelt’s unique abilities to reduce the dangers of frostbite and hypothermia in environments of rapidly changing extremes.’

The needle plus the better weaponry, and the group-planning allowed by full language, made Cro-Magnons unbeatable. The Neanderthals may simply have been driven to extinction by competition. Or worse: there is unsettling evidence from Les Rois in France of butchery marks on a Neanderthal skull, suggesting that modern humans may have eaten the contents. The Neanderthals were probably cannibals,
at least some of the time, but it is possible that any interaction we had with them back then was far removed from mere social observation, still less regular interbreeding: ‘Neanderthals? Mmm. . . . Far too tasty to flirt with.’

Of course, we have only the bony, stony splinters of lives lived in wood and colour, and enriched by music, stories and ideas about the cosmos lost to us. But such vast stretches of time have left their marks on us. Some anthropologists believe that our preferred, normal size of family and friendship groups – the people we really know and interact with, not our Facebook friends – reflects the size of prehistoric hunting groups. Then, there was even more need for a division of labour. The skinning, curing, cutting, stitching and cooking had to happen alongside the hunting and foraging. Sexual division of labour was already a fact. It has been argued that such seemingly subtle differences between the sexes today as men’s greater enthusiasm for strongly tasting food and drink (curries, pickles, whisky) are dim reflections of the hunter-gatherer past, when men foraged further and had constantly to test the edibility of dead flesh and berries.

The way our brains process visual information, ruthlessly focusing on movement, is certainly an early hunting (and running-away) adaptation. Is our readiness to close the curtains and huddle in front of a television set when winter arrives a memory of the safety felt in underground caves? Knowing for sure so little about our early society can make us drily cautious when we try to imagine this lost vast stretch of human history. Probably, the more boldly we let our imaginations range, the more realistic we are being.

But what lessons can safely be drawn from prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies?

First, that we were, from early on, the pawns of climate. Human civilization emerged during a warm, wet phase of Earth’s oscillation. Our earlier close-squeak moments came as a result of global cooling, and there is no reason to suppose the cycles of warming and cooling have been for ever suspended. We may be heating the planet up dangerously fast again and we may disappear as a result. But our history reminds us that we are versatile. We are here because we are good adapters.

Second, we are both extraordinarily creative and extraordinarily violent. Indeed, the two seem worryingly inseparable. A range of
modern historians and archaeologists have effectively debunked the myth of the noble savage, which infected European thinkers – reacting against their own leaders’ war-making – from the Enlightenment of the 1700s to Communism and into our own times. There is a history of lethal raiding and occasional massacres that has been uncovered from Stone Age Europe to the New Guinea Highlands, from Alaska and the Americas to the Asian steppe, which clearly pre-dates war-making states.
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As we shall see, it was certainly not universal. But hand-axe-shaped holes in the skulls of murdered Europeans suggest prehistoric man was doing more than making art.

The archaeologists Stephen LeBlanc and Katherine Register, after contemplating the evidence of war and massacre among the Anasazi people of New Mexico long before Europeans arrived, have made a long study of prehistoric warfare, which they conclude was regular and very brutal. They say this about those famous, glorious caves:

As I have argued earlier, this was probably linked with our strong group-bonding, which allowed us to populate the world in the first place, to celebrate ‘us’ and, by extension, to demonize ‘them’. We probably wiped out other human types, we certainly wiped out other mammals; and throughout our history we have, in the intervals between making art and love, tried very hard to wipe out each other. We began, and we remain, agents of instability.

The Farming Puzzle

In the Introduction, I warned that this would be a ‘great man’ and ‘great woman’ version of human history, and that kings mostly
mattered more than peasant farmers. But this is only so
because
of those farmers. Because of agriculture, the human population of the world rose hugely. Because people stopped moving around in bands of hunter-gatherers and settled down to look after crops and animals, they developed villages, then towns, then civilizations. Thicker versions of primitive maize, the heavy seeds of Asian grasses, the collected-and-replanted wild rice in China, are the tiny items upon which the Aztecs, Sumerians, Egyptians and early dynasties stand. And us too. Without farming – no class divisions, no surplus to elevate kings and priests, no armies, no French Revolution, no moon-landing.

So what is the puzzle? It is that people would choose to farm in the first place; because it did not make for an easy life. The chances are that, if you are reading this, then of the seven billion people alive right now you are among the one billion living in the rich world and within that one billion you have lived your life in a town or city. We have lost touch with the importance of farming, its perils, its hopes and timescales. Farming has become something most people who read books like this have never had to bother about. Famines happened in recent European history only because of wars or political incompetence. Our abundance is so great, no disaster-movie producer has even contemplated famine as a Western plot line.

Yet farming, which was mostly back-breaking, boring work, is coming back to haunt us, the victims of its very success. Farming made the human population take-off possible. It took nearly ten thousand years from the first attempts at agriculture for the world’s population to reach a billion. Now we are adding extra people at a billion every dozen years. World food stocks, held for emergencies, are tiny. This means that to avoid famine every person needs to be fed by a far smaller patch of land than ever before. This will not be easy. According to the US National Academy of Sciences, measured by weight humans make up less than 0.5 per cent of the planet’s animals but consume a quarter of its plants’ production. It is time to remember how interesting and important mere farming really is.

And to salute those who began it. For the archaeological record is clear. Early farmers had in general worse health and lived shorter lives than their hunter-gatherer predecessors and rivals. Fused and misshapen vertebrae, bad knees and bad teeth tell a story repeated in
cultures all around the world. In a study by the anthropologist J. Lawrence Angel in 1984, it was shown that human lifespans actually fell between the hunter-gatherers of the Palaeolithic period some twenty-five thousand years ago, when men lived for around thirty-five and a half years, and the height of the agricultural revolution five thousand years ago, when men lived on average to thirty-three. Men lost about six inches in height by becoming farmers; women shrank by about five inches. Later jokes about farmers always protesting about the weather, or being naturally glum, are rooted in a basic truth. It is a hard life, hedged about with worry. For early farmers the basic toil of cutting down trees, irrigating fields, hand-ploughing with branches and harvesting with slate and stone sickles was compounded by the fear of the crop being eaten by wild animals or stolen by better-armed and more aggressive hunters.

So again, why – why in a world of leaping salmon and herds of antelope, a world relatively empty of humans but filled with berries and game, would people choose to stick in the mud? Ancient myths of Gardens of Eden, of a golden age and of carefree people living in the forests are reminders that farming – shaping nature rather than plucking it – has never seemed an obviously attractive bargain. It is no accident that later on, when rulers emerged, they so often had themselves portrayed as hunters, and that even in the modern world hunting is a sport of kings. No monarch has had himself portrayed ploughing, or digging potatoes. The world of the hunter seems somehow nobler, grander and more exciting than that of the farmer, bowed over his furrows or uneasily patrolling the walls of the sheepfold.

One answer to the question of the rise of agriculture is that it simply allows far more humans to be alive. It has been estimated that a hunter-gatherer needs about ten square miles of game and berry-filled land to live on, whereas agriculture can produce enough calories in a tenth of that space to keep fifty people alive. More humans and therefore less available hunting land suggests that agriculture was the only answer. Yet this is to put the question the wrong way round. The increase in population came after agriculture started, not before. Across the planet, throughout this period, vastly more land was inhabited by hunters than by farmers: this is the unrecorded narrative of the Indian forests, the Eurasian steppes, the jungled islands of East Asia and the migrations of the Americas. Most people found ways of
not
farming. And yet farming was repeatedly invented in completely separate parts of the world.

It happened first in the Fertile Crescent, which curves from today’s Jordan and Israel, up to Anatolia in today’s Turkey, and then like a sickle back east into Iraq. It happened in northern China next. Then in Mexico; and independently in the Andes; then in what is now the eastern United States. It may have developed independently in Africa too, and in New Guinea. Thousands of years separate these ‘origins of farming’ breakthroughs, but they are clearly more than a coincidence. And once farming is firmly established, it often spreads, as it did from the Fertile Crescent into Europe some four thousand years after its invention, and into the Indus valley in today’s Pakistan, and Egypt.
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Though historians argue about the reasons, they mostly agree that, again, climate change was very important. There was no single ‘ice age’: as we have already hinted. But around fifteen thousand years ago the coldest part of the last ice age was coming to an end, and the climate of the key landmasses north of the equator began to improve. Without the greater fecundity of plants there could have been no farming. In the milder, wetter climate there was an early abundance of animal life too, which provided hunters with an easy living. But from the Americas to Australia, there is enough evidence of mankind’s arrival being followed by extinctions of large mammals to suggest that we simply became too good at hunting for our own long-term survival. The game got harder to find. Migrations of deer, horses, antelopes and others shrivelled and changed course. Animal bones found near human settlements actually get smaller over time, as the bigger adults are killed off.

By around eleven thousand years ago, some groups of humans realized that by keeping some animals near by – to begin with, the ancestors of today’s sheep, goats and pigs – they could ensure for themselves meat and hides. People had probably been gathering edible seeds for centuries before they started to plant stands of them, then returned to the same place for the annual harvest of seed-heavy grasses or nutrition-rich peas. Most plants and animals are, of course, useless to humans – the indigestible foliage, the poisonous roots, the thin-fleshed, hard-to-catch birds and insects – so careful selection of those species that would repay care and attention was crucial. We have to imagine an individual discovery, repeated again and again – those
grasses, with those slightly heavier grains swaying on that particular incline where the stream turns course, gathered and returned to, and eventually helped along, helped to multiply. In societies where men would be expected to hunt further from their settlements, this was probably a breakthrough made by women.