A History of the World Read online

  If we have not got cleverer, how have we increased so many times over, and often improved our individual material lives so successfully? The answer is that we are a collaborative and learning creature, gathering up the work and successes of the past and building on them. We stand not on the shoulders of giants, but on the shoulders of our grandparents and of our great-great-great-grandparents too. The point was made recently by a clever researcher who tried to build a simple electric pop-up toaster completely from scratch. It was almost impossible. You need the history of oil exploration, plastics and so on first, and the industrial specialization that followed.

  Left to itself (undisrupted by war, natural catastrophe or famine) this process produces, quite necessarily, that acceleration in human population. Writing was invented in Mesopotamia – and independently in China and America and India. But once it was moving around the Mediterranean, it was quickly adapted and advanced. It did not have to be reinvented by the French, the Ottomans or the Danes. Farming was invented up to seven times in different parts of the world between twelve thousand and five thousand years ago; but as has been pointed out, the steam engine did not need to be invented seven times to spread around the world.4

  There is another consequence of this, which may make us flinch. Farming was created by millions of people learning independently about the shapes of grasses, how to tend them, where to make water flow, and so on. It was a change embodied in human family experience, and therefore a cautious one, even if its consequences were momentous and unexpected. The industrial revolution was different. Steam power needed coalminers and metallurgists, lawyers and financiers; but few people who travelled on trains or wore the clothes produced by steam-driven machines needed to understand the technology. Specialization means that, overall, the advances are no longer embodied in individual lives; most of us need only take them on trust. As human civilization becomes more complex, individuals necessarily understand less about how it actually works. The personal ability of most of us to affect the course of our society (never strong) may seem, therefore, to vanish. Of the billions of us today who depend on digital technology or modern medicine, very few have the faintest clue about how it all happens. Individually, we have almost no control over anything. This is why politics, our only wobbly lever, continues to matter so much.

  And history is also the story of the bumps and setbacks that occur when more people, using more energy, build larger societies. Throughout early history, many big setbacks were caused by nature – by volcanic eruptions, sometimes big enough to destroy crops, summers and even ecosystems; by changes in weather systems big enough to destroy whole human cultures; and by lesser events such as floods, earthquakes and rivers changing their course. Much of early human religion is devoted to a worried and puzzled attempt to ask the rains to keep coming and the underground rumbling to stop. The story becomes more interesting as soon as humans are able to do more than react – build dams, irrigate, or move.

  Later on, the disruptions to human development may still be caused by natural events, but the likelier culprits are human. Once we settle we can quickly become victims of our own laziness and ignorance, killing off handy animal species, or deforesting land for farming, which then blows the topsoil away. The inhabitants of Easter Island made this mistake; but so did the ancient Greeks and the Japanese, who both nevertheless found ways to cope. Once we trade across large areas, we spread diseases to which some bodies are less hardened than others. This set back human development in the late Roman and Chinese world. It had even more awesome consequences when, after thirteen thousand years of separation, the peoples of Europe arrived in the Americas.

  Then we come to the rueful reflection of the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott, quoted above, who thought history was boredom interrupted by war. There has certainly been a lot of war. New research has shown that early hunter-gatherer societies were frantically warlike: kingdoms and empires just meant more people and better weapons, so bigger fights.

  But war often has an ambiguous effect. It is horrible, obviously. But conflict drives new inventions, makes people think more deeply about their societies, and by destroying some realms, allows new ones to emerge. Adversity makes the survivors stronger. The disappearance of easy-to-catch fish or deer forces people to develop new ways of fishing and hunting. Floods make people devise flood defences and new irrigation; and by requiring villages to combine together, they have set them on the road to creating states. Plagues depopulate regions but can also, as in Europe in the fifteenth century, free the survivors to lead different and more adventurous lives. Wars spread terror and destruction – but also technologies, languages and ideas.

  Amid so much bold assertion, it is worth remembering that history amounts to the fragments that survive from a vaster buried story. Some of the most wonderful moments of advance have happened to people (and in places) about whom (and which) we are almost completely ignorant. Who was the first to realize that squiggles could be made to stand for sounds of parts of words, and not only as mini-pictures of something else? Who first understood that it was possible to read without speaking the words out loud? Who fermented grain and drank the results? From southern China to Arabia, wet soils and shifting deserts have hidden civilizations which were once mighty and which collapsed for reasons we may never understand.

  There is so much we do not know. We do not know why the great palaces of the Greek Bronze Age were deserted and how those people lost the art of writing. For most of history, all we have left are the accidental remains, the things that could not rot or that somehow survived the sandpapering of time. In most places the wood and earth buildings, colourful textiles, languages, paintings, songs, music and stories have gone for ever; the cultures that were mostly made of wood and wool, tunes and stories, are the ones hardest to retrieve.

  What follows will be very disproportionate. Not only the endless savannahs of prehistory but the long periods of quiet social stability, the lulls, will be passed over in a paragraph or two. Convulsions that take place in a few decades in small places, such as in Greece around 400–300 BC or in Europe around 1500, will be pored over. For change is increasing – but also discontinuous and sometimes sudden. The conditions for a revolutionary break can be searched out, back through earlier centuries or decades, but the moment of breakthrough is still the nub of the story.

  However, before we start, let us pause and admire the 99 per cent; the forgotten heroes of the quieter years, busy with the hard graft of just getting on, keeping going and surviving – that peasant who followed his oxen, the farmers who worked and fed families and paid taxes without ending up being killed by Mongol raiders or recruited by Napoleon, the women who dug and birthed and taught in ten thousand vanished villages. This is a book about great change-makers and their times, but all of it takes place surrounded by the rest of us who kept the show on the road.

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

  Man never understands that the cities he has built are not an integral part of nature. If he wants to defend his culture from wolves and snowstorms, if he wants to save it from being strangled by weeds, he must keep his broom, spade and rifle always at hand. If he goes to sleep, if he thinks about something else for a year or two, everything’s lost. The wolves come out of the forest, the thistles spread and everything is buried under dust and snow. Just think how many great capitals have succumbed to dust, snow and couch-grass.

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

  Part One

  OUT OF THE HEAT, TOWARDS THE ICE

  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.1 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 literal
ly, 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.’2 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.