A History of the World

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 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.’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.

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.³

This picture of human development is a brutal simplification. There are intimidating-sounding lists of pre-modern human species, varying greatly in height, shape of skull, leg bones and weight. Though scientists name and slot them into seemingly neat divisions, as evolutionary trees are assembled, the truth must have been messier. Chris Stringer of London’s Natural History Museum usefully reminds us that species ‘are, after all, humanly created approximations of reality in the natural world’.⁴ Skulls of similar age, which are alike but not identical, hide subtler variations between early humans lost to us, so we should not get too scared by the thicket of scientific names.

What most needs to be grasped is that modern humans were not just a single super-bright, planet-conquering ape, who leapt as if by magic from an earlier world belonging to dim ape-men. Those earlier species, including the famous Neanderthals, and in Asia the ‘Denisovans’ (both coming after Homo heidelbergensis), also survived dramatic changes in climate and pushed into new territories as pioneers, equipped with cutting- and killing-tools. They probably decorated themselves, may have had some form of language, and may even, at the edges, have interbred with the newcomers, Homo sapiens. More interesting to us, though, is what they lacked.

So let us now return to Mother and her tribal migration. Did it really happen that way? Everyone agrees that Africa retains a genetic diversity of humans not found anywhere else, and that all humans began there at some point. But there has been a major argument about whether all non-African modern humans originated in a single (or nearly single) movement out of the continent, spreading round the world from around seventy thousand years ago. The alternative idea is that these other species, which had left Africa and colonized Europe and Asia much earlier, in fact survived. Could they have evolved into, and in places also bred with, Homo sapiens?

Between the two extremes there are shades of grey, but these offer two radically different views of today’s humanity. One says that, in essence, all non-Africans are close relatives, ‘Mother’s’ children. The other argues that different human populations emerged more slowly and separately in different parts of the world. This, it is claimed, may explain why many of us look and even behave so differently. The latter view has been more popular among academics outside the Western tradition, and our ideas about contemporary humanity barely need spelling out. This is not a dry argument. Are we family, or rivals?

Scientific opinion is now heavily tilted to the ‘out of Africa’ or ‘recent African origin’ model, mainly because of advances in tracing one particular form of DNA marker, mitochondrial DNA, leading back to Africa, where modern humanity, Homo sapiens, did not begin to appear until about two hundred thousand years ago. But the old picture of apes simply getting cleverer and cleverer until ‘our lot’ walked out of Africa and began populating an empty Europe and the Middle East seems to be wrong. Just like other animals, earlier hominids had been on the march long before. Recent archaeological discoveries in South Africa suggest that fire, and cooking, were being used nearly two million years ago by Homo erectus, though this is a highly controversial issue. It would help explain the growth in brain size, since cooking greatly increases the quantity of calories that can be ingested; and brains are very energy-hungry.

At any rate, before our migration the world was already inhabited by other kinds of people. What happened to them? It is likely that they were victims of changing climate conditions, destroyed by cold and hunger when temperatures fell again, or possibly by modern humans who were better organized and able to adapt. Nor, it seems, did modern humans leave Africa through Egypt, breaking first into the Mediterranean and European worlds, as Europeans once thought. We first went south, heading down along the coast of India and South-East Asia, foraging for shellfish as we went, and eventually somehow made it to Australia across the sea. Again, scientists argue about this, but it seems possible that aboriginal Australians arrived in their land many thousands of years before aboriginal French or Spanish got to theirs. And tracing back through the DNA trail suggests that the Cro-Magnon Europeans were descended from people who, before turning north, lived in today’s India. History is the story of migration, as much as settlement, long before Columbus or the Irish arrived in America.

What caused the Homo sapiens push out of Africa? Again, there are rival theories.

Around 73,500 years ago a massive volcano erupted in what is today called Sumatra. This was by far the biggest such disaster of the past two million years,⁵ and some scientists suggest that modern humans nearly did not make it through at all when the eruption misted the skies and radically cooled the planet. Some argue that the human population fell back to only a few thousand individuals in southern Africa, causing a bottleneck in evolution for thousands of years. This may have produced a radical pruning-back and regrowth of a more ruthless and organized humanity, better able to migrate round the world when conditions improved – Mother’s well organized tribe. Others think this has been exaggerated and that, bad though the conditions were, many species survived them.

Once that human migration from Africa had happened, however, it is clear that further episodes of chilling and heating shaped their later movements and ultimate success. It took a long time for the routes to open up across today’s Middle East and into Europe. But once humans arrived there, a later volcanic eruption in Italy, some thirty-nine thousand years ago, and sporadic ‘Heinrich events’ – when icebergs broke off into the Atlantic producing severe periods of cooling – kept the climate unpredictable. The northern ice cover retreated and then came back again several times. The migration patterns of deer, bison and other animals shifted. Comfortable refuges became grim; and then grim wastelands bloomed. Repeatedly, humans had to alter their habits and behaviour to survive. Again: adversity favours the versatile.

It seems that after the African migration, small numbers of Homo sapiens were better adapted to manage these shifts in climate than earlier versions of human had been. If so, this happened not because of classic Darwinian evolution (there wasn’t time) but because of the accelerated development caused by culture – language, learning, copying, remembering. We became more skilled with our fingers. In bigger groups, we were able to allow specialization – the best trackers to track, rope-weavers to weave, arrowhead-makers to chip. Working together we were better, more lethal, hunters. Human groups struggling to cope with a cold, drier world had to learn new things, including the ability to make more complex language, empathize with prey (about which more soon) – and both fight with, and learn from, rival groups.

Chris Stringer says that this allowed the acceleration that replaced the ‘two million years of boredom’: ‘Through imitation and peer-group feedback, populations could adapt well beyond the abilities of an isolated genius, whose ideas might never get beyond his or her cave, or might be lost through a sudden death.’⁶ It may very well be that other Homo groups were also able to speak, plan ahead, and so on, but not so well, and were therefore destroyed by the rate of change in the world around them; or were wiped out (and possibly eaten) by us. Another historian of early people, Brian Fagan, has argued that this new cooperation involved the invention not simply of speech but of abstract thought, ‘a new realm of symbolic meanings, which thrived in a world of partnerships between humans and their surroundings’ and which included, for the first time, art and perhaps religion.

Carrying all this with us, we spread first into Asia and then Europe. We reached the far east of Asia around 40,000 years ago and arrived in the Americas, across the ‘Beringia’ land bridge (long gone), around 20,000 years ago. By 12,000 years ago we had reached the southern areas of South America, and the final areas of human habitation were the islands of the mid-Pacific. Hawaii and New Zealand were reached only a thousand years ago, by people whose culture was still essentially that of the Stone Age yet who had developed impressive star navigation and boat-building. This spread of Homo sapiens is very fast compared with the 1.4 million years or so for the development of our previous ancestor, Homo erectus, into us.⁷ In biological time, it is like an explosion. Everywhere we arrived, there is evidence of the extinction of other large mammals.

We should rid ourselves of any comfortable or complacent sense that contemporary humans, sitting in coffee bars or driving cars, are superior in intellect to the hunter-gatherers who emerged from those hard African aeons. Hunter-gatherers had to be able to do many more different things than today’s urban people, and it has been estimated that men have lost around a tenth of their brain size compared with the people of the last ice age, and women 14 per cent. The Australian scientist Tim Flannery points out that the same is true of domesticated animals compared with their wild forebears, and for the same reasons: ‘Overall, life for all members of our domesticated mixed feeding flock is made so much more accommodating that its members can invest less of their energy in brains . . . If you doubt how far our civilization has turned us into helpless, self-domesticated livestock, just look at the world around you.’⁸ This may seem harsh, but it is a useful corrective to our modern condescension. Early humans, driving out of Africa, were extraordinary, rather terrifying creatures.

Caves of Genius

We know more about the first European settlers, the Cro-Magnons, than we do about the first Asians and Australians, but this is more to do with the history of archaeology, and European self-satisfaction, than with anything else. Predictions are dangerous when it comes to early history, but it seems safe to say that the big new discoveries are likely to come in China and other parts of East Asia. Meanwhile, the Europeans enjoy the odd bits of poetry awarded to early cultures by the accident of where their bones were found. They are ‘Aurignacians’, ‘Magdalenians’ or ‘Gravettians’, which is confusing, though better than the preferred modern academic term ‘European Early Modern Humans’, or EEMHs.

So, who were they?

Most people living then would have known only small local groups. It has been estimated that throughout this long period there was rarely a gathering of humans on the planet numbering more than three hundred or so. There must have been breeding across different groups, or the genetic cost would have been horrendous, so there must also have been contact between tribes at the edge of their range. We are sure they had language, but what kind? Settled people in Celtic or Chinese cultures had different dialects in different valleys, altering every few score miles. The same is true in Papua New Guinea, Australia, pre-European North America and the Amazon Basin.

The languages that emerged in different parts of the world are very different from each other, though hints of some original or ‘Ur-languages’ can be traced through common-sounding words. But over larger distances, there are big differences in the way sounds are formed – where in the mouth and throat, how the lips and tongue are used – and the way grammar works. It seems likely that the Cro-Magnon people, like aboriginal Australians, had a kaleidoscope of local dialects and languages with enough familiar words and sounds to allow communication across the edges of rival tribal groups.

We also know that later agricultural societies worshipped deities associated with their survival – gods for water, rain, sun, corn. So it seems likely that hunter-gatherer societies gave a special place to the aspects of nature they relied on most heavily – the animals they killed and used. Today’s hunter-gatherers tend to show reverence for, and close observatory interest in, the birds and animals they live off. African hunters are known to mimic animals they intend to pursue, to try to get inside their thinking. Surely the cave paintings of aurochs and bison have a similar origin? Modern hunter-gatherers also have creation myths, stories about where they came from. It seems unlikely that the darker-skinned earlier versions of ourselves did not have those too.

And indeed, the three hundred or so painted cave sites in Spain and France discovered so far imply a belief system based on animals and the natural world. Looking, drawing, copying – using the hand, eye and memory – seem to constitute a very early human characteristic, and it is always possible that the cave paintings are ‘art for art’s sake’ rather than having a spiritual purpose. Yet the use of cave art by people in Africa and Australia, and the intensely repeated images, suggest some kind of religious system. We have very early bone flutes; and the paintings would have been made in the semi-darkness.

There must have been stories, too. It is not a fantastic leap to imagine music-driven underground rituals intended to ensure that the deer and horses keep migrating, or to honour the giant creatures brought down by spear-throwing hunters. The association of darkness, bulls and mystery is deeply embedded in the European imagination. Similar art may have been made elsewhere, and lost. It may yet emerge in many other places: 6,000-year-old paintings were found recently in a cave in Inner Mongolia, northern China. But what we have in southwestern Europe is a wonderful trumpet-blast for the arrival of fully modern humans, art already quite as accomplished and moving as the later drawings of a Rubens or a Van Gogh.

Our relationship with a closer contemporary relative, the beetle-browed humans we call Neanderthal, is a darker story. These people can be defined as a separate species or a subgroup of our own, and were physically distinct: heavier-boned, with differently shaped skulls and perhaps without full speech. They appear fully developed only around 130,000 years ago and survived in Europe until between 30,000 and 24,000 years ago – though they disappeared earlier in Asia. So as an ‘unsuccessful’ species, an all-round failure much mocked by cartoonists, they survived, roughly speaking, for 100,000 years – much longer than has Homo sapiens outside Africa so far, and indeed fifty times longer than the period that separates you, reading this, and Christ.

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.⁹ 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.¹⁰ 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:

Even more evidence of warfare is found among the paintings at Lascaux and other caves in France and Spain. These earliest known human artworks feature magnificent renditions of bison, mammoth, and deer but also include sticklike human figures with spears projecting into their bodies. Somehow, descriptions of these less-than-harmonious sides of the world’s wonders don’t often make it into the travel brochures. There is a failure to look for or see evidence of warfare because of a myth and the preoccupation with the idea that the past was peaceful.¹¹

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.¹²

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.

In this, the people living in the Near East were especially fortunate. There are fifty-six edible grasses growing wild in the world – cereals like wheat, barley, corn and rice. Of those, no fewer than thirty-two grew on the hills and plains of the Fertile Crescent of today’s southern Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Israel and Iraq, compared with just four varieties apiece in Africa and America, and only one native variety, oats, in Western Europe. Furthermore, the peoples living in the Fertile Crescent had access to the wild originals of emmer wheat, barley, chickpeas, peas, lentils and flax, as well as more animals suitable for domestication. Over the course of later history, invaded by everyone from Egyptians and Persians to Arabs and Crusaders, this has not been a blessed slice of the world; but it began very lucky indeed.

The Americans had llamas, the Chinese, pigs. But these people of the Fertile Crescent had at their disposal a disproportionate number of the thirteen large animals that can be domesticated. They had not only pigs and nearby wild horses, but also cows, goats and sheep, plus those thirty-two grasses. Jared Diamond has pointed out that, by contrast, the most benign part of Chile had only two of the fifty-six prized grasses, ‘California and southern Africa just one each, and south-western Australia none at all. That fact alone goes a long way toward explaining the course of human history.’¹³

So in the Fertile Crescent, people called Natufians were gathering grain around thirteen thousand years ago; and early on – presumably in order to stay close to the precious grain – they settled down in villages rather than moving around as hunter-gatherers. They were not quite alone in this: at around the same time, it is now thought, groups of hunters living near the Yangtze River in China were also gathering and eating wild rice.

But then the climate changed again. The cooling was not as dramatic as during the ice ages proper, nor permanent, but it was dramatic enough. This brief period is known, after a plant whose advance and retreat are used to measure it, as the ‘Younger Dryas’. The Natufians found the grain they had been enjoying began to die out in the colder, drier plains. Higher ground attracts more water and keeps more species alive in hard times, so it was growing in the hills, but they had to go further to find and collect it. Elk and mammoth disappeared at the same time.¹⁴ Something similar must have happened in China too. Never underestimate the power of laziness: under this pressure people seem to have made the next logical step. Instead of going to the bother of migrating and building new villages, following the changing patterns of the wild grains, they started to collect surplus grains, carry them home and plant them. It seems an almost insignificant shift, a labour-saving way of avoiding long walks. But it was a huge one for humanity. In the Fertile Crescent, and in China, where a similar shift happened with rice and millet, agriculture had begun.

This may also explain why the first villages appeared where they did. There is most biodiversity in the hills and mountains, but people prefer to live in sheltered valleys. It was here that they found ‘just right’ places, not too exposed to wind, but near enough to the wild plants that they could gather and try to grow – from the corn, beans, squash, avocados and tomatoes of the Mexican mountains to the scores of grasses and beans in the Atlas mountains. No doubt plants were regularly brought down and tried out, and only the most promising were kept – those that were most nourishing, those that were hardiest and those that changed pleasingly fast into fatter versions of themselves when selected. To start with, and for a long time, this planting of crops and tethering or tending of animals was accompanied by hunting. The antelope would be culled as they migrated; deer and fish would be brought home.

But farming humanity had walked into a trap. Not for the last time, we had taken a decisive step whose consequences could never have been imagined, and from which there was no pulling back.

The trap was that settled farming communities swiftly produced bigger populations. Even with Late Stone Age technology, each acre of farmed land could support more than ten times as many people as each acre of hunted land. It was not simply about food, either. As we have seen, hunting tribes, always on the move, have to carry their children. That limits how many babies a woman can have. Once people settled down, the birth rate could rise, and it did. Larger families mean more mouths to feed, which means that farming and herding become ever more important. Once broken, the fields can never be safely abandoned. The herds can never be untethered and returned to the wild. The farming men and women may be shorter in stature, more prone to disease – because parasites and pests settle down as well – and they may die earlier. Their days may be longer and their worries greater. They may have lost the freedom to roam through the wild and magical places. But they are feeding more children – nephews, nieces, even grandchildren.

They cannot stop. Before, they were shaping and taming the plants and animals; now the plants and animals are shaping and taming them, too.

They also had to develop other skills. They had to grind and sift their grain, and store it. Their precious domesticated animals, which had to be protected from wild beasts and allowed to wander for food – but not too far – must be exploited in every possible way. Wool could be sheared and carded and woven. Blood could be drawn off and used to enrich meal. Some farmers developed the odd habit of drinking the milk of lactating goats and cows – and most of their European descendants remain lactose-tolerant to this day. The preparation of hides, the weaving of ropes to help with ploughing, and making baskets and pottery for storing or cooking grain – a whole new world of domestic jobs and skills emerged.

Farming was the most important human revolution of all. It produced not only an immense political change, as hierarchies grew from the sweat and success of farmers, but also less easily tracked changes in human consciousness. Presumably, the settled communities lost touch with the wider geography that their hunting forebears had known; and, with the ‘other’, the unknown, surrounding them. Villagers turned a little in on themselves and away from the lands of the wild beasts and passing hunter groups. Farming would eventually allow food surpluses for leaders and full-time priests; people able to live without actually ploughing or herding themselves.

But the arrival of farming also meant the emergence of the home, or homeland. And as the archaeology shows, settling down produced people who could pay in grain or hides for ‘luxury’ materials such as salt, sharp cutting stones, pretty shells and herbs. So quite early on, traders must have been carrying their packs along newly worn tracks. It turned out to be a rather more complex bargain than the first handful of fatter seeds might have suggested.

The rise of farming does indeed shape all of later history. The relative paucity of animals to domesticate, and the later start at farming that was the fate of the people who had arrived in Mesoamerica, meant that the civilizations established there were about three thousand years behind those of Europe and Asia and so would be very vulnerable to conquest. The degradation of the soil in the Mesopotamian delta led to the fall of the Sumerian civilization, and the overuse of agricultural land in the classical world led eventually to the desertification of North Africa. Both of these farming failures created political vacuums – relatively thinly populated stretches of land – which in due course would accelerate the spread of Islam.

Thin soil propelled both Vikings and Mongols. But first came towns.

Gentle Anarchists

One day, Tokyo and London, LA and Moscow, will be gone and forgotten. One day far in the future – let us hope – undulating mounds of stone, weirdly shaped green cover and buried walls, motorways and metal objects, will lie quietly, as planetary scars. If this is hard to imagine, reflect that the first towns are already long gone. Some are buried deep below today’s towns. Long before the walls of Jericho fell to Joshua’s priests’ trumpets, it had been an ancient settlement, one of the oldest in the world, with a fresh spring, mud-brick dwellings and even a wall and a tower, though these are thought to have been to protect its people against floods rather than attackers.

North of Jericho, on the Anatolian plains of today’s Turkey, are scores of odd-looking mounds, roughly symmetrical hills, gently rising above the modern fields of wheat, barley and maize. Quite probably, most of them are the remains of Neolithic towns, each once home to thousands of people: a lost, noisy world of early farmers and their families who had settled down and worked together for many centuries, worshipping leopard-gods, saving up for goods from far away, making jokes, marrying and burying their dead.

All this is a reasonable guess because one of these mounds has been opened up, initially by British archaeologists. It has proved to be a revelation, a treasure trove of knowledge about what happened after the shift to agriculture. Today Catalhoyuk is a small area of excavated earth under metal canopies, with a modest collection of archaeologists’ housing near by. It looks a little like a film director’s set for a movie set in the trenches. It is rather less well known than Rome or Angkor Wat, but in human history it is almost as significant.

Its buildings were lived in from around 9,500 to 7,700 years ago. It has no defensive walls. Nor does it have any buildings much grander than the others, or standing apart. There are no signs of rulers, priests, warrior quarters, lesser workers’ huts – it is just one egalitarian hive. In some ways the homes feel remarkably modern. With a hearth and a living room, a pantry close by, and other rooms which seem to have been bedrooms, the typical home was kept scrupulously clean with regular whitewashing of the walls and floor. When you walk around, the strangeness vanishes and these dwellings, about the size of a modern city apartment or a cottage, feel familiar – modest, but big enough.

Yet the sense of familiarity is only skin-deep. This is not a town as we know towns. Catalhoyuk had no streets, no squares or public buildings. Its people entered their honeycomb of homes through door-openings in the roofs, with ladders leading down, almost as if they were entering man-made caves. They socialized, we must assume, on the roofs which, connected together, would have made a large, safe, flat space for craft work or gathering and talking, and probably had canopies to keep off the sun. (In this area of Turkey, with its broiling summers, people still often sit out on the rooftop under a shade, and sleep overnight there too.)

The houses were renovated or rebuilt by partially knocking down the original, then building upwards on the ruins, so that they grew almost like a human coral, structure on structure. In places, there are eighteen separate layers of homes. Rooms were ornately decorated with plastered bulls’ heads, paintings of leopards and of hunts, and with stone and clay figures of women and animals. Unlike Jericho and other early urban centres, here everything seems to happen in the home. The current lead archaeologist for the site, Ian Hodder of Stanford University, says: ‘In a modern town we would expect to identify different functional areas and buildings such as the industrial and residential zones, the church or mosque or temple, and the cemetery. At Catalhoyuk all these separate functions occur in one place, in the house.’¹⁵

In these houses people stored their food, enough for a single family, in large carved wooden containers, and wove baskets and mats; they made daggers and belt buckles from flint and bone, polished obsidian mirrors, created bracelets and other jewellery; made curious stamp-seals, perhaps for marking property or their own skin; and they cooked and cleaned. All about was excellent farming land, streams and ponds with fish and birds; and the population grew to around seven thousand, perhaps ten thousand – which made it one of the largest human settlements on earth at the time. From the rubbish tips outside the town we can tell they lived well, on wild pigs, ducks, geese, sheep, fish, barley and oats.

The most striking thing about Catalhoyuk is where the bodies were buried. The dead were carefully curled up – ‘lovingly’ seems a reasonable description – and then interred under the floors of the houses, under the stoves, or under the platforms where the living slept. Some think they were first exposed to be picked clean by vultures; the current view is that this was not so, and people simply got used to the smell of decomposition. Some of the dead had their heads removed after death, and these were then plastered and painted and kept. Presumably they were the heads of significant people, perhaps the one-time heads of households. They seem to have been dug up, replastered and buried again, a kind of family memento that would be recycled through generations. One house had more than sixty corpses in it.

There are more mysteries in Catalhoyuk: in the houses, the bulls’ heads and paintings of leopards suggest a worship of natural power and aggression in the world outside. The inhabitants did not need David Attenborough to bring a sense of the danger of the sunlit outside world into the dark, cave-like womb of the home. But the practice of building home after home on the same site, and burying family members there and preserving heads, all point to ancestor worship, common throughout China and Japan, and indeed in the Mediterranean world up to Roman times.

These are people living in nuclear families, or at least nuclear homes, and identifying themselves with their parents, grandparents and back through the generations. They are saying, ‘We are this ground, this place, this footprint on the soil; a strong assertion of settlement after the thousands of years of nomadic roving. Does that sound odd? If so, it is only because most of us are now real city-dwellers who have lost any direct connection with a specific patch of earth, one that belonged to our ancestors. But for most of human history this identification of lineage and land was normal (even if burying granny under the stove was not).

The second part of the Catalhoyuk message is about equality. As time goes on, and layers grow upon layers, there are some houses that are larger, more decorated and with more burials than others – which suggests the slow emergence of dominant or more powerful families. But there is still nothing like a ruling or priestly class. Catalhoyuk offers a glimpse of an alternative society before the rise of class divisions, the warriors, chiefs and kings of later towns. It is a more peaceful society, poised somewhere between the early farming villages and the fighting empires ahead. Catalhoyuk enthusiasts see it as an egalitarian Eden, where women were venerated, there was no war, and families with only small amounts of personal property lived peaceably and cooperatively together.

We are told this simple anarchism is inherently unstable. Perhaps it is, but the people of Catalhoyuk seem to have managed pretty well for at least fourteen hundred years. There was enough surplus wealth for paintings, pottery and weaving, and a good diet; but not enough for swords or taxes. Lucky them.

The Child-people of Stonehenge

Our prejudices about early mankind are so smeared with blood and glinting with warriors that we have to ask whether the Catalhoyuk story of – relative – peace and love was rare, even unique. One way of trying to answer this is to travel forward in time, but to a more primitive part of the world that offers interesting comparisons.

What is now called Britain developed more slowly than the Fertile Crescent, and had a harsher climate. While Catalhoyuk was rising, nine thousand years ago, the ice sheet was only just