World History, Chapter 1:
This chapter is a bit introductory, in the sense that it covers a bunch of the background that sort-of precedes and sets the scene for the content we're going to cover in ancient and medieval World History this semester. There are historians who specialize in what they call "Big History", the point of which seems to be that the past of the universe, or galaxy, or solar system, or even planet Earth is so much bigger than the few thousand years people have been writing records. You can find good examples of these ideas in books like David Christian's Big History: Between Nothing and Everything and Origin Story: A Big History of Everything, or Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, which doesn't begin talking about human evolution until its sixth chapter.
There is some value to reminding ourselves that we humans are relatively new, and certainly our recorded history only makes up a tiny sliver at the end of a very long past. On the other hand, some might argue that if the word History is understood as interpretations and stories of the human past and the choices people have made that led to the present, then the origins of galaxies and stars (Chapter 2 of Maps of Time) or the beginnings of life on Earth (Chapter 4) might be considered a bit less relevant.
My own position is somewhere in between. As an Environmental Historian, I agree with the idea that the natural world isn't just a neutral background for human action, but rather has played an important role in shaping the choices available to us (that is, history). Some examples we'll cover right here at the beginning of the semester:
the remoteness of North America and its accessibility during ice ages allowed Native American cultures to develop here without the influence of other cultures in Europe, Asia, or Africa;
the availability of animals that could be easily domesticated in Afro-Eurasia (cows, horses, sheep, goats, pigs, chickens) and not in the Americas caused cultures to develop differently in these different regions.
I also, however, want to focus mostly on what humans did in response to these environmental conditions, not so much on the conditions themselves. Of course, recorded history is only about five or six thousand years old. How do historians deal with times before people were writing things down?
The answer to that question has probably occurred to you already: we use information provided by scholars and researchers in other disciplines. Typically in the past we collected insights from sciences like archaeology, geology, linguistics, and climatology. More recently we've had access to new techniques developed in evolutionary biology, genetics, and even satellite imaging and ground-penetrating radar. In some cases, new data from these disciplines has forced us to reevaluate and even change what we know about our remote past. This type of thing can happen even in more recent history, when new information is discovered; and we should remember that our understanding of the past is provisional, and should change as new information becomes available.
So let's begin our scene-setting with a brief look at who we are and where we came from. Modern humans are all members of a species called Homo sapiens. Archaeology and genetics tell us that this species is over 300,000 years old; the earliest remains we have found so far date to about 315,000 years ago. These were found in Morocco in 2018, reinforcing the theory that humans originated on the African continent. Homo sapiens seems to have left Africa and spread into the rest of the world, beginning between 80,000 and about 50,000 years ago.
That's not to say H. sapiens are our only ancestors, or that they were the first to leave Africa. Pre-sapiens humans such as Homo erectus left Africa about 1.8 million years ago and spread as far as China and Java. They used stone tools and fire, and were followed by other groups such as Neanderthals and Denisovans who left Africa about 600,000 years ago and settled in Europe and Central Asia. These people were even more advanced than their predecessors, making more complex stone tools and maybe even art and musical instruments.
In the past, it had been believed that these earlier "species" in the genus Homo were primitive "Cave Men", and were only distantly related to us. New discoveries have recently been made by archaeologists, who have found that the tools used by Neanderthals were very similar to those used by neighboring H. sapiens. And in just the last ten years, the idea has been shattered that these people were from different species. Geneticists such as Svante Pääbo and David Reich have proven that Denisovans and Neanderthals mated with H. sapiens and contributed to the modern human genome. Nearly all people whose ancestors were not sub-Saharan Africans got about 2% of their genes from Neanderthals. Personally, as someone descended from Mediterranean Europeans, I'm pretty happy about this!
One of the important environmental factors that affected the choices available to early humans was climate. Although the Earth's climate was very stable in the past, for tens of millions of years, in the last million years the planet has experienced a cycle of Ice Ages. About every 125,000 to 150,000 years, Earth's temperature varies by about 18 degrees (Fahrenheit). At the glacial maximums, large parts of northern Europe and North America are covered by ice sheets a couple of miles thick. This happened five or six times while Neanderthals were living in Europe, which suggests they were exceptionally hardy and were able to adapt to extreme changes in their environments.
Modern humans (H. sapiens) have also been around for three or four of these cycles. For the first few, we were living in Africa, where changes in the environment may not have been quite as extreme as in Europe. Even so, changes in rainfall probably forced animal migrations to which humans had to adapt. And there seems to have been a population "bottleneck" about 150,000 years ago (a glacial maximum), when geneticists believe the human population may have dropped as low as a few thousand. All the humans alive today are descended from the survivors of this event.
Some of the descendants of these survivors left Africa between 80,000 and 50,000 years ago and spread across the planet. They reached the remotest accessible places such as Australia between 65,000 and 45,000 years ago. When they arrived in the eastern Mediterranean, these Homo sapiens met and mixed with Neanderthals about 55,000 years ago. After about 15,000 years of living side by side in Europe, Neanderthals began to disappear. They became extinct about 40,000 years ago, although they contributed some important genes to modern humans.
The disappearance of the Neanderthals left the H. sapiens population to fend for themselves when the next glacial maximum began about 25,000 years ago. By this time, modern humans had spread everywhere that it was possible to go. When the formation of glaciers caused sea levels to drop by about 400 feet, new lands were exposed that allowed people to walk onto the Sunda Shelf in Southeast Asia, Sahul (greater Australia), Doggerland connecting Great Britain with Europe, and Beringia connecting Siberia with Alaska.
The existence of Beringia, between eastern Asia and western North America, allowed people to finally reach the Americas. Although there is speculation that people (possibly H. sapiens or possibly an earlier cousin) may have come to the Americas during an earlier glacial maximum, there were no humans waiting to welcome the ancestors of Native Americans when they arrived between 25,000 and 15,000 years ago. Beringia has been described in the past as a "Land Bridge", but I think this phrase paints a misleading picture. Beringia wasn't narrow: it was as wide as Alaska. And it wasn't temporary: the land was exposed for over ten thousand years. This was a place that Siberian hunter-gatherers lived for hundreds of generations. Archaeologists have found the remains of camps on the Siberian side that were occupied 29,000 years ago and on the Alaskan and Yukon side that are about 24,000 years old. Of course, potential sites on Beringia itself are now underwater.
The Beringians who lived in this region for thousands of years were prevented from entering North America by the glaciers that covered all of what's now Canada and much of the northern United States. About 16,000 years ago, as the global climate began to warm, the glacier began melting along the Pacific coast. It seems people traveled down the coast along what some researchers have called the "Kelp Highway", fishing and hunting marine mammals. By about 15,000 years ago, they had reached a site called Monte Verde, in southern Chile. Other Beringians entered North America by land as the glaciers continued to melt. We'll talk a lot more about their descendants in the coming weeks.
One thing that it is important to note, at this point, is that aside from dogs, which the Beringians brought to America, humans had not yet begun to domesticate animals when the ancestors of Native Americans were occupying Siberia and Beringia. And when they arrived in the Americas, people did not find many species that were good candidates for domestication. In order to be domesticated, animals need to be willing to accept a human as the leader of their herd. In the Americas, llamas, alpaca, and vicuña were willing to do this; bison were not. In Afro-Eurasia, many more species were willing to trade their freedom for the security of protected grazing and defense against predators. As a result, all of the traditional "farm animals" originated in the "old world". This had tremendous consequences for the development of different human cultures, as we'll see.
The major event in human prehistory (that is, the period before people began keeping written records) is what we've just been alluding to: the development of agriculture. Because this happened thousands of years before people developed writing and began keeping records, historians have once again been forced to speculate and to use information derived by different disciplines. One of the fields that has contributed a lot to speculation about the transition from hunting and gathering to settled agriculture is Anthropology. Anthropologists typically study currently-existing cultures (for example, the remaining small bands of hunter-gatherers living today) and extrapolate from their observations to speculate on what ancient people may have done. While useful, this technique can introduce errors, as we will see.
Another issue with the speculating about prehistory that has been done in previous generations, is that it was sometimes motivated by a desire to justify or explain or celebrate the way things turned out. For example, before there were advanced techniques of archaeology or genetic analysis, linguists discovered that many European and Asian languages had evolved from a common source, which they called proto-Indoeuropean. During the nineteenth century, a period when Great Britain ran a colonial empire that included India, historians used this linguistic data to tell a story of an "Aryan Invasion" that brought the Sanskrit language and civilization to India from Iran, which is close to the edge of Europe. Later the Nazis expanded on this Aryan idea to create an ideology of a Germanic master race. Later discoveries by geneticists and the decoding of very ancient writing in India (which turns out to be Sanskrit centuries before Iranian expansion) have overturned many of these long-held beliefs.
Similarly, it was once believed by Europeans that the first farmers had lived fairly close to Europe, in a region known as the "Fertile Crescent" that included Mesopotamia, the Middle East, and Egypt. Europeans believed this partly because the earliest archaeological digs were typically done by Europeans in this region of the world. But the story also supported the idea that the neighborhood of the eastern Mediterranean was the "Cradle of Civilization". Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the lands along the eastern Mediterranean coast figure in Europe's oldest stories at the very edge of history, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Bible, and the works of Homer. And the domestication of wheat from local grasses like emmer and einkorn, in this region, at least 10,000 years ago.
It wasn't until much later that historians began to include the stories of how *other* staple crops were domesticated, in our understanding of early agriculture. A staple crop is one that makes up a significant proportion of the calories that people depend on, for nutrition and survival. Wheat is only number three on the list of today's top five staple crops. The most important crop is maize (corn), followed by rice. After wheat, numbers our and five are potatoes and cassava. Each of these staples was domesticated in a different part of the world by different cultures, at about the same time.
Corn was was developed by natives of what is now Southern Mexico beginning about 9,000 years ago. The Central Americans created the single-stem, large-eared maize plant we are familiar with, by very gradually improving a native grass called *teosinte*. Year after year farmers saved seeds from the best plants with the biggest seed heads. Eventually, after generations of patient improvement these seeds began to look less like grass and more like what we would recognize as ears of corn. This process of selective breeding may have taken centuries, and along the way the maize plants lost the ability to reproduce by themselves. Modern corn seeds are trapped on their ears, and most will never germinate unless they are removed by people and replanted. Today, maize is the world’s most important food crop. Corn feeds billions of people and domesticated animals and produces a wide range of materials for energy, plastics, pharmaceuticals, and other industries.
Rice was developed by the ancient Chinese in the Yangtze River basin, beginning about 10,000 years ago, in a gradual shift from gathering wild rice to intensive cultivation. As they selected the best seeds to replant, farmers chose rice with larger grains that, like corn, would remain on the plant as it was harvested. Like corn, this choice made rice dependent on humans for propagation. Although second to corn with only about half as many tons produced each year, rice is the staple food of more than half the world's population today.
Potatoes are even older than corn, developed by South Americans over the period from 10,000 to 7,000 years ago, in a high-altitude plateau region of what is now Peru and Bolivia called the altiplano. Even today, markets in many remote villages still sell hundreds of potato varieties that people outside the region have never seen. South Americans bred potatoes for a wide range of uses. Because potatoes have a higher water content than grains, farmers learned to freeze-dry them for long-term storage. Potatoes would among the first “New World” products carried back to Spain by the conquistadors. They were widely adopted by European farmers and had solved Europe’s recurring famine problem by 1900. British economist Adam Smith, in his book On the Wealth of Nations, called Europe’s attention to the fact that fields planted with potatoes instead of wheat would feed three times as many people.
Cassava trees are native to central Brazil, where they were first domesticated between 10,000 and 7,000 years ago. Although the starch of the cassava tree, called manioc, is only familiar to most North Americans as tapioca or in bubble tea, the processed roots of this jungle tree are another of the world’s top five staple crops. Manioc feeds billions of people today in Asia and Africa. But unlike maize and potatoes, the roots of the cassava tree are mildly toxic in their raw form, containing cyanide compounds that must be removed before manioc can be eaten. Processing cassava roots involves grating, milling, fermenting, drying, and roasting—in various combinations depending on the end-product being produced. So in addition to discovering this food source when they settled in the Amazon, early Americans had to develop processing technologies to make it useable.
Historians once believed that the transition from hunting and gathering to farming, sometimes called the Neolithic Revolution, produced automatic and inevitable consequences such as the development of cities, armies, and civilization. Recently, new evidence and interpretations suggest that the "transition" was much more complicated and variable, and included some downsides as well as benefits. We'll cover this in more detail in the next couple of weeks, but here are some things to think about.
It is certainly true that the development of storable staple foods made possible a lot of the things we think of as civilization such as:
population growth and concentration in villages, towns, cities
division of labor, once not everybody needs to be concentrated on food production
growth of armies, as stored surpluses need to be defended
class distinctions, as people who control resources gain power
trade, as surpluses can be exchanged for goods from elsewhere
writing, usually developed to help keep records of commodities
stone monuments (megaliths)
But it is no longer clear that all of these are related in the straightforward ways we had once thought. For example, the recent discovery of really extensive megalithic sites in Turkey at Gobekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe, which are both at least 11,000 years old. That means they were almost certainly built before the advent of agriculture, by hunter-gatherers. So we probably don't really understand these people's motivations, much less how they organized their societies.
Similarly, as I mentioned, anthropologists tend to use their field studies of currently-existing peoples to build theories about how people may have lived in the past. The problem is, contemporary hunter-gatherers tend to live on the remotest and often on some of the most marginal land in the world. The San live in the Kalahari Desert; the Yanomami in the Amazon rainforest. These are not the most productive landscapes, but recent archaeological finds suggest that in ancient times, people were able to hunt and gather in regions that produced abundant food. This may not only have given them different ideas about the merits of settling down and farming, versus living on the land. It may also have suggested different forms of social organization than the transition we have imagined from small, egalitarian, wandering bands, to concentrated, hierarchical kingdoms and empires.
Next week we will begin looking at specific examples of these emerging societies, beginning with the farming communities that grew in river valleys and deltas. Some of the earliest of these are in the fertile crescent, at Çatal Höyük and Jericho -- but again this may be an artifact of where we've done the most looking. In any case, as we proceed, let's remember that although they typically left less evidence behind (both archaeological and later written records), the people who lived on the land, outside these settlements and their emerging civilizations, were as important and often had as big an influence on history, as the people in the villages, towns, and later cities.