a very short history of humanity

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A Very Short History of

Humanity

Out of Africa and Into the WorldIt started in Africa, in or about the year 50,000 B.C. We were

living in the savannahs of East Africa, hunting for meat,

gathering berries, and otherwise looking like any other

group of two-legged apes, once common in Africa. But

something was different about us. We decorated and

adorned our bodies like humans do; we created art like

humans do; we planned our hunting and gathering like

humans do; and most importantly, we improved on

everything we did and taught our children everything weknew, in the hopes that their lives would be better. Nobody

yet knows what made us different from the other

apesperhaps it was a combination of seeking new ideas

and having the language to communicate those ideas to

othersbut whatever happened so many years ago in Africa

finally made us human and thats when our story starts.

There were only a few thousand of us back then. All of

humanity could have fit into a ballpark. Every day under the

burning sun the men hunted while the women collectedberries and nuts. Every night under the brilliant stars we

huddled together and told ourselves stories. And sometimes

we were afraid, when the storms washed the land, or when a

lion came to hunt, but we knew where to hide and we knew

how to fight and every day we learned new things. There

were only a few thousand of us back then, but every century

there were more of us.

We have always been seekers of new things, and (possibly

more importantly) we have always been seekers of fame. It

By George Moromisato

13 June 2004A Very Short History of Humanity

1st version. 13 June 2004.

Notes

History is like a TV series. If you start in

the middle, you can't figure out what's

happening. Who is that guy? Why did

they do that? Oh, are they, like, allies?

My answer was to write a quick little

summary, a sort of "Previously, on Planet

Earth..." introduction. I hope it helps to

make sense of what's going on today

and maybe even foreshadow somefuture episodes.

I wrote this for my niece, Isabella, who

soon will be old enough to take an

interest.

References

My very short history is 4,000 words,

which should be almost too much for

today's TV generation. It was certainly

almost too much for me to write. But if

you are interested in more, you would

probably enjoy the following books,

which I used to create this history:

Blainey, Geoffrey.A Short History of the

World. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002.

Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and

Steel. New York: Norton, 1997.

Fagan, Brian M., ed. The Oxford

Companion to Archeology. New York:

Oxford University Press, 1996.

Hart. Michael H. The 100: A Ranking of

the Most Influential Persons in History.New York: Kensington Publishing, 1992.

A Very Short History of Humanity http://neurohack.com/earthguide/History.html

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did not take long for some of us to leave the hunting

grounds of East Africa and head north across the African

plain. As each century passed, we left our footprints on

more and more of the world. We walked to the Fertile

Crescent, settling in the places we liked, happy near the

abundant game and the bountiful earth. Later we walked

towards the Northern Star and settled in the craggy majesty

of Europe; and we walked East towards the rising sun and

walked on the golden steppes of Eurasia. Eventually, we

even built boats to reach the land of New Guinea and

antipodal Australia. In only a few millennia we had

populated three-quarters of the land. It has always been a

small world after all.

As we walked and hunted throughout the world we were not

always alone. In Europe we met another group ofape-descendants who had left Africa long ago. The

Neanderthals were our older cousins. They were larger than

us and had hunted in Ice Age Europe with fire and stone for

more than 50,000 years. But by then, our skills were great

and our tools were powerful. Nobody knows whether we

out-hunted them or out-fought them. All we know is that

the Neanderthals disappeared soon after we arrived.

Millennia went by and our collection of tools kept

increasing: gravers, borers, and scrapers; arrows, knives,and spears of all kinds. Every tool allowed us to live in new

places. With fish hooks made from ivory we could live by the

coast. With sewing needles made out of bone we could make

furs and live in the tundra of Asia. In time we followed the

wooly mammoth across the ice and found a whole New

World.

We crossed the icy-covered Bering Strait into America no

later than 10,000 B.C., just as the glacial blankets were

retreating towards the pole. The world was warming, andother species struggled to adapt. The mammoths

disappeared, as did the megathere, the saber-toothed cats,

the American lions, and the mastodons. But we had no

trouble adapting to the changes and in the end we thrived.

Nobody knows whether we pushed those other animals

towards extinction. All we know is that our campsites were

filled with their bones.

And so, at the end of the Ice Age, having started in Africa,

we now lived on every continent on Earth, save the coldest

Scupin, Raymond, and Christopher R.

DeCorse.Anthropology: A Global

Perspective, 5th ed. New Jersey:

Prentice Hall, 2004.


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one at the bottom of the world. The mammoths and the

mastodons were gone, but we hunted other prey. And now

everywhere we went, we met ourselves, and all other

ape-descendants were gone. There were 4 million of us then,

spread-out all over the world, living much as we had lived

for the last 40,000 years, and entirely unaware of the

wrenching changes that were to come.

To Have and Have-Not

At first, farming was a giant leap backwards. The reedy

weeds that passed for crops back then were nothing like the

hypermarket corn that you can buy today. But hunting was a

source of protein only if the hunt succeeded, and its no

surprise that we liked the idea of food that couldnt run

away from you.

Eventually, of course, we got better at growing food. But

more amazingly, eventually food got better at feeding us.

Every spring we planted many different seeds. At harvest

time, we could see that some seeds resulted in a better crop

than others. The next season we planted the seeds from the

best crop. Thirteen-thousand years later we realized what

we had done: We had selected the genes that were best at

feeding us. We genetically engineered our food in 11,000

B.C. In that way we domesticated barley, grapes, and olives

in the Near East; we cultivated soybeans, cabbage, and

plums in China; and we grew maize, squash, and chili

peppers in Central America.

Even animals were not immune from our influence. Wolves

came by our campsites from time to time. Those that

attacked us, we killed; those that were friendly, we fed. By

10,000 B.C. the wolves at the fringes of the campsite had

turned into dogs sleeping by the fire. Cats, ever more

independent, joined us 4,000 years later. The mammoths

were dead, but the dogs, the cats, the sheep, the goats, and

the cows now lived. The world was being shaped by our

hands, consciously or not, and not for the last time.

With our newly altered crops and our loyal animals, getting

enough food to eat no longer required sixteen hours a day.

For the first time in our history there was a surplus of food.

More importantly, we were no longer walking around the

world following game to hunt. Our campsites became more

permanent and soon they turned into villages. Those two

changes in our lives, the surplus of food and the emergence


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of villages, led to the greatest transformations in our

history. Civilization lay ahead.

Economics in 11,000 B.C. was simple. Farmers grew more

than enough food for their families, so they gave some of

their food to metal-workers. In exchange, metal-workers

gave the farmers tools for the farm. But it didnt take longfor things to get complicated. Bandits could take food from

the farmers and force the metal-workers to make weapons

for them. This forced the farmers and the metal-workers to

hire soldiers to protect themselves. In exchange farmers

gave the soldiers food and the metal-workers gave them

weapons.

But for us, nothing stays the same. We are always looking

for new things and (of course) we are always looking for

fame. And so, the villages got bigger and bigger, and the

farms got better at growing food; and the metal-workers

created new tools and new weapons. But it was the soldiers

who benefited most. With more and more surplus food, they

could support larger and larger armies. And among the

soldiers, some ruled over the others, and these rulers

became kings and queens of the villages. And though the

farmers just had enough food for themselves, the kings and

queens, the sultans and viziers, the emperors and their

bureaucrats, all controlled the wealth of the kingdom andtheir word was law (though law itself had not yet been

invented).

The division between the haves and have-nots has been with

us ever since. In a sense, it was both the cause of civilization

and the first product of civilization. But the greatest

contribution of civilization has been to provide an

environment in which new ideas could prosper. And not the

least of those new ideas, was the thought that all people are

equal, and that all, not just kings and queens, deserve thesame opportunity and freedom to pursue their dreams.

But that idea would have to wait. Other ideas were

flourishing that increased the power of a civilization. One of

the greatest must have been the realization that the sun, the

moon, and the stars moved in predictable ways. More

importantly, we discovered that the motion of the sun

marked the seasons and could tell us when to start sowing

and when to start reaping. Can you imagine a more

encouraging discovery? It must have seemed as if the


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universe itself was helping us to succeed. This discovery was

so important to us that we devoted enormous time and

energy to build gigantic monuments to help us track the

position of the sun. These monuments connected our

day-to-day farming life with the ethereal mysteries of the

cosmos. This was organized religion in 4,000 B.C.

The greatest idea of this time was probably writing. We are

all born with an instinct for spoken languagechildren will

spontaneously develop grammar for a pidgin language that

lacks it. But the idea of making marks on clay to represent

words only occurred to us in a few places in the world. At

first, writing was used mostly for record keeping. But in

time, writing served as the repository of knowledge. The

wisdom of a thousand of year was preserved in the written

word, long after authors were dead. Unlike many otherinventions and discoveries, writing improved the process of

invention and discovery itself.

And the world had changed again. Mesopotamia in the Near

East was the first to see the transforming power for

civilization. The city of Ur rose on the Euphrates river by

3500 B.C. In Egypt, the kingdom of the Pharaohs grew on

the Nile around the same time. The valley around the Indus

river followed in 2500 B.C.; and the Chinese civilization

around the Yangtze blossomed in 1800 B.C. Any hunter fromthe beginning of our story would have been lost in these

great cities, unaccustomed to the new roles (farmers,

craftsmen, soldiers, kings) and to the new ideas (writing,

organized religion, money). To us, on the other hand, a visit

would be no more than an exotic vacation. The differences

between 2000 B.C. and our time are no more than those that

can be covered in a good travel guide.

Sufficiently Advanced Technology

In A.D. 1969 two ape-descended human beings walked on

the surface of the moon. On Earth, 600 million people

watched or listened, using two recent inventions known as

television and radio. At the exact same moment, two other

ape-descendants held the power to launch thousands of

nuclear missiles, very similar to the ones that had just

propelled the astronauts to the moon, and loaded with

enough destructive power to kill most of those 600 million

people.

3,000 years earlier, we struggled to understand the world:


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What laws governed the motion of the planets? What were

rocks, trees, and rivers made out of? What caused diseases

and how could they be cured? What was the best way to

defeat the enemy? How should people be governed? Many

ideas were proposed to answer these and other questions.

Some of those ideas succeeded in answering interesting

questionsother ideas did not fit the facts. Over the years,

the successful ideas were kept while the unsuccessful ones

were discarded. And always, ideas built on other ideas, so

the more we learned about the world, the easier it was to

learn more.

On the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea, the

civilization of the Greek city-states produced many new

ideas. Greek philosophers measured the circumference of

the Earth, speculated on the circulation of blood, andlaunched a massive research-and-development program to

develop the catapult. Democracy was another such idea.

Instead of a permanent king who ruled over all, Greek

democracy called for shared rule, in which each landowner

took turns serving in a ruling council.

In the second centuryB.C. the Greek civilization was

conquered by the Romans, but the ideas that the Greeks

possessed were not lostthey were simply adopted by the

Romans. And in turn, the Romans built on the past anddeveloped new technologies to improve their life.

Many new ideas improved our control over the natural

world, but some ideas were more personal and dealt with

the questions that all humans have asked: Why am I here?

How should I live my life? Why do people suffer? What will

happen after I die? Many tried to answer these questions. In

northeast India, Buddha began a religion eschewing

selfishness and desire. In China, Confucius taught guides of

conduct, reinforcing the mutual responsibilities of rulersand subjects. And in the Near East, Jesus Christ preached a

religion founded on love. The philosophies of these three

men have endured long after their deaths and millions are

now inspired by their ideas.

In fourth centuryA.D. the Roman Empire succumbed to

invading Vandals and Goths. The ideas of that civilization

were lost for a time, but other empires rose in its place.

Mohammed united the tribes of the Arabian peninsula and

built a religion and an empire that challenged every realm


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from Spain to the western mountains of India. The Islamic

empire preserved and extended many of the ideas of the

ancient world. Algebra was one of those ideas. The number

zero was another.

Secure in the middle of Asia, China produced more than its

share of ideas and innovations. Books were printed in A.D.868. and gunpowder was known byA.D. 1044. Nevertheless,

the Mongols, united under Genghis Khan, managed to

conquer Peking in 1215. China turned inward and tempered

its curiosity about the rest of the world. In the early 1400s

China possessed the skills to build ships that could cross the

Pacific. But the Middle Kingdom, then the most advanced

civilization in the world, saw nothing outside itself that was

of interest.

The various tribes and civilizations of America were isolated

from each other. The ideas of the Aztecs, for example, were

not known to the Incas, and neither was able to learn from

the other. In contrast, the civilizations of Europe, Asia, and

Africa, all traded with each other and all learned from each

other. For example, paper was invented in China in A.D. 105,

but Arabs acquired the technology from captured Chinese

papermakers in 751, and Europe learned it from the Arabs

in the twelfth century. If an American delegation had visited

Europe in 1492, they would have found Europeantechnology to be almost indistinguishable from magic.

Unfortunately for the Native Americans, it was Europe

which sent a delegation to America in that year.

The European powers of the sixteenth century lacked the

technological sophistication of China or the Arab world.

Moreover, bottled-up in Europe, they ended up fighting

each other over land, religion, and power. But their

competition encouraged innovation and exploration, and

when the New World appeared before Columbus, it set off arace to exploit its treasures. Britain and France fought for

control of North America while Spain and Portugal raced to

subjugate South America. For the civilizations of the

Americas, resistance was futile. The Spanish

Conquistadores charged on horses (which the Americans

had never seen), fought with iron (which sliced through

quilted armor), and brought numerous infectious diseases

(to which the Native Americans had no immunity).

The competition among the European powers centered as


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much on technology as it did on conquest, and soon the

skills and knowledge of Europe surpassed those of the rest

of the world. Discoveries followed rapidly: In 1610, Galileo

worked a few laws of motion using, for the first time,

experiments and numerical measurement. In 1687, Newton

published thePrincipia which provided us with the tools

(calculus among them) to predict the behavior of the planets

and control the motion of cannon balls. In 1769, James Watt

perfected the steam engine. In 1789, Antoine Lavoisier

revolutionized Chemistry. In 1831, Michael Faraday

discovered electromagnetic induction, the principle behind

electric motors and generators. In 1859, Charles Darwin

explained why we are here when he published On the Origin

of Species. And in 1905, on the American coast settled by

Britain only three centuries before, Albert Einstein

developed the equation E = mc2, which accurately predicted

the ferocious power unleashed by an atomic bomb.

Armed with these and a thousand other advances, the

European powers fought each other, while the rest of the

world served as their pieces and their board. In the

eighteenth century, French and British empires fought each

other around the world; warships were their technology,

and they both fought for control of the seas. The American

Colonies seceded during this war, and vowed never to

become entangled in the affairs of the Great Powers. In the

nineteenth century, France and Britain fought again, this

time on land, and with Germany as their pawn. But as the

twentieth century opened, France and Britain became

reluctant allies as they warily realized that Germany was no

longer a pawn, and that the once dormant countries of

Russia, China, and Japan, had begun to stir.

We pause our story at the threshold of the twentieth

century, the most remarkable century in our history, to look

back at where we started. The agricultural revolution 12,000

years ago unleashed two irresistible forces. The first was the

increasing power of technology that enabled our competitive

human need to amass wealth, power, and status. The second

was the system of ideas that tempered and guided the first.

But as the power of technology increased exponentially, the

temptation to use that power for conquest and control

outstripped the guiding force of democracy, the rule of law,

and human rights. These powers increased so fast and

furiously that the deeds and weapons that burned the


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twentieth century would have been imaginable to the first

Fertile Crescent farmers only as visions of Hell.

It is said that the First World War started by accident, but if

so, it was an accident that required meticulous preparation.

In 1914 Germany and its allies fought against France,

Britain and its allies. Everyone thought that this would bejust another short European wars, but the power of

technology was too great for easy prediction. Machine guns

and chemical weapons kept the armies in the muddy

trenches for years, and when overwhelming strength finally

broke the stalemate on the French and British side, the

shock of defeat on the German side virtually ensured a

sequel. Other states were also casualties of that war. The

Ottoman Empire collapsed, turning the Middle East into a

dozen, warring, jigsaw-puzzle pieces. The Russianrevolution ushered in a totalitarian leadership that

corrupted the social aspirations of the masses to assume

dictatorial control over the largest country in Asia. And

Imperial Japan realized that technology was power and

decided to amass as much of it as it could.

Japan invaded Manchuria in 1932 and fought on the plains

of northern China in 1937. In Europe, the bitter defeat of

World War I and the Great Depression left Germany prey to

the totalitarian ambitions of Adolph Hitler. Germanyinvaded Poland in 1939 with Russia as its ally. Weak and

tired of war, France and Spain succumbed to the German

advance by 1941. Britain remained unconquered but

exhausted, while the United States, looked the other way,

safe on its own continent. But Japan did not trust the

strength of the US peace movement to keep the American

power out of the war. In 1941 it attacked and destroyed the

primary American naval base in the Pacific. In retrospect,

this was a miscalculation.

Another miscalculation was Hitlers betrayal of its Russian

ally. German armies invaded Russia in 1941, opening up a

disastrous second front. Meanwhile, the latent industrial

might of the United States surged into gear. Thousands of

tanks and airplanes rumbled out of factories in America.

The Western Front was won by the allied powers after an

audacious amphibious invasion in 1944. The Eastern Front

was won by Russia only after a sacrifice of millions of

soldiers. The war now turned to Japan, and once again the

economic power of the US was decisive. Battleships and


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carriers left American docks almost every week. Island by

island, the United States shrank the Japanese Empire until

American marines where fighting on the shores of Okinawa.

In previous centuries, this would have been the end, and the

leaders of Japan and the US would have settled on terms.

But this was a total and final war; too many people had died

and too many people had suffered. This had to be the war to

end all wars or else what was the point of fighting? In 1945,

the United States sent a message to the Japanese Emperor:

Surrender or be annihilated. In any other century this would

have been a bluff, and the Japanese treated it as such. But

the power of technology was incalculable. A few days later,

the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of

Hiroshima, instantly destroying the city center and killing

more than 100,000 people. A few days later, another bomb

was dropped, this time on Nagasaki. Japan did not wait fora third. The Second World War was over.

The dictatorships of Germany and Japan were defeated and

both were rebuilt by the allies into democratic republics. But

the dictatorship of Russia endured and prospered. In 1949,

Russia tested its own atomic bomb, the same year that

China fell under the control of totalitarian communism. To

the countries of the Western World it seemed as if the power

of their democratic ideas would fail under the contagion of

totalitarianism and one-party rule. East and West developed

and built more powerful nuclear weapons and the missiles

to carry them. Every person on Earth lived at the endpoint

of a missiles ballistic flight path. And just as it seemed that

this balance of terror would go on forever, the world

changed again.

In the end, the power of ideas was just as great as the power

of technology. The world was truly small now, and everyone

could see how the rest of the world lived. As the people of

the communist world saw the success of the Western

economies, they yearned to follow their example. In 1989,

the Soviet Empire collapsed, and the fear of nuclear

holocaust collapsed with it.

Being Human

It all started in a very different world. The warmth and

abundance of those African savannahs seem now like a

paradise lost. We are uncomfortable now, in our

mechanized and technological society. But we are a young


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and promising species and we should not give up hope. The

peace and balance of the natural world appears so only

because we live our lives in an instant of geologic time. Over

a long enough time, species rise and fall, battling with each

other to populate the world with their descendants. Life

defies balance because it always struggles to be better than

it is.

And so it is with us. Our history is filled with terror, death,

treachery, and cruelty, but we are always struggling to be

better than we are. Which is not to say that there are no

problems. We no longer live in fear of nuclear annihilation,

but we (rightly) worry about environmental collapse, global

pandemics, and persistent economic inequalities. But the

future will be better than the past as long as the men and

women of the present struggle to make it so. That at leasthas never changed.

Copyright 1999-2009 by George Moromisato. All Rights Reserved.


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a very short history of humanity

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