Why the West Rules—for Now

by Morris, Ian;

  The clearest evidence for clumping and settling comes from what archaeologists call the Hilly Flanks, an arc of rolling country curving around the Tigris, Euphrates, and Jordan valleys in southwest Asia. I will spend most of this chapter talking about this region, which saw humanity’s first major movement away from hunter-gatherer lifestyles—and with it, the birth of the West.

  The site of ‘Ain Mallaha in modern Israel (Figure 2.3; also known as Eynan) provides the best example of what happened. Around 12,500 BCE, now-nameless people built semisubterranean round houses here, sometimes thirty feet across, using stones for the walls and trimming tree trunks into posts to support roofs. Burned food scraps show that they gathered an astonishing variety of nuts and plants that ripened at different times of year, stored them in plaster-lined waterproof pits, and ground them up on stone mortars. They left the bones of deer, foxes, birds, and (above all) gazelle scattered around the village. Archaeologists love gazelles’ teeth, which have the wonderful property of producing different-colored enamel in summer and winter, making it easy to tell what time of year an animal died. ‘Ain Mallaha has teeth of both colors, which probably means that people lived there year-round. We know of no contemporary sites like this anywhere in the world outside the Hilly Flanks.

  Settling down in bigger groups must have changed how people related to one another and the world around them. In the past humans had had to follow the food, moving constantly. They doubtless told stories about each place they stopped: this is the cave where my father died, that is where our son burned down the hut, there is the spring where the spirits speak, and so on. But ‘Ain Mallaha was not just one place in a circuit; for the villagers who lived here, it was the place. Here they were born, grew up, and died. Instead of leaving their dead somewhere they might not revisit for years, they now buried them among and even inside their houses, rooting their ancestors in this particular spot. People took care of their houses, rebuilding them over and over again.

  Figure 2.3. The beginning of the West: sites in and around the Hily Flanks dliscussed in this chapter

  They also started worrying about dirt. Ice Age foragers had been messy people, leaving their campsites littered with food scraps. And why not? By the time maggots moved in and scavengers showed up, the band would be long gone, seeking the next source of food. It was a different story at ‘Ain Mallaha, though. These people were not going anywhere, and had to live with their garbage. The excavators found thousands of rat and mouse bones at ‘Ain Mallaha—animals that had not existed in the forms we know them during the Ice Age. Earlier scavengers had had to fit human refuse into a broader feeding strategy. It was a nice bonus if humans left bones and nuts all over a cave floor, but any proto-rats who tried to rely on this food source would starve to death long before humans came back to replenish it.

  Permanent villages changed the rules for rodents. Fragrant, delicious mounds of garbage became available 24/7, and sneaky little rats and mice that could live right under humans’ noses fared better in this new setting than big, aggressive ones that attracted attention. Within a few dozen generations (a century would be plenty of time; mice, after all, breed like mice) rodents in effect genetically modified themselves to cohabit with humans. Sneaky (domestic) vermin replaced their big (wild) ancestors as completely as Homo sapiens had replaced Neanderthals.

  Domestic rodents repaid the gift of endless garbage by voiding their bowels into stored food and water, accelerating the spread of disease. Humans learned to dislike rats for just this reason; some among us even find mice scary. The scariest scavengers of all, though, were wolves, who also find garbage irresistible. Most humans see drawbacks to having terrifying, Call of the Wild–type monsters hanging around, so as with the rodents, it was smaller, less threatening animals that fared best.

  Archaeologists long assumed that humans actively domesticated dogs, making the tamer wolf cubs into pets and breeding them to produce tamer-still pups who liked humans almost as much as humans liked themselves, but recent studies suggest that natural selection once again worked without our conscious input. Either way, though, the interaction of wolves, garbage, and humans created the animals we call dogs, which could kill the disease-bearing rodents that competed with them for scraps and even fight with true wolves, earning their place as man’s best friend. Woman’s, too: around 11,000 BCE an elderly woman was buried at ‘Ain Mallaha with one hand resting on a puppy, both of them curled up as if asleep.*

  DAILY BREAD

  In the introduction to this book I spun out the science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein’s one-liner that “progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things” into a general sociological theory that history is made by lazy, greedy, frightened people (who rarely know what they’re doing) looking for easier, more profitable, and safer ways to do things. This principle kicked in with a vengeance in the Hilly Flanks at the end of the Ice Age, creating a distinctive Western way of living, with higher social development than in any other part of the world.

  We can probably praise (or blame) women for this. In modern hunter-gatherer societies women do most of the plant gathering while men do more hunting. Judging from the tendency for men’s graves to contain more spear-and arrowheads while women’s have more grinding tools, things were similar in prehistory, too, which suggests that the answer to the question that has dominated this book so far—when and where we should start speaking of a Western way of life distinct from other ways—grew out of the ingenuity of women living in the Hilly Flanks nearly fifteen thousand years ago.

  Wild cereals are annual plants. That is, they grow, produce seeds, and die in one season, then their seeds grow into new plants the next year. When a plant ripens, the rachis (little stalks attaching individual seeds to the plant) weaken and one by one the seeds fall to the ground, where their protective husks shatter and they germinate. For foragers fifteen thousand years ago the simplest way to harvest such seeds was to take a basket and shake the plants so the almost-ripe seeds fell into it. The only problem was that every seed on every wild plant in every stand ripened at different times. If gatherers got to a stand late in the season, most of the seeds would already have fallen and germinated or been eaten by birds. If they came too early the rachis would still be strong and most seeds would be too firmly attached to shake loose. Either way, they lost most of the crop. They could, of course, visit the stand repeatedly, but then they would have less time to visit other stands.

  We don’t know whether sloth (not wanting to walk from stand to stand), greed (just wanting more food), or fear (of hunger or of someone else getting to the plant first) was the inspiration, but someone, very likely a woman, had a bright idea: Why not take some of the best seeds and replant them in a particularly fertile spot? Then, she presumably thought, if we look after them—turning the soil, pulling up weeds, maybe even watering the plants—we can rely on them to be there every year, and even to give us better yields. Life is good.

  Once again, the earliest direct evidence comes from the Hilly Flanks, and indirectly we can thank the Ba’ath Party for it. The Ba’athists are best known as Saddam Hussein’s murderous political movement in Iraq, but they first seized power next door in Syria in 1963. After purging their rivals they set about modernizing Syria. Damming the Euphrates to create the fifty-mile-long Lake Assad that now generates most of Syria’s electricity was a big part of this. Foreseeing that the dam would flood the heart of the Hilly Flanks, the Syrian Directorate General of Antiquities launched an international campaign to study the sites that would be destroyed. In 1971 a British team explored the mound of Abu Hureyra. Finds on the surface suggested there had been a village here around 7000 BCE, and the archaeologists documented this in rich detail; but one trench revealed that this village had been built on the ruins of an older settlement, dating back to 12,700 BCE.

  This was a huge bonus. The excavators raced against time, as the floodwaters rose, and against war, as the Syrian army drafted their workers to fight Israel in the 1973 Yo
m Kippur/Ramadan conflict. By the time the site was drowned, the team had excavated a little over five hundred square feet of the earliest village: a tiny area, but one of the most important in archaeology. They found semisubterranean circular huts, grinding stones, hearths, and thousands of carbonized seeds. Most came from wild grasses, but a handful of plump, heavy rye seeds stood out.

  These seeds suggest that people at Abu Hureyra were using hoes to till fields. They were planting seeds beneath the surface rather than just dropping them on it, and this favored larger seedlings, which find it easier to push their way up to the air, over smaller ones, which find this difficult. If the prehistoric cultivators simply ate everything they grew this would not have mattered, but if they saved some of the seeds to plant again next year, big seeds would be slightly overrepresented. At first the difference would not be enough to notice, but if cultivators repeated this often enough, they would gradually change the meaning of “normal” as the average size of seeds slowly increased. Archaeobotanists (people who study ancient plant remains) call these bigger seeds “cultivated,” to distinguish them from wild grains and from the fully domesticated grains we eat today.

  By the time the ‘Ain Mallahans buried the old woman and her little dog around 11,000 BCE, Abu Hureyrans had replanted rye so often that it gave them bigger seeds. This must have seemed a small thing at the time, but it proved (to use one of archaeology’s worst puns) the seed from which the West would grow.

  PARADISE LOST

  Half a planet away, icily indifferent to puppies and rye, the glaciers kept melting. A hundred thousand years earlier their advance had scoured North America, creating the vast flatness of the Midwest; their retreat now turned these increasingly forested plains into a boggy, mosquito-infested mess. Drunken woodland is what ecologists call it—the ground gets so wet that trees cannot stand up straight. Ridges of boulders and ice that had not melted yet trapped the runoff from glaciers in vast lakes. Geologists have named the biggest of these Lake Agassiz (Figure 2.1) after the Swiss scientist who, back in the 1830s, first realized that there must have been global ice ages. By 10,800 BCE Lake Agassiz covered almost a quarter-million square miles of the western plains, four times the area of modern Lake Superior. Then the inevitable happened: rising temperatures and rising waters undermined the icy spur holding the lake back.

  Its collapse was a drawn-out cataclysm, in striking contrast to many modern disaster stories. In the impressively implausible movie The Day After Tomorrow, for instance, Dennis Quaid plays Jack Hall, a scientist (apparently the only one) who has noticed that global warming is going to cause the ice caps to collapse the next day. Summoned to the White House, he tells the president that a superstorm is about to create temperatures of −150°F, switching off the Gulf Stream that bathes northern Europe’s coasts with tropical water and keeps London, England, from having winters like London, Ontario. The superstorm will trigger a new ice age, Hall insists, making most of North America uninhabitable. Not surprisingly, the president is skeptical. Nothing gets done. A few hours later the storm erupts, trapping Hall’s son in New York. Heroics ensue.

  I won’t spoil the plot by telling you how the movie turns out, except to say that when Lake Agassiz really turned off the Gulf Stream around 10,800 BCE, things unfolded rather differently. There was no superstorm, but for twelve hundred years, while the lake drained into the Atlantic, the world slid back into ice age conditions. (Geologists call the period 10,800–9600 BCE the Younger Dryas after the waterlogged petals of a little flower called the Arctic Dryas that is common in peat bogs of this date.) The wild cereals that had fed permanent villages in the Hilly Flanks, made garbage heaps possible, and given us mice and dogs now grew less thickly and yielded fewer, smaller seeds.*

  Mankind was expelled from the Garden of Eden. Abandoning year-round villages, most people divided into smaller groups and went back to roaming the hillsides in search of their next meal, much like their ancestors at the coldest point of the Ice Age. Animal bones from the Hilly Flanks show that gazelles were getting smaller by 10,500 BCE as people overhunted them, and the enamel on human teeth regularly has telltale ridges indicating chronic childhood malnutrition.

  There has never been another catastrophe on quite this scale. To find a parallel, in fact, we have to turn to science fiction. In 1941 Isaac Asimov, then just starting his career, published a story called “Nightfall” in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction. He set it on Lagash, a planet with six suns. Wherever Lagashians go, at least one sun is shining and it is always day—except for once every 2,049 years, when the suns line up just right for a passing moon to create an eclipse. The sky darkens and the stars come out. The terrified populace goes mad. By the time the eclipse ends the Lagashians have destroyed their civilization and plunged themselves into savagery. Over the next 2,049 years they slowly rebuild their culture, only for night to fall again and start the whole process over.

  The Younger Dryas sounds like “Nightfall” revisited: the earth’s orbit generates wild swings between freezing and thawing, which every few thousand years produce disasters like the draining of Lake Agassiz, wiping the slate of history clean. Yet while “Nightfall” is a great story (the Science Fiction Writers of America voted it the best science-fiction story of all time, and for what it is worth it has my vote too) it is not such a good model for historical thinking. In the real world not even the Younger Dryas could wipe the slate clean like “Nightfall.” We might do better, in fact, to follow the ancient Greek thinker Heraclitus, who—2,500 years before Asimov sat down to write—observed, “You can’t step into the same river twice.” It is a famous paradox: the second time you put your foot into a stream the waters you originally disturbed have flowed on to the sea and the river is not the same river anymore.

  In just the same way, you cannot have the same ice age twice. The societies in the Hilly Flanks when Lake Agassiz collapsed around 10,800 BCE were no longer the same as those that had been there during the previous ice age. Unlike Asimov’s Lagashians, earthlings did not go mad when nature turned their world upside down. Instead they applied a particularly human skill, ingenuity, and built on what they had already done. The Younger Dryas did not turn the clock back. Nothing ever does that.

  Some archaeologists suggest that far from being a Nightfall moment, the Younger Dryas actually speeded innovation up. Like all scientific techniques, those used to date the earliest cultivated rye seeds from Abu Hureyra have built-in margins of error. The site’s excavators point out that while the midpoints of the date ranges for the large rye seeds mentioned earlier fall around 11,000 BCE, before the Younger Dryas, they could perfectly well have been harvested five hundred years later, after the Younger Dryas began. Perhaps it was not laziness or greed that prompted the women of Abu Hureyra to tend rye; maybe it was fear. As temperatures fell and wild foods declined, Abu Hureyrans may have experimented, discovering that careful tending produced more and bigger seeds. On the one hand, cold, dry weather made it harder to cultivate cereals; on the other, the harsher weather increased incentives to do so. Some archaeologists imagine Younger Dryas foragers carrying bags of seeds around, scattering them in promising-looking spots as insurance against nature letting them down.

  Further digging will show whether this is right, but we already know that not everyone in the Hilly Flanks responded to climatic disaster by returning to moving around in search of food. At Mureybet, just upstream from Abu Hureyra, French excavators found a new village established around 10,000 BCE. They exposed only twenty-five square feet of the earliest levels before Lake Assad swallowed this site too, but it was enough to show that the villagers scraped together sufficient wild plants and gazelles to hang on year-round. And in a house dated 10,000–9500 BCE the archaeologists made an unexpected discovery: embedded in a clay bench were the horns of a wild aurochs, the fierce six-foot-tall predecessor of the modern ox, plus the shoulder blades of two more.

  No pre–Younger Dryas site has yielded anything quite this odd, but after 10,
000 BCE villages filled up with all kinds of surprising things. Take, for example, Qermez Dere in northern Iraq, exposed by bulldozing in 1986. Only two small trenches could be excavated, one of which hit an area for preparing wild foods, much like those known from ‘Ain Mallaha or Abu Hureyra. The other trench, though, produced no evidence of domestic activities. Instead it contained a sequence of three roundish chambers, each twelve to fifteen feet across and dug five feet beneath the ancient ground level. The first chamber was plastered and a row of four pillars had been set in the floor, so close together that it was hard to move around the room. One of the pillars was found intact: molded in clay and plaster over a stone core, it tapered and had odd bulges near the top, making it look like a stylized human torso with shoulders. The room had been filled (apparently deliberately) with several tons of earth, containing several groups of big animal bones and unusual objects like stone beads. A new room was then dug, just like the first one, on almost exactly the same spot; it, too, was plastered then filled in with tons of earth. Then a third room was dug in the same place, plastered, and filled in. After dumping a few baskets of soil into this final chamber, people placed six human skulls, minus their jawbones, just above the floor. The skulls were in bad shape, suggesting that they had been in circulation for a long time before being buried here.

  What on earth were these people doing? It is a standing joke among archaeologists that whenever we cannot figure out what we have dug up, we say it is religious (having just finished excavating a site on Sicily that I think is religious, I should confess to not finding the joke very funny anymore). The problem, of course, is that we cannot dig up past beliefs; yet that does not mean archaeologists are just making things up when they talk about prehistoric religion.