by Unknown
The only thing we can try to do is to influence the direction scientists are taking. Since we might soon be able to engineer our desires too, perhaps the real question facing us is not ‘What do we want to become?’, but ‘What do we want to want?’ Those who are not spooked by this question probably haven’t given it enough thought.
Afterword:
The Animal that Became a God
SEVENTY THOUSAND YEARS AGO, HOMO sapiens was still an insignificant animal minding its own business in a corner of Africa. In the following millennia it transformed itself into the master of the entire planet and the terror of the ecosystem. Today it stands on the verge of becoming a god, poised to acquire not only eternal youth, but also the divine abilities of creation and destruction.
Unfortunately, the Sapiens regime on earth has so far produced little that we can be proud of. We have mastered our surroundings, increased food production, built cities, established empires and created far-flung trade networks. But did we decrease the amount of suffering in the world? Time and again, massive increases in human power did not necessarily improve the well-being of individual Sapiens, and usually caused immense misery to other animals.
In the last few decades we have at last made some real progress as far as the human condition is concerned, with the reduction of famine, plague and war. Yet the situation of other animals is deteriorating more rapidly than ever before, and the improvement in the lot of humanity is too recent and fragile to be certain of.
Moreover, despite the astonishing things that humans are capable of doing, we remain unsure of our goals and we seem to be as discontented as ever. We have advanced from canoes to galleys to steamships to space shuttles - but nobody knows where we’re going. We are more powerful than ever before, but have very little idea what to do with all that power. Worse still, humans seem to be more irresponsible than ever. Self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no one. We are consequently wreaking havoc on our fellow animals and on the surrounding ecosystem, seeking little more than our own comfort and amusement, yet never finding satisfaction.
Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?
Notes
1 An Animal of No Significance
1 Ann Gibbons, ‘Food for Thought: Did the First Cooked Meals Help Fuel the Dramatic Evolutionary Expansion of the Human Brain?’, Science 316:5831 (2007), 1,558-60.
2 The Tree of Knowledge
1 Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).
2 Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005); Michael L. Wilson and Richard W. Wrangham, ‘Intergroup Relations in Chimpanzees’, Annual Review of Anthropology 32 (2003), 363-92; M. McFarland Symington, ‘Fission-Fusion Social Organization in Ateles and Pan, International Journal of Primatology 11:1 (1990), 49; Colin A. Chapman and Lauren J. Chapman, ‘Determinants of Groups Size in Primates: The Importance of Travel Costs’, in On the Move: How and Why Animals Travel in Groups, ed. Sue Boinsky and Paul A. Garber (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 26.
3 Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, 69-79; Leslie C. Aiello and R. I. M. Dunbar, ‘Neocortex Size, Group Size, and the Evolution of Language’, Current Anthropology 34:2 (1993), 189. For criticism of this approach see: Christopher McCarthy et al., ‘Comparing Two Methods for Estimating Network Size’, Human Organization 60:1 (2001), 32; R. A. Hill and R. I. M. Dunbar, ‘Social Network Size in Humans’, Human Nature 14:1 (2003), 65.
4 Yvette Taborin, ‘Shells of the French Aurignacian and Perigordian’, in Before Lascaux: The Complete Record of the Early Upper Paleolithic, ed. Heidi Knecht, Anne Pike-Tay and Randall White (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 1993), 211-28.
5 G. R. Summerhayes, ‘Application of PIXE-PIGME to Archaeological Analysis of Changing Patterns of Obsidian Use in West New Britain, Papua New Guinea’, in Archaeological Obsidian Studies: Method and Theory, ed. Steven M. Shackley (New York: Plenum Press, 1998), 129-58.
3 A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve
1 Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha, Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality (New York: Harper, 2010); S. Beckerman and P. Valentine (eds.), Cultures of Multiple Fathers. The Theory and Practice of Partible Paternity in Lowland South America (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002).
2 Noel G. Butlin, Economics and the Dreamtime: A Hypothetical History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 98-101; Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2002), 15; William Howell Edwards, An Introduction to Aboriginal Societies (Wentworth Falls, NSW: Social Science Press, 1988), 52.
3 Fekri A. Hassan, Demographic Archaeology (New York: Academic Press, 1981), 196-9; Lewis Robert Binford, Constructing Frames of Reference: An Analytical Method for Archaeological Theory Building Using Hunter-Gatherer and Environmental Data Sets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 143.
4 Brian Hare, The Genius of Dogs: How Dogs Are Smarter Than You Think (Dutton: Penguin Group, 2013).
5 Christopher B. Ruff, Erik Trinkaus and Trenton W. Holliday, ‘Body Mass and Encephalization in Pleistocene Homo’, Nature 387 (1997), 173-6; M. Henneberg and M. Steyn, ‘Trends in Cranial Capacity and Cranial Index in Subsaharan Africa During the Holocene’, American Journal of Human Biology 5:4 (1993): 473-9; Drew H. Bailey and David C. Geary, ‘Hominid Brain Evolution: Testing Climatic, Ecological and Social Competition Models’, Human Nature 20 (2009): 67-79; Daniel J. Wescott and Richard L. Jantz, ‘Assessing Craniofacial Secular Change in American Blacks and Whites Using Geometric Morphometry’, in Modern Morphometrics in Physical Anthropology: Developments in Primatology: Progress and Prospects, ed. Dennis E. Slice (New York: Plenum Publishers, 2005), 231-45.
6 Nicholas G. Blurton Jones et al., ‘Antiquity of Postreproductive Life: Are There Modern Impacts on Hunter-Gatherer Postreproductive Life Spans?’, American Journal of Human Biology 14 (2002), 184-205.
7 Kim Hill and A. Magdalena Hurtado, Ache Life History: The Ecology and Demography of a Foraging People (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1996), 164, 236.
8 Ibid., 78.
9 Vincenzo Formicola and Alexandra P. Buzhilova, ‘Double Child Burial from Sunghir (Russia): Pathology and Inferences for Upper Paleolithic Funerary Practices’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 124:3 (2004), 189-98; Giacomo Giacobini, ‘Richness and Diversity of Burial Rituals in the Upper Paleolithic’, Diogenes 54:2 (2007), 19-39.
10 I. J. N. Thorpe, ‘Anthropology, Archaeology and the Origin of Warfare’, World Archaeology 35:1 (2003), 145-65; Raymond C. Kelly, Warless Societies and the Origin of War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000); Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Lawrence H. Keeley, War before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Slavomil Vend, ‘Stone Age Warfare’, in Ancient Warfare: Archaeological Perspectives, ed. John Carman and Anthony Harding (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1999), 57-73.
4 The Flood
1 James F. O’Connel and Jim Allen, ‘Pre-LGM Sahul (Pleistocene Australia - New Guinea) and the Archaeology of Early Modern Humans’, in Rethinking the Human Revolution: New Behavioural and Biological Perspectives on the Origin and Dispersal of Modern Humans, ed. Paul Mellars, Ofer Bar-Yosef, Katie Boyle (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2007), 395-410; James F. O’Connel and Jim Allen, ‘When Did Humans First Arrive in Greater Australia and Why is it Important to Know?’, Evolutionary Anthropology 6:4 (1998), 132-46; James F. O’Connel and Jim Allen, ‘Dating the Colonization of Sahul (Pleistocene Australia - New Guinea): A Review of Recent Research’, Journal of Radiological Science 31:6 (2004), 835-53; Jon M. Erlandson, ‘Anatomically Modern Humans, Maritime Voyaging and the Plei
stocene Colonization of the Americas’, in The First Americans: The Pleistocene Colonization of the New World, ed. Nina G. Jablonski (San Francisco: University of California Press, 2002), 59-60, 63-4; Jon M. Erlandson and Torben C. Rick, ‘Archaeology Meets Marine Ecology: The Antiquity of Maritime Cultures and Human Impacts on Marine Fisheries and Ecosystems’, Annual Review of Marine Science 2 (2010), 231-51; Atholl Anderson, ‘Slow Boats from China: Issues in the Prehistory of Indo-China Seafaring’, Modern Quaternary Research in Southeast Asia 16 (2000), 13-50; Robert G. Bednarik, ‘Maritime Navigation in the Lower and Middle Paleolithic’, Earth and Planetary Sciences 328 (1999), 559-60; Robert G. Bednarik, ‘Seafaring in the Pleistocene’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 13:1 (2003), 41-66.
2 Timothy F. Flannery, The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and Peoples (Port Melbourne: Reed Books Australia, 1994); Anthony D. Barnosky et al., ‘Assessing the Causes of Late Pleistocene Extinctions on the Continents’, Science 306:5693 (2004): 70-5; Barry W. Brook and David M. J. S. Bowman, ‘The Uncertain Blitzkrieg of Pleistocene Megafauna’, Journal of Biogeography 31:4 (2004), 517-23; Gifford H. Miller et al., ‘Ecosystem Collapse in Pleistocene Australia and a Human Role in Megafaunal Extinction’, Science 309:5732 (2005), 287-90; Richard G. Roberts et al., ‘New Ages for the Last Australian Megafauna: Continent Wide Extinction about 46,000 Years Ago’, Science 292:5523 (2001), 1,888-92.
3 Stephen Wroe and Judith Field, ‘A Review of Evidence for a Human Role in the Extinction of Australian Megafauna and an Alternative Explanation’, Quaternary Science Reviews 25:21-2 (2006), 2,692-703; Barry W. Brook et al., ‘Would the Australian Megafauna Have Become Extinct if Humans Had Never Colonised the Continent? Comments on “A Review of the Evidence for a Human Role in the Extinction of Australian Megafauna and an Alternative Explanation” by S. Wroe and J. Field’, Quaternary Science Reviews 26:3-4 (2007), 560-4; Chris S. M. Turney et al., ‘Late-Surviving Megafauna in Tasmania, Australia, Implicate Human Involvement in their Extinction’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105:34 (2008), 12,150-3.
4 John Alroy, ‘A Multispecies Overkill Simulation of the End-Pleistocene Megafaunal Mass Extinction, Science, 292:5523 (2001), 1,893-6; O’Connel and Allen, ‘Pre-LGM Sahul’, 400-1.
5 L. H. Keeley, ‘Proto-Agricultural Practices Among Hunter-Gatherers: A Cross-Cultural Survey’, in Last Hunters, First Farmers: New Perspectives on the Prehistoric Transition to Agriculture, ed. T. Douglas Price and Anne Birgitte Gebauer (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1995), 243-72; R. Jones, ‘Firestick Farming’, Australian Natural History 16 (1969), 224-8.
6 David J. Meitzer, First Peoples in a New World: Colonizing Ice Age America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).
7 Paul L. Koch and Anthony D. Barnosky, ‘Late Quaternary Extinctions: State of the Debate’, Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 37 (2006), 215-50; Anthony D. Barnosky et al., ‘Assessing the Causes of Late Pleistocene Extinctions on the Continents’, 70-5.
5 History’s Biggest Fraud
1 The map is based mainly on: Peter Bellwood, First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005).
2 Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).
3 Gat, War in Human Civilization, 130-1; Robert S. Walker and Drew H. Bailey, ‘Body Counts in Lowland South American Violence’, Evolution and Human Behavior 34 (2013), 29-34.
4 Katherine A. Spielmann, ‘A Review: Dietary Restriction on Hunter-Gatherer Women and the Implications for Fertility and Infant Mortality’, Human Ecology 17:3 (1989), 321-45. See also: Bruce Winterhalder and Eric Alder Smith, ‘Analyzing Adaptive Strategies: Human Behavioral Ecology at Twenty-Five’, Evolutionary Anthropology 9:2 (2000), 51-72.
5 Alain Bideau, Bertrand Desjardins and Hector Perez-Brignoli (eds.), Infant and Child Mortality in the Past (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Edward Anthony Wrigley et al., English Population History from Family Reconstitution, 1580-1837 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 295-6, 303.
6 Manfred Heun et al., ‘Site of Einkorn Wheat Domestication Identified by DNA Fingerprints’, Science 278:5341 (1997), 1,312-14.
7 Charles Patterson, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust (New York: Lantern Books, 2002), 9-10; Peter J. Ucko and G. W. Dimbleby (eds.), The Domestication and Exploitation of Plants and Animals (London: Duckworth, 1969), 259.
8 Avi Pinkas (ed.), Farmyard Animals in Israel - Research, Humanism and Activity (Rishon Le-Ziyyon: The Association for Farmyard Animals, 2009 [Hebrew]), 169-99; “Milk Production - the Cow’ [Hebrew], The Dairy Council, accessed 22 March 2012, http://www.milk.org.il/cgi-webaxy/sal/sal.pl?lang=he&ID=645657_milk&act=show&dbid=katavot&dataid=cow.htm.
9 Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969); E. C. Amoroso and P. A. Jewell, ‘The Exploitation of the Milk-Ejection Reflex by Primitive People’, in Man and Cattle: Proceedings of the Symposium on Domestication at the Royal Anthropological Institute, 24-26 May 1960, ed. A. E. Mourant and F. E. Zeuner (London: The Royal Anthropological Institute, 1963), 129-34.
10 Johannes Nicolaisen, Ecology and Culture of the Pastoral Tuareg (Copenhagen: National Museum, 1963), 63.
6 Building Pyramids
1 Angus Maddison, The World Economy, vol. 2 (Paris: Development Centre of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, 2006), 636; ‘Historical Estimates of World Population’, U.S. Census Bureau, accessed 10 December 2010, http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/worldhis.html.
2 Robert B. Mark, The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002), 24.
3 Raymond Westbrook, ‘Old Babylonian Period’, in A History of Ancient Near Eastern Law, vol. 1, ed. Raymond Westbrook (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 361-430; Martha T. Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd edn (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997), 71-142; M. E. J. Richardson, Hammurabi’s Laws: Text, Translation and Glossary (London: T & T Clark International, 2000).
4 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia, 76.
5 Ibid., 121.
6 Ibid., 122-3.
7 Ibid., 133-3.
8 Constance Brittaine Bouchard, Strong of Body, Brave and Noble: Chivalry and Society in Medieval France (New York: Cornell University Press, 1998), 99; Mary Martin McLaughlin, ‘Survivors and Surrogates: Children and Parents from the Ninth to Thirteenth Centuries’, in Medieval Families: Perspectives on Marriage, Household and Children, ed. Carol Neel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 81 n.; Lise E. Hull, Britain’s Medieval Castles (Westport: Praeger, 2006), 144.
7 Memory Overload
1 Andrew Robinson, The Story of Writing (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 63; Hans J. Nissen, Peter Damerow and Robert K. Englung, Archaic Bookkeeping: Writing and Techniques of Economic Administration in the Ancient Near East (Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 36.
2 Marcia and Robert Ascher, Mathematics of the Incas - Code of the Quipu (New York: Dover Publications, 1981).
3 Gary Urton, Signs of the Inka Khipu (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003); Galen Brokaw, A History of the Khipu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
4 Stephen D. Houston (ed.), The First Writing: Script Invention as History and Process (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 222.
8 There is No Justice in History
1 Sheldon Pollock, ‘Axialism and Empire’, in Axial Civilizations and World History, ed. Johann P. Arnason, S. N. Eisenstadt and Bjorn Wittrock (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 397-451.
2 Harold M. Tanner, China: A History (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co., 2009), 34.
3 Ramesh Chandra, Identity and Genesis of Caste System in India (Delhi: Kalpaz Publications, 2005); Michael Bamshad et al., ‘Genetic Evidence on the Origins of Indian Caste Population’, Genome Re
search 11 (2001): 904-1,004; Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
4 Houston, First Writing, 196.
5 The secretary general, United Nations, Report of the Secretary General on the In-depth Study on All Forms of Violence Against Women, delivered to the General Assembly, UN Doc. A/16/122/Add.1 (6 July 2006), 89.
6 Sue Blundell, Women in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995). 113-2.9.131-3.
10 The Scent of Money
1 Francisco Lopez de Gomara, Historia de la Conquista de Mexico, vol. 1, ed. D. Joaquin Ramirez Cabanes (Mexico City: Editorial Pedro Robredo, 1943), 106.
2 Andrew M. Watson, ‘Back to Gold - and Silver’, Economic History Review 20:1 (1967), 11-12; Jasim Alubudi, Repertorio Bibliografico del Islam (Madrid: Vision Libros, 2003), 194.
3 Watson, ‘Back to Gold - and Silver’, 17-18.
4 David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2011).
5 Glyn Davies, A History of Money: From Ancient Times to the Present Day (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1994), 15.
