The Great Divide

by Peter Watson

  There is, therefore, hidden in Columbus’s account, a sense in which he was disappointed in what he found on the far side of the Atlantic. This may seem strange to us, who are the beneficiaries or the victims of his achievement, but Columbus’s disappointment relates – of course – to the well-known fact that, to the end of his life, he maintained ‘that he had reached the “Indies” he had set out to find. He had landed on islands close to Cipangu ( Japan), and on the mainland of Cathay (China).’7

  This insistence shows that all manner of historical forces were represented by Columbus, whether he knew it or not. In the first place, his voyages were the culmination in a mammoth series of navigational triumphs that had begun centuries earlier. Some of these voyages had been much longer than Columbus’s, and no less hazardous. In some ways, they collectively represent humankind’s most astounding characteristic: intellectual curiosity. Man’s medieval ventures into the unknown are, save for space travel, simply impossible for us to share and therefore separate us from Columbus’s time in a fundamental way.

  Low-key as Columbus’s landfall was, however, as the world now knows it eventually sparked a stampede across the Atlantic, a tide that still continues to an extent and changed forever the very shape of our world, with momentous consequences, both brilliant and catastrophic. It is not always recognised, however, that Columbus’s discovery, whatever else it did, also marked the end – or the beginning of the end – of a particular phase in history, a singular set of circumstances that have only been appreciated – can only have been fully understood – in recent years, owing to discoveries in several fields of learning. That unique period in history had begun, very roughly speaking, more than 16,000 years previously.

  THE GREATEST NATURAL EXPERIMENT IN HISTORY

  Until Columbus’s landfall on San Salvador, from approximately 15000 BC, when ancient peoples first entered the Americas, until roughly AD 1500, to speak in round numbers, there were two entirely separate populations on earth, one in the New World, one in the Old, each unaware of the other. This is a period of history that has never been regarded as an epoch in its own right before, but a moment’s thought will show how unusual it was, and how deserving of inquiry.

  These separate populations were faced with different environments, different weather, different landscapes, different vegetation, different animals. Nature in the two hemispheres, as we shall show, was very different. For more than sixteen thousand years – between 600 and 800 generations – these two populations, originally so similar, adapted to their environments, developing different survival strategies, different customs, different languages, different religions and, ultimately, different civilisations. For all of this time the world was divided in a unique – an unprecedented – way, but when Columbus set foot on Guanahaní, therefore, and, without knowing it, he began a process whereby this unique parallel development was eventually brought to an end.

  And this is the purpose of The Great Divide, to resurrect and recreate, to examine and investigate that parallel development, to observe the similarities and contrast the differences between the Old World populations and the New World populations, to see where the comparisons and the contrasts lead.

  In a sense the parallel development of these two populations was the greatest natural experiment the world has seen. Not a tidy experiment of course, in the laboratory sense, but a fascinating exercise in comparison nonetheless, a unique opportunity to see how nature and human nature interact, to explain ourselves to ourselves. It is a project not carried out before.

  The territories under scrutiny – entire hemispheres – are the greatest entities on Earth, along with the oceans, and some purists may be sceptical that the comparison involves too many variables to be meaningful. But I think the evidence is plentiful enough to enable us to draw some very fruitful conclusions about the important and long-term differences between the Old World and the New which explain – as well as describe – the markedly different trajectories of civilisation in the two hemispheres.

  For perfectly understandable reasons, archaeologists and anthropologists have in general looked at the similarities between different civilisations across the world, sharing the view that such comparisons will, more than anything else, reveal fundamentals about human nature, human society, and the way humankind has developed over the last 10,000 years, since the end of the Ice Age. While not denying that those parallels exist, or that they are important, this book takes the obverse approach and looks at the differences between the two hemispheres, on the grounds that these are just as instructive, perhaps more so, and that they have been relatively neglected. These differences also throw an important sidelight on what, ultimately, it means to be human.

  The book is divided into three. Part One describes how the first Americans reached the New World, what was special about their journey, how their experiences distinguished them from the peoples they left behind in Eurasia. Part Two describes the important and systematic ways in which the two hemispheres differed (and differ) – in geography, climate, their flora and fauna and the interaction between these separate elements. In some ways, this is the most surprising section of the book, that something as fundamental as Nature should vary so much between the two hemispheres. Part Three is a narrative, two narratives in fact, entwined around each other, as we follow the different trajectories as people in the two hemispheres both evolved great – but in some ways very different – civilisations.

  Broadly speaking, The Great Divide seeks to show that the physical world which early people inhabited – the landscape, the vegetation, the non-human animal life, plus the dominant features of the climate, of latitude and the relation of the land to the sea – determined the ideology of humans, their beliefs, their religious practices, their social structure, their commercial and industrial activities, and that, in turn, ideology, once it had emerged and cohered, determined the further characteristic interaction between humans and the environment. It may be true, as the socio-biologists and geneticists say, that there is only one human nature. But the very different environments across the world created some very different ideas that early peoples had about human nature. And, as this book seeks to show, that was in many ways more important.

  Our story will show that each hemisphere depended on, and was determined by, three very different phenomena. Vast stretches of the Old World fell under the influence of the Asian monsoon, the seasonal rainy period that extended from the eastern Mediterranean to China, which supported two-thirds of the world’s farmers and which has, for reasons we shall explore, been gradually weakening in strength for the past 8,000 years. This meant that fertility was the main preoccupation of religion in the Old World. Second, the existence of domesticated mammals exerted another all-important influence over the course of ancient history in the Old World, in particular the nature and extent of inter-societal competition and warfare. In the New World in contrast, the dominant influences were extreme – violent – weather, and, third, the much wider availability, variety and greater abundance of hallucinogenic plants. Together, these factors meant that religion, ideology, took on a far more vivid, intense and apocalyptic tone in the Americas.

  The Great Divide attempts quite an ambitious synthesis of what, to begin with, may appear to be very different disciplines: cosmology and climatology, geology and palaeontology, mythology and botany, archaeology and volcanology.

  It also makes use of one of the great breakthroughs in modern scholarship that has occurred since the Second World War – namely, the understanding of the newly deciphered scripts of the four main Mesoamerican civilisations – the Aztec, Mixtec, Zapotec and Mayan. Although only four Mayan books escaped the Spanish flames during the Conquest, other books or codices, produced jointly by Spanish clerics and Native Americans, and now countless inscriptions on stone stelae, altars and flights of stone steps, and other monuments and sculptures, are understood to such effect that the last thirty years have seen a massive explosion in knowledge and understanding of pre-Colum
bian life in the New World.

  The Great Divide uses this recent scholarship to formulate a systematic comparison between ancient history in the two hemispheres, and in doing so we shall see that there were very different trajectories as between Eurasia and the Americas. Despite these different paths, both hemispheres developed similar features, but it is the differences that are our concern here, in this book. They tell us just as much about human nature – and maybe more – as the similarities do.

  In examining these trajectories jointly, we shall not only see what happened – when and where the civilisations began to diverge – but why.

  • Part One •

  HOW THE FIRST AMERICANS DIFFERED FROM OLD WORLD PEOPLES

  • 1 •

  FROM AFRICA TO ALASKA: THE GREAT JOURNEY AS REVEALED IN THE GENES, LANGUAGE AND THE STONES

  If our ‘experiment’ of comparing developments in the New World with those in the Old is to have as much meaning as possible, then we need to be as clear in our minds as we can be as to what extent the people in the two hemispheres were similar in the beginning. Or, failing that, we need to know how they differed. Clearly, this is not an easy task – we are talking of a time of at least 15,000 years ago and, in much of the material in this and the next chapter, a lot longer ago than that. But, although the time depth is daunting, and the material of such a nature that we need to be cautious at all times – since so much is speculation, albeit informed speculation – that should not deter us. A few years ago, it would have been impossible to answer these sorts of question but now, thanks to developments in biology (in particular genetics), in geology, in cosmology, climatology, linguistics and mythology we understand far more about our deep history than ever before. The conclusions we are able to draw, however tentative, are worth the effort.

  OUT OF AFRICA

  Because of the discovery of DNA, genes, and in particular mitochondrial DNA (normally written as mtDNA and inherited only through the mother), and the Y-chromosome (which determines male sexuality), and because we know the rate at which DNA mutates, it has become possible – through the comparative analysis of the DNA of modern peoples right across the globe – to assess who is related to whom, both now and at various times in the past.* In effect mtDNA gives us, as one expert put it, ‘a cumulative history of our own maternal prehistory’, while the Y-chromosome does the same for our paternal history. For our purposes, the main elements in this theoretical picture (much of which is still to be confirmed archaeologically) are as follows:

  Modern humans evolved in Africa around 150,000 years ago.

  Perhaps as early as 125,000 years ago, a group of humans left Africa, most likely across the Bab al-Mandab Strait, at the southern end of the Red Sea (when that sea was some 230 feet lower than it is now) and travelled across the southern Arabian peninsula at a time when the region was much wetter than now, occupied by lakes and rivers. No human remains have been found, but primitive stone tools, similar to those produced in Africa at much the same time by Homo sapiens, have been excavated at Jebel Faya, a rock shelter near the Strait of Hormuz. Genetic evidence, of individuals across the world, alive now, shows that all non-African people are descended from one small group that must have passed through the Arabian peninsula. During very dry periods, the Jebel Faya population may have been isolated for hundreds or even thousands of years, before moving on, eastwards, along river routes that are now submerged in the Gulf. In this way they would have avoided the arid inland deserts of the region, eventually reaching India, by way of the Iranian and Pakistan coasts. This ‘beachcombing’ theory about the peopling of the world is still only that, a theory, but it is supported by the genetic evidence and by the presence of ancient shell middens on many coastal sites. Furthermore, we now know that, for much of human existence, before 6,000 years ago, sea levels were lower than now and as a consequence there was at that time perhaps as much as 16 million square kilometres more dry land in the world than there is now, ten per cent of the inhabited areas of the globe, a significant and attractive resource. We also know that, in general, marine/littoral environments provide a richer nutritional environment and support higher population densities and more sedentary settlements than do inland sites. Hunter-gatherers in ancient coastal and landbridge areas have so far been peripheral to human prehistory but that looks as though it is in the process of changing.

  This group that left Africa may not have been very large: Y-chromo-some studies suggest it perhaps comprised only about 1,000 men of reproductive age and the same number of women. Add on children and older people and this represents a population of perhaps 5,000. They may not all have gone together, either. Studies of foragers show that they like to live in groups of about 150, though when they ceased beachcombing, in Australia for example, they formed tribes of between 500 and 1,000 people (which is what the European colonisers found when they arrived in Australia at the end of the eighteenth century).

  After 70,000 years ago, humans crossed into Australia.

  At 50,000–46,000 years ago, in what is now Iran/Afghanistan, a group left the coast and travelled north and west, to populate Europe.

  About 40,000 years ago, a second bifurcation took place, this time in Pakistan/north India, with another group travelling inland into central Asia.

  At about the same time, the ‘beachcombers’ had reached China, travelling around the ‘corner’ of South East Asia, and then moving inland, back west, along what would become much later the Silk Route.

  Roughly 30,000–20,000 years ago, the groups that had headed inland from Pakistan/India bifurcated, with one group travelling west, towards Europe, while the other travelled deep into Siberia, perhaps meeting up with the people moving inland from China.

  Some time around 25,000–22,000 years ago, humans reached the Bering Land Bridge which connected Siberia to Alaska, though there is no archaeological evidence for them in Chukotka, or Alaska, until after 15,000 years ago. At that time, the world was in the grip of the last Ice Age, which endured from 110,000 years ago to about 14,000 years ago and as a result of which much of the world’s water was locked away in the great glaciers – many kilometres thick – which mantled the Earth. As a consequence, the world’s sea levels had fallen to some 400 feet below where they are now. In turn, this meant that the geography of the world was substantially different from what it is today. One important – crucial, fascinating – effect of this was that the Bering Strait did not then exist. It was comprised of dry land, or at least scrub land with lots of ponds and lakes but even so very passable for early humans. And so, some time between, roughly speaking, 20,000 and 14,000 years ago, early humans migrated into what would be called, later, variously the New World, the Americas, or the western hemisphere. Then, and this is no less crucial, after 14,000 years ago, when the world warmed up and the latest Ice Age came to an end, the Bering Strait refilled with water, Alaska and Siberia became parts of different landmasses and the western hemisphere – the Americas, the New World – was separated from the Old.

  Some of this evidence is shown on maps 1–10. These maps summarise visually several of the arguments to be found throughout the text of this book.

  As the crow flies (or a 747), it is about 7,500 miles from the southern end of the Red Sea to Uelen on the eastern-most tip of Siberia, but beachcombing around India and South East Asia would have more than doubled – and even tripled – that distance, and cutting across the landmass of Central Asia would not have been much shorter, and could have been more arduous, given the mountain ranges and lakes and rivers that needed to be circumvented without much in the way of technology. The journey of, say, 20,000 miles, took 50,000 years (though until early people reached the regions of intense cold, they may have spread quite quickly).

  But eventually, early peoples arrived in what is now known as the Chukotskiy Poluostrov, or Chukotskiy Peninsula, overlooking what would become the Bering Strait. It is not only the close proximity of Siberia to Alaska that suggests early peoples entered the New World in thi
s way (the strait – which was then a landbridge – is barely sixty miles wide at its narrowest point). There are three pieces of genetic evidence that, taken together, paint a coherent and convincing picture of early humankind’s entry into the Americas.

  The Chukchi people of eastern Siberia who, though they might be said to live at the edge of the world – the edge of the modern world at any rate – are nonetheless central from our point of view. Even today they live by herding reindeer and fishing through small holes in the ice-covered rivers.2 No one really knows why early peoples chose to live in this hard part of the world. Perhaps they followed mammoths and other big game; perhaps they didn’t choose to live there at all but were forced there by population pressures from the west and south. Just how hard life there was is confirmed by archaeological studies which show that there is a complete lack of sites in this part of Siberia between 19,000 and 18,000 years ago, suggesting that the amount of ice at its most extensive caused the area to be abandoned for a time before being re-colonised, by highly mobile hunter-gatherers who frequently moved their camps to where important animal resources were available – most sites have the remains of just one type of large-bodied prey species: reindeer, red deer or bison. Whatever happened, eastern Siberia (still a good distance from Chukotski) has been occupied – at sites such as Dyukhtai and Mal’ta – since 20,000 years ago (see map 5). This date is important, as is the location.