THE STORY OF ALL OF US
MANKIND™
BY PAMELA D. TOLER
© 2012 by A&E Television Networks, LLC.
HISTORY and the “H” logo are trademarks of A&E Television Networks, LLC.
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Published by Running Press,
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All the first-person narratives are fictionalized accounts based on historical evidence.
ISBN 978-0-7624-4703-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012946700
E-book ISBN 978-0-7624-4717-6
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CONTENTS
FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1 | SEEDS OF CHANGE
CHAPTER 2 | THE AGE OF IRON
CHAPTER 3 | CITIZENS
CHAPTER 4 | HOW THE EAST SAVED THE WEST
CHAPTER 5 | PLAGUE
CHAPTER 6 | NEW ERA
CHAPTER 7 | NEW WORLDS
CHAPTER 8 | SILVER
CHAPTER 9 | WILDERNESS
CHAPTER 10 | REVOLUTION
CHAPTER 11 | CLOSER
CHAPTER 12 | OBLIVION OR ETERNITY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FURTHER READING
PHOTO CREDITS
FOREWORD
Mankind
is a story of struggle—the struggle of all of us.
From our very first days on earth, we humans have confronted enormous challenges. Erupting volcanoes that blotted out the sun. Cruel ice ages that lasted for centuries. Deadly plagues that invaded our bodies and ruptured our cells. Ferocious weapons of mass destruction.
Time after time, unforeseen dangers have threatened to bring our story to an abrupt end.
But Mankind is also a story of triumph, because through it all, humanity has risen to meet every challenge. What does not kill us makes us stronger, and in learning to overcome adversity, we have made one great leap forward after another.
Across the last ten thousand years, these leaps have taken us from tiny bands of hunters following flocks of animals across empty landscapes to our great modern cities, crowded with tens of millions of people and crackling with energy.
Mankind is an ambitious and entertaining account of this journey. It tells our story in a new, exciting way, in vivid images and in the words of the people who lived through the events.
Unlike history books you may have read before, Mankind looks in the most surprising places for keys to explain how we got here.
Some keys lie in the planet itself—in the tides of the oceans, the contours of mountains, the minerals we mine from the ground.
Others are in our own bodies—how we see, in our blood, in the antibodies that protect us against infection.
Many are hidden in things we use everyday—humble goods like pepper, salt, sugar, and ice, all of which have played their part in the story.
Others still come from the mysterious remains of the past that dot the earth—the pyramids, Stonehenge, the Great Wall of China.
At times, we even have looked far beyond our own world—at the formation of stars or solar flares or the way the sun’s gravity causes our planet to wobble and tilt on its axis as we spin through space.
And often the answers are found in how things work—in the spin on a bullet as it leaves a rifle, in the perfect balance of an arch, or in the flow of water along a Roman aqueduct.
Mankind pulls the latest findings of historians and scientists together into a single gripping narrative, and shows how the lives of billions of individuals have come together to build the world we live in today.
Some of these individuals are famous names—Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln—whose decisions changed the direction of history.
But others were just ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events—like Agnolo di Tura, who had to bury his own wife and children when the Black Death killed half the people in his hometown. Or like Alice Harris, a missionary in the Congo whose photographs exposed one of the most horrifying crimes ever committed against humanity.
From the taming of fire to the invention of iron, from the birth of Buddhism to the crucifixion of Jesus, from the fall of Rome to the Industrial Revolution, from the earliest formation of democracy to the triumph of the civil rights movement, from the printing press to the computer—this book shows us history from the inside. It is alive, immediate, and always surprising.
Since the Stone Age, the pace of change has been speeding up, and one of the greatest lessons we learn from history is that the world will change more in the 21st century than in all previous times combined. It will present mankind with new challenges, which will take forms that we cannot yet even imagine.
History shows us who we are and where we have come from; and it also teaches us that the possibilities before us are endless. The human spirit has shown itself capable of meeting any challenge.
But history also shows that nothing is ever guaranteed.
If we are to go on succeeding in our struggle, triumphing over adversity as we have done so often in the past, we all need to understand our own story.
And for this, there is no better place to start than Mankind.
—IAN MORRIS
STANFORD UNIVERSITY
INTRODUCTION
FROM THE BIG BANG TO BIG BRAINS
We call it the big bang:
13.7 billion years ago, when time and space collided to produce the pure energy that ultimately formed matter and every species that ever lived, including us. Our human bodies are made, as are the skies, oceans, and mountains of planet Earth, from this same swirling mass of elements, later named carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen.
AFTER THE EARTH COOLED ENOUGH TO FORM ITS UNIQUE CONFIGURATION OF ELEMENTS AND ATMOSPHERE, IT TOOK ANOTHER HALF BILLION YEARS FOR THE FIRST SINGLE-CELLED ORGANISMS TO BLOSSOM IN ITS DEEP OCEANIC VENTS, AND TWO BILLION MORE FOR THEM TO BEGIN TO DIVIDE AND DIVERSIFY.
From specks of star dust to single-cell life-forms, the evolution of the human race into a form recognizable as the species we are today began some 150,000 years ago.
Mankind has existed for a fraction of time in the history of the universe, and most of it spent in a life-and-death struggle for survival—with no guarantees of success at any point, not even the present.
Mankind: The Story of All of Us retraces the path of learning that made us masters of fire and iron, gave us the comforts of food and shelter, and remade us into inventors, builders, and space travelers. Perhaps the most unlikely accomplishment of all on our zigzag learning curve as a species is our survival. Surprise has been the only constant in human history.
If there is one key to our longevity, it has been our ability to adapt to frequent, often viol
ent change. We have turned our most vulnerable weaknesses into strengths, beginning with our relatively small size and lack of speed compared to other mammals. Such an extreme physical disadvantage forced us to develop and employ bigger brains to outwit our foes, whether man, beast, or vast swings of temperature and climate.
A fair amount of luck was involved in humanity’s triumph over the astonishing odds wrought by ice ages. Mankind has faced predators five or ten times our size and strength. Also, unlike other species, we are born relatively fragile and unformed, requiring a long period of parental care that left our earliest ancestors vulnerable to violence, illness, and sudden death.
Physicist Paul Davis attributes our ability to persevere against these overwhelming odds to a chain of “Goldilocks moments” in which everything needed to help us adapt occurred exactly the way it needed to—or close enough to get us through another ten or twenty thousand years until a continent thawed or migration brought us closer to a vibrant river, the perfect prey, or a stretch of fertile soil.
Planetary and human history is traditionally presented in time lines lacking any visceral sense of the huge obstacles and near misses that pushed the human species to become smarter, more adept creatures. In third grade social studies, high school world history, or college surveys of Western civilization, a typical textbook follows an illusory linear progression. And while a time line can be a useful tool, it generally starts too late, since, in the context of the universe, we’ve been here barely long enough to catch our breath. Not only is the textbook time line too short; it is also too narrow, focusing with a few exceptions on humanity itself, with no reference to the world around us.
In fact, our history was shaped not just by our own actions, collective and individual, but also by incidents as large as a tilt in the earth’s orbit and as small as a genetic mutation in a grain of wheat. Human evolution has never been a forward march of progress consisting of evenly divided positive steps from archaic humans to their modern counterparts, each change in our appearance and behavior an improvement on the last. Several new hominid species coexisted in Africa between 2.5 million BCE and the arrival of modern man in 150,000 BCE. Which one would triumph and become our direct ancestor was far from settled as recently as fifty thousand years ago.
The majority of evolutionary changes have been relatively minor things—the refinement of an opposable thumb, a fractional increase in cranium size, the ability to stay upright long enough and stretch an arm far enough to grab a fruit from a low-hanging branch—the consequences of which play out incrementally over thousands of generations. This change in perspective does not detract from the significance of each Goldilocks moment. On the contrary, it underscores the precarious nature of the human drama: depended on the right behavioral adaptation meeting a hospitable setting.
Our history was shaped not just by our own actions, collective and individual, but also by incidents as large as a tilt in the earth’s orbit and as small as a genetic mutation in a grain of wheat.
In the chapters ahead we tell the story of pivotal points when natural forces intersected with human ingenuity and a bit of luck to make (or break) us as a species. In these times and places, the human race faced mysteries and obstacles so formidable that if they had not been solved and surmounted, chances are we would not be here today. By reliving these transitional events, we can better understand what our predecessors were up against when they made the huge leaps forward that ultimately ensured their survival—and set the stage for ours.
So we begin at mankind’s beginning, when staying alive translated into an unrelenting, often dangerous search for the day’s food.
1
SEEDS of CHANGE
Our early ancestors made the first tools more than 2 million years ago by striking one stone against another. Simple choppers evolved over the centuries into cleavers, hand axes and finely worked stone blades.
THE HUMAN RACE WAS BORN ON THE GRASSLANDS AND FORESTS OF AFRICA’S GREAT RIFT VALLEY, A FRACTURE IN THE AFRICAN CONTINENTAL PLATE WHERE DIVERSE ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS AND human-friendly temperature ranges made it the perfect laboratory for the development of a hairless, toolmaking ape. It is here that we join human evolution reached its first critical pivot: the transition from ape to human.
We have no precise dates for such monumental advances in the human condition as hunting and fire making, but scientists have amassed substantial evidence about what life was like before and after these breakthroughs. These traces of early human history come to us as artifacts: tools, abandoned campsites, ruined villages, hidden art, and skeleton fragments.
In recent years, we’ve learned to read ancient artifacts more closely than we could in the past. Geologists study climate changes using drill cores from lake sediment. Paleobotanists trace the evolution of foodstuffs using fossilized pollen DNA testing and sequencing. Techniques such as biomechanical modeling of teeth and bone scanning give paleontologists and paleoanthropologists a window through which to view the relationships between humans and animals, and between humans and other humans, across time and space. With the help of these new technologies and methods, we are finding more and more that we are all part of the same whole.
On the most basic level of survival, we know that our earliest human ancestors were scavengers who foraged for fruit, nuts, and seeds. They ate birds’ eggs, termites and ants, and dead birds or animals, at least when they were lucky enough to find them. Even after someone picked up a rock, threw it at a rabbit, and invented hunting, most of the diet consumed by these small human bands—men, women with children, and extended family members—still came from their collective efforts at foraging for wild grains, berries, and roots.
But how long ago did mankind make its appearance? That depends on how you define being human. If you don’t stand up and walk on your own two feet, you’re an ape, not a human. And while there is no clear moment at which we can draw a line between apes and humans, the Human Genome Project repeatedly brings us one step closer. Historians and scientists now believe that the first protohumans appeared in East Africa as early as 5.5 million years ago, but they weren’t direct ancestors of early humans. Like modern apes, they could walk upright for a brief time if circumstances required it, but for the most part they were tree climbers and knuckle walkers.
The first true hominid—a member of the family Hominidae, which includes modern humans—showed up 2 million years later, around 3.5 million years ago. Paleoanthropologists call her Australopithecus, or the southern ape; we’ll keep it simple and call her Lucy.
MEET LUCY
Australopithecus made headlines in 1974 when an expedition under the leadership of American paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson discovered a substantially complete female skeleton in the Afar region of Ethiopia. Members of the expedition named her “Lucy” after the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” which they played over and over on the evening they celebrated the find. Members of the international press quickly labeled her the “missing link”; she helped all of us understand the origins of humanity.
Finding Lucy was more than just a human-interest story in the evening news. Her skeleton was the oldest specimen of the genus Australopithecus found to date. (“Earliest” can always change when you’re talking about prehistory. The new earliest is always just one dig site away.) More important, enough of Lucy’s skeleton remained to establish that Australopithecus did indeed walk upright, like a human.
In 1975, Johanson’s team found more specimens of what is now termed Australopithecus afarensis at a single site in the same region, which they called “the First Family.”
LUCY WAS CLOSER TO AN APE than an early human. She stood only three or four feet tall and had a brain about the size of an orange. Her face was more like an ape’s than a human’s, her arms were longer than ours, and her fingers curled like those of a chimpanzee. She may have chosen to use those long arms to climb a tree, like an ape, but she had all the physical equipment she needed to walk upright on two feet. In fact, s
he was probably better designed for walking upright than we are. The human pelvis is a compromise between standing upright and giving birth to babies with large skulls and sizable brains.
Being bipedal has a major advantage: it leaves your hands free. Combine that with the opposable thumbs that small primates developed fifty million years earlier and you’re ready to pick up a tool. Lucy did. She probably didn’t make tools, but she used rocks and sticks to help her hunt for food and fend off predators.
After Lucy, our story gets more complicated. There may have been up to one hundred hominid species that coexisted in Africa between Lucy’s time and the arrival of modern humans around 150,000 BCE. We don’t know how they relate to each other, or which species we can call our direct ancestors, but after much controversy, anthropologists are in general agreement about two groups of proto-humans with whom they think we have more direct familial connections.
Homo habilis, literally the “handy man,” is considered the first protohuman, and he carries the distinction of being an adept toolmaker. He appeared in East Africa around 2.5 million BCE, making him a contemporary of some of Lucy’s descendants. Homo habilis was still much smaller than a modern man, but his brain was twice the size of a chimpanzee’s. He learned to hunt and to make crude stone tools by using one piece of flint to chip flakes off another. One of the great chicken-and-egg questions of human development is whether Homo habilis learned to make tools because he had a larger brain or whether the exercise of creating tools developed a larger brain. Chances are it will remain a mystery.
With Homo erectus, who lived around 1.5 million years ago, hominid life begins to look more familiar to us. Homo erectus probably had only rudimentary language ability, but he made more refined stone tools, most notably the hand ax; began to cook his food; established semipermanent camps; and perhaps formed long-term male-female bonds.
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