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World History in Three Pages

from Richard Ostrofsky

of Second Thoughts Bookstore (now closed)www.secthoughts.com

quill@travel-net.com

December, 2011

Roughly six million years ago, in the forests and plains of Africa, a

hominid line leading to modern humans diverged from the line that led to

modern chimpanzees. The latter remained wild animals. The former,(hominists, as we might call australopithecus and all those species

evolving in the human direction) domesticated each other, came to depend

upon collective mindset and decision-making (culture, in other words),

and became specialists in mutual dependency. Among more familiaradaptations (bipedalism, loss of body hair, prolonged infancy and

childhood, all-year-round sexual interest), these hominists evolved a

subtler form of mimicry, learning to read the attention and intentions oftheir fellow creatures by following their eye movements. They evolved

more conspicuous eyes, with pupils highlighted by coloured irises and

then by whites to help each other do that. Where other great apescamouflage the direction of their gaze, we telegraph ours. Check out the

phrase "Cooperative eye hypothesis" on Google, and see what you find.

This novel style of copying not just of overt behavior but of intention

itself made it possible to experiment with and teach the use and crafting

of implements to extend the body's natural powers. It may haveunderpinned our developing faculties of symbolic representation first as

ritual and dance, and then through vocal modulation. By 2.6 million yearsago (mya), a standardized technique was in general use to craft stone tools

of a certain type in the region that is today Ethiopia. By 1.8 mya, the

technique had been greatly refined and the resulting tools were much moreversatile and precise. By 250 thousand years ago (kya), fire had been

domesticated and was being used to cook food. All this time, hominist

bodies were changing in the ways we associate with full humanity. Theanatomy of the head shifted to balance comfortably on a biped's shoulders

with less work by the neck muscles, brains grew larger, and physiques

grew weaker and more vulnerable, as tools and weapons and clothingmade brute force and fur less advantageous. By about 45 kya, to judgefrom the remains we find, the extant hominists (now just a single species)

seem as fully human as we are ornamenting their bodies (probably to

mark tribal membership and status), burying their dead with rituals andgrave-goods to appease their spirits and supply their needs in the after-life,

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painting vivid pictures of animals on the walls of certain caves deep

underground, by torch light, with a purpose, probably religious, that we

can only guess. And these are only the artifacts that have been preservedand found. We must presume that they exploited perishable materials with

the same ingenuity.

What we know for sure is that biological evolution was no longer theironly means of adaptation. As cultural specialists, they could shape a tribe's

collective mindset and behavior to flourish just about anywhere.

Hominists migrated out of Africa and across the Eurasian steppe, aboutone million years ago, and colonization of Europe, Australia and the

Americas followed: They were in Europe 500 kya; in Australia 42 kya; in

Siberia 22 kya; in Alaska 14 kya; and at the tip of Tierra del Fuego, the

horn of South America, only two thousand years after that.Hunting-and-gathering bands move around a lot. They have to follow

the game, or the grains and nuts and berries; and they can't carry very

much with them. Permanent settlement could become preferable to this

nomadic lifestyle, but only when sufficient year-round foodstuffs andnatural resources (especially reliable drinking water) were available near a

given site. In a few places this was the case, and a depletion of naturalfoodstuffs made the more sedentary, labor intensive, protein-challenged

lifestyle of agriculture worthwhile. There were alternatives pastoralism

and fishing; and the peoples who took these directions often traded with

farmers, to the benefit of both parties. But, by land and sea, they alsoraided the sedentary farmers when they could, teaching their victims

accordingly to arm and organize for warfare, cluster together, build

defensive walls and store their grain in central, defensible locations. Atfirst, these settlements were just villages; but in a few places they grew

into substantial towns and then into true cities: centres of collective

defense, administration, craft, trade and religious worship. One afteranother, the arts of civilization developed, but always with military

security and power as their basis as remains the case today.

By 4000 BCE, this pattern was well established in 'Mesopotamia' "the land between the rivers," known today as Iraq and Syria. Partly by

diffusion but sometimes independently, there were similar developments

along the Nile, in Persia (modern Iran), in India, and in China. A little

later, there would be similar developments in the Americas. These city-states traded with one another, and the routes of trade had to be defended

against bandits and pirates. They also competed and went to war with each

other, with the most successful conquering their rivals and growing, ifonly temporarily, into empires. By the first millenium BCE, across

Eurasia, the whole system had reached a sort of climax. In this period,

known as 'the Axial Age,' religious leaders and (more secular-minded)philosophers came to worry and argue about the meaning of life and how

it should be lived and governed. Confucius, Buddha, the authors of the

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Upanishads, Lao Tzu, Homer, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Parmenides,

Heraclitus, Thucydides, Archimedes, Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and

Deutero-Isaiah all lived in this period. Jesus, Paul, Augustine andMohammed lived just a little later. It was no longer enough just to placate

the powers of Nature and get by from day to day. A search was on for

meaning, transcendence, salvation (whatever exactly that meant) and atleast some men had the leisure, the brains and the language to think about

such things and talk about them to others.

The next 1500 years was a period of divergence, when the civilizationsacross Eurasia mostly went their separate ways except for some long-

distance trading, constant fighting, and a considerable diffusion of

techniques and ideas. Most 'barbarians' were civilized one way or another.

Civilizations in the Americas followed their own trajectory. But, in the late15th century, European explorers, conquerors, colonists and missionaries

began to reverse this parting of life-ways. Around the globe, cultures and

civilizations were no longer at liberty to follow their own course, but had

to assimilate, resist or adapt to European incursions as best they could.Europe itself commenced a 'Renaissance' a period of explosive artistic,

intellectual and technological change. Perhaps for the first time in history,people began to look forward to future Progress (with a capital 'P'), instead

of backward to a supposed golden age of universal obedience to some

divine plan. We might call it a second axial age, which is not to say that

everything was rosy.In the early 20th century, what was essentially one terrible war with a

twenty-year intermission put an end to Europe's imperial power, and

transferred the hegemony of its (now global) civilization to the UnitedStates determinedly a Pacific power as well as an Atlantic one. What has

followed since then, is a series of challenges to that dominance, a series

that may be expected to continue as American power relative to the rest ofthe world continues to decline from its apex in 1945. Meanwhile, science

and technology continue to advance and population continues to grow to

the extent that Earth's carrying capacity for our species is threatened.Where we go from here is anyone's guess, because from the biological

perspective, we are now not just our worst, but our only serious enemies.

It remains doubtful that we will find the political wisdom and good will to

use our tremendous powers to a future human benefit.History is not a boring subject. Nightmare that it has often been, along

with Nature itself it is the context that has shaped our world and our

individual lives. This synopsis is proposed as an orientation for whateverfurther reading your curiosity may suggest.