Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

by Tom Phillips

  Modern humans have come a long way in the seventy thousand years they’ve walked the earth. Art, science, culture, trade—on the evolutionary food chain, we’re true winners. But it hasn’t always been smooth sailing, and sometimes—just occasionally—we’ve managed to truly f*ck things up.

  Weaving together history, science, politics and pop culture, Humans offers a panoramic exploration of humankind in all its glory, or lack thereof. From Lucy, our first ancestor, who fell out of a tree and died, to General Zhou Shou of China, who stored gunpowder in his palace before a lantern festival, to the Austrian army attacking itself one drunken night, to the most spectacular fails of the present day, Humans reveals how even the most mundane mistakes can shift the course of civilization as we know it. Lively, wry and brimming with brilliant insight, this unique compendium offers a fresh take on world history and is one of the most entertaining reads of the year.

  Praise for Tom Phillips’s Humans

  “Thoroughly informative. Thoroughly entertaining. Thoroughly demoralizing. In a fun kind of way.”

  —Robert Sapolsky, New York Times bestselling author of Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

  “Humans is a thoroughly entertaining account of unintended consequences, of arrogance and ignorance, of human follies and foibles from ancient times to the present. It seems history has taught us nothing—we are doomed to keep suffering the antics of both well-intended and ill-intended fools. As I was reading I wondered how I could be so disheartened and yet at the same time be laughing out loud.”

  —Penny Le Couteur, author of Napoleon’s Buttons: How 17 Molecules Changed History

  “Tom Phillips has proven beyond a doubt that humans are goddamn lucky to be here and are doing nearly nothing to remain relevant and viable as a species—except, that is, for writing witty, entertaining, and slightly distressing-but-ultimately-endearing books about the same. And if you care to avoid orbiting the earth in a space-garbage prison of your fellow humans’ design, you should probably read it.”

  —Sarah Knight, New York Times bestselling author of Get Your Sh*t Together

  “Humans is Tom Phillips’ timely, irreverent gallop through thousands of years of human stupidity. Every time you begin to find our foolishness bizarrely comforting, Phillips adds another kick in the ribs. Beneath all this book’s laughter is a serious question: Where does so much serial stupidity take us?”

  —Nicholas Griffin, author of Ping-Pong Diplomacy: The Secret History Behind the Game That Changed the World

  “A laugh-along, worst-hits album for humanity. With the delicate touch of a scholar and the laugh-out-loud chops of a comedian, Tom Phillips shows how our species has been messing things up ever since we evolved from apes and came down from the trees some four million years ago.”

  —Steve Brusatte, University of Edinburgh paleontologist and New York Times bestselling author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs

  HUMANS:

  A BRIEF

  HISTORY OF

  HOW WE

  F*CKED

  IT ALL UP

  Tom Phillips

  Given the subject matter,

  dedicating this book to my family

  could be badly misinterpreted.

  So instead, I dedicate this to anybody

  who has ever fucked up really badly.

  You are not alone.

  Timeline of History

  3 200 000 BCE: Lucy falls out of a tree and dies. Humanity will repeat this pattern many times over the following 3.2 million years.

  70 000 BCE: Modern humans migrate out of Africa, ruining everything for everyone else.

  70 000 BCE–40 000 BCE: Really bad period for Neanderthals.

  12 000 BCE: Humanity invents war! YAY HUMANITY! GO TEAM!

  11 000 BCE: Agriculture is invented, which may also have been an awful mistake tbh.

  3000 BCE: The Sumerians and Egyptians invent the idea of “absolute dynastic monarchy.” Thanks for that, Egypt and Sumer!

  2334 BCE: Sargon of Akkad goes one further and invents the idea of “empires.” Thanks for that, Sargon!

  222 BCE: Qin Shi Huang unites China, searches for elixir of life, dies.

  216 BCE: Battle of Cannae. Romans experiment with having two leaders, with opposing strategies. Goes roughly as well as you’d guess.

  27 BCE: In excellent news for fans of dictatorship, the Roman Republic becomes the Roman Empire.

  26 BCE–892 AD: Not much happens. Pretty quiet time, historically speaking.

  1004: First contact between Europeans and Americans; ends in lots of murder.

  1217: Ala ad-Din Muhammad II makes the worst decision in history: making an enemy of Genghis Khan.

  1492: Christopher Columbus fails to discover new route to Asia, crashes into America instead. Honestly this is the point where everything starts going really wrong.

  1519: In history’s most ill-advised hospitality, Moctezuma invites Cortés in as a guest.

  1617–1648: Ottoman Empire endures a run of mostly terrible leaders (two of them are called “the Mad,” which is a bad sign).

  1698: Scotland tries to establish an empire in Panama. This doesn’t go well, leaving hundreds dead and the country almost bankrupt.

  1788: Austrian army manages to defeat itself at the Battle of Karansebes.

  1812: Napoleon tries to invade Russia. This turns out to be a terrible idea.

  1859: Thomas Austin introduces 24 rabbits into Australia. This doesn’t end well.

  1885: King Leopold II is given the Congo for charitable purposes. His purposes are...not charitable.

  1890: Shakespeare fan Eugene Schieffelin introduces 60 starlings to New York, whimsically. They become a major, non-whimsical pest.

  1914: World goes to war. It’s awful.

  1917: In a well thought-through plan, Germany helps Lenin get back to Russia.

  1923: The first leaded gasoline, developed by Thomas Midgley Jr., goes on sale. Several generations get lead poisoning.

  1928: Not one to rest on his laurels, Thomas Midgley Jr. develops Freon. Which is bad news for the ozone layer.

  1929: It is predicted that the economy is doing very well. Global financial crisis begins a few days later.

  1933: The first dust storms of the American dust bowl begin.

  1933: The very cunning German politician Franz von Papen does a deal wth Hitler in an attempt to regain power. Yeah, that doesn’t work out great.

  1939: World goes to war again. Even more awful this time.

  1941: Hitler tries to invade Russia. Luckily, this turns out to still be a terrible idea.

  1945: Robert Oppenheimer predicts that nuclear weapons will end war. Results so far are mixed.

  1958: Mao’s Four Pests campaign begins, leading to the killing of 1 billion sparrows.

  1959: Chinese famine begins, caused in part by sudden lack of sparrows.

  1960: Soviets divert rivers from Aral Sea. In shock news, the Aral Sea dries up.

  1961: USA hilariously fails to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.

  1981: The Californian town of Sunol elects a dog called Bosco Ramos as mayor. This is the only good thing to happen on this timeline.

  2007: It is predicted that the economy is doing very well. Global financial crisis begins a few days later.

  2018: In April 2018, atmospheric carbon dioxide passes 410 parts per million for the first time in 3.2 million years. Hey, Lucy!

  2019: This book is published. A new age of enlight
enment dawns.

  Contents

  Prologue: The Dawn of Fuck-Ups

  1: Why Your Brain Is an Idiot

  2: Nice Environment You’ve Got Here

  3: Life, Uh, Finds a Way

  4: Follow the Leader

  5: People Power

  6: War. Huh. What Is It Good For?

  7: Super Happy Fun Colonialism Party

  8: A Dummies’ and/or Current Presidents’ Guide to Diplomacy

  9: The Shite Heat of Technology

  10: A Brief History of Not Seeing Things Coming

  Epilogue: Fucking Up the Future

  Acknowledgments

  Further Reading

  Picture Credits

  About the Author

  Index

  PROLOGUE

  The Dawn of Fuck-Ups

  A long, long time ago, as the sun rose across the great river valleys and plains of Ethiopia, a young ape was lounging in a tree.

  We can’t know what she was thinking or doing that day. Probably she was pondering finding something to eat, or finding a mate, or perhaps checking out the next tree over to see if it was a better tree. She certainly didn’t know that the events of that day would make her the most famous member of her species ever—even if you could somehow tell her, the concept of fame wouldn’t make any sense to her. She also didn’t know that she was in Ethiopia, because this was millions of years before anybody had the bright idea of drawing lines on a map and giving the shapes names that we could have wars about.

  She and her kin were slightly different from the other apes that lived at the same time: there was something unusual about their hips and legs that let them move in a novel way. These apes were beginning their descent from the trees, and starting to walk upright across the savannahs: the initial change that, in time, would lead to you and me and every other person on this planet. The ape didn’t know it, but she was living near the beginning of one of the most remarkable stories ever. This was the dawn of the great human journey.

  Then she fell out of the tree and died.

  Roughly 3.2 million years later, a different group of apes—some of them now in possession of PhDs—would dig up her fossilized bones. Because this was the 1970s, and they were listening to a popular song by a group of extremely high Liverpudlians at the time, they decided to call her Lucy. She was a brand-new species—what we now call an Australopithecus afarensis—and she was hailed as the “missing link” between humans and apes. Lucy’s discovery would captivate the world: she became a household name, her skeleton would be taken on a multiyear tour of the USA and she’s now the star attraction in the National Museum of Ethiopia, in Addis Ababa.

  And yet the only reason we know about her is because, bluntly, she fucked up. Which in retrospect set a pretty clear template for how things were going to play out from that point onward.

  * * *

  This is a book about humans, and our remarkable capacity for fucking things up. About why for every accomplishment that makes you proud to be human (art, science, tacos), there’s always something else that makes you shake your head in bafflement and despair (war, pollution, Taco Bell).

  It’s quite likely that—regardless of your personal opinions or political persuasion—at some point in recent times you’ve looked around at the state of the world and thought to yourself: Oh, shit, what have we done?

  This book is here to provide a tiny, hollow grain of comfort: don’t worry, we’ve always been like this. And hey, we’re still here!

  (Granted, at the time of writing this, there’s a broad awareness that the only thing that stands between us and imminent fiery nuclear annihilation is the whim of one petulant man-child or another, so who knows? I’m going to work on the assumption that you are in fact reading this book in the normal way, rather than planning to burn it for warmth as you shelter in the rubble, in which case I guess we made it to May 2019 at the very least.)

  There are lots of books about humanity’s finest achievements—the great leaders, the genius inventors, the indomitable human spirit. There are also lots of books about mistakes we’ve made: both individual screw-ups and society-wide errors. But there aren’t quite so many about how we manage to get things profoundly, catastrophically wrong over and over again.

  In one of those ironies that the universe seems to really enjoy, the reasons we cock it up on such a vast scale are often the exact same things that set us apart from our fellow animals and allow us to achieve greatness. Humans see patterns in the world, we can communicate this to other humans and we have the capacity to imagine futures that don’t yet exist: how if we just changed this thing, then that thing would happen, and the world would be a slightly better place.

  The only trouble is...well, we’re not terribly good at any of those things. Any honest assessment of humanity’s previous performance on those fronts reads like a particularly brutal annual review from a boss who hates you. We imagine patterns where they don’t exist. Our communication skills are, uh, sometimes lacking. And we have an extraordinarily poor track record of failing to realize that changing this thing will also lead to the other thing, and that even worse thing, and oh God no now this thing is happening how do we stop it.

  No matter how high humanity rises, no matter how many challenges we conquer, catastrophe is always lurking just around the corner. To pick a historical example: one moment you are Sigurd the Mighty (a ninth-century Norse Earl of Orkney), riding home in triumph from battle with the head of your slain enemy, Máel Brigte the Bucktoothed, dangling from your saddle.

  The next moment, you are...well, you’re Sigurd the Mighty a couple of days later, dying from an infection caused when the protruding bucktooth of Máel Brigte the Bucktoothed’s disembodied head grazed your leg while you were riding home in triumph.

  That’s right: Sigurd the Mighty holds the dubious distinction in military history of being killed by an enemy he’d already decapitated several hours earlier. Which teaches us important lessons about (a) hubris, and (b) the importance of choosing enemies who have high-quality dental care. It’s hubris and its subsequent downfalls that will be the major focus of this book. Fans of historical dentistry standards, by contrast, may be sadly disappointed.

  (It’s also worth noting that Sigurd the Mighty and Máel Brigte the Bucktoothed were only fighting because Sigurd had challenged Máel Brigte to a “forty soldiers on each side” battle. Máel Brigte agreed to this, whereupon Sigurd turned up with eighty soldiers. As such, there is possibly also a lesson in Sigurd’s story about the importance of not being a complete dick, which funnily enough is also a theme that recurs throughout the book.)

  Sigurd is just one of the many unfortunates who history remembers more for their losses than their wins. Over the next ten chapters, we’ll take a tour of the entire sweep of human history, and its catalog of cock-ups. A gentle warning: if you’re not really into schadenfreude, now might be a good time to stop reading.

  The story of human progress starts with our capacity for thinking and creativity. That’s what sets humans apart from other animals—but it’s also what leads us to make complete tits of ourselves on a regular basis.

  In the first chapter of this book, “Why Your Brain Is an Idiot,” we’ll look at how our ancestors thought differently—and then see how our attempts to make sense of the world end up with our minds playing tricks on us, letting us down and leading us into making all our terrible, terrible decisions.

  Then in the second chapter, “Nice Environment You’ve Got Here,” we’ll follow humanity to the dawn of agriculture, as we started to shape the world around us, and see how we regularly make a complete mess of the places we live, tracing our unfailing ability to not really think through the answer to the question: Hey, what’s the worst that could happen if we divert this river?

  After that, we’ll check in on our consistently ham-fisted attempts to control nature, in �
��Life, Uh, Finds a Way”—where we get to see, among other things, how Chairman Mao and a whimsical Shakespeare enthusiast managed to cause mirror-image catastrophes by radically underestimating birds.

  As humanity’s earliest societies developed and grew more complex, it became apparent that we were going to need someone in charge of making decisions. In the fourth chapter, “Follow the Leader,” we’ll look at a selection of the absolute worst unelected people to have ever had that job; in Chapter 5, “People Power,” we’ll check in on democracy to see if that does any better.

  For all that we manage to shape the world around us, humanity’s true potential for looking like complete idiots was not fully realized until we traveled the world and different civilizations started meeting each other. That’s when we got to really let our hair down and get things profoundly, catastrophically wrong.

  In Chapter 6, “War. Huh. What Is It Good For?” we’ll see how humans have a very long history of getting into pointless fights, and examine some of the stupidest things to have happened as a result—including the army that managed to lose a battle their opponents didn’t even show up for, and how to mess up your perfectly coordinated attack plans by forgetting that time zones exist.

  We’ll head out into the unknown with the heroic figures of the Age of Discovery in Chapter 7, “Super Happy Fun Colonialism Party,” in which we will discover (spoiler alert) that colonialism was terrible.

  Chapter 8, “A Dummies’ and/or Current Presidents’ Guide to Diplomacy,” will teach us important lessons about how to gracefully handle contacts between different cultures, including how the shah of the Khwarezmian Empire made possibly the single worst political decision in history. (It involved setting beards on fire.)

  In recent centuries, scientific and technological advances have ushered in an era of unprecedented innovation, rapid change and exciting new ways for humanity to fail. That’s the focus of Chapter 9, “The Shite Heat of Technology,” where we’ll see how science doesn’t always get things right—including the mysterious radiation that only French people could see, and the man who made not one but two of the twentieth century’s most catastrophic mistakes.