The Ascent of Man

by Jacob Bronowski

  The game is going to be won by a single goal, so no quarter is given. This is not a sporting event; there is nothing in the rules about fair play. The tactics are pure Mongol, a discipline of shock. The astonishing thing in the game is what routed the armies that faced the Mongols: that what seems a wild scrimmage is in fact full of manoeuvre, and dissolves suddenly with the winner riding clear to score.

  One has the sense that the crowd is much more excited, and more involved emotionally, than the players. The players, by contrast, seem committed but cold; they ride with a brilliant and brutal intensity, but they are not absorbed in playing, they are absorbed in winning. Only after the game is the winner himself carried away by the excitement. He should have asked the President to sanction the goal and, by missing that point of etiquette in this uproar, he has jeopardised the goal. It is nice to know that the goal was allowed.

  The Buz Kashi is a war game. What makes it electric is the cowboy ethic: riding as an act of war. It expresses the monomaniac culture of conquest; the predator posing as a hero because he rides the whirlwind. But the whirlwind is empty. Horse or tank, Genghis Khan or Hitler or Stalin, it can only feed on the labours of other men. The nomad in his last historic role as warmaker is still an anachronism, and worse, in a world that has discovered, in the last twelve thousand years, that civilisation is made by settled people.

  All through this essay there runs the conflict between the nomad and the settled way of life. So it is fitting by way of epitaph to go to that high, windy, inhospitable plateau at Sultaniyeh in Persia where ended the last attempt by the Mongol dynasty of Genghis Khan to make the nomad way of life supreme. The point is that the invention of agriculture twelve thousand years ago did not of itself establish or confirm the settled way of life. On the contrary, the domestication of animals that came with agriculture gave new vigour to nomad economics: the domestication of the sheep and the goat, for example, and then, above all, the domestication of the horse. It was the horse that gave the Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan the power and the organisation to conquer China and the Muslim states and to reach the gates of central Europe.

  Genghis Khan was a nomad and the inventor of a powerful war machine – and that conjunction says something important about the origins of war in human history. Of course, it is tempting to close one’s eyes to history, and instead to speculate about the roots of war in some possible animal instinct: as if, like the tiger, we still had to kill to live, or, like the robin redbreast, to defend a nesting territory. But war, organised war, is not a human instinct. It is a highly planned and co-operative form of theft. And that form of theft began ten thousand years ago when the harvesters of wheat accumulated a surplus, and the nomads rose out of the desert to rob them of what they themselves could not provide. The evidence for that we saw in the walled city of Jericho and its prehistoric tower. That is the beginning of war.

  Genghis Khan and his Mongol dynasty brought that thieving way of life into our own millennium. From AD 1200 to 1300 they made almost the last attempt to establish the supremacy of the robber who produces nothing and who, in his feckless way, comes to take from the peasant (who has nowhere to flee) the surplus that agriculture accumulates.

  Yet that attempt failed. And it failed because in the end there was nothing for the Mongols to do except themselves to adopt the way of life of the people that they had conquered. When they conquered the Muslims, they became Muslims. They became settlers because theft, war, is not a permanent state that can be sustained. Of course, Genghis Khan still had his bones carried about as a memorial by his armies in the field. But his grandson Kublai Khan was already a builder and settled monarch in China; you remember Coleridge’s poem,

  In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

  A stately pleasure-dome decree.

  The fifth of the heirs in succession to Genghis Khan was the sultan Oljeitu, who came to this forbidding plateau in Persia to build a great new capital city, Sultaniyeh. What remains is his own mausoleum which later was a model for much Muslim architecture. Oljeitu was a liberal monarch, who brought here men from all parts of the world. He himself was a Christian, at another time a Buddhist, and finally a Muslim, and he did – at this court – attempt really to establish a world court. It was the one thing that the nomad could contribute to civilisation: he gathered from the four corners of the world the cultures, mixed them together, and sent them out again to fertilise the earth.

  It is the irony of the end of the bid for power by the Mongol nomads here that when Oljeitu died, he was known as Oljeitu the Builder. The fact is that agriculture and the settled way of life were established steps now in the ascent of man, and had set a new level for a form of human harmony which was to bear fruit into the far future: the organisation of the city.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE GRAIN IN THE STONE

  In his hand

  He took the golden Compasses, prepar’d

  In Gods Eternal store, to circumscribe

  This Universe, and all created things:

  One foot he center’d, and the other turn’d

  Round through the vast profunditie obscure,

  And said, thus farr extend, thus farr thy bounds,

  This be thy just Circumference, O World.

  Milton, Paradise Lost, Book VII

  John Milton described and William Blake drew the shaping of the earth in a single sweeping motion by the compasses of God. But that is an excessively static picture of the processes of nature. The earth has existed for more than four thousand million years. Through all this time, it has been shaped and changed by two kinds of action. The hidden forces within the earth have buckled the strata, and lifted and shifted the land masses. And on the surface, the erosion of snow and rain and storm, of stream and ocean, of sun and wind, have carved out a natural architecture.

  Man has also become an architect of his environment, but he does not command forces as powerful as those of nature. His method has been selective and probing: an intellectual approach in which action depends on understanding. I have come to trace its history in the cultures of the New World which are younger than Europe and Asia. I centred my first essay on equatorial Africa, because that is where man began, and my second essay on the Near East, because that is where civilisation began. Now it is time to remember that man reached other continents too in his long walk over the earth.

  The Canyon de Chelly in Arizona is a breathless, secret valley, which has been inhabited by one Indian tribe after another almost without a break for two thousand years, since the birth of Christ; longer than any other place in North America. Sir Thomas Browne has a springing sentence: ‘The Huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia.’ At the birth of Christ, the huntsmen were settling to agriculture in the Canyon de Chelly, and starting along the same steps in the ascent of man that had first been taken in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East.

  Why did civilisation begin so much later in the New World than in the Old? Evidently because man was a latecomer to the New World. He came before boats were invented, which implies that he came dry-shod over the Bering Straits when they formed a broad land-bridge during the last Ice Age. The glaciological evidence points to two possible times when men might have wandered from the easternmost promontories of the Old World beyond Siberia to the rocky wastes of western Alaska in the New. One period was between 28,000 BC and 23,000 BC, and the other between 14,000 BC and 10,000 BC. After that the flood of melt-water at the end of the last Ice Age raised the sea level again by several hundred feet and thereby turned the key on the inhabitants of the New World.

  That means that man came from Asia to America not later than ten thousand years ago, and not earlier than about thirty thousand years ago. And he did not necessarily come all at once. There is evidence in archaeological finds (such as early sites and tools) that two separate streams of culture came to America. And, most telling to me, there is subtle but persuasive biological evidence that I can only interpret to mean that he came in two
small, successive migrations.

  The Indian tribes of North and South America do not contain all the blood groups that are found in populations elsewhere. A fascinating glimpse into their ancestry is opened by this unexpected biological quirk. For the blood groups are inherited in such a way that, over a whole population, they provide some genetic record of the past. The total absence of blood group A from a population implies, with virtual certainty, that there was no blood group A in its ancestry; and similarly with blood group B. And this is in fact the state of affairs in America. The tribes of Central and South America (in the Amazon, for example, in the Andes, and in Tierra del Fuego) belong entirely to blood group O; so do some North American tribes. Others (among them the Sioux, the Chippewa, and the Pueblo Indians) consist of blood group O mixed with ten to fifteen per cent of blood group A.

  In summary, the evidence is that there is no blood group B anywhere in America, as there is in most other parts of the world.

  In Central and South America, all the original Indian population is blood group O. In North America, it is of blood groups O and A. I can see no sensible way of interpreting that but to believe that a first migration of a small, related kinship group (all of blood group O) came into America, multiplied, and spread right down to the south. Then a second migration, again of small groups, this time containing either A alone or both A and O, followed them only as far as North America. The American Indians of the north, then, certainly contain some of this later migration and are, comparatively speaking, latecomers.

  Agriculture in the Canyon de Chelly reflects this lateness. Although maize had long been cultivated in Central and South America, here it comes in only about the time of Christ. People are very simple, they have no houses, they live in caves. About AD 500 pottery is introduced. Pit houses are dug in the caves themselves, and covered with a roof moulded out of clay or adobe. And at that stage the Canyon is really fixed until about the year AD 1000, when the great Pueblo civilisation comes in with stone masonry.

  I am making a basic separation between architecture as moulding and architecture as the assembly of parts. That seems a very simple distinction: the mud house, the stone masonry. But in fact it represents a fundamental intellectual difference, not just a technical one. And I believe it to be one of the most important steps that man has taken, wherever and whenever he did so: the distinction between the moulding action of the hand, and the splitting or analytic action of the hand.

  It seems the most natural thing in the world to take some clay and mould it into a ball, a little clay figure, a cup, a pit house. At first we feel that the shape of nature has been given us by this. But, of course, it has not. This is the man-made shape. What the pot does is to reflect the cupped hand; what the pit house does is to reflect the shaping action of man. And nothing has been discovered about nature herself when man imposes these warm, rounded, feminine, artistic shapes on her. The only thing that you reflect is the shape of your own hand.

  But there is another action of the human hand which is different and opposite. That is the splitting of wood or stone; for by that action the hand (armed with a tool) probes and explores beneath the surface, and thereby becomes an instrument of discovery. There is a great intellectual step forward when man splits a piece of wood, or a piece of stone, and lays bare the print that nature had put there before he split it. The Pueblo people found that step in the red sandstone cliffs that rise a thousand feet over the Arizona settlements. The tabular strata were there for the cutting; and the blocks were laid in courses along the same bedding planes in which they had lain in the cliffs of the Canyon de Chelly.

  From an early time man made tools by working the stone. Sometimes the stone had a natural grain, sometimes the toolmaker created the lines of cleavage by learning how to strike the stone. It may be that the idea comes, in the first place, from splitting wood, because wood is a material with a visible structure which opens easily along the grain, but which is hard to shear across the grain. And from that simple beginning man prises open the nature of things and uncovers the laws that the structure dictates and reveals. Now the hand no longer imposes itself on the shape of things. Instead, it becomes an instrument of discovery and pleasure together, in which the tool transcends its immediate use and enters into and reveals the qualities and the forms that lie hidden in the material. Like a man cutting a crystal, we find in the form within the secret laws of nature.

  The notion of discovering an underlying order in matter is man’s basic concept for exploring nature. The architecture of things reveals a structure below the surface, a hidden grain which, when it is laid bare, makes it possible to take natural formations apart and assemble them in new arrangements. For me this is the step in the ascent of man at which theoretical science begins. And it is as native to the way man conceives his own communities as it is to his conception of nature.

  We human beings are joined in families, the families are joined in kinship groups, the kinship groups in clans, the clans in tribes, the tribes in nations. And that sense of hierarchy, of a pyramid in which layer is imposed on layer, runs through all the ways that we look at nature. The fundamental particles make nuclei, the nuclei join in atoms, the atoms join in molecules, the molecules join in bases, the bases direct the assembly of amino acids, the amino acids join in proteins. We find again in nature something which seems profoundly to correspond to the way in which our own social relations join us.

  The Canyon de Chelly is a kind of microcosm of the cultures, and its high point was reached when the Pueblo people built the great structures just after AD 1000. They represent not only an understanding of nature in the stonework, but of human relations; because the Pueblo people formed here and elsewhere a kind of miniature city. The cliff dwellings were sometimes terraced to five or six storeys, with the top floors recessed from the lower ones. The front of the block was flat with the cliff, the back bowed back into the cliff. These large architectural complexes sometimes have a ground plan of two or three acres, and are made up of four hundred rooms or more.

  Stones make a wall, walls make a house, houses make streets, and streets make a city. A city is stones and a city is people; but it is not a heap of stones, and it is not just a jostle of people. In the step from the village to the city, a new community organisation is built, based on the division of labour and on chains of command. The way to recapture that is to walk into the streets of a city that none of us has seen, in a culture that has vanished.

  Machu Picchu is in the high Andes, eight thousand feet up in South America. It was built by the Incas at the height of their empire, round about AD 1500 or a little earlier (almost exactly when Columbus reached the West Indies) when the planning of a city was their greatest achievement. When the Spaniards conquered and plundered Peru in 1532, they somehow overlooked Machu Picchu and its sister cities. After that it was forgotten for four hundred years, until one winter’s day in 1911 Hiram Bingham, a young archaeologist from Yale University, stumbled on it. By then it had been abandoned for centuries and was picked bare as a bone. But in that skeleton of a city lies the structure of every city civilisation, in every age, everywhere in the world.

  The streets of a city that none of us has seen, in a culture that has vanished.

  Mortarless joints and cushioned faces of the granite blocks characterise Inca masonry.

  A city must live on a base, a hinterland, of a rich agricultural surplus; and the visible base for the Inca civilisation was the cultivation of terraces. Of course now the bare terraces grow nothing but grass, but once the potato was cultivated here (it is a native product of Peru), and maize which was long native by then, and in the first place had come from the north. And since this was a ceremonial city of some kind, when the Inca came to visit no doubt there were grown for him tropical luxuries of this climate like the coca, which is an intoxicating herb that only the Inca aristocracy was allowed to chew, and from which we derive cocaine.

  At the heart of the terrace culture is a system of irrigation. This
is what the pre-Inca empires and Inca empire made; it runs through these terraces, through canals and aqueducts, through the great ravines, down into the desert towards the Pacific and makes it flower. Exactly as in the Fertile Crescent it is the control of water that matters, so here in Peru the Inca civilisation was built on the control of irrigation.

  A large system of irrigation extending over an empire requires a strong central authority. It was so in Mesopotamia. It was so in Egypt. It was so in the empire of the Incas. And that means that this city and all the cities here rested on an invisible base of communication by which authority was able to be present and audible everywhere, directing orders from the centre and information towards it. Three inventions sustained the network of authority: the roads, the bridges (in a wild country like this), the messages. They came to a centre here when the Inca was here, and from him they went out of here. They are the three links by which every city is held to every other and which, we suddenly realise, are different in this city.

  Roads, bridges, messages in a great empire are always advanced inventions, because if they are cut then authority is cut off and breaks down – in modern times they are typically the first target in a revolution. We know that the Inca gave them much care. Yet on the roads there were no wheels, under the bridges there were no arches, the messages were not in writing. The culture of the Incas had not made these inventions by the year AD 1500. That is because civilisation in America started several thousand years late, and was conquered before it had time to make all the inventions of the Old World.