by Steve Jones
The new economy left analogous trails in other parts of the world. Rice cultivation started in the Yangtse basin about eight thousand years ago. Within three thousand years there were rice farmers from Vietnam to Thailand and north India. These were the people who developed sea-going canoes and spread into the remote Pacific, where — because rice cannot be grown there — they planted breadfruit, taro and yams. The pollen record from three millennia ago shows that large parts of Java were intensively farmed. Because they were entering an empty land the genes of these Pacific farmers and fishermen are still quite similar to those of their Asian ancestors. In Africa, too, there was a population explosion in places where millet was first grown. The movements of the sickle-cell gene can be traced across the continent in the wake of the first farmers. Those people were in their own way as destructive as had been their hunting ancestors. Great and empty cities in North African deserts were once supported by Holds that have now been overwhelmed. In the same way, in Spain, the Mesta, the great cooperative of the shepherds, turned most of the country into a desert within three hundred years.
Those African farmers and their European counterparts no doubt experienced social unrest as they gave up hunting to move to a more productive but perhaps less enjoyable way of life. However, any romantic view of a harmonious past when contented foragers shared their food is a hunger for a nonexistent Golden Age. Virgil, in the Georgics, mourns for a time when 'No fences parted fields, nor marks nor bounds,/ Divided acres of litigious grounds.' His plaints over a happier past may have been shared by the early farmers as they mourned the glorious times when they hunted food rather than growing it. Whatever the truth, the origin of agriculture marked the end of an economic system based on individual effort which lasted for nine tenths of history. With farming, Eden had been left forever; and politics began.
Chapter Eleven. THE KINGDOMS OF CAIN
Adam and Eve's children were a worry to their parents. Their eldest, Cain, is best known for having killed his brother Abel. He has another distinction. Just one generation after the expulsion from Eden he became the first capitalist. As the Old Testament says, he was the earliest to 'set bounds to fields'. By so doing he erected barriers among the peoples of the world. Frontiers have driven society, history, and genes ever since.
No doubt the idea which came to Cain struck the first farmers as well. Ownership of land was born with agriculture. The process can be seen today as hunter-gatherers give up the old social order. The Kipsigis of Kenya moved to a settled existence as maize farmers in the first years of the twentieth century. Great inequalities soon appeared. When harvests were bad the poor starved while the rich grew fat. Competition among males to gain a mate increased and there was a new campaign in the battle of the sexes. Those who owned productive land had far more children than did those with none. The farming genesis was when class began. From Mycenae to ancient Chile there emerged a difference in height and health between the rich, interred with their ornaments, and the rural poor, buried in penury.
The first farmers soon argued about who was to grow what and where. It did not take long for property to pass into fewer hands and for society to evolve into the system of competing tribes that persists today. Any barrier, be it a mountain, a frontier, or an inability to understand, which stops peoples from meeting and mating will cause them to diverge. All over the world, genetic changes mark the divisions — the bounds to fields — between ancient societies.
Even so, politics is a new clement in the evolutionary equation. Genetics suggests that what we see as history, the struggles between nations, is a recent event. From the Old Testament to Meirt Kampf, historians have seen conquest as the key to the peoples of the world. In the turbulent years after the First World War, the League of Nations tried to define just what a 'nation' might be. The best they could come up with was 'a society possessing the means of making war'. Over the past millennium, most great nations have spent half their time at war; but marauding states have shaped biological history only in the past few thousand years. Before then, people and their genes moved by gradual diffusion or by migration into an empty land, rather than by the defeat of one social entity by another.
In many parts of the world the earliest farms, and the first settled societies, were by rivers in an arid landscape. Such rivers (the Nile most of all) often flood, to leave fertile silt as they recede. Modern tribal farmers who use the land left bare by the departing waters of the Senegal River obtain a return on labour of fifteen thousand per cent: for every calorie of effort they put in they get a hundred and fifty back as food. This compares with a return of around fifty to one for the most efficient modern fields.
The return on the flood plain is enormous but, like the stock market, unpredictable. For the locals, life, as on Wall Street, could be bumpy. The flooding of the Nile has been noted since AD641. The records reveal a hundredfold difference in the area of land submerged from year to year. Some years are excellent but others are dry and disastrous. In today's Senegal, with its equally capricious rivers, this has produced a rigid pecking order. Some families always have access to the floodlands even when the area inundated is small. Others are allowed to grow crops only when the river has risen high and covered large tracts of ground. In dry years they have to find food elsewhere, and in earlier times that meant a return to hunting. Perhaps the earliest settled communities developed, not to increase efficiency but to manage risk. A wild free-for-all for the best land in a bad year would have been dangerous and expensive. Society evolved as a way of coping with uncertainty.
Ten thousand years ago the Natufians, the descendants of the cultivators of the Jordan Valley, had built villages with timber houses. Within two millennia Mesopotamia contained much larger settlements. It took but a few centuries for civilisation to advance to such an extent that such places were surrounded by walls, ditches and watchtowers. Warfare had begun to play the part which it has retained ever since. Farmers were forced from their hamlets by land degradation and the pressure of numbers. In Mesopotamia they moved into the hot and dry plains away from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Soon, the earliest city-states began, perhaps because of the need to organise which began with the irrigation. For the first time humanity was divided by political rather than physical barriers. The genes of today show that, since then, bigotry has been as effective an obstacle as has geography.
Capitalism was helped by technology. The bones of six-thousand-year-old horses at Sredny Stog in the Ukraine have broken teeth, as if they were controlled by bits. A horse increases mobility and helps people to work together to steal from others. Its power is seen in the success of a few dozen Spaniards in the conquest of the Inca and Aztec Empires and of the Mongols in taking over Hungary. Soon after the appearance of horsemen the civilisations of East-ern Europe built defensive walls around their towns. Within a few years their societies had collapsed.
By 3600 BC Mesopotamia contained great cities. Uruk had ten thousand people and within a millennium that number had increased fivefold. Its growth was due in part to warfare. Scores of villages were abandoned by their people, who moved to the new cities. The Sumerian city states, the first organised political entities, were the source of writing and of wheeled transport. They hud a priesthood and an aristocratic caste, and a dispossessed mass. Their decline was hastened by mismanagement. With irrigation, the soil became salty and in the last years of Suineria crop production dropped to a third of its peak. These, the first nations, were overcome by one of the first empires, that of the Akkadians, who invaded from the north.
Other cities came to an end because of bad planning. The ruins of Petra, in Jordan, are today surrounded by miles of arid desert. The evidence of its decline is preserved in an unusual way. Hyraxes (small mammals about the size of a guinea pig) live in communal mounds. They have the singular habit of cementing their homes together with urine, which dries to form an unpleasant but effective glue. It also preserves the seeds upon which their ancestors fed. At its height, Petra was surroun
ded by forests of cedar and pine. These were burned. Grassland followed and this was much farmed. Within a few centuries, the desert had taken over. No doubt, the inhabitants of Petra in its last days fled the city, taking their genes with them.
No one has studied the patterns of genes in today's Iraqis or Jordanians (some of whom may be direct descendants of the people of Petra). When they do, the genetic relics of the first cities may be revealed. However, other forgotten societies — and the divisions between them — have left biological traces which persist to the present time.
Soon after the collapse of the Sumerians, the Greek polis or city-state appeared. Its philosophy — and its name — is at the basis of modern politics. The Iliad and the Odyssey are accounts of wars among the first poleis, which included Corinth, Sparta and Athens. Greece entered its classical age. This was a triumph in artistic, economic and political terms. Three thousand years ago Greece was the most densely populated country in Europe. Its inventive people expanded to form Greater Greece, Magna Graeca, an empire that extended from the Caucasus to Spain. Forty towns in southern Italy were Greek. They included Syracuse, then the biggest city in the world, and Sybaris, a byword for wealth.
Patterns of blood groups and enzymes show that today's southern Italians and Sicilians are distinct from their compatriots to the north and share many genes with the population of modern Greece. The DNA of the first European states remains as a witness to their past. Sardinians, too, owe their distinctiveness to an ancient nation-state. They are related to the modern Lebanese, whose country occupies the territory of the Phoenicians, once the greatest traders of the Mediterranean.
Greeks, unlike Sunierians or Phoenicians, are still around as a reminder of the past. At about the time of the Greek Empire, central Italy supported another buoyant economy; that of the Etruscans, now the embodiment of obscurity. They lived in cities of half a million people and were skilled metal workers with, according to their Latin neighbours, a feminine and dreamy personality. Dreamy though they were, for a brief period their empire encompassed Rome itself. Almost no relics are left. The word Tuscany' refers to their homeland, and some enigmatic sculptures with a characteristic smile remain as does an eccentric object, a bronze sheep's liver covered in messages, used as a crib by the priest as he disembowelled the sacrificial lamb. These hints from the past were, until recently, all we knew about the Etruscan nation.
Its heritage has not been lost. Between the Rivers Arno and Tiber — modern Umbria — is a region distinct from its neighbours. It retains sonic of the genes of the Etruscans. Their biological legacy lives on in their descendants, although their language and culture are long gone.
Many movements involved commerce rather than conquest. Often, the traders left generical calling-cards. The Silk Road passes from the ancient Chinese city of Changan to the Mediterranean. It has been a trade route lor more than two thousand years and for much of this period was the main artery of cultural exchange. Silk passed from east to west; in return came cotton, pomegranates and Buddhism. Modern China has few of the genetic variants in haemoglobin, the red blood pigment, which are common elsewhere in the world, but the blood of today's Silk Road reveals a trail of variant haemoglobin genes. They came from the Mediterranean and spread, with the traders, along this ancient trackway. At its western end in China, about one person in two hundred carries an abnormal haemoglobin, while at the distant eastern end this drops to one in a thousand.
Other dispersals involved forced migration. Stalin moved thousands of people from the Crimea to Central Asia, and today's movements of minorities across Eastern Europe after the collapse of Communist regimes will have genetical consequences (although in the Balkans at least it seems that past turmoils have already led to so much blending that ethnic boundaries, cause of conflict as they are, do not reflect genetic change).
Often, there have been attempts to re-unite peoples fragmented by history. In the 1920s, Greeks (whose ancestry could be traced from Magna Graeca itself) were exchanged with Turks who found themselves marooned in modern Greece. Greek-speakers, many of whom incorporated Byzantine genes, were moved from as far east as the Caucasus. Part of the drive toward nationhood was the desire for unity among peoples who share a culture. Dr Johnson put it well: 'Languages are the pedigree of nations'.
The potency of speech in forming an identity is illustrated by the Statutes of Kilkenny of 1367. At that time, the English had subdued only that part of Ireland around Dublin known as the Pale. Everything beyond was seen as barbarous. The authorities were alarmed by the encroachment of the natives, which went as far as marriage with the settlers. The Statutes declared that . now, many English, forsaking the English language, manners, mode of riding, laws and usages, live and govern themselves according to the manner, fashion and language of the Irish enemies, and have also made divers marriages and alliances between themselves and the Irish enemies, whereby the said land and the liege people thereof, the English language, the allegiance due to our Lord the King, and the English laws are put into subjection and decayed, and the Irish enemies exalted and raised up contrary to reason. Therefore, if any Englishman or Irishman dwelling among the English, use Irish speech, he shall be attainted and his lands go to his lord.'
In Ireland the Dublin government still struggles to save the almost extinct Irish speech of the Gaeltacht and, in a matching historical obsession north of the border, not until 1992 was the ban on the use of Gaelic street names in Northern Ireland lifted. For six hundred years two nations who share a small island have tried to retain their identity with language; an attempt which, bizarrely enough, has survived the death of one of the tongues involved.
Any entity, be it a language or a pool of genes, which remains isolated from its fellows will begin to evolve away from them. Biological evolution has parallels in the origins of new languages from a shared ancestor. The analogy between linguistic and biological change is a deep one. Language barriers slow the movement of genes, and linguistic obstacles may mark a gen uric step. What is more, trees of language sometimes resemble those of genes, as a hint about a common history.
The world has five thousand different languages. Many more — like Etruscan — are extinct. Like genes, languages evolve because they accumulate mutations. Some words change quickly while others are more conservative. Although the Victorians claimed that within a hundred years English and American would be mutually unintelligible, most languages retain enough of their identity tor a sufficient long period of time to be, like genes, clues about the past.
Sometimes the barriers are scarcely noticeable. England can be divided into zones defined by whether people do or do not pronounce the final letter 'r' in words such as 'car'. I do not — I say caH because I was brought up in Wales and on Merseyside, but many of those in Cornwall, Lincolnshire or Northumbria (and plenty of Americans) pronounce it as caR. This might seems trivial, but such tiny differences can mount up to build a barrier to the exchange of information until a new language — and often a new people — is born.
Italy has several dialects, some of which trace certain words to their Greek past. Other local tongues also reflect history. A Portuguese farmer can no more understand a Venetian than we can, but he can talk to his Spanish neighbour, who can converse with his Catalan cousin, who in turn is linked to Italy through the langue d'oc in southern France. The chain of words reflects a history of shared descent that traces back to the Roman Empire and before.
It is sometimes possible to guess at what the ancestral languages sounded like. Father, padre and pere are obviously related terms. They all descend from the same word, p'ter; which means that the phrase 'God the father* can appear as both dens patris and Jupiter or, in Sanskrit, as diu piter.
A pedigree of European languages shows that nearly all are related. This Indo-Kuropean family also includes Indian languages such as Bengali and extinct tongues like Sanskrit. Its existence was recognised by Sir William Jones in 1786, who saw that Greek, Latin and Sanskrit 'all sprang from some common
source which perhaps no longer exists'. Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish and Maltese belong to other linguistic groups, but half the world's population now speaks an Indo-European tongue.
A political map of modern Europe is crossed by many national barriers, most of which mark a shift in language. Most Frenchmen speak French, and most Germans German. Language is a force for national cohesion and a barrier to the movement of people. It reduces the chance of marriage and the spread of genes and has long done so. The Old Testament describes the fate of an Ephraimite prisoner taken by the Gileadites: 'The men of Gilead said unto him. Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said nay, then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth; and he said Sibol-leth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him and slew him.'
Some borders between languages are regions of biological change. There are genetic differences between Welsh and English speakers in part of Pembrokeshire. This 'Little England beyond Wales' began when in rro8 King Henry I moved a group of artisans to Wales from the banks of the Tweed to set up a weaving industry. Their anglophone home ended at a sharp boundary, the Landsker. Even a century ago, just one marriage in five hundred took place across the divide. Eight hundred years after they arrived, the blood groups of the descendants of the immigrants still differ from those of their Welsh-speaking neighbours.