Why the West Rules—for Now

by Morris, Ian;

  Nothing quite like these cave paintings has been found anywhere else in the world. The modern human migration out of Africa had swept away all distinctions created by the Movius Line and all biological divergences between earlier species of ape-men; but should we locate the true beginning of a special (and superior) Western tradition thirty thousand years ago in a uniquely creative culture that filled northern Spain and southern France with prehistoric Picassos?

  The answer, perhaps surprisingly, lies in the frozen wastes of Antarctica. Every year snow falls there, burying previous snows, and compressing them into thin layers of ice. These layers are like a chronicle of ancient weather. By separating them, climatologists can measure their thickness, telling us how much snow fell; establish the balance between isotopes of oxygen, revealing temperatures; and compare the amounts of carbon dioxide and methane, illuminating greenhouse effects. But drilling cores through the ice sheets is one of the toughest assignments in science. In 2004 a European team finished extracting an Antarctic core almost two miles deep, going back an astonishing 740,000 years, to the days when Neanderthals were still a twinkle in some ape-man’s eye. The scientists did this despite temperatures that plunged to—58°F in winter and never got above —13°, being forced to start over when the drill jammed in 1999, and having to use a plastic bag filled with ethanol as a makeshift drill bit for the final hundred yards.

  The results these supermen and -women of science extracted from the ice make one thing very clear: the world the Altamira artists lived in was cold. Temperatures had started tumbling again after modern humans left Africa, and around twenty thousand years ago—when more artists were daubing ocher and charcoal on cave walls than ever before or since—the last ice age reached its chilling climax. Average temperatures stood 14°F below those of recent times. That made a staggering difference. Mile-thick glaciers covered northern Asia, Europe, and America, locking up so much water that the sea level was more than three hundred feet lower than today. You could have walked from Africa to England, Australia, or America without ever laying eyes on the sea. Not that you would have wanted to visit many of these places; at the edges of the glaciers winds howled and dust storms raged across vast arid steppes, frigid in winter and barren in summer. Even in the least forbidding regions, within 40 degrees of the equator, short summers, meager rainfall, and reduced levels of carbon dioxide in the air limited plant growth and kept animal (including human) populations low. Things were as bad as in the worst days before modern humans left Africa.

  Life was easier in what are now the tropics than it was in Siberia, but wherever archaeologists look, they find that people adapted to the Ice Age in rather similar ways. They lived in tiny bands. In colder environments, a dozen people was a big group; in the milder regions, twice that many might stick together. They learned when different plants ripened and where to find them; when animals migrated ahead of the seasons and where they could intercept them; and they followed both around the landscape. Those who did not learn these things starved.

  Such tiny bands would have struggled to reproduce themselves. Like modern hunter-gatherers in marginal environments, they must have come together from time to time to exchange marriage partners, trade goods, tell stories, and perhaps speak to their gods, spirits, and ancestors. These gatherings would have been the most exciting social events on the calendar. We are guessing, of course, but many archaeologists think these festival days lie behind western Europe’s spectacular cave paintings: everyone put on their best skins and beads, painted their faces, and did what they could to decorate their holy meeting places, making them truly special.

  The obvious question, though, is why—if these hard facts of life applied all across Africa, Asia, and Europe—we find such spectacular cave paintings only in western Europe. The traditional answer, that Europeans were more culturally creative than anyone else, seems to make a lot of sense, but we might do better to turn the question around. The history of European art is not a continuous catalogue of masterpieces running from Chauvet to Chagall; the cave paintings died out after 11,500 BCE and many millennia passed before we know of anything to equal them.

  Looking for the roots of Western rule in a thirty-thousand-year tradition of European creativity is obviously mistaken if this tradition in fact dried up for thousands of years. Perhaps we should ask instead why the cave paintings ended, because once we do so it starts to look like the astonishing finds from prehistoric Europe have as much to do with geography and climate as with any special Western culture.

  Through most of the Ice Age, northern Spain and southern France were excellent hunting grounds, where herds of reindeer migrated from summer to winter pastures and back again. But when temperatures started rising about fifteen thousand years ago (more on this in Chapter 2) the reindeer stopped migrating this far south in winter, and the hunters followed them northward.

  It cannot be a coincidence that western European cave painting declined at just the same time. Fewer and fewer artists crawled under the ground with their animal-fat lamps and sticks of ocher. Sometime around 13,500 years ago the very last artist walked away. He or she probably did not realize it, but on that day the ancient tradition died. Darkness fell in the caves, and for millennia only bats and dripping water disturbed their tomblike silence.

  Why did beautiful cave paintings not move steadily northward across Europe after 11,500 BCE as hunters followed the retreating reindeer? Probably for the very good reason that northern European hunters did not have such convenient caves to paint. Northern Spain and southern France have a tremendous number of deep limestone caves; northern Europe has far fewer. The efforts prehistoric peoples made to decorate their meeting places rarely survived for us to find unless hunting grounds coincided with deep caves. Whenever this happy coincidence failed to arise, people must have gathered nearer to or even above the surface. Exposed to wind, sun, and rain for twenty thousand years, few traces of their artwork survive.

  “Few traces” is not the same as “no traces,” though, and sometimes we get lucky. At the wonderfully named Apollo 11 Cave in Namibia, slabs of stone with drawings of rhinos and zebras peeled off the wall, fell to the floor, and were preserved under deposits that formed between 19,000 and 26,000 years ago, and some Australian examples are even older. At Sandy Creek, mineral deposits that built up over part of a carving on a cave wall can be dated to about 25,000 years ago and fragments of pigment are 26,000 to 32,000 years old, while at Carpenter’s Gap part of a painted cave wall fell into 40,000-year-old occupation debris, making it even earlier than Chauvet.

  None of the African or Australian examples compares aesthetically with the best French and Spanish work, and there are quite a few deep caves outside western Europe that do not have paintings (like Zhoukoudian, reoccupied twenty thousand years ago). It would be silly to claim that all humans put equal effort into cave art, let alone that all artistic traditions are equally successful. But given the preservation issues and the fact that archaeologists have been looking longer and harder in Europe than anywhere else, the survival of anything at all on other continents suggests that all modern humans, everywhere, shared the urge to create art. Where the conditions for cave painting were not so good as in western Europe, people may have put their energy into other media.

  Figure 1.5. The beginnings of Western culture? The open circles show cave paintings 12,000 or more years old, and the solid circles show finds of portable art of the same age.

  Figure 1.5 shows nicely that while cave art clusters in western Europe, stone, clay, and bone models of humans and animals are more common farther east. If the economics of publishing allowed it, I could show pictures of dozens of quite extraordinary figurines, found everywhere from Germany to Siberia. Since it does not, I will limit myself to the most recent discovery, found in 2008 at Hohle Fels in Germany (Figure 1.6)—a two-inch-tall statuette of a woman with no head but with gigantic breasts, carved 35,000 years ago from mammoth ivory. Around the same date hunters at Malaya Síya near Lake Baikal i
n Siberia—surely one of the most inhospitable spots on earth—took time to engrave pictures of animals on bones; and by 25,000 BCE groups up to 120 strong were gathering in huts of mammoth bone and skin at Dolní Vestonice in the Czech Republic, where they made thousands of clay figurines of animals and, again, large-breasted women. In East Asia the artistic record remains thin, but the earliest find—a tiny model bird carved perhaps fifteen thousand years ago from a deer antler, discovered at Xuchang in 2009—seems so sophisticated that we can be confident that future excavations will reveal a flourishing Ice Age artistic tradition in China, too.

  Figure 1.6. The urge to create: a two-inch-tall, 35,000-year-old headless statuette of a huge-breasted “Venus,” carved from mammoth ivory, found in 2008 at Hohle Fels in Germany

  Ice Age humans outside western Europe, lacking the conditions that made Chauvet and Altamira what they were, apparently found other outlets for their creativity. There is precious little evidence that earlier ape-men felt any creative urges at all, but imagination seems to be hardwired into Homo sapiens. By fifty thousand years ago humans had the mental faculties to seek meaning in the world and the skills to represent these meanings in art and (probably, though we cannot observe it) poetry, music, and dance. Once again, people (in large groups) all seem to be much the same, wherever we find them. For all its splendor, Altamira did not make the West different from the rest.

  Technological, intellectual, and biological differences accumulated for more than a million and a half years after the first ape-men left Africa, dividing the Old World into a Neanderthal/Homo sapiens West and a Homo erectus East. Around a hundred thousand years ago the West was characterized by relatively advanced technology and even hints of humanity, while the East looked increasingly backward; but when fully modern humans moved out of Africa sixty thousand years ago they swept all this away. By the time the last ice age reached its climax twenty thousand years ago, “east” and “west” were just directions in which the sun rose and set. Far more united the little bands of humans scattered from Britain to Siberia—and (relatively) soon to cross over into America—than divided them. Each band foraged and hunted, roaming over huge areas as plants ripened and animals came and went. Each must have known its territory intimately and have told stories about every rock and tree; each had its own art and traditions, tools and weapons, spirits and demons. And each surely knew that their gods loved them, because they were, in spite of everything, still alive.

  Humans had come as far as they were likely to in such a cold, dry world; and there, we must suspect, things would have stayed, had the earth not wobbled under their feet.

  2

  THE WEST TAKES THE LEAD

  GLOBAL WARMING

  Though the cavemen shivering around their campfires twenty thousand years ago could not know it, their world had begun moving back toward warmth. Over the next ten thousand years the combination of climate change and their own superfast brains would transform geography, generating distinct regional ways of life that have continued to this very day. East and West began to mean something.

  The consequences of global warming were mind-boggling. In two or three centuries around 17,000 BCE the sea level rose forty feet as the glaciers that had blanketed northern America, Europe, and Asia melted. The area between Turkey and Crimea, where the waves of the Black Sea now roll (Figure 2.1), had been a low-lying basin during the Ice Age, but glacial runoff now turned it into the world’s biggest freshwater lake. It was a flood worthy of Noah’s ark,* with the waters rising six inches per day at some stages. Every time the sun came up, the lakeshore had advanced another mile. Nothing in modern times begins to compare.

  Figure 2.1. The big picture: this chapter’s story seen at the global scale

  Earth’s changing orbit set off a wild seesaw of warming and cooling, feast and famine. Figure 2.2 shows how the ratios between two isotopes of oxygen in the Antarctic ice cores mentioned in Chapter 1 zigzagged back and forth as the climate changed. Only after about 14,000 BCE, when melting glaciers stopped dumping icy water into the oceans, did the world clearly start taking two steps toward warmth for every one back toward freezing. Around 12,700 BCE these steps turned into a gallop, and within a single lifespan the globe warmed by about 5°F, bringing it within a degree or two of what we have known in recent times.

  Figure 2.2. A story written in ice: the ratio between oxygen isotopes in air bubbles trapped in the Antarctic ice pack, revealing the swings between warm/wet and cold/dry weather across the last twenty thousand years

  Medieval Christians liked to think of the universe as a Great Chain of Being, from God down to the humblest earthworm. The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate—all had their allotted places in a timeless order. We might do better, though, to imagine an anything-but-timeless Great Chain of Energy. Gravitational energy structures the universe. It turned the primeval cosmic soup into hydrogen and helium and then turned these simple elements into stars. Our sun works as a great nuclear reactor converting gravitational into electromagnetic energy, and plants on Earth photosynthesize a tiny portion of this into chemical energy. Animals then consume plants, metabolizing chemical energy into kinetic energy. The interplay between solar and other planets’ gravities shapes the earth’s orbit, determining how much electromagnetic energy we get, how much chemical energy plants create, and how much kinetic energy animals make from it; and that determines everything else.

  Around 12,700 BCE, Earth leaped up the Great Chain of Energy. More sunlight meant more plants, more animals, and more choices for humans, about how much to eat, how much to work, and how much to reproduce. Every individual and every little band probably combined the options in their own ways, but overall, humans reacted to moving up the Great Chain of Energy in much the same ways as the plants and animals they preyed upon: they reproduced. For every human alive around 18,000 BCE (maybe half a million) there were a dozen people in 10,000 BCE.

  Just how people experienced global warming depended on where they lived. In the southern hemisphere the great oceans moderated the impact of climate change, but the north saw dramatic contrasts. For foragers in the pre–Black Sea Basin, warming was a disaster, and things were little better for people living on coastal plains. They had enjoyed some of the Ice Age world’s richest pickings, but a warmer world meant higher sea levels. Every year they retreated as waves drowned a little more of their ancestral hunting grounds, until finally everything was lost.* Yet for most humans in the northern hemisphere, moving up the Great Chain of Energy was an unalloyed good. People could follow plants and other animals north into regions that were previously too cold to support them, and by 13,000 BCE (the exact date is disputed) humans had fanned out across America, where no ape-man had trod before. By 11,500 BCE people reached the continent’s southern tip, scaled its mountains, and pushed into its rain forests. Mankind had inherited the earth.

  THE GARDEN OF EDEN

  The biggest beneficiaries of global warming lived in a band of “Lucky Latitudes” roughly 20–35 degrees north in the Old World and 15 degrees south to 20 degrees north in the New (see Figure 2.1). Plants and animals that had clustered in this temperate zone during the Ice Age multiplied wildly after 12,700 BCE, particularly, it seems, at each end of Asia, where wild cereals—forerunners of barley, wheat, and rye in southwest Asia and of rice and millet in East Asia—evolved big seeds that foragers could boil into mush or grind up and bake into bread. All they needed to do was wait until the plants ripened, shake them, and collect the seeds. Experiments with modern southwest Asian wild grains suggest that a ton of edible seeds could have been extracted from just two and a half acres of plants; each calorie of energy spent on harvesting earned fifty calories of food. It was the golden age of foraging.

  In the Ice Age, hunter-gatherers had roamed the land in tiny bands because food was scarce, but their descendants now began changing their ways. Like the largest-brained species of several kinds of animals (whether we are talking about bees, dolphins, parrots, or our
closest relatives, apes), humans seem to clump together instinctively. We are sociable.

  Maybe big-brained animals got this way because they were smart enough to see that groups have more eyes and ears than individuals and do better at spotting enemies. Or maybe, some evolutionists suggest, living in groups came before big brains, starting what the brain scientist Steven Pinker calls a “cognitive arms race” in which those animals that figured out what other animals were thinking—keeping track of friends and enemies, of who shared and who didn’t—outbred those whose brains were not up to the task.

  Either way, we have evolved to like one another, and our ancestors chose to exploit Earth’s movement up the Great Chain of Energy by forming bigger permanent groups. By 12,500 BCE it was no longer unusual to find forty or fifty people living together within the Lucky Latitudes, and some groups passed the hundred mark.

  In the Ice Age, people had tended to set up camp, eat what plants and kill what animals they could find, then move on to another location, then another, and another. We still sing about being a wandering man, rambling on, free as a bird, and so on, but when the Great Chain of Energy made settling down a serious possibility, hearth and home clearly spoke to us more strongly. People in China began making pottery (a bad idea if you plan to move base every few weeks) as early as 16,000 BCE, and in highland Peru hunter-gatherers were building walls and keeping them clean around 11,000 BCE—pointless behavior for highly mobile people, but perfectly sensible for anyone living in one place for months at a stretch.