The Human Story
Our History, From The Stone Age To Today
James C. Davis
To the Reader
This book tells how ancient wandering peoples settled down, and how they founded cities, conquered neighbors, formed religions, found out who they were and where among the stars they lived, did some good and many wrongs, thrived, and journeyed into space.
I never told a soul that I was writing a book about the human past without his asking, “What’s your slant, your point of view?” If I have one it is this: In spite of all we hear and say, the world has been improving for a good long time.
My hardest task was leaving out. Writing the human story is like packing a suitcase; you can’t find space for everything. I regret that this book seldom mentions the deeds of women. The human past was often like a play produced in Shakespeare’s time; men took all the roles. Inescapably the book has much to say in the final chapters about the United States, while it never mentions many of the nearly 200 nations in the world. Since so many nations have often behaved badly, not being mentioned here probably reflects well on them.
I welcome your comments and suggestions.
For their generosity and help, let me warmly thank these friends and fellow students of the past. Most of them are former colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania. Strange as it may seem, some of them wouldn’t know me if they saw me. But all of them were kind enough to lend a hand.
My thanks to Wendy Ashmore, Tom Austin, James Baker, Richard Balkin, Richard Beeman, Tom Boyd, Lee Cassanelli, David Chaplin-Loebell, Thomas Childers, Frank Conaway, Hilary Conroy, five Davises (Daniel, David, Elda, Susan, and William, the last of whom greatly improved the whole manuscript), Richard Dunn, Ann Farnsworth-Alvear, Jeffrey Fear, Robert Forster, Louis Girifalco, Avery Goldstein, Ward Goodenough, Samuel Humes, Jeremy Jackson, Margaret Jacob, Christopher Jones, Robert Kraft, Bruce Kuklick, John and Miriam Lally, Lynn Lees, Walter Levy, and Paul Liebman.
Also: Mia Macintosh, Victor Mair, Alan Mann, Joyce Martin, Walter McDougall, Cynthia Merman, Allyn Miner, Sue Naquin, Benjamin Nathans, Martin Ostwald, Robert Palmer, Ivo Panjek, Edward Peters, Sumathi Ramaswamy, Robert Regan, Frankie Rubinstein, Jerry Ruderman (who improved the entire manuscript), Madeline Sauvion, Selig and Jacqueline Savits, Barbara von Schlegell, Gino Segré, Benjamin Shen, David Silverman, Nathan Sivin, Ake Sjoberg, Bernard Steinberg, Nancy Steinhardt, Yvonne Surh, Emidio Sussi, Henry Teune, Jeffrey Tigay, Robert Turner, Étienne Van de Walle, Hugh Van Dusen, Susan Watkins, Martin and Dotty Wolfe, Charles Wright, Vikash Yadav, Sally Zigmond, and an expert copyeditor who chooses to remain anonymous.
Chapter 1
We fill the earth.
OUR TALE BEGINS when humans much like us evolved and filled the earth.
Before that happened other humans had already come and gone. The most important of our forebears was Homo erectus, or Upright Men, so named because they stood on their two feet. They evolved in Africa about two million years ago and wandered into Asia. They sometimes lived in caves and sometimes in the open, and they chipped their simple tools from stone and learned the use of fire. Erectus had heavy brows and flatter skulls than we do, and if one were to enter a bus today the other riders probably would stealthily slip out.
Before erectus vanished perhaps 300,000 years ago, they begat the species we belong to. We of course are Homo sapiens, or Wise Men. Immodestly we gave ourselves that name because we have larger brains, encased in higher skulls, than erectus. In spite of having larger brains, the early sapiens humans may not have had the gift of language.
THEY CHANGE their minds every time they find an ancient skull, but anthropologists are fairly sure that our own subspecies evolved from sapiens about 160,000 years ago. We probably evolved in Africa, below the Sahara Desert. To indicate that we are a subspecies of sapiens, we call ourselves Homo sapiens sapiens, or Wise Wise Men. We are now the only variety of humans on earth.
We evolved in different ways. Some of those in Africa developed tall, thin bodies that exposed a lot of skin and that air could therefore cool more easily. Dark pigment in their skin protected them from the tropical sun’s ultraviolet rays, and their tight-curled hair protected their heads from the heat. But humans who lived in Europe and Asia, coping with the long, dark winters, had other needs. To keep their bones from weakening, they needed sunlight to stimulate vitamin D production. Dark skin would have blocked out too much sun, so they developed pink or sallow skin with little pigment.
Prehistorians have learned a lot about the life of our sapiens sapiens ancestors, especially those who lived in southwest Europe about thirty thousand years ago. For example, individuals took as much pleasure in looking different from each other as modern humans do. In a cave in the Pyrenees Mountains between France and Spain, an artist scratched on the walls more than a hundred sketches of what appear to be real people. Some of them wore their hair long, and others short; some had it in braids, others in buns. Some men had beards and mustaches, while others were clean-shaven.
At some point, but the time is much debated, humans learned to speak to one another. They may have done this because they were developing a richer culture that depended on communication. They must have often hunted and collected food in groups, and they probably worked together when they fashioned fishing boats and sheltered entrances to caves.
They had clever hands. They could light a fire by striking sparks from lumps of iron ore, and they carved their sewing needles out of bones, each one with a tiny hole through which a thread could pass. With these they sewed their clothes, using skins of animals. They made tiny cutting tools, half as long as a paper match, from flint, and glued them with resin into holes in handles made from wood or antlers.
They invented the spear thrower, which is a short shaft with a hook at one end that fits into the back end of a spear. It enables a hunter to throw a spear very hard. Some ancient artist carved the end of a spear thrower that was found in the Pyrenees Mountains in the shape of a fawn. Its head is facing backward, and it is looking at a little bird that is perched atop a lump of feces emerging from the fawn.
When someone died the early humans often left his necklaces of teeth and shells on his body, and food and tools beside it. They made a powder from the soft red stone called ocher, and sprinkled it on his body. So they clearly thought of death as meaningful and solemn. Perhaps they thought the one who died would have an afterlife where he or she would once again need tools and food, in a place where beauty mattered.
NOTHING THAT WE KNOW about the early humans is as awesome as what they painted in the depths of caves. Prehistorians first learned about these paintings in 1875, when an amateur archaeologist was hunting bones and tools in a cave at Altamira near the northern coast of Spain. His little daughter, whom he’d brought along for company, wandered into a nearby chamber. Holding up her candle, she saw paintings on the ceiling of two dozen nearly life-size bison, drawn in yellow, red, brown, and black. The paintings are so masterful that experts quickly — wrongly — called them modern fakes.
The greatest find of prehistoric paintings took place at Lascaux in southwest France soon after the start of World War II. Four teenaged boys were rambling on a hillside. In a place where a storm had uprooted a tree, the boys discovered that where the roots had been there was now a deep hole in the ground. A few days later they returned with a kerosene lamp, and one of them climbed down inside the hole. In the scanty light he clambered down a rocky slope and found that he was in a cavern.
The boy was stunned by what he saw. On the cavern walls were mural paintings of short and shaggy horses, bison, oxen, deer with spreading antlers, and that mythic beast the unicorn. Some of the animals were merely staring; others running for their lives. In a sloping gallery n
ear the main one, other searchers later came on sketches of a stag swimming across a river. In another cave they found a drawing of a man with a horned head and an erect penis. He seems to be pursuing a reindeer and an animal that is part deer, part bison.
Since the Lascaux find, explorers in caves in southern France and northern Spain have discovered thousands of paintings and drawings. These were not just casual doodles; painting them required a lot of trouble. To prepare, the artist and his helpers would have gathered minerals and clays of different colors and prepared the paints. Then they would have carried the equipment down inside the caves, and someone would have built a scaffold to support the painter. Finally, with others lighting up the cave with torches, he would have set to work.
Painters often worked in chambers that are hard to get to. One such chamber can be reached only by wriggling through a narrow 200-foot-long tunnel. A portly priest who was an expert on these paintings once got stuck inside this tunnel. Others had to pull him out.
Some of these deep and scary chambers may have been the scenes of solemn rites. One can picture adults, holding flaming torches, leading children through the narrow tunnels and then, as torchlight flickered on the paintings, explaining what they meant. The caves hold proof that children then were much like children now. Deep inside them modern-day explorers sometimes come on footprints left by children running barefoot who made a point of splashing through the puddles.
Explorers found some stunning sculptures in the Pyrenees. Moving first by boat you enter a cave where a river flows out of a mountain. Then you walk for a mile through narrow passages, then through a kind of hall with long and twisted stalactites, then through other bending tunnels, till at last you reach a chamber where you have to stoop. Lying in the middle of it are two bison, two feet long, which someone sculpted out of yellow clay fifteen-thousand years ago.
No one can be certain what their art reveals about the culture of these ancient folk. The animals no doubt reflect a great concern with hunting, and perhaps with magic. By painting mammoths and bison, they may have hoped to master these fierce beasts and raise the odds of killing them. Some animals are pierced with spears, and one painting shows a mammoth trammeled in a pitfall.
These early men (and maybe women) were skillful hunters. They discovered when to wait at places where the big game passed on their migrations — for example, where reindeer always forded rivers. Or they camped beside the open ends of narrow valleys where cliffs closed off the sides and the farther end. These were natural traps where they could drive an animal or herd and kill it then or later when they needed meat.
Prehistorians in France have found the bones of between 10,000 and 100,000 horses in a giant heap at the bottom of a cliff. Over many years, no doubt, ancient hunters stampeded horses over the cliff or ambushed them in the narrow pass below. At a village in the Czech Republic prehistorians found a pile of bones of more than a hundred mammoths, and on a site in Russia searchers found remains of more than two hundred of them.
BY FIFTY THOUSAND YEARS AGO, we had spread through Africa, Asia, and Europe. Now we would spread into three other continents where no humans had set foot.
The most mystifying of these migrations is the one from Southeast Asia to Australia. It’s hard to see how humans did it. Getting as far as the Indonesian islands wouldn’t have been hard if they did it at a time when a “land bridge” connected the Asian mainland to Indonesia. (A land bridge is a crest of land that appears in a shallow sea during an ice age, when much of the earth’s water freezes into glaciers, lowering the level of the sea.) From Indonesia they might have moved to the nearby island of New Guinea in boats made with skins, or rafts of bundled reeds.
Filling the Earth
We evolved in Africa; roamed on foot to Asia, Europe, and the Americas; and reached Australia and the Pacific islands in boats.
To move from New Guinea to Australia, however, they would have had to sail or paddle over roughly sixty miles of open sea. It’s hard to see why would they have done such a dangerous thing, since they had no way of knowing they would ever come to land. Most likely they made the crossing without meaning to, blown there during storms. These were the people whose descendants now are called the “Aborigines,” although they were not in Australia “from the beginning,” which is what aborigine means.
From the Australian mainland, some of these pioneers must have wandered down into Tasmania, which then was a peninsula jutting south from the continent. What happened to them in this place is interesting and revealing. Like the other Australian Aborigines, these people lived in Tasmania as simple hunters and gatherers. Then, more than ten thousand years ago, the oceans slowly rose, and stormy waters drowned the link to the mainland. Tasmania became an island.
Its people, who were isolated now from other Aborigines, clung to ancient ways for ten millennia. When the first Europeans came upon them two centuries ago, they were living specimens of life in the remote past. They had a rich social and ritual life, but they still used crude stone tools. In the early 1800s, British settlers nearly exterminated the Tasmanians in what was called “the Black War.” They hunted them down with dogs, and moved the remnant to an offshore island, where they died of disease and civilization.
While the Tasmanians were changing not at all during 10,000 years, the Aborigines on the mainland evolved a somewhat more complex culture. They learned to tie stone points to wooden shafts, and they used spear throwers. Even today some Aborigines using spear throwers can hit a kangaroo three out of four times from more than a hundred feet, and kill it in one throw from thirty to fifty feet. And of course the Aborigines learned to make the boomerang, the well-known throwing stick.
OTHERS OF OUR subspecies moved to North and South America, two other continents where humans had never been. Prehistorians of today disagree about who made this move, and how and when.
The long-accepted story of the settlement of North America went like this. Humans lived in the extreme northeastern tip of Siberia, at the Arctic Circle, which reaches far to the east. Today, fifty-three miles of rough and icy water separate this tip of Asia from North America, but at the time in question the seas were low. So a wide land bridge of tundra and marshes connected Asia and North America. Bands of Siberian hunters moved back and forth along this land bridge (from continent to continent, but that they didn’t know) following mammoths and wild horses.
Then some of them — from this point on we will refer to them as Indians — wandered away from the eastern (North American) end of the land bridge. From there the Indians probably followed game to the south and east. Since this was during one of earth’s cold periods, glaciers covered two-thirds of North America, but these pioneers could have walked south along the ice-free Alaskan coast. Or they could have trod a narrow ice-free corridor that we know led south between the glaciers. As they trudged along this corridor mile-high walls of ice would have flanked them on both sides. When at last they were south of the ice, they would have found themselves in the northwest of what is now the United States.
That is the old story of the arrival of humans in the Americas. The newer variations on it are so many that we can only briefly list them. The Indians may have come at different times. They may have come from South Asia, Japan, even Australia. And they may have come by water, not by land, perhaps hugging the shore all the way from Asia, along the Bering land bridge, and down the western coasts of the Americas.
After scattering through North America, the Indians made their way to the other continent that lies to the south. We don’t know when, but after decades, or centuries, or perhaps thousands of years they wandered down the isthmus between the continents, and then on through the jungles, mountains, and grasslands, all the way to the windy southern tip of South America.
By luck, we know just a little about the life of the Indians who lived on a site near the southern tip of South America nearly eleven thousand years ago. After the Indians abandoned it, a peat bog covered their village, and the acids in the partial
ly decomposed plants preserved what would otherwise have rotted. Not only bones survived here, but also garbage, wood, and even the chewed leaves of a shrub that the villagers used as a drug. Surprisingly, these early Indians lived in parallel rows of huts, each hut covered with skins and floored with logs or planks.
Both of the newfound continents were full of game, a hunter’s paradise. The archaeologists who found the evidence tell about an event that happened one day ten thousand years ago on the plains east of the central Rocky Mountains. Using some imagination, we believe it may have gone like this. A band of Indians saw a herd of bison. Approaching from the downwind side, so that the bison couldn’t smell them, the hunters crept up close. Suddenly they shouted, and they threw their spears so as to panic the bison and drive them into a deep gully. The animals stampeded. They tried to jump the gully, but many fell short and landed at the bottom. In no time, writhing, bellowing animals filled the gully.
The hunters moved in and killed the bison that had not been crushed to death. When they had finished, 190 animals lay dead. Then the hunters butchered them. They had tons and tons of meat, enough for feasting and plenty to dry and eat later — probably much more meat than they could use.
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