Domest icated animals have provided humans with food, clothing, and friendship. They’ve pulled plows, carts, and barges. They’ve caught rats, treed possums, and retrieved waterfowl. We’ve ridden them, raced them, and taught them silly tricks. But we’ve also caught diseases from them. Most of the serious epidemics of modern history, from the plague to AIDS, began life as relatively mild animal diseases. When these germs were transferred to humans, they evolved into deadly killers.
IN THE ICE AGE, HUMANS PAUSED in their struggle for survival and created the first known art. Some of their art was small and portable, the kind you would expect nomadic peoples to create. They carved three-dimensional images of their prey on their atlatl handles. They made necklaces and bracelets from bones, teeth, and shells. They made small carvings out of limestone, soap-stone, bone, antlers, and horns, as well as baked clay figurines. Some Ice Age figurines depict animals, similar to the soapstone carvings made by modern Inuit. The most common human figures are the so-called Venus figures: small statuettes of the female form that are all breasts and buttocks, with unformed facial features and stubby legs.
The best-known examples of Ice Age art are neither small nor portable. They are the massive and visually powerful cave paintings that can still be found from France to Siberia. These works were painted by firelight on the walls of hard-to-reach caves. Their primary subject is the game Ice Age man hunted—deer, wild cattle, buffalo, and mammoths. The animals are portrayed with the power of a Picasso print: a combination of closely observed detail, rounded form, and powerful abstraction. They are always in profile, always in motion. The rare human figures who appear beside them are generally no more than stick figures.
The techniques used to create these works were surprisingly sophisticated. Ice Age artists painted with the tips of their fingers, well-chewed twigs, and possibly even brushes made with animal hair. They made paint in shades of red, yellow, and brown by dissolving iron ochres in water, mixed with egg whites, fats, plant juices, and blood. Animal charcoal provided black tones and the strong lines that outline many of the figures.
Side by side with paintings of game animals are handprints, painted on the walls using techniques familiar to any modern parent or kindergarten teacher. In some cases, the artist’s hand was coated with paint and pressed against the wall. In other cases, the hand was outlined with paint blown through a pipe, creating a negative handprint.
Art, religion, or ancient graffiti? Painted between 25,000 and 40,000 years ago, prehistoric cave paintings represent our only direct look at what our Ice-Age ancestors thought about, what was important to them.
Egyptian hieroglyphics, a pictographic writing style
FROM PICTOGRAPHS TO
PARAGRAPHS
It’s a short step from a painting that represents a deer to an abstract picture that means deer. Such pictures, called pictographs, were the earliest form of writing. The problem with pictographs is that they require a character for every object and make it difficult to write abstract ideas. Pictographs evolved into writing systems based on syllables. In a syllabic language, the abstract picture of a deer can represent both the object deer and the sound deer ('dir). The symbol for deer could mean either deer or dear or could be combined with other symbols to create the words reindeer, dearth, or commandeer. True alphabets move the concept one step further, linking a symbol to a sound.
The universal symbols now in use for such things as toilets, telephones, public libraries, and stairs are a return to the pictograph: mankind’s oldest and newest form of written communication.
pictograph of bull and symbols from Mohenjo-daro in Pakistan
Paintings and carvings created by Ice Age humans give us our only clues about how these ancestors of ours thought. They are also the first examples we have of humans thinking symbolically. Symbolism is the basis of language and every other form of culture. Working backward from what we know about later cultures, scholars guess that these cave paintings were intended as hunting magic, the handprints were part of a ritual, and the plump little female figures were related to fertility. But we don’t really know all the answers—historians and scientists continue to search for the clues that link us all to early humans.
AROUND 10,000 BCE, THE EARTH began to warm again. The glaciers retreated, leaving behind moraines, kettles, drumlins, and grooves gouged out of the bedrock. Sea levels rose, once more covering the land bridges that linked the Americas to Eurasia. The weather became warmer and wetter.
New adaptations were required of post-Ice Age Homo sapiens, who now dwelled on every continent except Antarctica. The specialized big game hunting that humans depended on during the Ice Age became less certain. Large game animals were dying out: at least fifty types of megafauna became extinct in the last five thousand years of the Ice Age, from climate change, increased hunting, or both. As hunting became less reliable, gathering became more important. Some nomadic tribes began to methodically harvest wild grains, roots, and berries, becoming a little less nomadic in the process.
The person who first noticed the power of wheat to reproduce by burying fertile seeds in the soil was probably female.
Harvesting wild grains differs from planting seeds with the aim to grow more plants and thereby yield large volumes of grain. The latter is called agriculture, and its discovery was another Goldilocks moment for man. The person who first noticed the power of wheat to reproduce by burying fertile seeds in the soil was probably female, not male, since it was the women who primarily harvested wild seeds, while their men continued to hunt. The woman credited with the human innovation of agriculture was probably a member of the Natufian tribe—seminomadic farmers who lived in the area that is now Palestine and southern Syria around 9000 BCE.
THE MIRACLE OF SEEDS
AYOUNG WOMAN WALKS THROUGH A GROUP OF HUTS, carrying some bones from a meal to discard at the communal garbage dump. She passes two men working beside a hut, threshing grain with forks, repeatedly lifting it to allow the fine, wispy materials to blow away in the breeze.
At the dump, the young woman throws away the bones. As she turns to leave, something protruding up through the discarded bones catches her eye. When she bends down, she notices wheat sprouting there. It looks just like the kind that grows in the high meadow where she goes to harvest grains. Curious, she removes some seeds from these plants.
Instead of walking home, she goes immediately to the high meadow. At the edge of the field, she kneels down and uses her fingers to push the seeds from the garbage dump plants into the ground.
Weeks later, when she returns, the young woman notices that seeds from the garbage pit plants are more robust than those produced by wild plants growing in the meadow. She has discovered one of the gritty facts of wild plant propagation: some seeds need time in a digestive tract before they can perform their miracle.
WHY WHEAT?
The grain in wild grasses, like wheat, barley, and the wild-grass relative of maize, grows at the top of the stalk. As it matures, the stalk “shatters,” dropping its seeds to the ground, where they germinate and produce more stalks of the wild grass.
In wheat and barley, a relatively common single-gene mutation creates a stalk that does not shatter, and the seeds remain on the stalk. In the wild, the stalks that don’t shatter are an evolutionary dead end. Seeds that remain on the stalk do not reproduce. From the hunter-gather’s point of view, seeds that remain on the stalk are a bonanza. From a farming point of view, seeds that remain on the stalk were to be desired.
IT PROBABLY TOOK MANY STEPS between this one discovery of the ability of wheat seeds to reproduce themselves to planting annual crops, but over time the Natufians learned to set aside a portion of each harvest for seed and tended their fields with sharpened digging sticks and simple wooden hoes.
Seeds are a near-perfect food source, rich in proteins and carbohydrates. They don’t spoil quickly, and they can be easily stored and transported. One seed contains all the genetic information to create an entirely new
plant, which in turn will bear dozens more seeds the following year. Over just a few seasons, replanting the best seeds produces new plants with bigger seeds. Wild grasses are domesticated, and transformed into wheat, barley, and rye.
IN ITS EARLY STAGES, FARMING didn’t necessarily tie nomadic tribes down. A tribe cleared a piece of ground, planted a crop, stayed in one place long enough to harvest it, and moved on. Over time, people created permanent settlements, which led to changing gender roles, new social structures, and the concept of property.
New technologies developed to fill new needs: fired pottery containers for storage, grindstones and mortars for processing foodstuffs, and clay bricks for building houses.
By 7000 BCE, farmers cultivated wheat and barley in a continuous zone that stretched from western Turkey to modern Pakistan. Farming then spread west from Anatolia through the Balkans, along the Mediterranean shore, and slowly into Central Europe, where the first farming villages appeared around 5400 BCE.
In 5000 BCE, settled agriculture was a primary way of life in four regions of the world: the Middle East, Egypt, northern India, and the Yangtze and Yellow River basins in China.
AN A-MAIZE-ING
TRANSFORMATION
THE MIDDIE EAST WASN’T THE only region of the world to discover farming. The ancient peoples of Central America domesticated what Americans call corn and the rest of the world calls maize sometime between 7000 and 10,000 BCE. Unlike the domestication of wheat, where the evolutionary path is relatively clear, with corn, we don’t know how they did it.
Corn’s closest wild relative that we know of is a grass called teosinte. Unlike wild wheat, it is not an obvious food source. Botanically, teosinte is two or three important genetic changes away from corn, processes that would take millennia to occur in nature and would leave a trail of maize missing links behind it. The grain head, the equivalent of an ear of corn, is not more than an inch long and made up of seven to twelve woody seeds. Like wheat, it spreads its seeds by “shattering.” Unlike wheat, it has no known variant that does not shatter.
Botanists are divided into two passionate camps on the subject of how ancient Americans created maize. One group theorizes that maize is descended from a now-extinct wild ancestor and a different wild grass with more obvious traits for domestication. The other group argues that ancient Americans bred maize from teosinte in spite of the difficulties.
One way or the other, by 6000 BCE, the ancient peoples of Central America had created a system of farming that later Native Americans would call the “three sisters”; beans and squash were planted in the same field with maize, creating a symbiotic relationship in which bean and squash vines use the maize stalk as a trellis, while beans’ nitrogen-fixing roots provide the nutrients the maize needs. The symbiotic relationship between the “three sisters” continues in the cook pot as well. Beans and maize together make a nutritionally complete meal.
By the time Europeans arrived, “three sisters” agriculture had spread north and south through the Americas.
THE DOWNSIDE OF FARMING
Eventually, successful farming offers a society a more stable food supply and a wider variety of food than hunting and foraging. Over the short run, farming was no more secure than life as a hunter-gatherer, and it was a lot more work.
Hunter-gatherer cultures cannot afford for a woman to bear a child until her previous child is able to walk on its own. Without that limitation, permanent farm settlements allowed families to raise more children. Population growth created a demand for more fields, which in turn created a demand for more children to work them. When fields wore out after several years of intensive gardening or a season of bad weather damaged crops, famine struck.
The result? Archaeological studies comparing early farmers with similar hunter-gatherer populations show that the farmers were often smaller, had less diverse diets, suffered from more diseases, and died at a younger age.
THRODGHOBT THE WORLD, agriculture led to the creation of permanent settlements. Increasing crop yields created food surpluses that supported larger settled communities. For the first time, not everyone needed to be part of the effort to create food. A few people were able to specialize in creating other things that the community needed. Potters were probably the first craft specialists, but they were soon followed by weavers, tanners, brick makers, builders, metalworkers, and others who played specialized roles.
The first towns, known as the tel cultures, from the Arabic word for “hill,” appeared in western Asia around 9000 BCE. True to their name, they were often built on hills and were surrounded by defensive stone walls, suggesting that towns felt a need to protect themselves against nomadic peoples who coveted their food surpluses. The most well-known of the Natufian towns is the multilayered site of Jericho, also known as Tel es-Sultan, located in Palestine’s West Bank.
Jericho palace
JERICHO
Jericho is possibly the oldest continuously occupied place in the world. The first town dates from 8300 to 7300 BCE, but the oldest remains at the site suggest that it was a campsite for the Natufian tribes long before a permanent settlement was built.
The earliest town builders of Jericho constructed a defensive exterior wall around a freshwater spring and beehive-shaped stone houses that were built halfway underground. The find that makes Jericho stand out from other neolithic towns are the human skulls covered with individually modeled plaster faces and seashell eyes. Apparently the townspeople of Jericho buried the decapitated bodies under the floor of their houses and displayed the decorated heads in their homes.
Jericho dwindled back down to a farm settlement around 5000 BCE. The town was rebuilt two thousand years later into what has been identified as the Jericho of the Old Testament, complete with ten-foot-high stone walls with twenty-five-foot watchtowers.
Jericho and the other cities of the tel cultures weren’t the only neolithic towns to appear and disappear in the agricultural regions of Eurasia. Others followed as agriculture spread: Çatal Hüyük in western Turkey around 7000 BCE, Karanovo in Bulgaria in 6200 BCE, Kot Diji in Pakistan in 3000 BCE, and Chengziya in China in 2500 BCE. The cultures were different from region to region, but the towns shared common concerns. They struggled with irrigation and flooding. They built temples and granaries. They buried their dead with ritual and sacrificed to their gods. They created distinctive pottery. They traded over amazingly long distances. (Archaeologists have found obsidian from Turkey, turquoise from the Sinai, and sea-shells from the Mediterranean and the Red Sea in the ruins at Jericho.) They went to war.
It isn’t a coincidence that the great civilizations of the ancient world were all tied to major river systems. Neolithic agricultural techniques could not support a large settled population. After a period of intense cultivation, the fertility of the fields decreased and the towns they supported failed. The only exceptions were those river valleys where flooding fertilized the land year after year. In the areas where settled agriculture was a primary way of life, three river systems provided the conditions under which cities could flourish: the fertile land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in modern Iraq, the Nile River valley in Egypt, and the Indus River valley in modern Pakistan and northern India.
Located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, Mesopotamia was literally “the land between the rivers.” Also known as the Fertile Crescent, Mesopotamia was home to the world’s first civilization: the Sumerian city-states, which were founded between 4500 and 4000 BCE.
The city-states were politically independent and culturally linked. They shared a common language, culture, and religion. Built almost entirely from mud bricks, the cities were small by modern standards: with roughly the same population as Duluth or Asheville. Ur, best known from the Hebrew Bible as the city from which Abraham fled, was the dominant city for most of Sumer’s history.
Sumerian clay tablet in cuneiform script
BASE TWELVE
The city-states of Sumer are long gone, but they affect our daily live
s in one very basic way.
The Sumerian counting system was based on twelve rather than ten. It survives today in our sixty-second minute, sixty-minute hour, twenty-four-hour day, and 360-degree circle.
We know more about the city-states of Sumer than we do about their predecessors at Jericho and Çatal Hüyük because the Sumerians were the first people to develop a written language. Cuneiform is a syllabic script with about three thousand characters, halfway between a true alphabet and pictographs. It was written by incising a soft clay tablet with a wedge-shaped stylus. If someone needed a permanent copy of a document, he baked the tablet. The earliest surviving tablets date from 3100 BCE. Many of them are financial records, detailing the complicated economic life of the culture. Each city had a major temple that owned property, collected tribute, and bought supplies for a household of priests and scribes. Merchants traveled by donkey caravan across the desert to trade with Turkey, Iran, Syria, and the Indus Valley.
terracotta figurine all from the Mohenjo-daro dig in Pakistan.
one of the skulls of Jericho discovered in the mid-1950s.
terracotta toy
bust of a priest king
Financial records weren’t the only things recorded on clay tablets. Sumerians wrote religious works, historical accounts, lists of kings, and the earliest surviving epic poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh. We can read their hymns, their law code, and a magical spell for protecting an infant from blood-sucking demons.
Mankind Page 3