A Very Short History of Humanity
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A Very Short History of
Humanity
Out of Africa and Into the World
It started in Africa, in or about the year 50,000 B.C. We were
living in the savannahs of East Africa, hunting for meat,
gathering berries, and otherwise looking like any other
group of two-legged apes, once common in Africa. But
something was different about us. We decorated and
adorned our bodies like humans do; we created art like
humans do; we planned our hunting and gathering like
humans do; and most importantly, we improved on
everything we did and taught our children everything we
knew, in the hopes that their lives would be better. Nobody
yet knows what made us different from the other
apes—perhaps it was a combination of seeking new ideas
and having the language to communicate those ideas to
others—but whatever happened so many years ago in Africa
finally made us human and that’s when our story starts.
There were only a few thousand of us back then. All of
humanity could have fit into a ballpark. Every day under the
burning sun the men hunted while the women collected
berries and nuts. Every night under the brilliant stars we
huddled together and told ourselves stories. And sometimes
we were afraid, when the storms washed the land, or when a
lion came to hunt, but we knew where to hide and we knew
how to fight and every day we learned new things. There
were only a few thousand of us back then, but every century
there were more of us.
We have always been seekers of new things, and (possibly
more importantly) we have always been seekers of fame. It
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http://neurohack.com/earthguide/History.
By George Moromisato
13 June 2004
A Very Short History of Humanity
1st version. 13 June 2004.
Notes
History is like a TV series. If you start in
the middle, you can't figure out what's
happening. Who is that guy? Why did
they do that? Oh, are they, like, allies?
My answer was to write a quick little
summary, a sort of "Previously, on Planet
Earth..." introduction. I hope it helps to
make sense of what's going on today
and maybe even foreshadow some
future episodes.
I wrote this for my niece, Isabella, who
soon will be old enough to take an
interest.
References
My very short history is 4,000 words,
which should be almost too much for
today's TV generation. It was certainly
almost too much for me to write. But if
you are interested in more, you would
probably enjoy the following books,
which I used to create this history:
Blainey, Geoffrey. A Short History of the
World. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002.
Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and
Steel. New York: Norton, 1997.
Fagan, Brian M., ed. The Oxford
Companion to Archeology. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1996.
Hart. Michael H. The 100: A Ranking of
the Most Influential Persons in History.
New York: Kensington Publishing, 1992.
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did not take long for some of us to leave the hunting Scupin, Raymond, and Christopher R.
DeCorse. Anthropology: A Global
grounds of East Africa and head north across the African Perspective, 5th ed. New Jersey:
plain. As each century passed, we left our footprints on Prentice Hall, 2004.
more and more of the world. We walked to the Fertile
Crescent, settling in the places we liked, happy near the
abundant game and the bountiful earth. Later we walked
towards the Northern Star and settled in the craggy majesty
of Europe; and we walked East towards the rising sun and
walked on the golden steppes of Eurasia. Eventually, we
even built boats to reach the land of New Guinea and
antipodal Australia. In only a few millennia we had
populated three-quarters of the land. It has always been a
small world after all.

As we walked and hunted throughout the world we were not

always alone. In Europe we met another group of
ape-descendants who had left Africa long ago. The
Neanderthals were our older cousins. They were larger than
us and had hunted in Ice Age Europe with fire and stone for
more than 50,000 years. But by then, our skills were great
and our tools were powerful. Nobody knows whether we
out-hunted them or out-fought them. All we know is that
the Neanderthals disappeared soon after we arrived.

Millennia went by and our collection of tools kept

increasing: gravers, borers, and scrapers; arrows, knives,
and spears of all kinds. Every tool allowed us to live in new
places. With fish hooks made from ivory we could live by the
coast. With sewing needles made out of bone we could make
furs and live in the tundra of Asia. In time we followed the
wooly mammoth across the ice and found a whole New
World.

We crossed the icy-covered Bering Strait into America no

later than 10,000 B.C., just as the glacial blankets were
retreating towards the pole. The world was warming, and
other species struggled to adapt. The mammoths
disappeared, as did the megathere, the saber-toothed cats,
the American lions, and the mastodons. But we had no
trouble adapting to the changes and in the end we thrived.
Nobody knows whether we pushed those other animals
towards extinction. All we know is that our campsites were
filled with their bones.

And so, at the end of the Ice Age, having started in Africa,
we now lived on every continent on Earth, save the coldest

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one at the bottom of the world. The mammoths and the

mastodons were gone, but we hunted other prey. And now
everywhere we went, we met ourselves, and all other
ape-descendants were gone. There were 4 million of us then,
spread-out all over the world, living much as we had lived
for the last 40,000 years, and entirely unaware of the
wrenching changes that were to come.

To Have and Have-Not

At first, farming was a giant leap backwards. The reedy
weeds that passed for crops back then were nothing like the
hypermarket corn that you can buy today. But hunting was a
source of protein only if the hunt succeeded, and it’s no
surprise that we liked the idea of food that couldn’t run
away from you.

Eventually, of course, we got better at growing food. But

more amazingly, eventually food got better at feeding us.
Every spring we planted many different seeds. At harvest
time, we could see that some seeds resulted in a better crop
than others. The next season we planted the seeds from the
best crop. Thirteen-thousand years later we realized what
we had done: We had selected the genes that were best at
feeding us. We genetically engineered our food in 11,000
B.C. In that way we domesticated barley, grapes, and olives
in the Near East; we cultivated soybeans, cabbage, and
plums in China; and we grew maize, squash, and chili
peppers in Central America.

Even animals were not immune from our influence. Wolves

came by our campsites from time to time. Those that
attacked us, we killed; those that were friendly, we fed. By
10,000 B.C. the wolves at the fringes of the campsite had
turned into dogs sleeping by the fire. Cats, ever more
independent, joined us 4,000 years later. The mammoths
were dead, but the dogs, the cats, the sheep, the goats, and
the cows now lived. The world was being shaped by our
hands, consciously or not, and not for the last time.

With our newly altered crops and our loyal animals, getting
enough food to eat no longer required sixteen hours a day.
For the first time in our history there was a surplus of food.
More importantly, we were no longer walking around the
world following game to hunt. Our campsites became more
permanent and soon they turned into villages. Those two
changes in our lives, the surplus of food and the emergence

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of villages, led to the greatest transformations in our

history. Civilization lay ahead.

Economics in 11,000 B.C. was simple. Farmers grew more

than enough food for their families, so they gave some of
their food to metal-workers. In exchange, metal-workers
gave the farmers tools for the farm. But it didn’t take long
for things to get complicated. Bandits could take food from
the farmers and force the metal-workers to make weapons
for them. This forced the farmers and the metal-workers to
hire soldiers to protect themselves. In exchange farmers
gave the soldiers food and the metal-workers gave them
weapons.

But for us, nothing stays the same. We are always looking
for new things and (of course) we are always looking for
fame. And so, the villages got bigger and bigger, and the
farms got better at growing food; and the metal-workers
created new tools and new weapons. But it was the soldiers
who benefited most. With more and more surplus food, they
could support larger and larger armies. And among the
soldiers, some ruled over the others, and these rulers
became kings and queens of the villages. And though the
farmers just had enough food for themselves, the kings and
queens, the sultans and viziers, the emperors and their
bureaucrats, all controlled the wealth of the kingdom and
their word was law (though law itself had not yet been
invented).

The division between the haves and have-nots has been with
us ever since. In a sense, it was both the cause of civilization
and the first product of civilization. But the greatest
contribution of civilization has been to provide an
environment in which new ideas could prosper. And not the
least of those new ideas, was the thought that all people are
equal, and that all, not just kings and queens, deserve the
same opportunity and freedom to pursue their dreams.

But that idea would have to wait. Other ideas were

flourishing that increased the power of a civilization. One of
the greatest must have been the realization that the sun, the
moon, and the stars moved in predictable ways. More
importantly, we discovered that the motion of the sun
marked the seasons and could tell us when to start sowing
and when to start reaping. Can you imagine a more
encouraging discovery? It must have seemed as if the

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universe itself was helping us to succeed. This discovery was

so important to us that we devoted enormous time and
energy to build gigantic monuments to help us track the
position of the sun. These monuments connected our
day-to-day farming life with the ethereal mysteries of the
cosmos. This was organized religion in 4,000 B.C.

The greatest idea of this time was probably writing. We are

all born with an instinct for spoken language—children will
spontaneously develop grammar for a pidgin language that
lacks it. But the idea of making marks on clay to represent
words only occurred to us in a few places in the world. At
first, writing was used mostly for record keeping. But in
time, writing served as the repository of knowledge. The
wisdom of a thousand of year was preserved in the written
word, long after authors were dead. Unlike many other
inventions and discoveries, writing improved the process of
invention and discovery itself.

And the world had changed again. Mesopotamia in the Near

East was the first to see the transforming power for
civilization. The city of Ur rose on the Euphrates river by
3500 B.C. In Egypt, the kingdom of the Pharaohs grew on
the Nile around the same time. The valley around the Indus
river followed in 2500 B.C.; and the Chinese civilization
around the Yangtze blossomed in 1800 B.C. Any hunter from
the beginning of our story would have been lost in these
great cities, unaccustomed to the new roles (farmers,
craftsmen, soldiers, kings) and to the new ideas (writing,
organized religion, money). To us, on the other hand, a visit
would be no more than an exotic vacation. The differences
between 2000 B.C. and our time are no more than those that
can be covered in a good travel guide.

Sufficiently Advanced Technology

In A.D. 1969 two ape-descended human beings walked on
the surface of the moon. On Earth, 600 million people
watched or listened, using two recent inventions known as
television and radio. At the exact same moment, two other
ape-descendants held the power to launch thousands of
nuclear missiles, very similar to the ones that had just
propelled the astronauts to the moon, and loaded with
enough destructive power to kill most of those 600 million
people.

3,000 years earlier, we struggled to understand the world:

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What laws governed the motion of the planets? What were

rocks, trees, and rivers made out of? What caused diseases
and how could they be cured? What was the best way to
defeat the enemy? How should people be governed? Many
ideas were proposed to answer these and other questions.
Some of those ideas succeeded in answering interesting
questions—other ideas did not fit the facts. Over the years,
the successful ideas were kept while the unsuccessful ones
were discarded. And always, ideas built on other ideas, so
the more we learned about the world, the easier it was to
learn more.

On the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea, the

civilization of the Greek city-states produced many new
ideas. Greek philosophers measured the circumference of
the Earth, speculated on the circulation of blood, and
launched a massive research-and-development program to
develop the catapult. Democracy was another such idea.
Instead of a permanent king who ruled over all, Greek
democracy called for shared rule, in which each landowner
took turns serving in a ruling council.

In the second century B.C. the Greek civilization was

conquered by the Romans, but the ideas that the Greeks
possessed were not lost—they were simply adopted by the
Romans. And in turn, the Romans built on the past and
developed new technologies to improve their life.

Many new ideas improved our control over the natural

world, but some ideas were more personal and dealt with
the questions that all humans have asked: Why am I here?
How should I live my life? Why do people suffer? What will
happen after I die? Many tried to answer these questions. In
northeast India, Buddha began a religion eschewing
selfishness and desire. In China, Confucius taught guides of
conduct, reinforcing the mutual responsibilities of rulers
and subjects. And in the Near East, Jesus Christ preached a
religion founded on love. The philosophies of these three
men have endured long after their deaths and millions are
now inspired by their ideas.

In fourth century A.D. the Roman Empire succumbed to

invading Vandals and Goths. The ideas of that civilization
were lost for a time, but other empires rose in its place.
Mohammed united the tribes of the Arabian peninsula and
built a religion and an empire that challenged every realm

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from Spain to the western mountains of India. The Islamic

empire preserved and extended many of the ideas of the
ancient world. Algebra was one of those ideas. The number
zero was another.

Secure in the middle of Asia, China produced more than its

share of ideas and innovations. Books were printed in A.D.
868. and gunpowder was known by A.D. 1044. Nevertheless,
the Mongols, united under Genghis Khan, managed to
conquer Peking in 1215. China turned inward and tempered
its curiosity about the rest of the world. In the early 1400’s
China possessed the skills to build ships that could cross the
Pacific. But the Middle Kingdom, then the most advanced
civilization in the world, saw nothing outside itself that was
of interest.

The various tribes and civilizations of America were isolated

from each other. The ideas of the Aztecs, for example, were
not known to the Incas, and neither was able to learn from
the other. In contrast, the civilizations of Europe, Asia, and
Africa, all traded with each other and all learned from each
other. For example, paper was invented in China in A.D. 105,
but Arabs acquired the technology from captured Chinese
papermakers in 751, and Europe learned it from the Arabs
in the twelfth century. If an American delegation had visited
Europe in 1492, they would have found European
technology to be almost indistinguishable from magic.
Unfortunately for the Native Americans, it was Europe
which sent a delegation to America in that year.

The European powers of the sixteenth century lacked the

technological sophistication of China or the Arab world.
Moreover, bottled-up in Europe, they ended up fighting
each other over land, religion, and power. But their
competition encouraged innovation and exploration, and
when the New World appeared before Columbus, it set off a
race to exploit its treasures. Britain and France fought for
control of North America while Spain and Portugal raced to
subjugate South America. For the civilizations of the
Americas, resistance was futile. The Spanish
Conquistadores charged on horses (which the Americans
had never seen), fought with iron (which sliced through
quilted armor), and brought numerous infectious diseases
(to which the Native Americans had no immunity).

The competition among the European powers centered as

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much on technology as it did on conquest, and soon the

skills and knowledge of Europe surpassed those of the rest
of the world. Discoveries followed rapidly: In 1610, Galileo
worked a few laws of motion using, for the first time,
experiments and numerical measurement. In 1687, Newton
published the Principia which provided us with the tools
(calculus among them) to predict the behavior of the planets
and control the motion of cannon balls. In 1769, James Watt
perfected the steam engine. In 1789, Antoine Lavoisier
revolutionized Chemistry. In 1831, Michael Faraday
discovered electromagnetic induction, the principle behind
electric motors and generators. In 1859, Charles Darwin
explained why we are here when he published On the Origin
of Species. And in 1905, on the American coast settled by
Britain only three centuries before, Albert Einstein
developed the equation E = mc2, which accurately predicted
the ferocious power unleashed by an atomic bomb.

Armed with these and a thousand other advances, the

European powers fought each other, while the rest of the
world served as their pieces and their board. In the
eighteenth century, French and British empires fought each
other around the world; warships were their technology,
and they both fought for control of the seas. The American
Colonies seceded during this war, and vowed never to
become entangled in the affairs of the Great Powers. In the
nineteenth century, France and Britain fought again, this
time on land, and with Germany as their pawn. But as the
twentieth century opened, France and Britain became
reluctant allies as they warily realized that Germany was no
longer a pawn, and that the once dormant countries of
Russia, China, and Japan, had begun to stir.

We pause our story at the threshold of the twentieth

century, the most remarkable century in our history, to look
back at where we started. The agricultural revolution 12,000
years ago unleashed two irresistible forces. The first was the
increasing power of technology that enabled our competitive
human need to amass wealth, power, and status. The second
was the system of ideas that tempered and guided the first.
But as the power of technology increased exponentially, the
temptation to use that power for conquest and control
outstripped the guiding force of democracy, the rule of law,
and human rights. These powers increased so fast and
furiously that the deeds and weapons that burned the

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twentieth century would have been imaginable to the first

Fertile Crescent farmers only as visions of Hell.

It is said that the First World War started by accident, but if

so, it was an accident that required meticulous preparation.
In 1914 Germany and its allies fought against France,
Britain and its allies. Everyone thought that this would be
just another short European wars, but the power of
technology was too great for easy prediction. Machine guns
and chemical weapons kept the armies in the muddy
trenches for years, and when overwhelming strength finally
broke the stalemate on the French and British side, the
shock of defeat on the German side virtually ensured a
sequel. Other states were also casualties of that war. The
Ottoman Empire collapsed, turning the Middle East into a
dozen, warring, jigsaw-puzzle pieces. The Russian
revolution ushered in a totalitarian leadership that
corrupted the social aspirations of the masses to assume
dictatorial control over the largest country in Asia. And
Imperial Japan realized that technology was power and
decided to amass as much of it as it could.

Japan invaded Manchuria in 1932 and fought on the plains

of northern China in 1937. In Europe, the bitter defeat of
World War I and the Great Depression left Germany prey to
the totalitarian ambitions of Adolph Hitler. Germany
invaded Poland in 1939 with Russia as its ally. Weak and
tired of war, France and Spain succumbed to the German
advance by 1941. Britain remained unconquered but
exhausted, while the United States, looked the other way,
safe on its own continent. But Japan did not trust the
strength of the US peace movement to keep the American
power out of the war. In 1941 it attacked and destroyed the
primary American naval base in the Pacific. In retrospect,
this was a miscalculation.

Another miscalculation was Hitler’s betrayal of its Russian

ally. German armies invaded Russia in 1941, opening up a
disastrous second front. Meanwhile, the latent industrial
might of the United States surged into gear. Thousands of
tanks and airplanes rumbled out of factories in America.
The Western Front was won by the allied powers after an
audacious amphibious invasion in 1944. The Eastern Front
was won by Russia only after a sacrifice of millions of
soldiers. The war now turned to Japan, and once again the
economic power of the US was decisive. Battleships and

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carriers left American docks almost every week. Island by

island, the United States shrank the Japanese Empire until
American marines where fighting on the shores of Okinawa.
In previous centuries, this would have been the end, and the
leaders of Japan and the US would have settled on terms.
But this was a total and final war; too many people had died
and too many people had suffered. This had to be the war to
end all wars or else what was the point of fighting? In 1945,
the United States sent a message to the Japanese Emperor:
Surrender or be annihilated. In any other century this would
have been a bluff, and the Japanese treated it as such. But
the power of technology was incalculable. A few days later,
the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of
Hiroshima, instantly destroying the city center and killing
more than 100,000 people. A few days later, another bomb
was dropped, this time on Nagasaki. Japan did not wait for
a third. The Second World War was over.

The dictatorships of Germany and Japan were defeated and

both were rebuilt by the allies into democratic republics. But
the dictatorship of Russia endured and prospered. In 1949,
Russia tested its own atomic bomb, the same year that
China fell under the control of totalitarian communism. To
the countries of the Western World it seemed as if the power
of their democratic ideas would fail under the contagion of
totalitarianism and one-party rule. East and West developed
and built more powerful nuclear weapons and the missiles
to carry them. Every person on Earth lived at the endpoint
of a missile’s ballistic flight path. And just as it seemed that
this balance of terror would go on forever, the world
changed again.

In the end, the power of ideas was just as great as the power
of technology. The world was truly small now, and everyone
could see how the rest of the world lived. As the people of
the communist world saw the success of the Western
economies, they yearned to follow their example. In 1989,
the Soviet Empire collapsed, and the fear of nuclear
holocaust collapsed with it.

Being Human
It all started in a very different world. The warmth and
abundance of those African savannahs seem now like a
paradise lost. We are uncomfortable now, in our
mechanized and technological society. But we are a young

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and promising species and we should not give up hope. The

peace and balance of the natural world appears so only
because we live our lives in an instant of geologic time. Over
a long enough time, species rise and fall, battling with each
other to populate the world with their descendants. Life
defies balance because it always struggles to be better than
it is.

And so it is with us. Our history is filled with terror, death,

treachery, and cruelty, but we are always struggling to be
better than we are. Which is not to say that there are no
problems. We no longer live in fear of nuclear annihilation,
but we (rightly) worry about environmental collapse, global
pandemics, and persistent economic inequalities. But the
future will be better than the past as long as the men and
women of the present struggle to make it so. That at least
has never changed.

Copyright © 1999-2009 by George Moromisato. All Rights Reserved.

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