Chapter 1 Before Civilization
HUMANITY
AND THE ENVIRONMENT
The search for water and food
was probably the primary motive for the spread of these early human beings, as
it had been for their hominid predecessors. For, like other species, early human
beings lived at the whim of nature. They followed their food and water supplies,
not yet having learned how to control them, perhaps not knowing yet any need to
control them.
These early humans lived by hunting
and gathering the food they needed: small animals, insects, roots, berries,
nuts, seeds, edible plants. Such food sources of course were heavily dependent
upon the types and amount of water resources available as well as the fertility
of the soil. As early humans learned
to cooperate and coordinate their activities, they also became capable hunters
of larger animals. This increased the levels of protein in their diets, thereby
contributing to their further physical development. Since they constantly moved
from place to place in search of these foodstuffs, never settling anywhere for
very long, today we call these people nomads.
The most important element of the environment in these early stages of
human development was undoubtedly the climate. While in geologic time the most
important changes have been tied to the splitting apart of the continents, such
events have usually moved far too slowly to interfere with the long-term
survival or development of a species. Changing patterns in the general climate
and weather, however, have been much faster, and have consequently affected
human beings much more directly and suddenly - forcing them to adapt culturally
rather than biologically in order to survive. The reasons for such rapid periods
of climate change have varied. Some have indeed been functions of the processes
of continental drift in the form of on-going volcanic processes of the planet.
Perhaps even more spectacular have been the consequences of occasional
interplanetary collisions – as asteroids and comets have struck the earth with
devastating consequences for the planet’s life forms. Perhaps the steadiest
changes have come from the slight wobble in the planet’s orbit about the sun
– a wobble that has contributed to cyclical changes in the relative warmth and
cold of planetary climate zones, marked by periodic advance and retreat of polar
ice.
For most of human history the spread of human populations, perhaps even
the evolution of the species, has been largely determined by the Ice Ages. When
human beings first appeared on the planet, the earth was experiencing one of its
colder phases of climate. The only really warm places were Central and South
America, Africa, and parts of southeastern Asia. Between 2.5 million and 1
million years ago, the climate grew even colder, so cold that in Northern
Eurasia and Canada the snow that fell in winter did not thaw in the summers.
Soon, huge sheets of ice formed in these northern regions and began to move
slowly south.
By about 500,000 years ago ice sheets covered most of North America and western Eurasia. As the planet experienced periodic warming and then cooling trends, between about 500,000 B.C. and 8000 B.C. these ice sheets either advanced or retreated. The colder periods, when the ice advanced southwards, are called glacials. Glacial periods usually last between 40,000 and 60,000 years. The warmer periods in between glacials, which last about 40,000 years, we call interglacials.
Northern hemisphere glaciation during the last ice ages. Taken from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age
To a considerable extent, human development was closely attuned to these
shifts in climate, and their consequent transformations of the environment. The
advance of the ice during glacial periods served to bring moisture to previously
dry areas in both Eurasia and North America. When the ice sheets retreated,
these areas then became vast grasslands, able to sustain the kinds of animal
populations upon which early humans increasingly depended for food. As the herds
moved north, following the retreating ice, so too did humanity.
Probably copying the animals themselves, which with their thick hides and
body hair were able to live close to the ice sheets, human beings also began to
learn the uses of clothing to keep warm in these cooler climates. Fire too
permitted them to live in colder regions. Then, when the ice began to move south
again, during glacial periods, humans moved with it.
At the same time, as the ice grew thick and advanced during glacials, it
locked up so much of the earth's water that the level of the oceans and seas
dropped significantly, exposing new lands for human occupation. In some areas
land bridges appeared, connecting regions that had previously been covered by
water. Moving across these appearing and disappearing land bridges, probably
still following the roaming herds of animals, at different times humans
inhabited the Americas, the British Isles, Indonesia and even Australia.
During warmer periods, when the melting ice raised the sea levels and
covered these land bridges, some of these human populations were cut off from
their fellows, isolated in their new homes. In these new regions, as before,
they had to adapt to local conditions. Thus, over extended periods of time,
human beings interacted with their changing environment, learning new techniques
of adaptation and survival.
TOOLS
AND HUMAN SURVIVAL
A major feature of humanity's
capacity for cultural adaptation to their environment was their growing ability
to change the environment to suit themselves. Crucial to this ability was the
development of tools. Even before the appearance of modern humans, earlier
hominids had learned how to use objects in the world around them, such as
sticks, stones, even bones, to expand the range of their own physical abilities
in extracting necessary resources from the environment. For example, a stick
might be used to extract termites from their large mounds, providing early
people with a nutritious snack. The stick had thus become an extension of the
individual's arm and hand that increased their efficiency. Unlike other species,
however, eventually modern humans learned to use certain objects to create other
objects. Stones could be used to chip other stones, thereby giving them a sharp
edge. The sharp-edged rock could then be used as a more efficient means of
killing small animals, or scraping hides for clothing. Such discoveries marked
the beginnings of technology.
Technology greatly accelerated humanity's capacity for cultural adaptation to the environment. Modern humans learned to use tools in ever more complicated forms. Soon they used stones to sharpen and polish other larger stones, fashioning hand axes, as well as a variety of other stone tools. Eventually, they began to combine sticks and sharpened stones, creating more complex and versatile tools.
The era in which such stone tools were humankind's primary technology is
usually divided by scholars into three great stages: the Paleolithic,
meaning Old Stone Age; the Mesolithic,
or Middle Stone Age; and the Neolithic,
or New Stone Age. These terms refer not to ages of time, but to the development
and use of particular kinds of stone tools. Thus some peoples in the world may
still be living in the Old Stone Age while others are in the New Stone Age, or
have left the ages of stone tools altogether because they have discovered how to
make tools out of various metals, or, more recently, man-made materials like
plastic.
Other discoveries and inventions also allowed early humans to interact
with their environment in more adaptive ways. Perhaps the most important was
learning how to make, control and to use fire. As we have seen, the ability to
make and use fire allowed humans to survive in colder climates than they were
naturally used to. As they learned that fire could be used to cook their meat,
they also unknowingly increased their intake of protein. Cooking meat helps to
break it down for the body's digestive system, which is then able to absorb more
protein from the meat than would be the case if it were raw. Increased levels of
protein, the basic building-block of the human body, may well have contributed
to the biological evolution of the human species, particularly the increase in
overall size and brain capacity. This in turn contributed to the human capacity
for cultural development.
In fact, fire also seems to have been a major factor in human cultural
development very early on. It became a centerpiece of human existence. It
changed night into day. It kept other predators away. Not least, eventually
people discovered that they could use fire to change the properties of physical
materials like rocks and clays in ways that made them much easier to fashion
into tools. Moreover, by seeming to change one substance into another, that is
wood into flame, smoke, and ash, it may even have contributed to early human
ideas about the power of nature, and the hidden forces within the world - forces
that waited only to be let out by the right sequence of actions.
In a world in which things that moved were alive and things that did not
were dead, to early humans fire itself must have seemed to be the living spirit
of the wood set free. If it could be done with fire, then why not with other
spirits, trapped in physical forms? If we consider that its early discovery was
probably a result of something as spectacular, violent, and inexplicable as a
bolt of lightning sent from the heavens, the mark fire made on the human
imagination begins to make sense. Along with wind and rain, and other natural
occurrences of the environment that had no obvious cause or source, fire may
well have inspired developments within the early imagination of humanity that
marked the first steps towards religious ideas. For those who did not understand
it, it must have seemed punishment from on high; but for those who learned to
master and use it, fire must indeed have seemed a gift from the gods.
HUNTERS
AND GATHERERS
Humanity has lived by far the
vast bulk of its existence on planet earth as Hunters and Gatherers. During this
phase of human history, human beings probably lived and roamed the planet in
small groups or bands, most members of which were related to one another. Archeologists,
scientists who look for the past record of humanity by digging up the remains of
their settlements or camps, suggest that these bands tended to number between
about twenty and sixty.
There is some evidence that such bands were in contact with others,
though how often is not certain. They seem to have exchanged certain items, like
shells and perhaps stone tools, though we do not know whether this was a matter
of gift-giving, payment, or part of some religious or social custom. They may
have intermarried. Intermarriage among bands would have helped to improve the
chances of survival by increasing the gene pool, and with it the available
hereditary characteristics that determined environmental adaptability.
Over the years, through countless generations, Hunters and Gatherers
learned and passed on the knowledge it took to survive in a natural environment.
Eventually, their survival skills became as finely tuned to the requirements of
their circumstances as those of any modern brain surgeon. The difference is that
hunting and gathering skills are more general
skills, while those of a brain surgeon are specialized skills.
Even among Hunters and Gatherers, however, specialization did occur.
Crafting stone tools, for example, became a fine art, probably practiced better
by some than others. Also, there may have been a general division of labor
between men and women. Men probably did most of the hunting, though perhaps not
all, while women were primarily gatherers. In part this would have been due to
the fact that women bore and nursed the children. Hunting with a small child
clinging to one's shoulder would have been difficult to say the least. Women
without children of course, may also have hunted.
At first, gathering was probably a more leisurely activity in which
everyone participated as they chose: men, women, and children. Once a kill had
been made there was no need to hunt further for the day, and a handy snack of
termites or beetles, or perhaps nuts and berries, must have appeared just as
attractive to men as to women. After all, there were no set hours or set quotas
for production, other than those imposed by a grumbling stomach.
As humans learned to hunt larger and larger animals, however, this early
division of labor probably began to become more refined. Larger game would have
required advanced organizational skills and better technology. As more and more
time was taken up preparing for the hunt and in the hunt itself, men must have
had less time to participate in gathering activities. Consequently, women
probably became the primary gatherers for the group while men became the primary
hunters. (Interestingly, while there is evidence that meat was the preferred
food, the bulk of people's diets in this era actually seems to have come from
gathering.)
COMMENTARY
For a long time, many scholars
believed that the life of Hunters and Gatherers was a rather miserable one, in
which they spent their entire time looking for food, in constant fear of natural
predators or attacks by other bands of humans. More recent analyses, however,
based in part on studies of present-day Hunters and Gatherers, suggest that far
less time may have been spent in food gathering or hunting among these peoples
than is true for people in modern cities. Some scholars have gone so far as to
suggest that the daily existence of Hunters and Gatherers is virtually idyllic,
with none of the stress and strains of modern life; a veritable paradise in
which the rule was cooperation among human beings who experienced virtually no
strife.
Drawing on present-day examples of Hunting and Gathering groups,
particularly the San peoples, or Bushmen, of Southern Africa, some revisionist scholars,
scholars who try to reinterpret the historical record in fundamentally new ways,
believe that Hunters and Gatherers developed largely egalitarian societies, in
which there were no personal possessions, and everyone shared everything in
common.
As evidence of the cooperative nature of such societies, they sometimes
cite the remains of one early man who was found to have had severe arthritis and
other crippling physical conditions although he lived a relatively long life.
His survival, so the argument goes, would have been impossible without the
assistance and care of his fellows. To draw from this kind of evidence general
rules about the kindly, cooperative nature of early human beings, however, may
be an overly generous leap of the modern imagination.
Using present-day Hunters and Gatherers as sources for our conclusions
about bands living over thirty thousand years ago is rather daring. After all,
modern bands have had another 30,000 years of experience in which to learn the
cultural lessons and advantages of cooperation. Given the relatively slow pace
of change in their lives, it has been tempting to some scholars to assume that
these societies are static, not changing at all. This is simply not the case. In
the last 8,000 years, for example, the San of Africa have been steadily hunted
by other groups of humans nearly to extinction. In the process, they have also
been pushed into relatively isolated and less productive territories: an
environmental change that may well have forced them to cooperate more
intensively in order to survive.
While it is probably true that early hunting and gathering societies were
more cooperative than competitive, at least within the group, it is still
extremely likely that some distinctions developed among individuals. The best
hunters, for example, almost certainly got the best bits of meat from their
kills for themselves and their immediate family members. In addition, there may
well have been periodic strife among bands of humans, if not within them. After
all, tools for hunting game could also become weapons of war. In short, everyday
life for earlier Hunters and Gatherers was probably not nearly as rosy as some
recent accounts suggest: according to most estimates, the life expectancy of
Paleolithic peoples was about 20 years or less.
The fact is we simply do not know enough about these early people to do
more than guess. And however educated our guesses may be, with the scanty
evidence available, modern scholars may easily fall into the trap of bias,
reading the historical record according to their own preconceived notions of
what they want to find, rather than what it actually contains.
When confronted by the more romantic interpretations of a hunting and
gathering existence, it is perhaps worth asking how many modern people today
would really prefer life in the open savanna of Africa to their centrally-heated
and air-conditioned homes, with the super-market and the movie theater just down
the street, and the television on in the living room, and a hot bath at the end
of the day? Of course, modern people have paid a price for such things: longer
work hours, problems of pollution, stress, perhaps even the tragedy of war. The
question for all of us is whether the benefits outweigh the costs. While each
type of existence has its appeal, each surely also has its problems.
Having said this, however, it remains to be asked why the Hunting and
Gathering stage, which comprised over 99% of human history, did indeed
eventually give way to other types of existence? As we shall see in the next
chapter, the answer lies in two areas: one beyond humanity's control -- a
changing environment; and the other very much within their control - their
response to the changes. In the course of adapting to this changing environment,
humanity took its first steps out of the Paleolithic Era, out of its infancy
according to some, out of the Garden of Eden according to others, and onto a
road that would lead it in starts and stops and starts again to where we now
are.