Hour 1 | 3,300,000 - 4000 BCE
Welcome to WH24 · First Use of Stone Tools · Early Human Groups · Fire · Out of Africa 1 & 2 · Neanderthals · Oldest Instruments · Last Humans on Earth · Ice Ages & Water Levels · Bering Strait Land Bridge · Agriculture ·Çatalhöyük · Copper Metallurgy · The Problems with “Civilization”
Browse the main books, articles, lectures, and interviews we relied on to make this episode.
Note: We’ve added links throughout the SYNOPSIS which are not our official sources. We’ve linked pictures, maps, encyclopedia entries, etc for you to enjoy if you want to see the things we are discussing, or get a quick reminder of people, time periods, concepts etc (what is an australopithecine again??). For our official sources check out the BOOKS, ARTICLES, INTERVIEWS, and LECTURE tabs.
Welcome! In this first episode, we cover the period between the first use of stone tools, about 3.3 million years ago, and the very beginnings of what historians call “civilization,” roughly 6000 years ago. As our starting point for “human history,” we have chosen the first evidence of stone tools, because it marks a significant turning point between our shared past with the rest of the animal kingdom. (Worth mentioning, the idea that humans are the only animal that use tools is controversial!) These tools, used by our early ancestors, indicate the beginning of the Paleolithic Era, also known as the “Stone” Age.
Our ancestors spread across Africa, continuing to evolve into other Hominin subspecies. About a million years into the Paleolithic, the globe was plunged into an ice age. (We were amazed to learn that the average global temperature during the ice age was only 11° F or 6° C colder than the average global temperature in the 20th century!).
Until about 1.6 million years ago, well into the ice age, all human subspecies lived in Africa. Then Homo Erectus traveled up through the Levant and spread across Eurasia. Anthropologists refer to this event as Out Of Africa One.
As human groups continued to evolve across Afro-Eurasia, some learned to control fire. Like all truly ancient history, there are many contrasting theories about when this happened. Most scientists put it at 400,000 years ago, but others think it was much earlier.
Across Afro-Eurasia, hominin groups continued to evolve, including Denisovans, Neanderthals, and many, many others. Anthropologist, Tom Higham, describes the world Homo Sapiens were born into as a “Middle Earth,” populated by many types of humans, including the group affectionately named hobbits. Many early discoveries previously attributed to Homo Sapiens, like art, jewelry, flutes, and stalagmite circles, are now hypothesized to be made by other early human groups.
Between 23,000 and 13,000 years ago, humans crossed from Northeast Asia into the Americas. There are many theories about when and how this happened, but by 13,000 years ago, a surprisingly cohesive architectural package had spread across most of North America. This is called the Clovis Culture.
Somewhere between 30,000 and 15,000 years ago, the last of our cousin subspecies died out, and we were left alone on Earth.
Around 12,000 years ago, the ice age ended. Many people began to cultivate foods. The shift to agriculture for many early humans was a long, gradual process. “Hunter/gathers” had long practiced landscape manipulation to encourage the growth of the plants and animals they favored. Many of the first early humans to cultivate plants were semi-nomadic. They migrated regularly and grew crops seasonally. Many would plant crops, leave for long periods, and return to reap the harvest.
There are many examples of people working together on large projects without the trappings of city specialization and government. While Stonehenge is famous, there are many… other… stone… circles… across the world. The relationship between the origins of structural inequality and the invention of agriculture is debated. Many historians, such as Jared Diamond, view agriculture as a terrible mistake. Others, such as David Graeber and David Wengrow, argue the evidence does not suggest a relationship between agriculture and inequality.
Over time, many people began to live in permanent settlements. Villages, then clusters of villages, appeared on every continent. Some of these like Catalhoyuk lasted for more than a thousand years.
Stone tools were replaced by coppertools. Arsenic, and eventually, tin was mixed into the copper to make bronze. This time is the famous Bronze Age. This is the official beginning of what almost everyone means when they talk about “history.” The Bronze Age is the time period when humankind began to write literature, build pyramids and temples, send large armies into war, enslave their fellow humans, and permanently alter the ecosystems of the lands they occupied.
Several of these massive early civilizations formed independently around the same time. We will look at each of them individually next episode.
Science, “Evidence of an Early Projectile Point Technology in North America at the Gault Site, Texas, US”
Nature, “Ice-core Evidence of Earliest Extensive Copper Metallurgy in the Andes 2700 years ago”
Science Daily, Sweet Discovery Pushes Back the Origins of Chocolate
The New York Times, “Desert Monoliths Reveal Stone Age Architectural Blueprints ”
“Blueprints” for desert kites discovered.
Smithsonian Magazine, “A 146,000-Year-Old Fossil Dubbed 'Dragon Man' Might Be One of Our Closest Relatives”
Royal Society Publishing, “The Discovery of Fire by Humans: a Long and Convoluted Process”
Was it millions or hundreds of thousands of years ago?
Discover Magazine, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race”
Jared Diamond on agriculture.
Tides of History, “Neanderthals Our Closest Kin”
Tides of History, “Archaeology Human Bones Iberian Copper Age”
Tides of History, “The Genetic Origins of Indigenous Americans”
Interview with Jennifer Raff Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Kansas and author of the book Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas)
Genetics Unzipped, “Jennifer Raff: A Genetic History of the Americas”
Genetics Unzipped, “Direwolves and Denisovans: Uncovering the Stories in Ancient DNA”
Tides of History, “Interview with Shane Miller and Jessi Halligan on the White Sands footprints”
Great interview with two archeologists who disagree about the White Sands footprints.
Professor Tom Higham, “The World Before Us”
I loved the books The World Before Us. The author summarizes the main points in this video.
William Parkinson Associate Curator of Eurasian Anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History, The Age of Metal (Copper age) and the Evolution of European Civilization
Narodni Muzej Slovenije, Neanderthal Flute - NMS
Australian National University, Study Finds Most Likely Route of First Humans into Australia - ANU
Çatalhöyük Research Project
Website for the archeological site.
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(Edited slightly for clarity)
Charlie: Let's begin the story of human history with an exercise that illustrates the scale of our family tree.
Ellie: Stretch your arms out to your sides like a child playing “airplane.” If your left fingertip is the beginning of life on Earth and your right fingertip is this minute that you are listening to us talk, the distance between your fingers represents about 3.7 billion years of time. That is how long life has existed on Earth. If you start at your left hand and move all the way up your arm past your elbow, it's not until you reach your shoulder that some living organisms begin to photosynthesize. All life is still tiny, one cell, but now some of these one-celled organisms can process sunlight filling the world with oxygen. Continue to move across your chest, past your right shoulder, and down your arm. When you get all the way to your elbow, the first simple animals, sea sponge-like creatures, come into existence. Keep moving forward in time from your elbow. When you get to your right wrist, here life finally crawls out of the ocean and onto the land. Remember our timeline started at your left hand with the genesis of life. It's not until we travel across your entire wingspan and into the middle of your right palm that dinosaurs evolve, and not until the second joint of your finger that the first flowers bloom across the planet. Almost all the way at the end, the very last joint of your finger, mammals arrive and the dinosaurs go extinct. And finally, at the very, very tip of your finger, the white section of your nail, the first primates appear. Everything we will talk about on this podcast, the Mayan Empire, the two world wars, Mansa Musa, Joan of Arc, Genghis Khan, the Bubonic Plague, the Library of Alexandria, all of human history, takes place on the slenderest edge, easily removed with the swipe of a nail file.
Charlie: Welcome to World History 24, where my older sister Ellie teaches me world history in order in just 24 hours. My name is Charlie. This podcast consists of 24 episodes, each covering a specific span of years in human history, beginning with early human evolution up to 1945. This podcast is intended to help place the big events, the big names, the big ideas, and to help unlearn the incorrect, the problematic, the Eurocentric, and the outdated. The content is fast and sweeping. Think of it more as a chronological crash course, not necessarily a deep dive. And don't worry if you don't catch every name or date. It's meant to give the broad outlines of human history and to spark interest and fascination. For this reason, we created a website filled with recommendations and resources to help the moment you feel the desire for a deeper dive on any subject that we cover. And if you aren't driving, it's extra fun to listen to this podcast with a globe or Google Earth handy as we use modern country names to place the history we discuss.
In this first episode, we will cover the origin story of humanity, how the first hominin groups evolved in Africa and spread across the planet creating art, instruments, and stone tools, and how eventually these many diverse hominin groups went extinct, leaving our species Homo sapiens alone on the earth. We will discuss the fascinating and complicated Neolithic Age when many groups began to rely more on cultivated foods. Some people began to work with metal, taking parts of the world into the copper age. During this time, we find humans living in permanent settlements, some lasting over a thousand years, well before the rise of the first commonly acknowledged cities. These early human groups invented such essentials as chocolate, cheese, tea, and alcohol, and their lives and decisions still affect ours every day.
So without further ado, let's call Ellie and begin the magnificent story of human history.
Early Human Evolution
Charlie: I suppose the first question that arises in my mind at least is when and where does history technically start? I mean, yeah, how do you start this whole thing?
Ellie: Yeah, that's a really good question. And it's a little bit arbitrary when you want to start it. But what we're going to pick is the moment when an early species of hominin, so an animal that's sort of like us, it's one of our direct ancestors, it's between humans and apes.
Charlie: Sure
Ellie: So an early species of those began to use stone tools. That's about 3.3 million years ago. We have the evidence for it in East Africa. And that moment is as good of a time to say that human history began as any.
Charlie: And so from there, does it kind of just progress linearly up to now? I'm picturing that like illustration in a textbook, you know, where like a hominin is kind of like standing up from an ape into a modern into modern man like holding a spear or whatever.
Ellie: Yeah. No, I know exactly what you're referring to. And interestingly, no, it doesn't seem to have worked like that. That is exactly how we were taught in high school. But it turns out that our current understanding of early human evolution is much more a story of many early subspecies evolving and overlapping and interacting with each other, specifically interbreeding with each other. So instead of that linear story, it's much more overlapping. And these early human groups, these early human subspecies spread out all across Africa. They continue to interact. They continue to use their stone tools. They continue to interbreed and evolve. And then eventually, about 2.5 million years ago, our genus, Homo, evolves.
Genus Voiceover:
Charlie: In case you're like me and don't remember much of biology, the term genus refers to a certain rank in the classification system that biologists use to organize the incredible diversity of life. Broadly speaking, there are seven ranks in which all organisms can be placed from most general categories to the most specific. “Kingdom,” “phylum,” “class,” “order,” “family,” “genus,” and finally, the most specific, “species.” This system is not only helpful for classification, but also in visualizing evolution. We can imagine a tree with a massive woody trunk representing the kingdom rank. As we move up through time, the branches get smaller and smaller as evolution puts things into increasingly specific niches. And eventually, the branch that our genus is on branches away from the rest. At this point in Ellie's story of evolution, our species hasn't evolved yet, but our ancestors are now in a totally different category from other apes and chimps.
Charlie: And that's all of that early evolution and subspecies and cousins and things is all taking place in Africa?
Ellie: That's exactly right. Homo erectus evolves around two million years ago, and Homo erectus looks a lot like us from the neck down, but has a very different head. And they are the first out of Africa event. So Out of Africa One is what they call it, and it's about 1.6 million years ago. They go all over Eurasia and continue to evolve and you know continue to use their stone tools and just live successfully all over Eurasia for millennia.
Charlie: So Homo erectus is the first early human group to leave Africa. Does that mean that's ultimately who modern humans are descended from?
Ellie: Actually, our direct ancestry, our direct line is still evolving in Africa. And that will be true for the next one and a half million years. However, these early human groups that are all over AfroEurAsia are all continuing to evolve everywhere that they are. So eventually in Eurasia, that's our best guess, some of the more sophisticated groups that you may have heard of evolve, like the Neanderthals, like the Denisovans. And now we're getting to early human groups that are quite close to anatomically modern humans. If you can picture that Neanderthal face, you've probably seen it in a book or something. They look like people. They have a bigger brow ridge and a more prominent nose or something, but they look a lot like an anatomically modern human.
Charlie: How sophisticated are these hominin groups at this point? They're still using simple stone tools. What else are they up to?
Ellie: Generally speaking, yes, they're using stone tools. One big question is when does fire show up? And interestingly, like a couple sources I read said that some experts think it showed up like 1.5 million years ago. Way more of the consensus is that it showed up more like 400,000 years ago, which is just this like enormous.
Charlie: It's just a small difference.
Ellie: Exactly. It's just an enormous gap. And it really sort of shows how hard some of these things are to figure out because of course fire was all over the earth forever and there's evidence of it all over the earth forever. But when it really seems to be clear that something was controlling it regularly was at least 400,000 years ago. And what's interesting about that is it means it wasn't us, it wasn't homo sapiens. It was one of these earlier groups.
Charlie: When do we show up then? When are we on the scene?
Ellie: So homo sapiens arrive, like anatomically modern humans show up somewhere around 200,000 years ago, maybe 300,000 years ago. But it's very hard to say. Maybe like a helpful metaphor to think of is like the entire unfolding of this early human evolution is like a movie and we have a lot of individual photographs of it. So we don't,
Charlie: ok
Ellie: yeah. And it becomes very easy to argue from silence. If you can't find something, it's very easy to be like it doesn't exist. So modern, like it's not like we have a human skeleton from every single year and we can decide exactly at this point, their jaw is just modern and like their skull is just so, and everything is exactly. But somewhere around then and definitely by 100 to 150,000 years ago, we solidified into ourselves. Like that seems pretty agreed upon. It might be that it was a little earlier.
Charlie: And you mentioned earlier that homo erectus had an out of Africa event. When do homo sapiens leave the African continent?
Ellie: So we used to think it was about 40 to 60,000 years ago. We now think it was probably much earlier than that. And we also now think it was probably not one event. There were probably many times that they left. And so even though it's referred to as Out of Africa Two, as though it's a singular thing that happened, it was actually probably a process.
Charlie: okay
Ellie: So if you can picture the Northeast corner of Egypt, the Sinai peninsula, that is likely where people walked across and up into the middle East and all across Eurasia. Possibly also people left where, if you can picture where like Djibouti reaches out to Yemen, that water barrier would have been much smaller because of the ice ages. And so it's possible also that people crossed there and got up into Eurasia that way. What we know for sure is that by 50 to 60,000 years ago, anatomically modern humans were
all over Eurasia.
Charlie: And as homo sapiens are expanding into EurAsia, are they running into all the groups that we were talking about earlier, Homo erectus, Neanderthals and things like that?
Ellie: Yeah. They absolutely were, which is so neat. I read this book called The World Before Us by Tom Hyam, and he describes the world 50,000 years ago as like middle earth, like Tolkien,
Charlie: Lord of the Rings
Ellie: Where there was all these different types of humans like hobbits and elves or whatever living side by side or at least living simultaneously, which I just think is really neat. And of course what we now understand because we can sequence DNA is that they were interbreeding with each other. So surely, no matter who you are in the world, you have some DNA from your Neanderthal ancestors or your Denisovan ancestors or some other early human group, which I just think is the coolest.
Charlie: That is very cool. Yeah. Interesting.
Ellie: We don't really know exactly how much they interacted in terms of cultural exchange. We don't really know if they were living side by side learning from each other for long periods of time. One thing that's really neat though, is that we do more and more seem to think that these more sophisticated cousin groups like Neanderthals and Denisovans had complex lives. Like there doesn't seem to be the massive intellectual distinction that maybe we once thought.
Charlie: Oh, I see.
Ellie: Yeah. Some of the cave art that's been left in various places we now think was actually made by Neanderthals. And they had thought out burials, for example, there was pierced shells and other ways in which they decorated themselves. And so they clearly had some kind of abstract life, abstract intellectual life. They had music, they had flutes.
Voiceover Divje-Babe Flute:
Charlie: What you're hearing is a replica of the Divje-Babe flute, named after the cave in Slovenia where it was discovered this is the oldest musical instrument we have ever found. Strewn amid everyday remains, archaeologists in 1995 carefully unearthed a small length of bone from an extinct species of cave bear. Four evenly spaced holes had been bored through the hard exterior and into the marrowless center, creating a beautiful, simple instrument. Scientists estimate this flute is 60,000 years old and musicologists debate the careful spacing of the holes and its tuning.
As Ellie was just saying, the world 60,000 years ago was populated by many different human subspecies and scientists conclude this flute was most likely made by Neanderthals, not Homo sapiens. We've unearthed ancient flutes made from hollow bones of vultures and swans, the femurs of cave bears, and even mammoth ivory. Each one is clear evidence that our ancestors engaged with much more than brutish survival. These flutes, although precious to us, are frequently found among everyday objects, suggesting that instruments were a standard household item and that, just like today, music was as common and as vital as knives or dishes.
Australia and the Americas
Charlie: Yeah, that seems definitely way different than what I learned in high school about Neanderthals
or at least what I remember. That's awesome. When do anatomically modern humans reach other continents, America and Australia and things?
Ellie: Yeah, I feel silly saying, well, it's controversial, but it's controversial. It seems likely that they reached Australia about 65,000 years ago, which is really fascinating because they would have needed boats. There was much smaller water crossings than there are, and there's a lot of island hopping, but there would have inevitably been some amount of ocean crossing, which is just very hard for me to get my head around. But that seems to be the deal.
Charlie: Yeah.
Ellie: so that's how long they took to get to Australia.
Charlie: 65,000 years ago. The boats thing is presumably not something that would have been needed to expand in the way that hominins had expanded up to this point. This is the first time that boats are required to get somewhere?
Ellie: Oh that's interesting. Well, I don't know because just because we look at, well, they could have just walked across the Sinai peninsula, why would they have gone through the Yemen-Djibouti corridor? But that's really far away if you're on foot, so they might have looked at their globe that was on their coffee table and thought, "Hmm."
Charlie: Maybe we should go a different route.
Charlie: How do humans get to North America, kind of cross from Asia to North America?
Ellie: Yeah, great question. So all of this human evolution has been taking place during the last ice age. So the most recent ice age began about two and a half million years ago and ended pretty recently like 11 to 13,000 years ago or something. And so because of that, lots of the world's water was in these huge glaciers. So the whole ocean was lower. The whole sea level was lower than it is now because all this excess water was in these glaciers.
Charlie: sure
Ellie: And what that means is that in that whole corner of the world that connects Alaska to Siberia, there was all this land that was exposed.
Voiceover Ice Age:
This might be a little hard to picture at first. During the ice age that Ellie is referring to, the global temperature was only six degrees Celsius colder than today, which according to the U.S. Geological Survey, meant glaciers covered almost one third of the Earth's land mass, with the results being that the oceans were about 122 meters or 400 feet lower than today. So the two big things to remember are that ice ages both cover the land we currently live on with glaciers, but they also expose tons of new land by lowering the water level and expanding the coastlines.
Ellie: So as humans, as Homo sapiens spread out all over Eurasia, eventually they get way the heck up into Siberia. And as far as we know, they're the only early human group that ever got that far.
Charlie: Who is?
Ellie: Homo sapiens as opposed to Neanderthals or something.
Charlie:I see, I see. Yeah.
Ellie: So they get all the way way the heck up into northeastern Asia. And there's now this big piece of land there that at the moment in 2022 is under like 150 feet of water.
Charlie: Okay.
Ellie: So this is frequently referred to as a land bridge. And I read this really neat thing that said that they think that that's like an unhelpful metaphor because the word bridge implies that there's an important place and then a different important place with a thing that connects them.
Charlie: sure right
Ellie: And what this really is, is more like a lost continent. This land.
Charlie: Like it was huge.
Ellie: It's this huge piece of land that existed for thousands and thousands of years. Archaeologists call it “Beringia.” So this thing that we refer to as a land bridge that connects Siberia to Alaska in the modern, you know, in the modern world, that's what those two places are called, is actually this gigantic piece of land that people lived on for generation after generation after generation.
Charlie: Cool. Beringia as in ‘Bering Strait.’
Ellie: There we go.
Charlie: I'm picturing like an extension of Alaska just like as wide as that is, just like kind of like swiping that all the way across into the eastern coast of Asia.
Ellie: Yeah, that's exactly right. It's exactly right.
Charlie: That would be called like “Beringia.”
Ellie: Yeah. It only seems bizarre because we're used to looking at flat maps. But if you look at a globe, you can see how it's just this barely...there's barely a break between Alaska and Asia even now. And it's just, yeah, if the ocean levels were just a little bit lower, it would just be this whole one big landmass that people could live on.
Charlie: So now humans are in Alaska and, you know, how do humans make it from there down to the
southern parts of the Americas? I mean, what is it called? Like an ice-free corridor or something?
Ellie: Yeah. Well, the ice-free corridor was the theory they were super attached to when we were in high school, which is weird because apparently it's been disputed since the 70s, which before we were born, much less in high school.
Charlie: Nice. I'm so glad I was taught that.
Ellie: Exactly. I know. Anyway. So just a refresher in case you don't remember the incorrect information you were taught. The ice-free corridor theory is the idea that because of this Ice Age, there were these two huge glacier sheets covering Canada. As the Ice Age began to end, they started to melt and recede and separate from each other and this corridor opened up between the two of them. And the people, you know, sort of zoomed down it as quickly as possible and filled up the Americas. The reason that they think it had to be quick was because the archaeological sites that are dotting North America are almost concurrent with the end of the last Ice Age.
Charlie: Okay. So it literally would have had to have been like a sprint down quick start a little town immediately.
Ellie: Exactly.
Charlie: Which seems kind of unlikely.
Ellie: It seems very unlikely. And what's definitely really true about this and I want to emphasize is how controversial all this stuff is. Like, I listen to so many interviews with archaeologists talking about what they think happened and there's a lot of dispute. But it's at least important to say that the ice-free corridor theory is incredibly disputed. I just want to make sure that that's clear. It seems like way more people think that what happened was people came down the West Coast on boats.
Charlie: Okay. Why would that be more compelling than the ice-free corridor theory? Just speed?
Ellie: That's a big one. So it means that people could have gotten much further, much quicker. So they could have gotten way down into South America where there are these disputed, but nevertheless, there are these archaeological sites that are quite old in South America. So people could have gotten there much quicker on a boat. And again, I listened to so many archaeologists and so many of them talk about how all of them want to find what they call the smoking gun, which is an actual human skeleton that's older than X number of years. And that still is elusive. But one thing that's cool is after we started making this podcast a few months ago, there was this really neat discovery published about these footprints in New Mexico. And so there's all these, there's tons, thousands of these little footprints in New Mexico that are, appear to be between 21 and 23,000 years ago and appear to be human.
Charlie: Oh, so they were like underground, like an archaeological site, an archaeology site.
Ellie: Yeah, exactly. It's in this place called White Sands, New Mexico, which has this really unique ecosystem, which is why they were able to be found.
Charlie: Preserved.
Ellie: Preserved, exactly. And I say the little footprints, because they're mostly children and adolescents who presumably would have been the ones sent to get water.
Charlie: Aw, cool.
Ellie: So it's around this old, where there used to be a lake. And there's all these footprints. And again, so interesting because all, I read all these different people responding to it, all these different archaeologists responding to it. And some of them were like, here it is, yay! Like we've finally proved that people were in the Americas 21 to 23,000 years ago. And then other people would say, no way, those aren't really human footprints. We think they're adolescent sloths. Or no way, those aren't, they are human footprints, but they're not really that old or whatever. So there's all these people going back and forth about it. But what there seems to be agreement about is that people were in the Americas by 13,000 years ago. There seems to be a lot of consensus that people were in the Americas by 15 to 16,000 years ago. And there seems to be increasing evidence that they were here 23,000 years ago or something. So we don't know for sure, but more and more the evidence seems to point that they were here well before the end of the last Ice Age.
Charlie: Thinking about, speaking of those snapshots, wouldn't we find sort of along the western coast of America evidence of their like boat travel because they would have been docked. I mean, they would have probably, it's not like they were zooming down the coast, like you said, I mean, it's like they would have been settling for a generation and then moving, you know, a couple miles and then settling. So wouldn't we find like pottery and things?
Ellie: Yeah. Well, that's one thing that I just, one of the reasons I think it's so cool to think about all this stuff is because yes, of course, but the so much of the water was in these glaciers, again. So while this migration would have been happening, the coast of what's now North and South America was in a totally different place than it is now. So if there are these archaeological sites, they're now underwater, like they're in the ocean now because so much of the water has come out of these glaciers and the level of the ocean is so much higher. So the coasts are now flooded by the standards of 23,000 years ago.
Charlie: I'm thinking like extrapolating forward with climate change now, it's like there's going to be tons of “coastal settlements,” quote unquote, that we have now that are going to be like, you know, in a million years, people are going to or whatever, 27,000 years, people are going to be like, wow, there seems like there might've been a city here. There might've been a whole city.
Ellie: There might've been a whole city. It looks like they called it Manhattan.
Charlie: And now it's a mile underwater. Yikes.
Alone on the earth
Charie: And then just, you know, moving along chronologically, we come to the elephant in the room of where did all the other early human groups go?
Ellie: Yeah. Well, I mean, that's a good question. Again, that-
Charlie: Or how? How did they go, maybe?
Ellie: And that same book, The World Before Us calls us the last humans on earth. DNA evidence seems to suggest that as recently as 21,000 years ago, we interbred with Denisovans.
Charlie: Right.
Ellie: Which is just nothing. I mean, 21,000 years ago is very recent.
Charlie: Yeah. Interesting.
Ellie: And the answer is kind of that nobody really knows what happened to them. I mean, people always say environmental change, which doesn't fully make sense to me because these other groups were all over, you know, they were like living in the jungle and the mountains and the, you know, like they were sort of living in a million different types of environments. So it's strange to me that it would so categorically wipe them out. But, you know, I don't know what I know.
Charlie: Wait, you're saying climate change couldn't have wiped them out because they were in diverse enough environments to–?
Ellie: Well, I mean, certainly it could have. I just mean, it's confusing to me that that would be the reason. It just seems like they were widely adapted and to all different types of situations already. And, you know, would climate change affect every type of ecosystem equally?
Charlie: Sure.
Ellie: You know, it's just, I don't know. I don't know what the reason is. You know, humans like to think that it's just because we were so brilliant and that's, you know, we just had such an intellectual advantage and that was our big evolutionary advantage. But it just seems like the more we learn about Neanderthals and Denisovans, the less likely that seems because they just seem to have this very abstract life too. And they were out here making complicated stone tools and having jewelry and making music and having art and just these things that suggest an abstract intellectual life.
Charlie: Yeah, right. Of course.
Ellie: Some people say it's just that the models predicted it. Like when you put all these numbers into a computer, they just say there were fewer of these other species than there were of us and just kind of like math. They were on a path to extinction.
Charlie: Just like birth rates and death rates.
Ellie: Exactly. And like modern, you know, anatomically modern humans just weren't on the same path to extinction.
Charlie: Huh. Yeah. Like when you think about it, like I guess my brain is searching for like a reason why early human groups would have gone extinct. But most stuff is extinct, right?
Ellie: Yeah. Carl Sagan says that “extinction is the rule and survival is the exception”. National Geographic says that over 99% of the species that have ever existed are extinct. And most of them were already extinct by that point.
Voiceover:
Charlie: As Ellie wrapped up the story of early human evolution, I'm left with a strange nostalgic feeling. I'd never considered that humans once had a large, intricate and varied family. And one by one, our hominin cousins died off and we've only barely outlived them. The evidence in our own DNA suggests that we were interbreeding with Denisovans as recently as 20,000 years ago. That's only four times longer than the Egyptian pyramids are old. Ellie's arm span timeline comes to mind and I once again see the story of our entire species in a new light.
Neolithic Age
Charlie: So we ended that last segment with the new reality across Earth that anatomically modern humans are alone and all our cousin and ancestor species are extinct. How do we get from that time to giant pyramid building civilizations and things?
Ellie: Yeah. Okay. Well, so let's come back to the word “civilization,” which is very important and fraught and we'll definitely talk about it.
Charlie: Sure.
Ellie: But sort of moving a little bit past it right now. Yeah. So anatomically modern humans are the last humans on Earth. We're now alone. And the thing that happens right now, about 12,000 years ago, is the Ice Age ends. And this is again, of course, like something that actually happens over the course of a very long period of time, but the climate does kind of change. Things warm up, things that were wet dry out, things that were dry, you know, get wetter, whatever. The climate changes. And people begin to cultivate food. And so this is the Neolithic Age, which is the new Stone Age. What is so important to know about this period is that it goes on for thousands of years and that cultivating land and changing your ecosystem in order for it to benefit you calorie-wise does not actually require domesticating plants and animals immediately. So what that means is that hunter gatherers for thousands of years and still currently to this day, in some ecosystems, begin a wide variety of landscape alteration to make it easier to attain their food. So they terraced the land, they dam rivers, they make canals, they dig artificial ponds out of swamps in order to kind of collect fish. You know, they weed things, they fertilize things, they prune plants. And then of course, a big thing that they do is burn, you know, do controlled burns. So it's just this like long complicated like play period of figuring out farming way before we get to just like plant a billion crops right in a row and live off them.
Charlie: Right, right. And is those different sort of like environmental reasons, you know, you said like terracing land and floodplains and things. Is that why agriculture might take off more successfully in some places rather than others?
Ellie: Yeah, yeah. And you know, it's hard to go hard to know, hard to go back and ask everyone. But you know, like in Guns –,
Charlie: Very hard,
Ellie: Very hard. Like Jared Diamond in guns, germs and steel sort of makes this case that it has everything to do with like the ecosystems that different people were sort of happen to find themselves in. And he points out a lot of really interesting things like the types of wild grass species that grow in various parts of the world. And interestingly, there's not very many wild grass species on the whole planet that can make a good cereal crop. There's actually only 56 anywhere on the planet. And of those 56, none of them are native to Australia. And only one is native to North America or to Southern Africa. And two are native to South America. And then in the Fertile Crescent, there's 32 of the of the 56 growing wild.
Charlie: Right. Interesting.
Ellie: It just means that the barrier between how much work it takes to get calories from farming is in a different place if you're somewhere where there's just an abundance of domesticable wild plants versus if your ecosystem doesn't have those.
Charlie: Gotcha. Is the same kind of principle true with animals for domesticated animals?
Ellie: Yeah, it's absolutely true. There's only 14 large animals that can be domesticated.
Charlie: On the earth?
Ellie: On the whole Earth, yeah. And yeah, and there's a lot of reasons why that's true. Like the temperament of animals. Some of that means like they can't be bred in captivity or something. So you might think like a zebra can pull your plow just as good as a horse can. But in fact, a zebra like won't pull your plow. So yeah, so there's not very many like sheep, goats, cow, pig, horses, camels, alpacas, things, you know, the things that you might think of. But those are very unevenly distributed across the earth. You know, you might easily live in an ecosystem that just doesn't have one.
Copper
Charlie: So people are living all over the world in different landscapes with different plants and animals at their disposal to farm with and work with. Then what happens?
Ellie: So the next big thing that happens for a lot of people is they begin to use metal.
Charlie: Sure. That makes sense.
Ellie: Yeah. And you can imagine that that could be a pretty big technological leap for a lot of people.
Charlie: Right.
Ellie: Metal is more versatile than stone, which is what we've been using for tools since the beginning of, you know, the first hominins. So if you've taken your stone and you've carved it into a knife, then you can't just make it into an arrowhead the next day and a bracelet the third day. You have to, you know, it just is whatever it was. Whereas with metal, you can just melt it down. So you may have a lot of decoration and then calamity ensues and you can turn all your decorations into weapons.
Charlie: Sure.
Ellie: And then also just as an actual material, stones tend to be either very sharp, but brittle, or very sturdy, but they can't be sharpened as dramatically. So metal can be both very sharp and very strong. So that's a big benefit.
Charlie: Yeah, that makes sense. What kind of metal do humans use first?
Ellie: So surprisingly, or maybe not, but surprisingly to me, copper is the answer to that question. So this, this period is called the Chalcolithic age, like the Copper Age. And it's the first time that metallurgy appears on the earth.
Charlie: What is metallurgy?
Ellie: Just the use of metal.
Charlie: Oh, Okay. Okay. Cool. Copper is the first metal. Okay. What years are we talking about when people start using copper?
Ellie: Okay. So if we, if we think back to our movie metaphor and we only have these still shots of this whole overarching narrative, this is a classic example where it's a little bit hard to say exactly when things begin and end. And that's true for a couple of reasons. One is because it begins at different times throughout the world. And another is because our evidence keeps changing.
Charlie: Sure. We keep making new discoveries and things, right.
Ellie: Exactly. Right. We have copper tools from the North America's like some sort of around the Great Lakes. They call that the Old Copper Culture. Our earliest artifacts are from like 5,000 BCE. And that's sort of similar timing to the first metallurgy in like Mesopotamia and whatnot, which is like Iraq now. But we also are sometimes wrong about things. Like we thought that there wasn't copper metallurgy in South America until much, much later because that's when they could find actual artifacts from it. But then they looked at ice cores and they found, they could look at the pollution in the air, the pollutants that would have been in the air throughout, you know, like going back thousands of years. And they could see that there were the pollutants that would have been created by the smelting of copper from like 1400 BCE. So that's just one example of how we can be wrong. Like we can develop more sophisticated technology to find this stuff and then realize that we were off by like a thousand years.
Voiceover naming ages:
Before Ellie continues into the copper age, I just want to pause quickly to talk about the naming convention of these historical ages. You may have noticed that she said, the oldest evidence of copper use in North America and the oldest evidence of copper use in South America differ by almost 4,000 years. So when does the copper age begin then? Answering this question can be surprisingly tricky. Of course, these ages always refer to technology. Think copper, stone, bronze, agriculture, etc. However, they can get more specific or more broad depending on the context. For example, when you hear “The Bronze Age” or “The Neolithic Age,” that's a shorthand to talk about specific years across the earth. But that lumps groups together that are not necessarily all using that technology at the same time, as these ages heavily favor the historical trajectories of the Mediterranean and China, not necessarily the rest of the world. But when you hear the Bronze Age as it references a specific place, it's referring to that region's technological stage. For example, we could conclude from our artifacts that Ellie was talking about that the North American and South American Copper Age differ by 4,000 years. So these ages are a good way to talk about big patterns and draw some parallels and comparisons. But remember that they very often generalize from the Mediterranean world and China, and that technological trajectories vary and that new discoveries keep changing their dates, and that these broad historical terms can often become very problematic if we don't think critically about their context.
Charlie: Why would humans have chosen to start–, like why would copper be the first metal that humans used?
Ellie: Good question. So it's important to remember that humans tried everything. They tried to eat every plant, they tried to domesticate every animal, they just, you know, just whatever. They tried everything. Copper is very specific looking. It's that blue-green color that you can think of when you, you know, the Statue of Liberty or a fancy copper gutter in some fancy neighborhood or whatever. It's very specific looking.
Charlie: Sure
Ellie: So what that means is that it was easy to find. And then it's also copper just as a metal is very soft and pliable. So it's much easier for people to work with without very complicated smelting techniques. So these early groups that didn't have complex metallurgy yet, you know, could still work with this stuff because you didn't need to be blistering hot before it even gets soft or anything.
Charlie: Not to mention the fact that the only tools they had to shape the copper with were stone.
Ellie: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Charlie: Or wood. So there, you know, it's not like there was like a stainless steel hammer that they were using. Which is what I always picture for some reason.
Ellie: Right, right. They didn't have like all the blacksmiths tools at their disposal to bang out the copper. Yeah. No, it's true. It's true and hard to imagine really.
Charlie: Yeah, sorry, continue.
Ellie: No, it’s okay! So the other and probably most important reason that copper came first is that it's very abundant in the landscape. And so much like we were talking earlier about the plants and animals that happen to be available, copper is very, very abundant in a lot of the world, and then it isn't in other parts of the world. So, you know, for example, like Central and South America, although there was copper and they did use it, a lot of their early metallurgy was also gold, which is similarly soft and bright
Charlie: Yeah, beautiful. Yeah, right.
Ellie: Yeah. So it's just like, you can find it and then it's easy to work with because it's soft. So that, you know, there are like exceptions, but roughly like copper is just all over the place and easy to find and easy to use.
Charlie: And when you say soft in terms of like, I think of metal as being super hard. Like do you just mean like it doesn't need to get very hot before it's kind of like pliable? Or do you like literally mean soft, soft?
Ellie: Well, both. I mean, I think like gold famously, like you can bite it, you know.
Charlie: Oh sure.
Ellie: if you're trying to make it into something very intricate, you'd still warm it up. But it's just some metals are like you would need, you need just incredibly specific temperatures. You know, you need to be able to control your thing you're melting it in like exactly. And you know, that's just a lot of technology that was not available in 5000 BCE.
Charlie: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes sense. I feel like in school, the Copper Age was like, you know, I mean, we're kind of moving quickly through it, but it was it was like a time that was like completely glossed over. I feel like there's a lot of like interesting stuff happening here.
Ellie: I really agree. I think it's like viewed as this transition period. It reminds me of what the bridge metaphor for the land bridge when we were talking about Beringia, it's like there's this kind of notion that like the Stone Age mattered, and the Bronze Age mattered, and the Copper Age just rushed us between the two as though the people living there didn't have a sense of permanence. But in fact, it lasted for thousands of years and this nothing about it would have felt transitory if you actually live then.
Charlie: Yeah, right.
Ellie: In fact, I think it's a pretty important time period that still has a lot of effect over our lives right now. And I think that it's important because I think there's stuff we could learn from it.
Charlie: There we go. Like what what stuff do you think like effects like–, let's come back to what we can learn. How does it affect our lives today?
Ellie: So a lot of things that are still, you know, that we're still using all the time were invented during this period. So this is the time when animals were domesticated for secondary reasons, meaning other than meat. So they began being domesticated to pull your plow, for example, like for traction. They began to be domesticated to ride or for dairy or for wool, for example. And what that means is that you can get a lot out of your animal and that allows you to be more stationary, like more sedentary, because if you can just keep eating like milk and cheese –,
Charlie: Right.
Ellie: Yeah, you just can live off the same animal for longer than you can if you slaughter it and eat the meat.
Charlie: Yeah, that makes sense. What else is like going on? Or like how else does it affect our lives?
Ellie: Yeah. Well, some things that are kind of fun, like this is the time period when chocolate was first domesticated and people began drinking it. It was the time that tea was first used. Interestingly, it was eaten first as a green, which makes sense because it's a leaf. And then it was mixed into a grain porridge. And then eventually they began to steep it.
Charlie: They’re drinking drinking chocolate and eating tea. Okay.
Ellie: Okay, exactly a little different than now, but still two vitally important things. And then, like I said earlier, you know, all these things like milk and cheese and of course, metal being the big one, you know, if you have any of those things in your home, you're being affected by this chalcolithic period. So, it just is an important explosion of innovation.
Cooperation, kites, stonehenge
Charlie: Yeah, it seems also like what you're implying with all these sorts of developments and like, you know, like if I found a copper artifact, I would immediately infer that there was lots of, you know, it was a society, there was cooperation on like a pretty large scale. Is that kind of emerging at this time as well?
Ellie: Yeah, it is. And that kind of harkens back to me saying that I think that there's stuff that we can learn from this time period, from this copper age, because in fact, there's so much evidence during the Chalcolithic of these large, complicated cultures, and these big projects that require like massive amounts of cooperation with each other, literally the world over.
Charlie: Cool.
Ellie: And just, you know, just a couple examples. Like in this time period around 5,000 BCE, all across the Middle East and all the way into Central Asia were constructed these gigantic stone structures that people referred to, that archaeologists referred to as desert kites. And they're referred to as desert kites because of the way they look from above. So, if you're looking down on one, it kind of looks like the outline of the drawing of a kite.
Charlie: Okay.
Ellie: Yeah. I will say that to me, they look much more like a flower or a jellyfish or something, but regardless that they're called “desert kites.”
Charlie: And to an archaeologist, they look like a kite.
Ellie: Exactly. Exactly. And what they are is kind of these endlessly long stone walls that make these outlines, but they are so big, like some of them stretch a couple kilometers. And so what they look like is they have these two long arms that converge into a kind of gigantic enclosure.
Charlie: Hmm. What are they for?
Ellie: Well, yeah. So our best guess, or archaeologists' best guess is that they're for herding animals. So you can kind of picture that you could chase animals into this funnel, like into this chute that's going to get your animals into a big enclosure where then you can keep them for a while until you're ready to slaughter them or whatever.
Charlie: I see. It's like a trap. Yeah. It's like a trap. Okay. Cool. Wow. That's crazy.
Ellie: But just either way, they're so big. I mean, to build a stone wall that's several kilometers long, I mean, that's a big project. And there's also other types of examples of these big projects, these big cooperative projects. For instance, the Chalcolithic is the time period in which Stonehenge was built. So in actual calendar years, Stonehenge is built a little bit later than what we're talking about throughout this whole episode and certainly much later than the Desert Kites, but in terms of the technological stage that the people were in–,
Charlie: sure
Ellie: if that makes sense. Yeah. So the people who built Stonehenge were sort of in this Chalcolithic period and the stones that make up Stonehenge, not the giant ones, but like the slightly smaller blue stones, we now think were hauled from a quarry that's like 150 kilometers away.
Charlie: …Okay. That's crazy. How?
Ellie: Yeah. It's really crazy. I don't know. I don't know. The feats of engineering, I don't know. But clearly it required unbelievable amounts of cooperation to move a stone that weighs a few tons, 150 kilometers.
Charlie: Totally. And it feels like it's cooperation. It's sort of doubly amazing because it's unlike the Desert Kites that we might justify as sort of a functional artifact. They funnel animals, we eat the animal. You know, they're about food and survival. Stonehenge is, in my mind, a demonstration of cooperation for the sake of astronomy and math and sort of spirituality and place in the world. It's like celestially aligned and all that stuff.
Ellie: Absolutely. No, I totally agree. I totally agree. And what's interesting is that Stonehenge is very famous and probably most people listening to this podcast have heard of Stonehenge. But in fact, there are stone structures like this kind of all over the world and they tend similarly to be aligned with the solstices or aligned with the equinox or all these other things that exactly what you're saying kind of give the idea that they're there for more than some just purely practical ‘how do we feed ourselves tonight’ use, you know, that they have a little bit more to do with like what is our place in the world. And I highly recommend like the Google wormhole of just looking up like Stonehenge and then name any country and see what comes up because there's kind of like the Stonehenge of, you know, the world over and they're just kind of spectacular and yeah, definitely evidence of people cooperating. You know, in this early–,
Charlie: Right. And in this in this technological stage that in my in my mind kind of I would I would think like it wasn't until we had sort of these more complicated metals like bronze and big agriculture and things like that when we start to see the emergence of these huge cooperative artifacts. But it seems like what you're saying is the Copper Age had tons of that. Yeah. Well before we had bronze and yeah.
Ellie: Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely.
Charlie: Or before that given region had bronze at least. Amazing.
Catalhoyuk.
Charlie: I'm wondering is this before kings and pharaohs and things like that? I mean, I feel like I was taught in school that that some sort of leadership structure, maybe this is just like capitalism talking, but it was required to get people to to agree and to cooperate. You know, it's like now that I say it out loud. That's clearly–,
Ellie: I agree. Like that's exactly the way that I was taught, like 100% the way I was taught. And what's so strange is that it seems like more and more. That isn't true. Like the more archaeological evidence we have, the more we realize that apparently not that these that we have evidence of these complex societies before there was social inequality. So it seems as though some boss would have had to say, ‘go get that six thousand pound stone and drag it a hundred miles.’ You know, I don't know how, but apparently not. You know, there weren't, there isn't really a lot of evidence of extreme class structure.
Charlie: And like, how did we know that? How would we like be able to like make that inference?
Ellie: OK. Well, here's in order to answer that question. I think we should just look at an important example of a civilization from this time. The one we're going to look at is Catalhoyuk. And the reason we're choosing it is because it's kind of the first city and it isn't doesn't get to count as a city for exactly the reason that we're saying. Bizarrely in the definition of city is the concept of class structure, is the concept of institutionalized inequality and–,
Charlie: Neighborhoods.
Ellie: Neighborhoods, exactly. This site doesn't appear to have that. However, what it is and the reason I'm calling it a city is this huge site. It's in Anatolia like in central Turkey that lasted for like fifteen hundred years. Centuries of time, it was there and it was stable and there was thousands of people living in it, like eight thousand people is sort of what they're guessing. So, you know, lots of people packed together in a very stable place for a long time, you know, which maybe that's not a city, whatever.
Charlie: Yeah
Ellie: But the reason it's kind of unique is because it's viewed as the first place like that where most of what people ate was domesticated foods. So it's this...
Charlie: They're farmers.
Ellie: They're farmers, exactly. It's a large group of people farming in a stable way for a long time. Like I said earlier, you know, it's easy to argue from silence. It's probably the actual first one. We just haven't dug up yet, but, but you know, whatever. It's sort of given that honor.
I'll definitely link to articles about it to just like dive into all the exact culture of it, which is really cool to look at. But just sort of quickly, some of the cool, some of the highlights are that it didn't have streets, like you just walked around on the rooftops and then went down into the houses. And then they clearly had a lot of spiritual life or something because there was, there were lots of animal heads were on the walls, like bulls and whatnot would be there and they would bury their dead beneath their floors in the same corner of the house. And then they would live in a different corner, like it was very organized. And so they just, I mean, we, again, we can call that spiritualism or we can call it whatever, but either way, they had a relationship to the dead that was, you know, thought out and consistent. There doesn't seem to be, in this place, houses or structures that people didn't live in. And what that means maybe, or we think, is that they're, there don't seem to be like temples or yeah, like churches, there doesn't seem to be palaces even. That's just sort of like everybody kind of has the same setup and there's not administrative buildings, which is a big difference from the, what we actually call the cities of Mesopotamia and whatnot that we'll talk about in our next episode. Catalhoyuk is like an incredible place for archeology because what people would do is they would live in a house or a house would be occupied for 50 to a hundred years and then they would just knock it down, like fill it in and build on top of it. And so there's just layers and layers of archeological evidence, like just going down in time.
Charlie: Sure, right, yeah
Ellie: Which is really neat. And then because they buried their dead, there's like skeletons that we can look at and learn from. And having said all that, we've only dug up about 5% of it, which is sort of mind boggling to me, but just really shows how much there still is to learn from these societies. Like I just really think that there's a lot that we can learn from these societies.
Charlie: Yeah. Cause like, how do you get 8,000 people in a tight place, you know, specialized and doing their own thing and cooperating and without, you know, like, can we please figure that out?
Ellie: No, I totally agree.
Charlie: Without subjugation and casts and you know.
Ellie: Yeah. Cause there seems to be specialization in terms of the labor that people did really specifically. But it doesn't, yeah, it doesn't seem to be, there don't seem to be casts. And for example, when they, when they examine the skeletons, the skeletons of men and women seem to have eaten the same food, which is different than in a lot of later Bronze Age societies, when women had started to be more oppressed and so they wouldn't have had the same diets and the wear on their bodies seems to be similar, which shows that they were like doing the same types of labor. And that's just, you know, somehow we were there and then we lost it is a little bit how it feels as we moved into the Bronze Age, which is, you know, just kind of not the way it's taught, which is that as soon as we started farming, inequality ensued.
Civilizations
Charlie: I guess this is, it feels like a good time then to like hark back to a while ago when you said we were going to talk about civilizations. Can I like ask now what–?
Ellie: Yeah, no, it's a perfect time, I think, to circle back to that question. So a civilization has sort of a technical definition and this is what it means technically: It means that there are cities, so nobody's nomadic, they're living in permanent dwellings. It has well organized governments, complex religion, the specialization of labor, distinct social classes, art and architecture, large public works, and complex communication, which usually means writing, but there are some massive civilizations, like the Incas use these intricate knots on strings to communicate rather than writing, and the Incas are like one of the biggest civilizations in the world, like you could–, empires in the world, you couldn't possibly not call it a civilization. So that's what it means technically.
Charlie: And it's all those things more or less with some exceptions, basically.
Ellie: Yeah, and there's a lot of variations on that list, is the truth, but that's roughly what it means. Now, of course, it's an incredibly problematic word. Like it has very problematic origins that are very racist and it's very much about like who's civilized as opposed to who's not civilized. The definition of it is contested to the point where it kind of doesn't mean anything anymore.
Charlie: Not to mention that like that definition or those bullet points that you just kind of went through of what a civilization means are like a retroactive look. In other words, like archaeologists, archeologists, historians have discovered all these various sites, come up with all these patterns that kind of connect them, and then call that a civilization. But like there's all these other sites that are variable or a little older or a little bit different or this or that. And then those just don't count as civilizations. So then they kind of are less important, you know, they're less ‘good’ or whatever. Is how it feels.
Ellie: No, I think you're exactly right. We came up with a definition based on a couple of societies that we were looking at closely, namely Mesopotamia and Egypt, we looked at the characteristics they had in common and decided that's what a civilization was. And what that means is that then when we find other big societies that don't fit those, we're like, I guess they're not a civilization. Instead of thinking maybe Catalhoyuk is a city and cities don't have to have institutionalized inequality, which seems like a way better way of looking at it.
Charlie: I would agree.
Ellie: But it's like we locked ourselves into this definition and now we can't actually see clearly, like we can't see what these other societies are, that there's actually many ways to build a complex society and they don't require, potentially, slavery and kings and all the horrors that we associate with too many of them.
Charlie: Right, right. We think of those, it seems like we think of those tenants of a city as an inherent part of life versus, you know, we can't have like, we think of it as like, we can't have a big settlement with a lot of people cooperating without inequity. Like those two things go hand in hand, but when you look at history this way realize the copper age lasted for, you know, 4,000 years without that institutionalized inequality. Ya know.
Ellie: Yeah. No, I think so we talk, we mentioned Jared Diamond earlier who wrote Guns, Germs and Steel and he wrote this essay arguing that, well, here's just an exact quote. He says, “the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered.”
Charlie: Right
Ellie: “With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism that curse our existence,”
Charlie: Yeah
Ellie: Which is very much the way that it was explained to me, which is that once, once we had agriculture, we had, you know, surpluses of food, which allowed for artisans, which allowed for division of labor, which allowed for structural inequality basically. And it was just sort of inevitable chain of events. But now we've kind of spent a long time looking at the actual neolithic period when we had all this agriculture going into the copper age and we had all this agriculture and there doesn't, there isn't a lot of evidence for institutionalized inequality. I read this incredible book that I hope everybody reads called the Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengerow and they push back really hard on that sort of paradigm that agriculture equals institutionalized inequality and that there's no way out of that.
Charlie: Yeah.
Ellie: So I think that we just have to think people are complex and we have to think of them complexly. And I don't know why most societies in the modern world have institutionalized inequality, but I don't think the answer is just because we one time put a blueberry in the ground. And that was the end. Like I don't think that's the reason.
Charlie: Well, I'm reluctant to move on from the copper age, but I suppose we must. I think the bronze
age is next. How do humans start making bronze?
Ellie: Yeah. People begin to mix things into their copper. They experiment with everything. As we said earlier, a lot of people begin mixing arsenic into their copper. Strangely enough, lots of early bronze artifacts are made with arsenic. Eventually they begin mixing tin into copper, which tin and copper makes bronze. This makes their metal more–, less lumpy and less brittle. And suddenly there we are. We've got bronze.
Charlie: Cool. So is that where the next hour begins?
Ellie: Yep. That's exactly right. We're going to spend time in the bronze age cities next hour. So to wrap this episode up though, I wrote one more timeline like the one that we did at the beginning.
Charlie: Oh perfect.
Ellie: So that one covered the 3.7 billion years. That was like all of life, all of the evolution of all life getting up to Homo Sapiens. And this one covers just 3.3 million years, which is what we've talked about in this last hour. So it's from the earliest hominins, like just the human evolution until now.
Second Timeline
Ellie: All right, so one more time. Stretch your arms out like you're playing airplane.
If your left fingertip is the beginning of the Paleolithic age, the Stone Age, the earliest use of stone tools, and the tip of your right hand is this minute that you are listening to me speak. The distance between your fingers represents about 3.3 million years. If you start at your left hand and move all the way up your arm, it's a little past your elbow, about a million years into our timeline that the most recent Ice Age begins and our genus Homo evolves. Continue moving up your arm. In the middle of your left shoulder, Homo erectus appears. In the center of your chest, chasing herds or fertile ground or for reasons we can't reach back through time to imagine, Homo erectus crosses the Sinai Peninsula and begins to spread up through Eurasia, marking the first time our human family existed anywhere outside Africa. Continue moving down your arm. Just past your right wrist, an early ancestor, a cousin of ours, learns to control fire, forever changing our diets and the ecosystems we successfully live in.
Around the bottom of your finger, Homo Sapiens are fully formed. It's here, more than 3 million years since those first stone tools that we fully develop into the animal that we remain today. Somewhere in the middle of your finger, Homo Sapiens, anatomically modern humans, leave Africa, spreading across the entire planet. Encountering other sophisticated human groups such as Neanderthals and Denisovans, and adapting to occupy every ecosystem.
Remember our timeline began at your left fingertip with our ancestors beginning to use tools. Travel all the way across your entire wingspan, down your right arm, along your hand, along your finger. Somewhere in the middle of your nail, the last of our intricate and broad network of cousin species goes extinct and we are left alone on the earth. And finally, even on this magnified scale, only considering the timeline of our most direct hominin ancestors, the last 5000 years disappear into a tiny fraction of the very tip of your finger. All the human history we imagine matters, the history that begins in Mesopotamia and takes us through today, the history we will spend the next 23 episodes covering, again falls away with the swipe of a nail file.
Charlie: And with that we come to the end of our first call, covering early human evolution, up to 4000 BCE. Next hour we'll pick up right there and cover from 4000 to 1700 BCE, when full-fledged cities and massive civilizations rise in India, Egypt, Iraq, Peru, and China. These historians refer to as the "Five Cradles of Civilization". They developed complex math, they built pyramids, large armies went to war, they controlled rivers and many, but not all, relied heavily on grains and bronze. It's in these cities that humans began to write, imprinting their daily life, recipes, poems, laws, and more. We'll pick up there in our next hour.
Ellie: Bye Charlie!
Charlie: Bye Ellie!
Charlie: World History 24 is written and researched by Ellie Koczela.
I do the production and music.
Our logo and design work is done by Alyssa Alarcon-Santo.
For links to any sources mentioned in the episode, as well as lots of fascinating extra
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That's worldhistory24.com.
My name is Charlie Koczela and on behalf of myself and my sister, thank you for listening
and we will see you next hour.
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Episodes
- Jan 24, 2023 Hour 1 | 3,300,000 - 4000 BCE
- Jan 23, 2023 Hour 2 | 4000 - 1700 BCE
- Jan 22, 2023 Hour 3 | 1700 - 1200 BCE
- Jan 21, 2023 Hour 4 | 1200 - 800 BCE
- Jan 20, 2023 Hour 5 | 800 - 575 BCE
- Jan 19, 2023 Hour 6 | 575 - 480 BCE
- Jan 18, 2023 Hour 7 | 480 - 300 BCE
- Jan 17, 2023 Hour 8 | 300 - 100 BCE
- Jan 16, 2023 Hour 9 | 100 BCE - 100 CE
This book is fascinating, but due to many recent discoveries and new research methods, is already out of date. The author is currently writing a new book. Still this is worth reading for the first third alone, which gives a fascinating explanation of the evolution of languages and the way linguists can work backwards to recreate lost languages.