Sapiens: a brief History of Humankind

Homo
sapiens
. The whole of history takes place within the bounds of this biological
arena.
b
. However, this arena is extraordinarily large, allowing Sapiens to play an
astounding variety of games. Thanks to their ability to invent ction, Sapiens
create more and more complex games, which each generation develops and
elaborates even further.

---

c
. Consequently, in order to understand how Sapiens behave, we must describe the
historical evolution of their actions. Referring only to our biological constraints
would be like a radio sports-caster who, attending the World Cup football
championships, o ers his listeners a detailed description of the playing eld
rather than an account of what the players are doing.
What games did our Stone Age ancestors play in the arena of history? As far as we
know, the people who carved the Stadel lion-man some 30,000 years ago had the
same physical, emotional and intellectual abilities we have. What did they do
when they woke up in the morning? What did they eat for breakfast – and lunch?
What were their societies like? Did they have monogamous relationships and
nuclear families? Did they have ceremonies, moral codes, sports contests and
religious rituals? Did they ght wars? The next chapter takes a peek behind the
curtain of the ages, examining what life was like in the millennia separating the
Cognitive Revolution from the Agricultural Revolution.
*
 Here and in the following pages, when speaking about Sapiens language, I refer to the basic linguistic abilities of
our species and not to a particular dialect. English, Hindi and Chinese are all variants of Sapiens language.
Apparently, even at the time of the Cognitive Revolution, different Sapiens groups had different dialects.

---

3
A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve
TO UNDERSTAND OUR NATURE, HISTORY and psychology, we must get inside
the heads of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. For nearly the entire history of our
species, Sapiens lived as foragers. The past 200 years, during which ever
increasing numbers of Sapiens have obtained their daily bread as urban labourers
and o ce workers, and the preceding 10,000 years, during which most Sapiens
lived as farmers and herders, are the blink of an eye compared to the tens of
thousands of years during which our ancestors hunted and gathered.
The ourishing eld of evolutionary psychology argues that many of our
present-day social and psychological characteristics were shaped during this long
pre-agricultural era. Even today, scholars in this eld claim, our brains and minds
are adapted to a life of hunting and gathering. Our eating habits, our conflicts and
our sexuality are all the result of the way our hunter-gatherer minds interact with
our current post-industrial environment, with its mega-cities, aeroplanes,
telephones and computers. This environment gives us more material resources and
longer lives than those enjoyed by any previous generation, but it often makes us
feel alienated, depressed and pressured. To understand why, evolutionary
psychologists argue, we need to delve into the hunter-gatherer world that shaped
us, the world that we subconsciously still inhabit.
Why, for example, do people gorge on high-calorie food that is doing little good
to their bodies? Today’s a uent societies are in the throes of a plague of obesity,
which is rapidly spreading to developing countries. It’s a puzzle why we binge on
the sweetest and greasiest food we can nd, until we consider the eating habits of
our forager forebears. In the savannahs and forests they inhabited, high-calorie
sweets were extremely rare and food in general was in short supply. A typical
forager 30,000 years ago had access to only one type of sweet food – ripe fruit. If
a Stone Age woman came across a tree groaning with gs, the most sensible thing
to do was to eat as many of them as she could on the spot, before the local baboon
band picked the tree bare. The instinct to gorge on high-calorie food was hard-
wired into our genes. Today we may be living in high-rise apartments with over-
stu ed refrigerators, but our DNA still thinks we are in the savannah. That’s what
makes us spoon down an entire tub of Ben & Jerry’s when we nd one in the

---

freezer and wash it down with a jumbo Coke.
This ‘gorging gene’ theory is widely accepted. Other theories are far more
contentious. For example, some evolutionary psychologists argue that ancient
foraging bands were not composed of nuclear families centred on monogamous
couples. Rather, foragers lived in communes devoid of private property,
monogamous relationships and even fatherhood. In such a band, a woman could
have sex and form intimate bonds with several men (and women) simultaneously,
and all of the band’s adults cooperated in parenting its children. Since no man
knew de nitively which of the children were his, men showed equal concern for
all youngsters.
Such a social structure is not an Aquarian utopia. It’s well documented among
animals, notably our closest relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos. There are
even a number of present-day human cultures in which collective fatherhood is
practised, as for example among the Barí Indians. According to the beliefs of such
societies, a child is not born from the sperm of a single man, but from the
accumulation of sperm in a woman’s womb. A good mother will make a point of
having sex with several different men, especially when she is pregnant, so that her
child will enjoy the qualities (and paternal care) not merely of the best hunter, but
also of the best storyteller, the strongest warrior and the most considerate lover. If
this sounds silly, bear in mind that before the development of modern
embryological studies, people had no solid evidence that babies are always sired
by a single father rather than by many.
The proponents of this ‘ancient commune’ theory argue that the frequent
in delities that characterise modern marriages, and the high rates of divorce, not
to mention the cornucopia of psychological complexes from which both children
and adults su er, all result from forcing humans to live in nuclear families and
monogamous relationships that are incompatible with our biological software.
1
Many scholars vehemently reject this theory, insisting that both monogamy and
the forming of nuclear families are core human behaviours. Though ancient
hunter-gatherer societies tended to be more communal and egalitarian than
modern societies, these researchers argue, they were nevertheless comprised of
separate cells, each containing a jealous couple and the children they held in
common. This is why today monogamous relationships and nuclear families are
the norm in the vast majority of cultures, why men and women tend to be very
possessive of their partners and children, and why even in modern states such as
North Korea and Syria political authority passes from father to son.
In order to resolve this controversy and understand our sexuality, society and
politics, we need to learn something about the living conditions of our ancestors,
to examine how Sapiens lived between the Cognitive Revolution of 70,000 years
ago, and the start of the Agricultural Revolution about 12,000 years ago.

---

Unfortunately, there are few certainties regarding the lives of our forager
ancestors. The debate between the ‘ancient commune’ and ‘eternal monogamy
schools is based on imsy evidence. We obviously have no written records from
the age of foragers, and the archaeological evidence consists mainly of fossilised
bones and stone tools. Artefacts made of more perishable materials – such as
wood, bamboo or leather – survive only under unique conditions. The common
impression that pre-agricultural humans lived in an age of stone is a
misconception based on this archaeological bias. The Stone Age should more
accurately be called the Wood Age, because most of the tools used by ancient
hunter-gatherers were made of wood.
Any reconstruction of the lives of ancient hunter-gatherers from the surviving
artefacts is extremely problematic. One of the most glaring di erences between
the ancient foragers and their agricultural and industrial descendants is that
foragers had very few artefacts to begin with, and these played a comparatively
modest role in their lives. Over the course of his or her life, a typical member of a
modern a uent society will own several million artefacts – from cars and houses
to disposable nappies and milk cartons. There’s hardly an activity, a belief, or
even an emotion that is not mediated by objects of our own devising. Our eating
habits are mediated by a mind-boggling collection of such items, from spoons and
glasses to genetic engineering labs and gigantic ocean-going ships. In play, we use
a plethora of toys, from plastic cards to 100,000-seater stadiums. Our romantic
and sexual relations are accoutred by rings, beds, nice clothes, sexy underwear,
condoms, fashionable restaurants, cheap motels, airport lounges, wedding halls
and catering companies. Religions bring the sacred into our lives with Gothic
churches, Muslim mosques, Hindu ashrams, Torah scrolls, Tibetan prayer wheels,
priestly cassocks, candles, incense, Christmas trees, matzah balls, tombstones and
icons.
We hardly notice how ubiquitous our stu is until we have to move it to a new
house. Foragers moved house every month, every week, and sometimes even
every day, toting whatever they had on their backs. There were no moving
companies, wagons, or even pack animals to share the burden. They consequently
had to make do with only the most essential possessions. It’s reasonable to
presume, then, that the greater part of their mental, religious and emotional lives
was conducted without the help of artefacts. An archaeologist working 100,000
years from now could piece together a reasonable picture of Muslim belief and
practice from the myriad objects he unearthed in a ruined mosque. But we are
largely at a loss in trying to comprehend the beliefs and rituals of ancient hunter-
gatherers. It’s much the same dilemma that a future historian would face if he had
to depict the social world of twenty- rst-century teenagers solely on the basis of
their surviving snail mail – since no records will remain of their phone

---

conversations, emails, blogs and text messages.
A reliance on artefacts will thus bias an account of ancient hunter-gatherer life.
One way to remedy this is to look at modern forager societies. These can be
studied directly, by anthropological observation. But there are good reasons to be
very careful in extrapolating from modern forager societies to ancient ones.
Firstly, all forager societies that have survived into the modern era have been
in uenced by neighbouring agricultural and industrial societies. Consequently, it’s
risky to assume that what is true of them was also true tens of thousands of years
ago.
Secondly, modern forager societies have survived mainly in areas with di cult
climatic conditions and inhospitable terrain, ill-suited for agriculture. Societies
that have adapted to the extreme conditions of places such as the Kalahari Desert
in southern Africa may well provide a very misleading model for understanding
ancient societies in fertile areas such as the Yangtze River Valley. In particular,
population density in an area like the Kalahari Desert is far lower than it was
around the ancient Yangtze, and this has far-reaching implications for key
questions about the size and structure of human bands and the relations between
them.
Thirdly, the most notable characteristic of hunter-gatherer societies is how
di erent they are one from the other. They di er not only from one part of the
world to another but even in the same region. One good example is the huge
variety the first European settlers found among the Aborigine peoples of Australia.
Just before the British conquest, between 300,000 and 700,000 hunter-gatherers
lived on the continent in 200–600 tribes, each of which was further divided into
several bands.
2
Each tribe had its own language, religion, norms and customs.
Living around what is now Adelaide in southern Australia were several patrilineal
clans that reckoned descent from the father’s side. These clans bonded together
into tribes on a strictly territorial basis. In contrast, some tribes in northern
Australia gave more importance to a person’s maternal ancestry, and a person’s
tribal identity depended on his or her totem rather than his territory.
It stands to reason that the ethnic and cultural variety among ancient hunter-
gatherers was equally impressive, and that the 5 million to 8 million foragers who
populated the world on the eve of the Agricultural Revolution were divided into
thousands of separate tribes with thousands of di erent languages and cultures.
3
This, after all, was one of the main legacies of the Cognitive Revolution. Thanks
to the appearance of ction, even people with the same genetic make-up who
lived under similar ecological conditions were able to create very di erent
imagined realities, which manifested themselves in different norms and values.
For example, there’s every reason to believe that a forager band that lived
30,000 years ago on the spot where Oxford University now stands would have

---

spoken a di erent language from one living where Cambridge is now situated.
One band might have been belligerent and the other peaceful. Perhaps the
Cambridge band was communal while the one at Oxford was based on nuclear
families. The Cantabrigians might have spent long hours carving wooden statues
of their guardian spirits, whereas the Oxonians may have worshipped through
dance. The former perhaps believed in reincarnation, while the latter thought this
was nonsense. In one society, homosexual relationships might have been accepted,
while in the other they were taboo.
In other words, while anthropological observations of modern foragers can help
us understand some of the possibilities available to ancient foragers, the ancient
horizon of possibilities was much broader, and most of it is hidden from our view.
*
The heated debates about