Sapiens: a brief History of Humankind

8.
 A painting from Lascaux Cave
, 
c
.15,000–20,000 years ago. What exactly do we see, and what is the
painting’s meaning? Some argue that we see a man with the head of a bird and an erect penis, being
killed by a bison. Beneath the man is another bird which might symbolise the soul, released from the
body at the moment of death. If so, the picture depicts not a prosaic hunting accident, but rather the
passage from this world to the next. But we have no way of knowing whether any of these speculations
are true. It’s a Rorschach test that reveals much about the preconceptions of modern scholars, and little
about the beliefs of ancient foragers
.
In Sungir, Russia, archaeologists discovered in 1955 a 30,000-year-old burial site
belonging to a mammoth-hunting culture. In one grave they found the skeleton of
a fty-year-old man, covered with strings of mammoth ivory beads, containing
about 3,000 beads in total. On the dead man’s head was a hat decorated with fox
teeth, and on his wrists twenty- ve ivory bracelets. Other graves from the same
site contained far fewer goods. Scholars deduced that the Sungir mammoth-hunters
lived in a hierarchical society, and that the dead man was perhaps the leader of a
band or of an entire tribe comprising several bands. It is unlikely that a few dozen
members of a single band could have produced so many grave goods by
themselves.

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9.
 Hunter-gatherers made these handprints about 9,000 years ago in the ‘Hands Cave’, in Argentina. It
looks as if these long-dead hands are reaching towards us from within the rock. This is one of the most
moving relics of the ancient forager world – but nobody knows what it means
.
Archaeologists then discovered an even more interesting tomb. It contained two
skeletons, buried head to head. One belonged to a boy aged about twelve or
thirteen, and the other to a girl of about nine or ten. The boy was covered with
5,000 ivory beads. He wore a fox-tooth hat and a belt with 250 fox teeth (at least
sixty foxes had to have their teeth pulled to get that many). The girl was adorned
with 5,250 ivory beads. Both children were surrounded by statuettes and various
ivory objects. A skilled craftsman (or craftswoman) probably needed about forty-
ve minutes to prepare a single ivory bead. In other words, fashioning the 10,000
ivory beads that covered the two children, not to mention the other objects,
required some 7,500 hours of delicate work, well over three years of labour by an
experienced artisan!
It is highly unlikely that at such a young age the Sungir children had proved
themselves as leaders or mammoth-hunters. Only cultural beliefs can explain why
they received such an extravagant burial. One theory is that they owed their rank
to their parents. Perhaps they were the children of the leader, in a culture that
believed in either family charisma or strict rules of succession. According to a
second theory, the children had been identi ed at birth as the incarnations of
some long-dead spirits. A third theory argues that the children’s burial re ects the

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way they died rather than their status in life. They were ritually sacri ced –
perhaps as part of the burial rites of the leader – and then entombed with pomp
and circumstance.
9
Whatever the correct answer, the Sungir children are among the best pieces of
evidence that 30,000 years ago Sapiens could invent sociopolitical codes that went
far beyond the dictates of our DNA and the behaviour patterns of other human
and animal species.
Peace or War?
Finally, there’s the thorny question of the role of war in forager societies. Some
scholars imagine ancient hunter-gatherer societies as peaceful paradises, and
argue that war and violence began only with the Agricultural Revolution, when
people started to accumulate private property. Other scholars maintain that the
world of the ancient foragers was exceptionally cruel and violent. Both schools of
thought are castles in the air, connected to the ground by the thin strings of
meagre archaeological remains and anthropological observations of present-day
foragers.
The anthropological evidence is intriguing but very problematic. Foragers today
live mainly in isolated and inhospitable areas such as the Arctic or the Kalahari,
where population density is very low and opportunities to ght other people are
limited. Moreover, in recent generations, foragers have been increasingly subject
to the authority of modern states, which prevent the eruption of large-scale
con icts. European scholars have had only two opportunities to observe large and
relatively dense populations of independent foragers: in north-western North
America in the nineteenth century, and in northern Australia during the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Both Amerindian and Aboriginal
Australian cultures witnessed frequent armed con icts. It is debatable, however,
whether this represents a ‘timeless’ condition or the impact of European
imperialism.
The archaeological ndings are both scarce and opaque. What telltale clues
might remain of any war that took place tens of thousands of years ago? There
were no forti cations and walls back then, no artillery shells or even swords and
shields. An ancient spear point might have been used in war, but it could have
been used in a hunt as well. Fossilised human bones are no less hard to interpret.
A fracture might indicate a war wound or an accident. Nor is the absence of
fractures and cuts on an ancient skeleton conclusive proof that the person to
whom the skeleton belonged did not die a violent death. Death can be caused by

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trauma to soft tissues that leaves no marks on bone. Even more importantly,
during pre-industrial warfare more than 90 per cent of war dead were killed by
starvation, cold and disease rather than by weapons. Imagine that 30,000 years
ago one tribe defeated its neighbour and expelled it from coveted foraging
grounds. In the decisive battle, ten members of the defeated tribe were killed. In
the following year, another hundred members of the losing tribe died from
starvation, cold and disease. Archaeologists who come across these no skeletons
may too easily conclude that most fell victim to some natural disaster. How would
we be able to tell that they were all victims of a merciless war?
Duly warned, we can now turn to the archaeological ndings. In Portugal, a
survey was made of 400 skeletons from the period immediately predating the
Agricultural Revolution. Only two skeletons showed clear marks of violence. A
similar survey of 400 skeletons from the same period in Israel discovered a single
crack in a single skull that could be attributed to human violence. A third survey
of 400 skeletons from various pre-agricultural sites in the Danube Valley found
evidence of violence on eighteen skeletons. Eighteen out of 400 may not sound
like a lot, but it’s actually a very high percentage. If all eighteen indeed died
violently, it means that about 4.5 per cent of deaths in the ancient Danube Valley
were caused by human violence. Today, the global average is only 1.5 per cent,
taking war and crime together. During the twentieth century, only 5 per cent of
human deaths resulted from human violence – and this in a century that saw the
bloodiest wars and most massive genocides in history. If this revelation is typical,
the ancient Danube Valley was as violent as the twentieth century.
*
The depressing ndings from the Danube Valley are supported by a string of
equally depressing ndings from other areas. At Jabl Sahaba in Sudan, a 12,000-
year-old cemetery containing fty-nine skeletons was discovered. Arrowheads and
spear points were found embedded in or lying near the bones of twenty-four
skeletons, 40 per cent of the nd. The skeleton of one woman revealed twelve
injuries. In Ofnet Cave in Bavaria, archaeologists discovered the remains of thirty-
eight foragers, mainly women and children, who had been thrown into two burial
pits. Half the skeletons, including those of children and babies, bore clear signs of
damage by human weapons such as clubs and knives. The few skeletons belonging
to mature males bore the worst marks of violence. In all probability, an entire
forager band was massacred at Ofnet.
Which better represents the world of the ancient foragers: the peaceful skeletons
from Israel and Portugal, or the abattoirs of Jabl Sahaba and Ofnet? The answer is
neither. Just as foragers exhibited a wide array of religions and social structures,
so, too, did they probably demonstrate a variety of violence rates. While some
areas and some periods of time may have enjoyed peace and tranquillity, others
were riven by ferocious conflicts.
10

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The Curtain of Silence
If the larger picture of ancient forager life is hard to reconstruct, particular events
are largely irretrievable. When a Sapiens band rst entered a valley inhabited by
Neanderthals, the following years might have witnessed a breathtaking historical
drama. Unfortunately, nothing would have survived from such an encounter
except, at best, a few fossilised bones and a handful of stone tools that remain
mute under the most intense scholarly inquisitions. We may extract from them
information about human anatomy, human technology, human diet, and perhaps
even human social structure. But they reveal nothing about the political alliance
forged between neighbouring Sapiens bands, about the spirits of the dead that
blessed this alliance, or about the ivory beads secretly given to the local witch
doctor in order to secure the blessing of the spirits.
This curtain of silence shrouds tens of thousands of years of history. These long
millennia may well have witnessed wars and revolutions, ecstatic religious
movements, profound philosophical theories, incomparable artistic masterpieces.
The foragers may have had their all-conquering Napoleons, who ruled empires
half the size of Luxembourg; gifted Beethovens who lacked symphony orchestras
but brought people to tears with the sound of their bamboo utes; and charismatic
prophets who revealed the words of a local oak tree rather than those of a
universal creator god. But these are all mere guesses. The curtain of silence is so
thick that we cannot even be sure such things occurred – let alone describe them in
detail.
Scholars tend to ask only those questions that they can reasonably expect to
answer. Without the discovery of as yet unavailable research tools, we will
probably never know what the ancient foragers believed or what political dramas
they experienced. Yet it is vital to ask questions for which no answers are
available, otherwise we might be tempted to dismiss 60,000 of 70,000 years of
human history with the excuse that ‘the people who lived back then did nothing of
importance’.
The truth is that they did a lot of important things. In particular, they shaped
the world around us to a much larger degree than most people realise. Trekkers
visiting the Siberian tundra, the deserts of central Australia and the Amazonian
rainforest believe that they have entered pristine landscapes, virtually untouched
by human hands. But that’s an illusion. The foragers were there before us and they
brought about dramatic changes even in the densest jungles and the most desolate
wildernesses. The next chapter explains how the foragers completely reshaped the
ecology of our planet long before the rst agricultural village was built. The
wandering bands of storytelling Sapiens were the most important and most
destructive force the animal kingdom had ever produced.

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*
 A ‘horizon of possibilities’ means the entire spectrum of beliefs, practices and experiences that are open before a
particular society, given its ecological, technological and cultural limitations. Each society and each individual
usually explore only a tiny fraction of their horizon of possibilities.
*
 It might be argued that not all eighteen ancient Danubians actually died from the violence whose marks can be
seen on their remains. Some were only injured. However, this is probably counterbalanced by deaths from trauma
to soft tissues and from the invisible deprivations that accompany war.

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4
The Flood
PRIOR TO THE COGNITIVE REVOLUTION, humans of all species lived exclusively
on the Afro-Asian landmass. True, they had settled a few islands by swimming
short stretches of water or crossing them on improvised rafts. Flores, for example,
was colonised as far back as 850,000 years ago. Yet they were unable to venture
into the open sea, and none reached America, Australia, or remote islands such as
Madagascar, New Zealand and Hawaii.
The sea barrier prevented not just humans but also many other Afro-Asian
animals and plants from reaching this ‘Outer World’. As a result, the organisms of
distant lands like Australia and Madagascar evolved in isolation for millions upon
millions of years, taking on shapes and natures very di erent from those of their
distant Afro-Asian relatives. Planet Earth was separated into several distinct
ecosystems, each made up of a unique assembly of animals and plants.