Sapiens: a brief History of Humankind

Part One
The Cognitive Revolution
1.
 A human handprint made about 30,000 years ago, on the wall of the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in
southern France. Somebody tried to say, ‘I was here!’

---

1
An Animal of No Significance
ABOUT 13.5 BILLION YEARS AGO, MATTER, energy, time and space came into
being in what is known as the Big Bang. The story of these fundamental features
of our universe is called physics.
About 300,000 years after their appearance, matter and energy started to
coalesce into complex structures, called atoms, which then combined into
molecules. The story of atoms, molecules and their interactions is called chemistry.
About 3.8 billion years ago, on a planet called Earth, certain molecules
combined to form particularly large and intricate structures called organisms. The
story of organisms is called biology.
About 70,000 years ago, organisms belonging to the species 
Homo sapiens
started to form even more elaborate structures called cultures. The subsequent
development of these human cultures is called history.
Three important revolutions shaped the course of history: the Cognitive
Revolution kick-started history about 70,000 years ago. The Agricultural
Revolution sped it up about 12,000 years ago. The Scienti c Revolution, which got
under way only 500 years ago, may well end history and start something
completely di erent. This book tells the story of how these three revolutions have
affected humans and their fellow organisms.
There were humans long before there was history. Animals much like modern
humans rst appeared about 2.5 million years ago. But for countless generations
they did not stand out from the myriad other organisms with which they shared
their habitats.
On a hike in East Africa 2 million years ago, you might well have encountered a
familiar cast of human characters: anxious mothers cuddling their babies and
clutches of carefree children playing in the mud; temperamental youths cha ng
against the dictates of society and weary elders who just wanted to be left in
peace; chest-thumping machos trying to impress the local beauty and wise old
matriarchs who had already seen it all. These archaic humans loved, played,
formed close friendships and competed for status and power – but so did
chimpanzees, baboons and elephants. There was nothing special about them.

---

Nobody, least of all humans themselves, had any inkling that their descendants
would one day walk on the moon, split the atom, fathom the genetic code and
write history books. The most important thing to know about prehistoric humans
is that they were insigni cant animals with no more impact on their environment
than gorillas, fireflies or jellyfish.
Biologists classify organisms into species. Animals are said to belong to the
same species if they tend to mate with each other, giving birth to fertile o spring.
Horses and donkeys have a recent common ancestor and share many physical
traits. But they show little sexual interest in one another. They will mate if
induced to do so – but their o spring, called mules, are sterile. Mutations in
donkey DNA can therefore never cross over to horses, or vice versa. The two types
of animals are consequently considered two distinct species, moving along
separate evolutionary paths. By contrast, a bulldog and a spaniel may look very
di erent, but they are members of the same species, sharing the same DNA pool.
They will happily mate and their puppies will grow up to pair o with other dogs
and produce more puppies.
Species that evolved from a common ancestor are bunched together under the
heading ‘genus’ (plural genera). Lions, tigers, leopards and jaguars are di erent
species within the genus 
Panthera
. Biologists label organisms with a two-part Latin
name, genus followed by species. Lions, for example, are called 
Panthera leo
, the
species 
leo
of the genus 
Panthera
. Presumably, everyone reading this book is a
Homo sapiens –
the species 
sapiens
(wise) of the genus 
Homo
(man).
Genera in their turn are grouped into families, such as the cats (lions, cheetahs,
house cats), the dogs (wolves, foxes, jackals) and the elephants (elephants,
mammoths, mastodons). All members of a family trace their lineage back to a
founding matriarch or patriarch. All cats, for example, from the smallest house
kitten to the most ferocious lion, share a common feline ancestor who lived about
25 million years ago.
Homo sapiens
, too, belongs to a family. This banal fact used to be one of
history’s most closely guarded secrets. 
Homo sapiens
long preferred to view itself
as set apart from animals, an orphan bereft of family, lacking siblings or cousins,
and most importantly, without parents. But that’s just not the case. Like it or not,
we are members of a large and particularly noisy family called the great apes.
Our closest living relatives include chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans. The
chimpanzees are the closest. Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two
daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own
grandmother.

---

Skeletons in the Closet
Homo sapiens
has kept hidden an even more disturbing secret. Not only do we
possess an abundance of uncivilised cousins, once upon a time we had quite a few
brothers and sisters as well. We are used to thinking about ourselves as the only
humans, because for the last 10,000 years, our species has indeed been the only
human species around. Yet the real meaning of the word human is ‘an animal
belonging to the genus 
Homo
’, and there used to be many other species of this
genus besides 
Homo sapiens
. Moreover, as we shall see in the last chapter of the
book, in the not so distant future we might again have to contend with non
-
sapiens
humans. To clarify this point, I will often use the term ‘Sapiens’ to denote
members of the species 
Homo sapiens
, while reserving the term ‘human’ to refer to
all extant members of the genus 
Homo
.
Humans rst evolved in East Africa about 2.5 million years ago from an earlier
genus of apes called 
Australopithecus
, which means ‘Southern Ape’. About 2 million
years ago, some of these archaic men and women left their homeland to journey
through and settle vast areas of North Africa, Europe and Asia. Since survival in
the snowy forests of northern Europe required di erent traits than those needed to
stay alive in Indonesia’s steaming jungles, human populations evolved in di erent
directions. The result was several distinct species, to each of which scientists have
assigned a pompous Latin name.