Sapiens: a brief History of Humankind

resulted
from discrimination against
blacks).
By the mid-twentieth century, segregation in the former Confederate states was
probably worse than in the late nineteenth century. Clennon King, a black student
who applied to the University of Mississippi in 1958, was forcefully committed to
a mental asylum. The presiding judge ruled that a black person must surely be
insane to think that he could be admitted to the University of Mississippi.

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The vicious circle: a chance histotical situation is translated into a rigid social system.
Nothing was as revolting to American southerners (and many northerners) as
sexual relations and marriage between black men and white women. Sex between
the races became the greatest taboo and any violation, or suspected violation, was
viewed as deserving immediate and summary punishment in the form of lynching.
The Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist secret society, perpetrated many such
killings. They could have taught the Hindu Brahmins a thing or two about purity
laws.
With time, the racism spread to more and more cultural arenas. American
aesthetic culture was built around white standards of beauty. The physical
attributes of the white race – for example light skin, fair and straight hair, a small
upturned nose – came to be identi ed as beautiful. Typical black features – dark
skin, dark and bushy hair, a attened nose – were deemed ugly. These
preconceptions ingrained the imagined hierarchy at an even deeper level of
human consciousness.
Such vicious circles can go on for centuries and even millennia, perpetuating an
imagined hierarchy that sprang from a chance historical occurrence. Unjust
discrimination often gets worse, not better, with time. Money comes to money,
and poverty to poverty. Education comes to education, and ignorance to
ignorance. Those once victimised by history are likely to be victimised yet again.
And those whom history has privileged are more likely to be privileged again.
Most sociopolitical hierarchies lack a logical or biological basis – they are
nothing but the perpetuation of chance events supported by myths. That is one
good reason to study history. If the division into blacks and whites or Brahmins
and Shudras was grounded in biological realities – that is, if Brahmins really had
better brains than Shudras – biology would be su cient for understanding human
society. Since the biological distinctions between di erent groups of 
Homo sapiens
are, in fact, negligible, biology can’t explain the intricacies of Indian society or

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American racial dynamics. We can only understand those phenomena by studying
the events, circumstances, and power relations that transformed gments of
imagination into cruel – and very real – social structures.
He and She
Di erent societies adopt di erent kinds of imagined hierarchies. Race is very
important to modern Americans but was relatively insigni cant to medieval
Muslims. Caste was a matter of life and death in medieval India, whereas in
modern Europe it is practically non-existent. One hierarchy, however, has been of
supreme importance in all known human societies: the hierarchy of gender.
People everywhere have divided themselves into men and women. And almost
everywhere men have got the better deal, at least since the Agricultural
Revolution.
Some of the earliest Chinese texts are oracle bones, dating to 1200 
BC
, used to
divine the future. On one was engraved the question: ‘Will Lady Hao’s
childbearing be lucky?’ To which was written the reply: ‘If the child is born on a
ding
day, lucky; if on a 
geng
day, vastly auspicious.’ However, Lady Hao was to
give birth on a 
jiayin
day. The text ends with the morose observation: ‘Three weeks
and one day later, on 
jiayin
day, the child was born. Not lucky. It was a girl.’
4
More than 3,000 years later, when Communist China enacted the ‘one child’
policy, many Chinese families continued to regard the birth of a girl as a
misfortune. Parents would occasionally abandon or murder newborn baby girls in
order to have another shot at getting a boy.
In many societies women were simply the property of men, most often their
fathers, husbands or brothers. Rape, in many legal systems, falls under property
violation – in other words, the victim is not the woman who was raped but the
male who owns her. This being the case, the legal remedy was the transfer of
ownership – the rapist was required to pay a bride price to the woman’s father or
brother, upon which she became the rapist’s property. The Bible decrees that ‘If a
man meets a virgin who is not betrothed, and seizes her and lies with her, and
they are found, then the man who lay with her shall give to the father of the
young woman fty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife’ (Deuteronomy
22:28–9). The ancient Hebrews considered this a reasonable arrangement.
Raping a woman who did not belong to any man was not considered a crime at
all, just as picking up a lost coin on a busy street is not considered theft. And if a
husband raped his own wife, he had committed no crime. In fact, the idea that a
husband could rape his wife was an oxymoron. To be a husband was to have full

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control of your wife’s sexuality. To say that a husband ‘raped’ his wife was as
illogical as saying that a man stole his own wallet. Such thinking was not confined
to the ancient Middle East. As of 2006, there were still fty-three countries where
a husband could not be prosecuted for the rape of his wife. Even in Germany, rape
laws were amended only in 1997 to create a legal category of marital rape.
5
Is the division into men and women a product of the imagination, like the caste
system in India and the racial system in America, or is it a natural division with
deep biological roots? And if it is indeed a natural division, are there also
biological explanations for the preference given to men over women?
Some of the cultural, legal and political disparities between men and women
re ect the obvious biological di erences between the sexes. Childbearing has
always been women’s job, because men don’t have wombs. Yet around this hard
universal kernel, every society accumulated layer upon layer of cultural ideas and
norms that have little to do with biology. Societies associate a host of attributes
with masculinity and femininity that, for the most part, lack a rm biological
basis.
For instance, in democratic Athens of the fth century 
BC
, an individual
possessing a womb had no independent legal status and was forbidden to