Sapiens: a brief History of Humankind

part of medieval art and literature, such as the tales of King Arthur and the Holy
Grail. What was Camelot but an attempt to prove that a good knight can and
should be a good Christian, and that good Christians make the best knights?
Another example is the modern political order. Ever since the French
Revolution, people throughout the world have gradually come to see both equality
and individual freedom as fundamental values. Yet the two values contradict each
other. Equality can be ensured only by curtailing the freedoms of those who are
better o . Guaranteeing that every individual will be free to do as he wishes
inevitably short-changes equality. The entire political history of the world since
1789 can be seen as a series of attempts to reconcile this contradiction.
Anyone who has read a novel by Charles Dickens knows that the liberal regimes
of nineteenth-century Europe gave priority to individual freedom even if it meant
throwing insolvent poor families in prison and giving orphans little choice but to
join schools for pickpockets. Anyone who has read a novel by Alexander
Solzhenitsyn knows how Communisms egalitarian ideal produced brutal tyrannies
that tried to control every aspect of daily life.
Contemporary American politics also revolve around this contradiction.
Democrats want a more equitable society, even if it means raising taxes to fund
programmes to help the poor, elderly and in rm. But that infringes on the
freedom of individuals to spend their money as they wish. Why should the
government force me to buy health insurance if I prefer using the money to put
my kids through college? Republicans, on the other hand, want to maximise
individual freedom, even if it means that the income gap between rich and poor
will grow wider and that many Americans will not be able to afford health care.
Just as medieval culture did not manage to square chivalry with Christianity, so
the modern world fails to square liberty with equality. But this is no defect. Such
contradictions are an inseparable part of every human culture. In fact, they are

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culture’s engines, responsible for the creativity and dynamism of our species. Just
as when two clashing musical notes played together force a piece of music
forward, so discord in our thoughts, ideas and values compel us to think,
reevaluate and criticise. Consistency is the playground of dull minds.
If tensions, con icts and irresolvable dilemmas are the spice of every culture, a
human being who belongs to any particular culture must hold contradictory beliefs
and be riven by incompatible values. It’s such an essential feature of any culture
that it even has a name: cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is often
considered a failure of the human psyche. In fact, it is a vital asset. Had people
been unable to hold contradictory beliefs and values, it would probably have been
impossible to establish and maintain any human culture.
If, say, a Christian really wants to understand the Muslims who attend that
mosque down the street, he shouldn’t look for a pristine set of values that every
Muslim holds dear. Rather, he should enquire into the catch-22s of Muslim culture,
those places where rules are at war and standards scu e. It’s at the very spot
where the Muslims teeter between two imperatives that you’ll understand them
best.
The Spy Satellite
Human cultures are in constant ux. Is this ux completely random, or does it
have some overall pattern? In other words, does history have a direction?
The answer is yes. Over the millennia, small, simple cultures gradually coalesce
into bigger and more complex civilisations, so that the world contains fewer and
fewer mega-cultures, each of which is bigger and more complex. This is of course a
very crude generalisation, true only at the macro level. At the micro level, it seems
that for every group of cultures that coalesces into a mega-culture, there’s a mega-
culture that breaks up into pieces. The Mongol Empire expanded to dominate a
huge swathe of Asia and even parts of Europe, only to shatter into fragments.
Christianity converted hundreds of millions of people at the same time that it
splintered into innumerable sects. The Latin language spread through western and
central Europe, then split into local dialects that themselves eventually became
national languages. But these break-ups are temporary reversals in an inexorable
trend towards unity.
Perceiving the direction of history is really a question of vantage point. When
we adopt the proverbial bird’s-eye view of history, which examines developments
in terms of decades or centuries, it’s hard to say whether history moves in the
direction of unity or of diversity. However, to understand long-term processes the

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bird’s-eye view is too myopic. We would do better to adopt instead the viewpoint
of a cosmic spy satellite, which scans millennia rather than centuries. From such a
vantage point it becomes crystal clear that history is moving relentlessly towards
unity. The sectioning of Christianity and the collapse of the Mongol Empire are
just speed bumps on history’s highway.
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The best way to appreciate the general direction of history is to count the number
of separate human worlds that coexisted at any given moment on planet Earth.
Today, we are used to thinking about the whole planet as a single unit, but for
most of history, earth was in fact an entire galaxy of isolated human worlds.
Consider Tasmania, a medium-sized island south of Australia. It was cut off from
the Australian mainland in about 10,000 
BC
as the end of the Ice Age caused the
sea level to rise. A few thousand hunter-gatherers were left on the island, and had
no contact with any other humans until the arrival of the Europeans in the
nineteenth century. For 12,000 years, nobody else knew the Tasmanians were
there, and they didn’t know that there was anyone else in the world. They had
their wars, political struggles, social oscillations and cultural developments. Yet as
far as the emperors of China or the rulers of Mesopotamia were concerned,
Tasmania could just as well have been located on one of Jupiter’s moons. The
Tasmanians lived in a world of their own.
America and Europe, too, were separate worlds for most of their histories. In 
AD
378, the Roman emperor Valence was defeated and killed by the Goths at the
battle of Adrianople. In the same year, King Chak Tok Ich’aak of Tikal was
defeated and killed by the army of Teotihuacan. (Tikal was an important Mayan
city state, while Teotihuacan was then the largest city in America, with almost
250,000 inhabitants – of the same order of magnitude as its contemporary, Rome.)
There was absolutely no connection between the defeat of Rome and the rise of
Teotihuacan. Rome might just as well have been located on Mars, and
Teotihuacan on Venus.
How many di erent human worlds coexisted on earth? Around 10.000 
BC
our
planet contained many thousands of them. By 2000 
BC
, their numbers had
dwindled to the hundreds, or at most a few thousand. By 
AD
1450, their numbers
had declined even more drastically. At that time, just prior to the age of European
exploration, earth still contained a signi cant number of dwarf worlds such as
Tasmania. But close to 90 per cent of humans lived in a single mega-world: the
world of Afro-Asia. Most of Asia, most of Europe, and most of Africa (including
substantial chunks of sub-Saharan Africa) were already connected by signi cant

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cultural, political and economic ties.
Most of the remaining tenth of the world’s human population was divided
between four worlds of considerable size and complexity: