Sapiens: a brief History of Humankind

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. The Mesoamerican World, which encompassed most of Central America and
parts of North America.
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. The Andean World, which encompassed most of western South America.
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. The Australian World, which encompassed the continent of Australia.
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. The Oceanic World, which encompassed most of the islands of the south-
western Pacific Ocean, from Hawaii to New Zealand.
Over the next 300 years, the Afro-Asian giant swallowed up all the other worlds. It
consumed the Mesoamerican World in 1521, when the Spanish conquered the
Aztec Empire. It took its rst bite out of the Oceanic World at the same time,
during Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe, and soon after that
completed its conquest. The Andean World collapsed in 1532, when Spanish
conquistadors crushed the Inca Empire. The rst European landed on the
Australian continent in 1606, and that pristine world came to an end when British
colonisation began in earnest in 1788. Fifteen years later the Britons established
their rst settlement in Tasmania, thus bringing the last autonomous human world
into the Afro-Asian sphere of influence.
It took the Afro-Asian giant several centuries to digest all that it had swallowed,
but the process was irreversible. Today almost all humans share the same
geopolitical system (the entire planet is divided into internationally recognised
states); the same economic system (capitalist market forces shape even the
remotest corners of the globe); the same legal system (human rights and
international law are valid everywhere, at least theoretically); and the same
scienti c system (experts in Iran, Israel, Australia and Argentina have exactly the
same views about the structure of atoms or the treatment of tuberculosis).
The single global culture is not homogeneous. Just as a single organic body
contains many di erent kinds of organs and cells, so our single global culture
contains many di erent types of lifestyles and people, from New York
stockbrokers to Afghan shepherds. Yet they are all closely connected and they
in uence one another in myriad ways. They still argue and ght, but they argue
using the same concepts and ght using the same weapons. A real ‘clash of
civilisations’ is like the proverbial dialogue of the deaf. Nobody can grasp what
the other is saying. Today when Iran and the United States rattle swords at one
another, they both speak the language of nation states, capitalist economies,
international rights and nuclear physics.

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