Sapiens: a brief History of Humankind

Map 3. Earth in 
AD
 1450. The named locations within the Afro-Asian World were places visited by the
fourteenth-century Muslim traveller Ibn Battuta. A native of Tangier, in Morocco, Ibn Battuta visited
Timbuktu, Zanzibar, southern Russia, Central Asia, India, China and Indonesia. His travels illustrate the
unity of Afro-Asia on the eve of the modern era
.
We still talk a lot about ‘authentic’ cultures, but if by authentic’ we mean
something that developed independently, and that consists of ancient local
traditions free of external in uences, then there are no authentic cultures left on
earth. Over the last few centuries, all cultures were changed almost beyond
recognition by a flood of global influences.
One of the most interesting examples of this globalisation is ‘ethnic’ cuisine. In
an Italian restaurant we expect to nd spaghetti in tomato sauce; in Polish and
Irish restaurants lots of potatoes; in an Argentinian restaurant we can choose
between dozens of kinds of beefsteaks; in an Indian restaurant hot chillies are
incorporated into just about everything; and the highlight at any Swiss café is
thick hot chocolate under an alp of whipped cream. But none of these foods is
native to those nations. Tomatoes, chilli peppers and cocoa are all Mexican in
origin; they reached Europe and Asia only after the Spaniards conquered Mexico.
Julius Caesar and Dante Alighieri never twirled tomato-drenched spaghetti on
their forks (even forks hadn’t been invented yet), William Tell never tasted
chocolate, and Buddha never spiced up his food with chilli. Potatoes reached
Poland and Ireland no more than 400 years ago. The only steak you could obtain
in Argentina in 1492 was from a llama.
Hollywood lms have perpetuated an image of the Plains Indians as brave
horsemen, courageously charging the wagons of European pioneers to protect the
customs of their ancestors. However, these Native American horsemen were not
the defenders of some ancient, authentic culture. Instead, they were the product of

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a major military and political revolution that swept the plains of western North
America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a consequence of the arrival
of European horses. In 1492 there were no horses in America. The culture of the
nineteenth-century Sioux and Apache has many appealing features, but it was a
modern culture – a result of global forces – much more than authentic’.
The Global Vision
From a practical perspective, the most important stage in the process of global
uni cation occurred in the last few centuries, when empires grew and trade
intensi ed. Ever-tightening links were formed between the people of Afro-Asia,
America, Australia and Oceania. Thus Mexican chilli peppers made it into Indian
food and Spanish cattle began grazing in Argentina. Yet from an ideological
perspective, an even more important development occurred during the rst
millennium 
BC
, when the idea of a universal order took root. For thousands of
years previously, history was already moving slowly in the direction of global
unity, but the idea of a universal order governing the entire world was still alien
to most people.