Sapiens: a brief History of Humankind

partly because population growth burned humanity’s boats. If the adoption of
ploughing increased a village’s population from a hundred to no, which ten
people would have volunteered to starve so that the others could go back to the
good old times? There was no going back. The trap snapped shut.
The pursuit of an easier life resulted in much hardship, and not for the last time.
It happens to us today. How many young college graduates have taken
demanding jobs in high-powered rms, vowing that they will work hard to earn
money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they
are thirty- ve? But by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages,
children to school, houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per
family, and a sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and
expensive holidays abroad. What are they supposed to do, go back to digging up
roots? No, they double their efforts and keep slaving away.
One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to
spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for

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granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally they reach a point where they
can’t live without it. Let’s take another familiar example from our own time. Over
the last few decades, we have invented countless time-saving devices that are
supposed to make life more relaxed – washing machines, vacuum cleaners,
dishwashers, telephones, mobile phones, computers, email. Previously it took a lot
of work to write a letter, address and stamp an envelope, and take it to the
mailbox. It took days or weeks, maybe even months, to get a reply. Nowadays I
can dash o an email, send it halfway around the globe, and (if my addressee is
online) receive a reply a minute later. I’ve saved all that trouble and time, but do
I live a more relaxed life?
Sadly not. Back in the snail-mail era, people usually only wrote letters when
they had something important to relate. Rather than writing the rst thing that
came into their heads, they considered carefully what they wanted to say and how
to phrase it. They expected to receive a similarly considered answer. Most people
wrote and received no more than a handful of letters a month and seldom felt
compelled to reply immediately. Today I receive dozens of emails each day, all
from people who expect a prompt reply. We thought we were saving time; instead
we revved up the treadmill of life to ten times its former speed and made our days
more anxious and agitated.
Here and there a Luddite holdout refuses to open an email account, just as
thousands of years ago some human bands refused to take up farming and so
escaped the luxury trap. But the Agricultural Revolution didn’t need every band in
a given region to join up. It only took one. Once one band settled down and
started tilling, whether in the Middle East or Central America, agriculture was
irresistible. Since farming created the conditions for swift demographic growth,
farmers could usually overcome foragers by sheer weight of numbers. The foragers
could either run away, abandoning their hunting grounds to eld and pasture, or
take up the ploughshare themselves. Either way, the old life was doomed.
The story of the luxury trap carries with it an important lesson. Humanity’s
search for an easier life released immense forces of change that transformed the
world in ways nobody envisioned or wanted. Nobody plotted the Agricultural
Revolution or sought human dependence on cereal cultivation. A series of trivial
decisions aimed mostly at lling a few stomachs and gaining a little security had
the cumulative e ect of forcing ancient foragers to spend their days carrying
water buckets under a scorching sun.
Divine Intervention

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The above scenario explains the Agricultural Revolution as a miscalculation. It’s
very plausible. History is full of far more idiotic miscalculations. But there’s
another possibility. Maybe it wasn’t the search for an easier life that brought
about the transformation. Maybe Sapiens had other aspirations, and were
consciously willing to make their lives harder in order to achieve them.
Scientists usually seek to attribute historical developments to cold economic and
demographic factors. It sits better with their rational and mathematical methods.
In the case of modern history, scholars cannot avoid taking into account non-
material factors such as ideology and culture. The written evidence forces their
hand. We have enough documents, letters and memoirs to prove that World War
Two was not caused by food shortages or demographic pressures. But we have no
documents from the Natu an culture, so when dealing with ancient periods the
materialist school reigns supreme. It is di cult to prove that preliterate people
were motivated by faith rather than economic necessity.
Yet, in some rare cases, we are lucky enough to nd telltale clues. In 1995
archaeologists began to excavate a site in south-east Turkey called Göbekli Tepe.
In the oldest stratum they discovered no signs of a settlement, houses or daily
activities. They did, however, nd monumental pillared structures decorated with
spectacular engravings. Each stone pillar weighed up to seven tons and reached a
height of ve metres. In a nearby quarry they found a half-chiselled pillar
weighing fty tons. Altogether, they uncovered more than ten monumental
structures, the largest of them nearly thirty metres across.
Archaeologists are familiar with such monumental structures from sites around
the world – the best-known example is Stonehenge in Britain. Yet as they studied
Göbekli Tepe, they discovered an amazing fact. Stonehenge dates to 2500 
BC
, and
was built by a developed agricultural society. The structures at Göbekli Tepe are
dated to about 9500 
BC
, and all available evidence indicates that they were built by
hunter-gatherers. The archaeological community initially found it difficult to credit
these ndings, but one test after another con rmed both the early date of the
structures and the pre-agricultural society of their builders. The capabilities of
ancient foragers, and the complexity of their cultures, seem to be far more
impressive than was previously suspected.

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