Sapiens: a brief History of Humankind

15.
 A modern calf in an industrial meat farm. Immediately after birth the calf is separated from its
mother and locked inside a tiny cage not much bigger than the calf’s own body. There the calf spends its
entire life – about four months on average. It never leaves its cage, nor is it allowed to play with other
calves or even walk – all so that its muscles will not grow strong. Soft muscles mean a soft and juicy
steak. The first time the calf has a chance to walk, stretch its muscles and touch other calves is on its
way to the slaughterhouse. In evolutionary terms, cattle represent one of the most successful animal
species ever to exist. At the same time, they are some of the most miserable animals on the planet
.
Yet from the viewpoint of the herd, rather than that of the shepherd, it’s hard to
avoid the impression that for the vast majority of domesticated animals, the
Agricultural Revolution was a terrible catastrophe. Their evolutionary ‘success’ is
meaningless. A rare wild rhinoceros on the brink of extinction is probably more
satis ed than a calf who spends its short life inside a tiny box, fattened to produce

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juicy steaks. The contented rhinoceros is no less content for being among the last
of its kind. The numerical success of the calf’s species is little consolation for the
suffering the individual endures.
This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual su ering is
perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution.
When we study the narrative of plants such as wheat and maize, maybe the purely
evolutionary perspective makes sense. Yet in the case of animals such as cattle,
sheep and Sapiens, each with a complex world of sensations and emotions, we
have to consider how evolutionary success translates into individual experience. In
the following chapters we will see time and again how a dramatic increase in the
collective power and ostensible success of our species went hand in hand with
much individual suffering.

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6
Building Pyramids
THE AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION IS ONE of the most controversial events in
history. Some partisans proclaim that it set humankind on the road to prosperity
and progress. Others insist that it led to perdition. This was the turning point, they
say, where Sapiens cast o its intimate symbiosis with nature and sprinted
towards greed and alienation. Whichever direction the road led, there was no
going back. Farming enabled populations to increase so radically and rapidly that
no complex agricultural society could ever again sustain itself if it returned to
hunting and gathering. Around 10,000 
BC
, before the transition to agriculture,
earth was home to about 5–8 million nomadic foragers. By the rst century 
AD
,
only 1–2 million foragers remained (mainly in Australia, America and Africa), but
their numbers were dwarfed by the world’s 250 million farmers.
1
The vast majority of farmers lived in permanent settlements; only a few were
nomadic shepherds. Settling down caused most peoples turf to shrink
dramatically. Ancient hunter-gatherers usually lived in territories covering many
dozens and even hundreds of square kilometres. ‘Home’ was the entire territory,
with its hills, streams, woods and open sky. Peasants, on the other hand, spent
most of their days working a small eld or orchard, and their domestic lives
centred on a cramped structure of wood, stone or mud, measuring no more than a
few dozen metres – the house. The typical peasant developed a very strong
attachment to this structure. This was a far-reaching revolution, whose impact was
psychological as much as architectural. Henceforth, attachment to ‘my house’ and
separation from the neighbours became the psychological hallmark of a much
more self-centred creature.
The new agricultural territories were not only far smaller than those of ancient
foragers, but also far more arti cial. Aside from the use of re, hunter-gatherers
made few deliberate changes to the lands in which they roamed. Farmers, on the
other hand, lived in artificial human islands that they laboriously carved out of the
surrounding wilds. They cut down forests, dug canals, cleared elds, built houses,
ploughed furrows, and planted fruit trees in tidy rows. The resulting arti cial
habitat was meant only for humans and ‘their’ plants and animals, and was often
fenced o by walls and hedges. Farmer families did all they could to keep out

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wayward weeds and wild animals. If such interlopers made their way in, they
were driven out. If they persisted, their human antagonists sought ways to
exterminate them. Particularly strong defences were erected around the home.
From the dawn of agriculture until this very day, billions of humans armed with
branches, swatters, shoes and poison sprays have waged relentless war against the
diligent ants, furtive roaches, adventurous spiders and misguided beetles that
constantly infiltrate the human domicile.
For most of history these man-made enclaves remained very small, surrounded
by expanses of untamed nature. The earth’s surface measures about 510 million
square kilometres, of which 155 million is land. As late as 
AD
1400, the vast
majority of farmers, along with their plants and animals, clustered together in an
area of just 11 million square kilometres – 2 per cent of the planet’s surface.
2
Everywhere else was too cold, too hot, too dry, too wet, or otherwise unsuited for
cultivation. This minuscule 2 per cent of the earth’s surface constituted the stage
on which history unfolded.
People found it di cult to leave their arti cial islands. They could not abandon
their houses, elds and granaries without grave risk of loss. Furthermore, as time
went on they accumulated more and more things – objects, not easily
transportable, that tied them down. Ancient farmers might seem to us dirt poor,
but a typical family possessed more artefacts than an entire forager tribe.
The Coming of the Future
While agricultural space shrank, agricultural time expanded. Foragers usually
didn’t waste much time thinking about next week or next month. Farmers sailed in
their imagination years and decades into the future.
Foragers discounted the future because they lived from hand to mouth and could
only preserve food or accumulate possessions with di culty. Of course, they
clearly engaged in some advanced planning. The creators of the cave paintings of
Chauvet, Lascaux and Altamira almost certainly intended them to last for
generations. Social alliances and political rivalries were long-term a airs. It often
took years to repay a favour or to avenge a wrong. Nevertheless, in the
subsistence economy of hunting and gathering, there was an obvious limit to such
long-term planning. Paradoxically, it saved foragers a lot of anxieties. There was
no sense in worrying about things that they could not influence.
The Agricultural Revolution made the future far more important than it had
ever been before. Farmers must always keep the future in mind and must work in
its service. The agricultural economy was based on a seasonal cycle of production,

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comprising long months of cultivation followed by short peak periods of harvest.
On the night following the end of a plentiful harvest the peasants might celebrate
for all they were worth, but within a week or so they were again up at dawn for a
long day in the eld. Although there was enough food for today, next week, and
even next month, they had to worry about next year and the year after that.
Concern about the future was rooted not only in seasonal cycles of production,
but also in the fundamental uncertainty of agriculture. Since most villages lived by
cultivating a very limited variety of domesticated plants and animals, they were
at the mercy of droughts, oods and pestilence. Peasants were obliged to produce
more than they consumed so that they could build up reserves. Without grain in
the silo, jars of olive oil in the cellar, cheese in the pantry and sausages hanging
from the rafters, they would starve in bad years. And bad years were bound to
come, sooner or later. A peasant living on the assumption that bad years would
not come didn’t live long.
Consequently, from the very advent of agriculture, worries about the future
became major players in the theatre of the human mind. Where farmers depended
on rains to water their elds, the onset of the rainy season meant that each
morning the farmers gazed towards the horizon, sni ng the wind and straining
their eyes. Is that a cloud? Would the rains come on time? Would there be enough?
Would violent storms wash the seeds from the elds and batter down seedlings?
Meanwhile, in the valleys of the Euphrates, Indus and Yellow rivers, other
peasants monitored, with no less trepidation, the height of the water. They needed
the rivers to rise in order to spread the fertile topsoil washed down from the
highlands, and to enable their vast irrigation systems to ll with water. But oods
that surged too high or came at the wrong time could destroy their elds as much
as a drought.
Peasants were worried about the future not just because they had more cause for
worry, but also because they could do something about it. They could clear
another eld, dig another irrigation canal, sow more crops. The anxious peasant
was as frenetic and hardworking as a harvester ant in the summer, sweating to
plant olive trees whose oil would be pressed by his children and grandchildren,
putting o until the winter or the following year the eating of the food he craved
today.
The stress of farming had far-reaching consequences. It was the foundation of
large-scale political and social systems. Sadly, the diligent peasants almost never
achieved the future economic security they so craved through their hard work in
the present. Everywhere, rulers and elites sprang up, living o the peasants’
surplus food and leaving them with only a bare subsistence.
These forfeited food surpluses fuelled politics, wars, art and philosophy. They
built palaces, forts, monuments and temples. Until the late modern era, more than

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90 per cent of humans were peasants who rose each morning to till the land by
the sweat of their brows. The extra they produced fed the tiny minority of elites –
kings, government o cials, soldiers, priests, artists and thinkers – who ll the
history books. History is something that very few people have been doing while
everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.
An Imagined Order
The food surpluses produced by peasants, coupled with new transportation
technology, eventually enabled more and more people to cram together rst into
large villages, then into towns, and nally into cities, all of them joined together
by new kingdoms and commercial networks.
Yet in order to take advantage of these new opportunities, food surpluses and
improved transportation were not enough. The mere fact that one can feed a
thousand people in the same town or a million people in the same kingdom does
not guarantee that they can agree how to divide the land and water, how to settle
disputes and con icts, and how to act in times of drought or war. And if no
agreement can be reached, strife spreads, even if the storehouses are bulging. It
was not food shortages that caused most of history’s wars and revolutions. The
French Revolution was spearheaded by a uent lawyers, not by famished
peasants. The Roman Republic reached the height of its power in the rst century
BC
, when treasure eets from throughout the Mediterranean enriched the Romans
beyond their ancestors’ wildest dreams. Yet it was at that moment of maximum
a uence that the Roman political order collapsed into a series of deadly civil
wars. Yugoslavia in 1991 had more than enough resources to feed all its
inhabitants, and still disintegrated into a terrible bloodbath.
The problem at the root of such calamities is that humans evolved for millions of
years in small bands of a few dozen individuals. The handful of millennia
separating the Agricultural Revolution from the appearance of cities, kingdoms
and empires was not enough time to allow an instinct for mass cooperation to
evolve.
Despite the lack of such biological instincts, during the foraging era, hundreds of
strangers were able to cooperate thanks to their shared myths. However, this
cooperation was loose and limited. Every Sapiens band continued to run its life
independently and to provide for most of its own needs. An archaic sociologist
living 20,000 years ago, who had no knowledge of events following the
Agricultural Revolution, might well have concluded that mythology had a fairly
limited scope. Stories about ancestral spirits and tribal totems were strong enough

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to enable 500 people to trade seashells, celebrate the odd festival, and join forces
to wipe out a Neanderthal band, but no more than that. Mythology, the ancient
sociologist would have thought, could not possibly enable millions of strangers to
cooperate on a daily basis.
But that turned out to be wrong. Myths, it transpired, 
are
stronger than anyone
could have imagined. When the Agricultural Revolution opened opportunities for
the creation of crowded cities and mighty empires, people invented stories about
great gods, motherlands and joint stock companies to provide the needed social
links. While human evolution was crawling at its usual snail’s pace, the human
imagination was building astounding networks of mass cooperation, unlike any
other ever seen on earth.
Around 8500 
BC
the largest settlements in the world were villages such as
Jericho, which contained a few hundred individuals. By 7000 
BC
the town of
Çatalhöyük in Anatolia numbered between 5,000 and 10,000 individuals. It may
well have been the world’s biggest settlement at the time. During the fth and
fourth millennia 
BC
, cities with tens of thousands of inhabitants sprouted in the
Fertile Crescent, and each of these held sway over many nearby villages. In 3100
BC
the entire lower Nile Valley was united into the rst Egyptian kingdom. Its
pharaohs ruled thousands of square kilometres and hundreds of thousands of
people. Around 2250 
BC
Sargon the Great forged the rst empire, the Akkadian. It
boasted over a million subjects and a standing army of 5,400 soldiers. Between
1000 
BC
and 500 
BC
, the rst mega-empires appeared in the Middle East: the Late
Assyrian Empire, the Babylonian Empire, and the Persian Empire. They ruled over
many millions of subjects and commanded tens of thousands of soldiers.
In 221 
BC
the Qin dynasty united China, and shortly afterwards Rome united the
Mediterranean basin. Taxes levied on 40 million Qin subjects paid for a standing
army of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and a complex bureaucracy that
employed more than 100,000 o cials. The Roman Empire at its zenith collected
taxes from up to 100 million subjects. This revenue nanced a standing army of
250,000–500,000 soldiers, a road network still in use 1,500 years later, and
theatres and amphitheatres that host spectacles to this day.

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