A Short History of the World

Ivan R. Dee Publisher

Chapter One

FROM AFRICA

They lived in Africa and, two million years ago, they were few. They were almost human beings, though they tended to be smaller than their descendants who now inhabit the world. They walked upright; they were also skilled climbers.

    They ate mainly fruits, nuts, seeds and other food-plants but were beginning to eat meat. Their implements were primitive. If they tried to shape stone they did not carry the shaping very far. Probably they were capable of using a stick for defense or attack or even for digging?if a small rodent was hiding in a burrow. Whether they made simple shelters out of shrubs and sticks to ward off the cold winds in winter is not known. No doubt some lived in caves?if caves could be found?but such a permanent residence would have gravely restricted the mobility needed to find enough food, for their food must have varied according to the seasons. To live off the land called for long walks to the places where certain seeds or fruits could be found. Their diet was the result of a chain of discoveries, made over hundreds of thousands of years. A crucial discovery was whether a seemingly safe food-plant was poisonous. Scavenging for new foods in a time of drought and famine, some must have died or become seriously ill through poisoning.

    Two million years ago these human beings?known as hominids?lived mainly in the lands now called Kenya, Tanzania and Ethiopia. If Africa is divided into three horizontal zones, the human race occupied the middle or tropical zone. Probably much of it was grassland. Indeed, a change of climate one or two million years earlier, with grassland largely replacing forest in certain regions, might have encouraged these humans gradually to part company from their relatives?the apes?and spend more time on the ground.

    They already had a long history, though they had no memory or record of it. We talk today of the vast span of time since the building of the pyramids in Egypt, but that span was merely a wink compared to the long history which the human race had already experienced. One early record has been uncovered in Tanzania. Two adults and a child were walking on top of volcanic ash softened by recent rain. Their footprints then were baked by the sun and slowly covered by layers of earth. The footprints, definitely human, are at least 3,600,000 years old. Even that is young in the history of the living world. The last of the dinosaurs were extinguished about 64,000,000 years ago.

    In East Africa the early humans liked to camp on the shores of lakes and in sandy riverbeds or on the grassy plains: some of their remains have been found in such places. They were also able to adapt to cooler climates and in Ethiopia they preferred an open plateau at a height of 1,600 or 2,000 meters above sea level. In the evergreen forests of the uplands they were also at home. Their adaptability was impressive.

    In the cutthroat contest to stay alive and to multiply, humans were usually successful. In their part of Africa they were far outnumbered by various species of large animals, some of them aggressive, but the humans flourished. Their population became too large for the resources of their area or perhaps a long drought drove them north. The evidence is strong that sometime around two million years ago they began to migrate farther north. The longest desert in the world?stretching from northwest Africa and past Arabia?may have temporarily blocked their way. The narrow land bridge between Africa and Asia Minor was easily crossed.

TREK INTO ASIA

They moved in small bands: they were explorers as well as settlers. In each unfamiliar region they had to adapt to new foods, and they had to watch for wild animals, venomous snakes and poisonous insects. The people leading the way had one advantage. Those other stern opponents of territorial intruders, human beings, were not standing in their way.

    It was more like a relay race than a trek. Possibly one group of maybe six or 12 moved a short distance and then serried down. Others came, leapfrogged them or drove them forward. The move across Asia might have taken 10,000 or 200,000 years. Mountain slopes had to be climbed, swamps traversed. Wide, fast, cold rivers had to be crossed. Did they cross them at fords in very dry seasons or cross them in the high country, before the streams became wide? Could the explorers swim? The answers are not known. At night in strange terrain, a shelter or a place of some security had to be selected. Without the aid of guard dogs, a watch had to be kept for wild animals hunting at night.

    In the course of the slow and long migration?the first of many long migrations in the history of the human race?these people originating in the tropics moved into territory far colder than any which their ancestors had experienced. Presumably they stayed entirely in the milder parts of the temperate zone, whose climate and many of whose food-plants were familiar. During many phases, moreover, the climate became colder, and the ice sheets moved some distance to the south. Even southern Europe was long out of bounds to them.

    Whether they could warm themselves by fires on cold nights is not certain. When a strike of lightning set fire to adjacent countryside they presumably collected the fire by lighting a stick and carrying the fire away. When the stick was almost burned and the fire faded, they could light another stick. Fire was so valuable that, once it was captured, it would be carefully tended. But fire could be extinguished through carelessness, or doused by heavy rain or lost through an absence of dry wood and kindling. While they possessed fire, they must have carried it on their travels as a precious possession, just as the early Australians travelled with fire. If it went out, they had to wait until another strike of lightning set fire to bush or they came across other humans who had kept their fire alight.

    The ability to create fire, rather than borrow it already alight, came late in human history. Eventually humans could produce a flame through the friction and heat caused by rubbing dry wood against dry wood. Or they could strike a piece of pyrite or other suitable rock and thus make a spark. In both processes, some very dry kindling was required, as well as the art of gently blowing on the smoking kindling. Even the native Tasmanians, as observed early in the 19th century, carried fire sticks wherever they went and were despondent when the flames went out. It is far from certain that they could normally accomplish the laborious task of producing a spark that could light a fresh fire.

    The skilled employing of fire?the result of many brainwaves and experiments during thousands of years?is one of the achievements of the human race. How ingeniously it was used can be seen in the way of life which survived in a few remote regions of Australia until the 20th century. On the flat cloudless plains of the outback the Aborigines lit small fires to send a smoke signal?it was a clever form of telegraph. Many explorers knew that they were being watched by Aborigines who, remaining out of sight, sent these smoke signals to one another. Aborigines used fire...