Sapiens: Chapters 3–4

Today’s affluent societies are in the throes of a plague of obesity, which is rapidly spreading to developing countries.

This ‘gorging gene’ theory is widely accepted. Other theories are far more contentious.

In play, we use a plethora of toys, from plastic cards to 100,000-seater stadiums.

Religions bring the sacred into our lives with Gothic churches, Muslim mosques, Hindu ashrams, Torah scrolls, Tibetan prayer wheels, priestly cassocks, candles, incense, Christmas trees, matzah balls, tombstones and icons.

We hardly notice how ubiquitous our stuff is until we have to move it to a new house.

A reliance on artefacts will thus bias an account of ancient hunter-gatherer life. One way to remedy this is to look at modern forager societies. These can be studied directly, by anthropological observation. But there are good reasons to be very careful in extrapolating from modern forager societies to ancient ones.

Thanks to the appearance of fiction, even people with the same genetic make-up who lived under similar ecological conditions were able to create very different imagined realities, which manifested themselves in different norms and values.

One band might have been belligerent and the other peaceful.

Experts disagree about the exact date, but we have incontrovertible evidence of domesticated dogs from about 15,000 years ago.

Sociopolitical relations, too, tended to be sporadic. The tribe did not serve as a permanent political framework, and even if it had seasonal meeting places, there were no permanent towns or institutions.

Notwithstanding the popular image of ‘man the hunter’, gathering was Sapiens’ main activity, and it provided most of their calories, as well as raw materials such as flint, wood and bamboo.

While people in today’s affluent societies work an average of forty to forty-five hours a week, and people in the developing world work sixty and even eighty hours a week, hunter-gatherers living today in the most inhospitable of habitats—such as the Kalahari Desert—work on average for just thirty-five to forty-five hours a week.

Most of the infectious diseases that have plagued agricultural and industrial societies (such as smallpox, measles and tuberculosis) originated in domesticated animals and were transferred to humans only after the Agricultural Revolution. Ancient foragers, who had domesticated only dogs, were free of these scourges.

The wholesome and varied diet, the relatively short working week, and the rarity of infectious diseases have led many experts to define pre-agricultural forager societies as ‘the original affluent societies’.

But did they consider walnuts a delicacy or a humdrum staple?

Animism (from anima, ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ in Latin) is the belief that almost every place, every animal, every plant and every natural phenomenon has awareness and feelings, and can communicate directly with humans.

The rock might be angry about something that people did and rejoice over some other action, the rock might admonish people or ask for favours.

Humans, for their part, can address the rock, to mollify or threaten it.

Theism (from ‘theos’, ‘god’ in Greek) is the view that the universal order is based on a hierarchical relationship between humans and a small group of ethereal entities called gods.

The generic rubric ‘theists’ covers Jewish rabbis from eighteenth-century Poland, witch-burning Puritans from seventeenth-century Massachusetts, Aztec priests from fifteenth-century Mexico, Sufi mystics from twelfth-century Iran, tenth-century Viking warriors, second-century Roman legionnaires, and first-century Chinese bureaucrats.

Each of these viewed the others’ beliefs and practices as weird and heretical.

It’s likely that different bands had different structures. Some may have been as hierarchical, tense and violent as the nastiest chimpanzee group, while others were as laid-back, peaceful and lascivious as a bunch of bonobos

It’s likely that different bands had different structures. Some may have been as hierarchical, tense and violent as the nastiest chimpanzee group, while others were as laid-back, peaceful and lascivious as a bunch of bonobos.

Which better represents the world of the ancient foragers: the peaceful skeletons from Israel and Portugal, or the abattoirs of Jabl Sahaba and Ofnet?

Planet Earth was separated into several distinct ecosystems, each made up of a unique assembly of animals and plants. Homo sapiens was about to put an end to this biological exuberance.

Some scholars try to exonerate our species, placing the blame on the vagaries of the climate (the usual scapegoat in such cases).

It’s common today to explain anything and everything as the result of climate change, but the truth is that earth’s climate never rests. It is in constant flux.

Despite its burgeoning navigational abilities, Homo sapiens was still overwhelmingly a terrestrial menace.

Thirdly, mass extinctions akin to the archetypal Australian decimation occurred again and again in the ensuing millennia—whenever people settled another part of the Outer World.

In these cases Sapiens guilt is irrefutable. For example, the megafauna of New Zealand—which had weathered the alleged ‘climate change’ of c. 45,000 years ago without a scratch—suffered devastating blows immediately after the first humans set foot on the islands.

Humans don’t come across as particularly dangerous. They don’t have long, sharp teeth or muscular, lithe bodies.

The climate changes that beset Australia about 45,000 years ago destabilised the ecosystem and made it particularly vulnerable.

However, humans appeared on the stage at just this critical juncture and pushed the brittle ecosystem into the abyss. The combination of climate change and human hunting is particularly devastating for large animals, since it attacks them from different angles.

The first Americans arrived on foot, which they could do because, at the time, sea levels were low enough that a land bridge connected north-eastern Siberia with north-western Alaska. Not that it was easy—the journey was an arduous one, perhaps harder than the sea passage to Australia.

South America hosted an even more exotic menagerie of large mammals, reptiles and birds.

Again, some scholars try to exonerate Homo sapiens and blame climate change (which requires them to posit that, for some mysterious reason, the climate in the Caribbean islands remained static for 7,000 years while the rest of the western hemisphere warmed).

We are the culprits. There is no way around that truth. Even if climate change abetted us, the human contribution was decisive.

If we combine the mass extinctions in Australia and America, and add the smaller-scale extinctions that took place as Homo sapiens spread over Afro-Asia—such as the extinction of all other human species—and the extinctions that occurred when ancient foragers settled remote islands such as Cuba, the inevitable conclusion is that the first wave of Sapiens colonisation was one of the biggest and swiftest ecological disasters to befall the animal kingdom.

If we knew how many species we’ve already eradicated, we might be more motivated to protect those that still survive.

Among all the world’s large creatures, the only survivors of the human flood will be humans themselves, and the farmyard animals that serve as galley slaves in Noah’s Ark.