Origin Story: A Big History of Everything

by David Christian

Cultural evolution, a nonbiological mode of adaptation, acts in parallel with biological evolution as the means of transmitting knowledge of the past and adaptive behaviour across generations.

And this slow increase in available information and the control that this accumulated information gave our species over the natural world and over energy flows through the biosphere would turn out to be the primary driver of change in human history.

As humans spread, so did knowledge.

In the year 2000, the total biomass of all wild land mammals was about one-twenty-fourth that of domesticated land mammals.1

Humans have changed genetically as a result of farming.

For example, if you’re descended from people who once herded cattle and consumed cow’s or mare’s milk, you will probably be able to digest their milk even as an adult because you can keep producing lactase, the enzyme that digests lactose (milk sugar). Hunter-gatherers consumed only breast milk till about four years of age, and after childhood, they no longer needed to produce lactase. But where cow’s or mare’s milk became a major food source, humans began to produce lactase into adulthood—a genetic mutation had occurred.

Farming, or near-farming, evolved quite independently in different parts of the world. It was not a one-off invention.

as independent human communities accumulated more technological and ecological knowledge, there was a high probability, wherever they were, that they would eventually use the knowledge they had accumulated as foragers to develop farming techniques.

But they were likely to do so only if they needed the extra resources that farming could provide because, after all, farming was hard work and it meant ...

First, climates began to get warmer and wetter around the globe; second, foragers now occupied so much of the Earth that some regions were beginning to feel overpopulated. Both changes nudged humans toward farming.

While foragers normally thought of themselves as embedded within the biosphere, farmers saw the environment as something to be managed, cultivated, exploited, improved, and even conquered.

If your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents were all descended from the eldest children in each generation, then you could claim the seniority of an elder child for yourself and your whole family. Mechanisms like this made it possible to rank whole families and lineages by seniority. Here we see the beginnings of classes and castes.

The outlines of imperial power were already prefigured in the feasts and fights of ancient villages.

In some regions of Afro-Eurasia, however, such as Central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, the gains in productivity from secondary products were so great that entire communities began to live off their livestock, following them from grassland to grassland, living in tents, and returning to a nomadic way of life. We call such people pastoral nomads. Their mobility made pastoral nomads perfect connectors between distant regions, and eventually, they would carry ideas, technologies, people, goods, and even diseases right across Afro-Eurasia through the so-called Silk Roads.

But the payoff was huge in a region whose soils had been enriched for millennia by flooding from the major rivers.

Farming advanced by leaps and bounds in regions suitable for irrigation, including North India, China, Southeast Asia, and, eventually, some regions in the Americas.

Irrigation farming supported larger populations, but it also required increasing ...

tended to bind farming villages into larger social and p...

A city of fifty thousand people may not sound impressive today. But in its time, Uruk was a monster, perhaps the largest settled community that had ever existed in human history.

If you were a king, taking resources from your neighbors was one of the most important ways of growing your economy. And if you succeeded (think Alexander the Great), you would probably be admired, no matter how much misery you caused.

Roads were, after all, the arteries of empires.

Skillful rulers learned many ways of increasing their wealth. They tried to protect peasants from overexploitation, because they understood that most of their

wealth came from peasant villages. It was

dangerous to oppress peasants too much and sensible to protect them from enemy armies or predatory landlords and support them ...

As the Arthashastra pointed out, peasants were the economic foundation of each state, so wise ruler...

By two thousand years ago, such networks carried large amounts of goods, including silks, coins, glassware, and spices, right across Afro-Eurasia over the land routes known as the Silk Roads and through the sea routes of the Indian Ocean.

Four centuries later, early in the thirteenth century CE, the Mongol Empire was created by pastoral nomads led by Genghis Khan. Though it lasted for less than a century, it was the largest empire that had existed so far and the first to reach across the whole of Afro-Eurasia, from Korea to Eastern Europe.

As they looked for more energy and resources, rulers, entrepreneurs, and land-hungry peasants competed for new farmable lands and new forms of wealth, including furs, spices, and minerals.2 And they were always willing to push aside foragers if necessary. These

pressures drove peasants to settle in lands they might once have scorned, in the north of Scandinavia, for example, or in parts of Ukraine and Russia on the edges of the arid Eurasian steppes.

The new emperor and his advisers decided that the money spent on them could be put to better uses, such as defending the empire’s northern borders from pastoral nomadic invaders. Rulers with fewer resources and smaller populations had more reason to seek wealth beyond their borders.

In the same century, a rival Muslim empire emerged in the Indian subcontinent: the Mughal Empire, founded by Babur, a descendant of the Mongolian emperor, Genghis Khan.

Who would do this and when remained uncertain, though the intense mobilizational pressures in the Afro-Eurasian zone made it extremely likely that the breach would come from within this zone.

By the twentieth century, the noösphere had become a disruptive force for change within the entire biosphere.

European navigators broke through to the other world zones because they did not enjoy easy access to the rich markets of South and Southeast Asia. That meant they had to take risks if they were to get their share.

Study the world itself rather than what has been said about the world.

borrow from merchants. European rulers were generally keener to work with merchants than traditional rulers such as the Ming emperors of China had been because most European states had modest resources, fought endless wars, and were constantly short of cash. And rulers who borrowed from merchants were naturally eager to support commerce. In this way, there emerged a close symbiotic

relationship between European traders and rulers. Rulers protected and supported commerce, and in return they got the right to tax and profit from commercial wealth. This was the earliest and crudest form of capitalism, a system admired by European economists from Adam Smith to Karl Marx.

Though capitalism generated new forms of inequality, economists admired it because it was also good at generating both wealth and innovation.

For the most part, merchants had to use guile rather than force. That meant seeking out new information. They had to find new commodities and markets, and they had to trade efficiently and cut costs. Above all, they had to innovate if they wanted to outsmart their rivals. They had to find new ways of mobilizing and controlling flows of energy and resources. This helps explain why the increasingly capitalistic societies of Europe became both wealthier and more innovative in the centuries after Columbus first crossed the Atlantic.

The most important mega-innovations were usually those that released new flows of energy, such as fusion or photosynthesis.

Pressure to find new sources of energy would eventually conjure up the mega-innovations that we describe today as the fossil-fuels revolution. These gave humans access to flows of energy much greater than those provided by farming—the energy locked up in fossil fuels, energy that had accumulated not over a few decades but since the Carboniferous period, more than 360 million years earlier. In seams of coal, oil, and gas lay several hundred million years’ worth of buried sunlight in solid, liquid, and gaseous forms.

Seventeenth-century scientists had begun to understand how atmospheric pressure worked, and by the early eighteenth century, that knowledge was put to use in Newcomen steam engines to pump water from coal mines.

Not surprisingly, global levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide began to rise from about the middle of the nineteenth century. And as early as 1896, the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius recognized both that carbon dioxide was a greenhouse gas and that it was being generated in large enough amounts to start changing global climates.

There were unexpected side effects. Using steam to spin and weave textiles increased the demand for raw cotton, which stimulated cotton planting in the United States, Central Asia, and Egypt. Industrial production of textiles increased demand for subsidiary products such as artificial dyes and bleaches, which kick-started the modern chemicals industry, many of whose products came from coal.

Cheap energy encouraged experimentation and investment in many new technologies. One of the most important was electricity.

The destructive power of industrial weapons became clear during the American Civil War, the first real fossil-fuels war,

Man the food-gatherer reappears incongruously as information-gatherer. In this role, electronic man is no less a nomad than his paleolithic ancestors.

Within decades, Europe’s commercial and military power had undermined ancient states and lifeways. Textile production using spinning and weaving machines powered by steam engines ruined artisan textile producers in India, which had been the agrarian era’s leading producer of cotton cloth. As Britain gained political and military control of the Indian subcontinent, it locked in these imbalances by keeping Indian textiles out of British markets. Even the building of India’s major railroads benefited Britain more than India.

Most of the track and rolling stock was manufactured in Britain, and the huge Indian rail network was designed primarily

to move British troops quickly and cheaply, to export cheap Indian raw materials, and to import...