Origin Story: A Big History of Everything

by David Christian

We can be pretty sure that the first farmers took up farming reluctantly, because living standards seem to have declined in early agrarian villages. The skeletons found in early farming villages in the Fertile Crescent are usually shorter than those of neighboring foragers, which suggests that their diets were less varied. Though farmers could produce more food, they were also more likely to starve, because, unlike foragers, they relied on a small number of staple crops, and if those crops failed, they were in serious trouble. The bones of early farmers show evidence of vitamin deficiencies, probably caused by regular periods of starvation between harvests. They also show signs of stress, associated, perhaps, with the intensive labor required for plowing, harvesting crops, felling trees, maintaining buildings and fences, and grinding grains.

In summary, warmer climates made village life and farming possible in a few favored regions, population pressure sometimes made it necessary, and the reserve knowledge accumulated by foragers over many millennia provided the start-up technologies for the first farmers.

Even better were seasonal plants with tubers or fat seeds that stored up nutritional goodies to help humans survive dry periods. Wheat and rice, if harvested at their peak, provided such concentrated sources of nutrition that they were worth the huge effort required to plant, protect, water, harvest, and store them.9

Animals, too, varied in their usefulness. Zebras were too ornery to be tamed. Lions and tigers were too dangerous and not particularly tasty. But herd animals such as goats, cattle, and horses were easier to control, particularly if humans could stand in for the leader of the herd. If the animals were grass-eaters, they could turn grass into meat, milk, fibers, and power, enabling humans to exploit the world’s vast grasslands. And their meat was usually tasty and nutritious.

As farmers spread, they transformed their surroundings. Everywhere, farmers cut back forests, built villages, plowed up the land, drove off pests, and dug up weeds. By its very nature, farming required a manipulative attitude to the environment. 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. And while collective learning gave farmers the knowledge they needed to manipulate their environments, farming gave them the food and energy flows they needed to multiply and to transform their surroundings over larger and larger areas and with increasing power and virtuosity.

Traditional rules of kinship were challenged as villages and networks of villages grew larger.12 As early farming villages expanded, built new links with neighbors, and sometimes turned into small towns, traditional rules of kinship and family had to be modified or supplemented with new rules about property, rights, ranking, and power. The traditional social modules of one or two hundred people had to be linked into larger networks that were, inevitably, hierarchical. Everywhere, as farming spread, we begin to see new and more hierarchical structures that overlay village communities organized by traditional kinship rules.

With more people and more exchanges, the machinery of collective learning operated with increasing synergy and power. Many innovations offered incremental improvements to farming in different areas, and some innovations were game changers. Two particularly important innovations were the domestication of large animals and the emergence of large-scale irrigation.

Populations rose fast as farming methods improved and farming spread. It had taken at least one hundred thousand years for human populations to reach five million, at the end of the last ice age. By five thousand years ago, human numbers had quadrupled, rising to about twenty million. By two thousand years ago, there were two hundred million humans, forty times the number at the end of the last ice age.

But population growth was never steady. Everywhere, it was interrupted by catastrophes. Disease, famine, war, and death—the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—flourished in the agrarian era. As mentioned earlier, unlike nomadic camps, villages accumulated waste and attracted vermin, so diseases spread fast. Where new diseases appeared—infections for which people had no immunity, such as smallpox—it was not uncommon for half the population to die. Farmers were also more vulnerable to famine than foragers were, because they relied on so few crops. When food began to run out, weeds, acorns, and tree bark could support people only for so long, and the very young and very old suffered most and died first. As populations grew, villages fought over land, water, and other resources. Their battles summoned the Third Horseman, war, who could be even more ruinous than disease and famine and often worked alongside them. Humans had always fought, but in farming societies more people were involved, and weapons became more lethal as fighters acquired metal spears, chariots, and siege engines. The Fourth Horseman, death, rode behind the other three.

Surplus wealth meant surplus people. As productivity rose, not everyone needed to farm, so new social roles appeared. Many people became vagrants or slaves, but other nonfarmers ended up controlling much of society’s surplus wealth because they could specialize in useful social roles. They could become full-time priests or potters or soldiers or philosophers or rulers. Specialists became expert at their limited roles. But the division of labor also created new forms of dependence. As social roles multiplied, human societies, like the first metazoans, became more networked, more differentiated, more interdependent, and more complex. And new linking structures arose, the social equivalents of skeletons, muscles, and nervous systems.

As specialization increased, so did inequality. The earliest farming communities were reasonably egalitarian, even when they exceeded the ancient community maximum of 150 to 200 people. The Neolithic town of Çatalhüyük (in modern-day Turkey) flourished eight to nine thousand years ago, and it shows little variation in the size of domestic dwellings, even though its population may have reached several thousand. Eventually, however, we start finding wealthy minorities, and more and more of them.

Here, powerful figures, known to anthropologists as big men or chiefs, built their power on respect and the loyal support of family, allies, and followers. But their power was always precarious. If they failed to distribute enough wealth and privilege to maintain the loyalty of their followers, they could swiftly lose their power, their wealth, and sometimes their lives. Why follow someone who cannot coerce you and from whom you receive no benefits?

Sometime around five thousand years ago, the first writing appeared in Uruk, on clay tablets in the temples of Eanna. More complexity meant more information, and writing was the new technology that allowed the wealthy and powerful to keep track of the increasing resources and energy flows at their disposal. Almost all the earliest writing in Mesopotamia consists of inventories—so many cows and bulls, so many sheep, so many bales of linen, so many slaves. They tell us that we are now in a world of rapidly increasing inequality in which networks of rulers, aristocrats, and officials control flows of information and power that enable them to mobilize the energy and produce of large numbers of slaves, farmers, and artisans.

Viewed ecologically, states and their rulers represent a new step in the food chain, a new trophic level. We have seen how energy from sunlight enters the biosphere through photosynthesis and travels from plants to herbivores to carnivores. And we have seen how most of that energy gets wasted at each trophic level, in a sort of garbage tax. That leaves much less energy to support the higher levels, which is why there are fewer lions than antelopes. Agriculture increased the resources available to humans, so states could add one more trophic level at the top of the hierarchy. Rulers and nobles and officials began to squeeze wealth from the labor and produce of peasants, who in turn got their energy and food from farming. States used these new flows of labor, produce, and energy to pay for the armies, bureaucracies, palaces, and goods that made them powerful and wealthy.

To increase their wealth and power, traditional rulers had three main options. The most foresighted encouraged peasants to plow up unfarmed land and urged merchants to seek out new commodities. But many sought more rapid gains by using two riskier and more coercive strategies. They could press harder on their own populations, at the risk of popular uprisings or economic breakdown. Or they could gamble on taking wealth from neighboring states by sending in their armies. This was dangerous, but it often worked, and that is why most traditional elites were warlike. That also explains why, when rulers had statues made in their honor, they usually posed wearing armor and carrying weapons.

For states, as for living organisms, the ultimate source of most energy flows is photosynthesis, which allows farmers to capture energy from sunlight. In states, as in living organisms, flows of energy must be managed with care. Too small, and the state starves. Too large, and subjects revolt or starve, and flows of energy and resources dry up. Just as living organisms maintain electrochemical gradients that drive flows of energy, states maintain gradients of persuasion and coercion. They use law, education, and religion to persuade their subjects that their power is just. But they also maintain armies and disciplined groups of coercers so they can compel obedience when persuasion fails. This is why the Arthashastra treats punishment (danda) as the foundation of statehood. Coercion was fundamental to mobilization in all agrarian civilizations, which helps explain the importance of warfare and the pervasiveness of physical punishments in society and within households and families.

Everywhere, writing evolved as a way of recording politically useful information. States have rules, just as cells have genomes. In states, the rules can be found in law books, in the pronouncements of rulers and local officials, in manuals such as the Arthashastra, carved on stone pillars, in the collective wisdom of rulers and officials, and embedded in religious traditions.

These were gods whose worshippers saw them as universal rulers, just as the empires that worshipped them claimed to rule over the known world. All the major world religions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as the religious traditions of Rome and Greece, of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism, and the religious traditions of American empires, incorporated superhuman gods. And for the most part, rulers and the leaders of institutionalized religious traditions worked closely together because they understood how powerful religious beliefs could be as a way of generating support for systems from which they both benefited.

By two thousand years ago, there were large empires right across Afro-Eurasia. They included the Roman, Sassanian, Kushan, Mauryan, and Han Empires. And there were many smaller semidependent states in between. During the next millennium, between two thousand and one thousand years ago, some of the larger empires collapsed, including the largest of all, the Roman and Han Empires. Disease and imperial breakdown slowed growth for almost a millennium.

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 human numbers increased, so did the pressure to find new land, new resources, new sources of wealth. Siberian foragers and reindeer herders came under growing pressure from tax officials, fur traders,

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. Mobilizational pressure thickened and diversified networks within Afro-Eurasia, increasing their size and the wealth and diversity of the goods and ideas they exchanged through the Silk Roads or through the maritime routes of the Indian Ocean.

But after 1433, under a new emperor, Hongxi, the Ming abandoned these expeditions. China was wealthy and pretty self-sufficient, so Zheng He’s expeditions had little commercial value. Besides, they were extremely expensive. 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.

So powerful was the shock from linking the different world zones that, within just a few centuries, human societies had crossed the eighth threshold of increasing complexity. The change was fast because it occurred in a globalized world. In the past, collective learning had worked at local or regional scales, which is why it took ten thousand years for farmers to spread around the planet. In a world of global networks, it took just a few centuries to transform much of Earth. This was a change as momentous as anything that had happened in the entire four-billion-year history of the biosphere. Suddenly, humans found themselves linked within a single global sphere of thought: the noösphere. By the twentieth century, the noösphere had become a disruptive force for change within the entire biosphere.

Many, perhaps most, of the early encounters between people from the different world zones were violent, chaotic, and destructive. Suspicion of strangers played a role. But so did the many differences in population densities, technologies, patterns of social and military organization, and even resistance to diseases that had accumulated over many millennia. There were winners and losers, and for the losers, the outcomes could be catastrophic. Like the appearance of the first oxygen atmosphere or the sudden death of the dinosaurs, this was an example of what the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter termed creative destruction—the constant, often violent replacement of the old by the new, which Schumpeter saw as the very heart of modern capitalism. Many societies were ruined, and many lives destroyed. But there was creation, too, because the sheer scale of the first global-exchange networks synergized collective learning on a planetary scale, releasing huge flows of information, energy, wealth, and power that would eventually transform human societies throughout the world.

Information flowed down these gradients alongside wealth, and information would prove equally important. The invention of efficient new ways of printing by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-fifteenth century magnified the impact of new information flows. Almost thirteen million books were published between 1450 and 1500, and more than three hundred million between 1700 and 1750.5 Books, and the information they stored, ceased to be a rare, pricey luxury and became an everyday acquisition for people with education. And, just as arbitrage profits stimulated European commerce, huge new flows of information stimulated European science and technology.

Dazzling new flows of wealth and information had one more powerful effect: they stimulated the commercial forms of mobilization often described as capitalism that were driven by gradients of both wealth and information. For the most part, traditional rulers had mobilized wealth with the threat of coercion, the promise of protection, and appeals to religious and legal authorities. But in all civilizations, merchants had also mobilized a lot of wealth through commerce. Commercial mobilization depended on arbitrage, on buying cheap in one region and selling dear somewhere else. To succeed, merchants needed wealth to invest and information about what to invest it in. The steep gradients of wealth and information in the first global-exchange networks opened such vast commercial opportunities for European merchants and entrepreneurs that their wealth and political influence increased until even emperors, such as the Holy Roman emperor Charles V, began to borrow from merchants.

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. To get a sense of the energies locked up in fossil fuels, imagine carrying a car full of passengers over your head and running very, very fast for several hours, then remind yourself that a few gallons of gasoline pack that much energy and more (because a lot of the energy is wasted).

In some regions, though, wood was scarce. In England, as populations grew, cities expanded (particularly London), and commerce boomed, demand for energy began to outstrip supplies. England was one of the first countries in the world to feel the energy squeeze. But, unlike most countries, England had a fallback. It had large reserves of coal quite close to the surface, much of it near rivers or the coast, so it could be transported cheaply and easily by sea or canals to the major cities, including London. English manufacturers and households began switching over to coal. By the seventeenth century, English brewers, brickmakers, and bakers were using coal, and Londoners began to complain about the city’s foul air. By 1700, coal was producing 50 percent of English energy.

But there was a problem. As demand for coal increased, coal miners had to dig deeper mines, which soon filled up with water, so getting more coal depended on building efficient pumps to drain mines. In England the incentives to solve this technological problem were greater than anywhere, so designing cheap, efficient pumps became a major goal for entrepreneurs and inventors. The combination of new science and widespread mechanical skills provided the intellectual background needed to solve the problem. 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.