The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

by Tamim Ansary

Tool making flourished once we had language because we no longer had to watch somebody making something in order to make the same thing. People could describe what they’d done, and others could then duplicate those steps. After all, people now lived in a world that included lots of things they themselves had never physically seen. If someone in a group had seen it, everyone else had as good as seen it, for it was now part of the furniture in the symbolic world that others of this person’s group inhabited. Skills and knowledge could accumulate in that symbolic world, as each generation built on what was known in the past to make the tools of the future.

I say belief system because I hesitate to use the term religion here. Religion means something so specific to most of us that we are apt to understand other religions within the framework of our own. But since every religion is a frame of reference, situating one framework inside another is bound to distort both. Belief system, therefore, is the term I prefer, generic though it be.

Buddhist ideas moving east, however, found richer soil. It’s not that the dominant Chinese paradigm digested Buddhism all that readily. Buddha and Confucius were like oil and water. They offered internally consistent but entirely different conceptual gestalts. Buddha was all about the journey of the individual soul; Confucius was all about the individual’s social context. Buddha was all about the cosmos; Confucius was all about family and empire. Buddha was all about detaching from this material world. Confucius was all about conducting oneself gracefully in the material world. Buddha was all about merging into the eternal. Confucius was all about behaving properly in the here and now.

Spice, in this context, is an umbrella term for trade goods that were rare, compact, light, transportable, marketable, and more or less imperishable. Even diamonds counted. Spices were generally things people wanted, not things people needed. They indulged the human urge for pleasure, luxury, recreation, ecstasy, and orgasm. Spices, in this larger sense, were a dominant factor in the global economy thousands of years ago and they still are today. (Think drug trade.)

By the time Christ was crucified, over 25 percent of the empire’s population were slaves.

Silver is just abundant enough to have value as a commodity but just scarce enough to function as a working currency for a whole (and complex) society.

Historians sometime argue that science and technology run on separate tracks, each advancing independently of the other. In this view, scientists develop deep theories; inventors come up with gizmos. Newton plumbed the nature of light, but he didn’t invent the prism. Boyle worked out the formula for calculating the pressure exerted by expanding gas, but a bunch of other guys invented the steam engine, and they knew nothing of Boyle’s law. They were just trying to improve on a pump that was being used for the very practical purpose of emptying water out of mines.