Why the West Rules—for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future

by Ian Morris

That said, other finds suggest—indirectly—that ape-men in the Eastern Old World could communicate, after a fashion.

The implication, once again, is that Homo erectus could communicate well enough to cross the sea.

Nor could you get through to them by drawing pictures; there is no good evidence that art made any more sense to Homo erectus than it does to chimpanzees. The Peking Men that evolved in the Eastern Old World were very different from us.

The First Westerners: Neanderthals But were Peking Men also different from the ape-men that were evolving in the Western Old World?

The hints of cannibalism grabbed headlines, but paleoanthropologists were even more excited by the ways in which Atapuerca differed from Zhoukoudian.

The Atapuerca skulls had bigger brain cavities than those of Homo erectus and rather modern-looking noses and cheekbones. The paleoanthropologists concluded that a new species was emerging, which they called Homo antecessor (“Ancestral Man”).

Here at last we have some incontrovertible facts. By 600,000 years ago, when Heidelberg Man came onto the scene and Peking Man ruled the roost at Zhoukoudian, there were definitely different species of Homo in the Eastern and Western parts of the Old World: in the East the small-brained Homo erectus and in the West the larger-brained Homo antecessor and Heidelberg Man.14

Yet Heidelberg Man does seem to have been a lot smarter than earlier ape-men or contemporary Peking Man. Before Heidelberg Man showed up, stone tools had barely changed for a million years, but by 500,000 BCE Heidelberg Man was making thinner and therefore lighter versions, striking more delicate flakes using soft (probably wood) hammers as well as just banging rocks together.

Zhoukoudian’s occupants changed little between 670,000 and 410,000 years ago, but Western ape-men continued evolving across this period.

The Spanish excavators classify most of them as Heidelberg Man, but many foreign scholars think they look more like yet another species—the Neanderthals.

The Atapuerca finds suggest that Neanderthals emerged gradually across a quarter of a million years. Rather than climate change or expansion into new areas providing conditions for a few mutants to out-breed and replace Heidelberg Man, this may have been a case of genetic drift, with many different kinds of ape-men developing alongside one another.

“Classic” Neanderthals appeared by 200,000 years ago and within another hundred thousand years spread over much of Europe and east into Siberia, though so far as we know they did not reach China or Indonesia.

Despite having much heavier bones than most ape-men, Neanderthals got injured a lot; the closest modern parallel to their bone-breakage patterns, in fact, comes from professional rodeo riders.

Archaeologists had long suspected that Neanderthals got some of their meat by eating one another, just like Peking Man, and in the 1990s finds in France proved this beyond a doubt. The bones of half a dozen Neanderthals were found mixed with those of five red deer. The ape-men and deer had been treated exactly the same way: first they were cut into pieces with stone tools, then the flesh was sliced off their bones, and finally their skulls and long bones were smashed to get at their brains and marrow.

For one thing, Neanderthals had big brains—even bigger brains than ours, in fact, averaging around 1,520 cc to our 1,350 cc. They also had wider neural canals than the Turkana Boy, and these thick spinal cords gave them more manual dexterity. Their stone tools were better made and more varied than Peking Men’s, with specialized scrapers, blades, and points. Traces of tar on a stone point found embedded in a wild ass’s neck in Syria suggest that it had been a spearhead attached to a stick.

Even the most austere scientists agree that Neanderthals—by contrast with all earlier kinds of Homo and their contemporaries at Zhoukoudian—showed something we can only call “humanity.”

Some paleoanthropologists even think that Neanderthals’ big brains and wide neural canals allowed them to talk more or less like us. Like modern humans they had hyoid bones, which anchor the tongue and let the larynx make the complex movements needed for speech.

FOXP2 came to geneticists’ attention because sometimes it just needs one thing to go wrong for a whole system to crash. A mouse chews through a two-cent wire and my twenty-thousand-dollar car won’t start; FOXP2 malfunctions and the brain’s elaborate speech networks seize up.

What is less well known is that back in 1997, in a scene reminiscent of Jurassic Park, scientists in Leipzig, Germany, extracted ancient DNA from the arm of the original Neanderthal skeleton found in the Neander Valley in 1856. This was an extraordinary feat, since DNA begins breaking down immediately upon death, and only tiny fragments survive in such ancient material.

but in 2007 the process of sequencing a draft of the Neanderthal genome (which was completed in 2009) produced a remarkable discovery—that Neanderthals also had the FOXP2 gene.

Maybe this means that Neanderthals were as chatty as us; or maybe that FOXP2 was not the key to speech. One day we will surely know, but for now all we can do is observe the consequences of Neanderthals’ interactions. They lived in bigger groups than earlier types of ape-men, hunted more effectively, occupied territories for longer periods, and cared about one another in ways earlier ape-men could not.

Whether that is right or not, though, if the time machine I invoked earlier could transport you to Shanidar as well as to Zhoukoudian, you would see real behavioral differences between Eastern Peking Man and Western Neanderthals. You would also be hard-pressed to avoid concluding that the West was more developed than the East.

This may already have been true 1.6 million years ago, when the Movius Line took shape, but it was definitely true a hundred thousand years ago.

Again the specter of a racist long-term lock-in theory rears its head: Does the West rule today because modern Europeans are the heirs of genetically superior Neanderthal stock, while A...

Baby Ste...

Europeans do not descend from superior Neanderthals, and Asians do not descend from inferior Homo erectus. Starting around seventy thousand years ago, a new species of Homo—us—drifted out of Africa and completely replaced all other forms.

Our kind, Homo sapiens (“Wise Man”), did interbreed with Neanderthals in the process. Modern Eurasians share 1 to 4 percent of their genes with the Neanderthals, but everywhere from France to China it is the same 1 to 4 percent.

The spread of modern humans wiped the slate clean. Evolution of course continues, and local variations in skin color, face shape, height, lactose tolerance, and countless other things have appeared in the two thousand generations since we began spreading across the globe. But when we get right down to it, these are trivi...

The evolution of our species and its conquest of the planet established the biological unity of mankind and thereby the baseline for ...

Humanity’s biological unity rules out race-based theories. Yet despite the overwhelming importance of these processes, much about the ori...

By the 1980s archaeologists knew that skeletons more or less like ours first appeared around 150,000 years ago on sites in eastern and southern Africa. The new species had flatter faces, more r...

Homo sapiens tools and behavior looked much like those of earlier ape-men, and—again like other ape-men, but utterly unlike us—early Homo sapiens seemed to have had just one way of doing things. Regardless of where archaeologists dug in Africa, they kept coming up with the same, not particularly exciting, kinds of finds.

Unless, that is, they excavated Homo sapiens sites less than fifty thousand years old. On these younger sites Homo sapiens started doing all kinds of interesting things, and doing them in lots of different ways.

For instance, archaeologists identify no fewer than six distinct styles of stone tools in use in Egypt’s Nile Valley between 50,000 and 25,000 BCE, whereas before then a single fashion prevailed ...

Humans had invented style. Chipping stone tools this way, rather than that way, now marked a group off as different from their neighbors; chipping them a third way marked a new generation as different from their elders. Change remained glacial by the standards we are used to, when pulling out a four-year-old cell phone that can’t make movies, locate me on a map, or ch...

At site after site across Africa after 50,000 BCE archaeologists find ornaments of bone, animal tooth, and ivory; and these are just the activities that leave remains for us to excavate. Most likely all those other forms of personal adornment we know so well—hairstyles, makeup, tattoos, clothes—appeared around the same time.

And in all these ways, how unlike an ape-man. By 50,000 BCE modern humans were thinking and acting on a whole different plane from their ancestors. Something extraordinary seemed to have happened—something so profound, so magical, that in the 1990s it moved normally sober scientists to flights of rhetoric. Some spoke of a Great Leap Forward;18 others of the Dawn of Human Culture or even the Big Bang of Human Consciousness.

They required us to imagine not one but two transformations, the first (around 150,000 years ago) producing modern human bodies but not modern human behavior, and the second (around 50,000 years ago) producing modern human behavior but leaving our bodies unchanged.

The most popular explanation was that the second transformation—the Great Leap—began with purely neurological changes that rewired the brain to make modern kinds of speech possible, which in turn drove a revolution in behavior; but just what this rewiring consisted of (and why there were no related changes to skulls) remained a mystery.

The big problem archaeologists had in those far-off days when I was an undergraduate was that they simply had not excavated very many sites dating between 200,000 and 50,000 years ago. As new finds accumulated across the 1990s, though, it began to become clear that we did not need monoliths after all; in fact, the Great Leap Forward itself began to dissolve into a series of Baby Steps Forward, spread across tens of thousands of years.

We now know of several pre-50,000-BCE sites with signs of surprisingly modern-looking behavior.

Yet Homo sapiens not only headed for the beach—distinctly modern behavior—but when they got there they were smart enough to gather, open, and cook shellfish. They also chipped stones into the small, light points that archaeologists call bladelets, perfect as tips for javelins or arrows—something that neither Peking Man nor Europe’s Neanderthals ever did.

At each of these sites we find traces of one or two kinds of modern behavior, but never of the whole suite of activities that becomes familiar after 50,000 BCE.

Geologists realized back in the 1830s that the miles-long, curving lines of rubble found in parts of Europe and North America must have been created by ice sheets pushing debris before them (not, as had previously been thought, by the biblical flood). The concept of an “ice age” was born, although another fifty years passed before scientists understood exactly why ice ages happen.

Earth’s orbit around the sun is not perfectly round, because the gravity of other planets also pulls on us. Over the course of a hundred thousand years our orbit goes from being almost circular (as it is now) to being much more elliptical, then back again.

Earth’s tilt on its axis also shifts, on a 22,000-year rhythm, as does the way the planet wobbles around this axis, ...

Scientists call these Milankovich cycles, after a Serbian mathematician who worked them out, longhand, while interned during World War I (this was a very gentlemanly internment, leaving Milankovich free to spend all...

The patterns combine and recombine in bewilderingly complex ways, but on a roughly hundred-thousand-year schedule they take us from receiving slightly more solar radiation than the average, distributed slightly unevenly across the year, to re...

None of this would matter much except for the way Milankovich cycles interact with two geological trends. First, over the last 50 million years continental drift has pushed most land north of the equator, and having one hemisphere mostly land and the other mostly ...

Second, volcanic activity has declined across the same period. There is (for the time being) less carbon dioxide in our atmosphere than there was in the age of the dinosaurs, and because of this the planet has—over ...