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

by Ian Morris

Through most of Earth’s history the winters were cold enough that it snowed at the poles and this snow froze, but normally th...

By 14 million years ago, however, declining volcanic activity had cooled Earth so much that at the South Pole, where there is a large landmass, ...

At the North Pole, where there is no landmass, ice melts more easily, but by 2.75 million years ago temperatures had dropped enough for...

This had huge consequences, because now whenever Milankovich cycles gave Earth less solar radiation, distributed more evenly across the year, the North Pole ice cap would expand onto northern Europe, Asia, and America, locking up more water, making the earth drier and the sea level lower, reflecting back more solar radiation, and reducing temperatures further still. Earth then spiraled down into an ice...

Depending on how you count, there have been between forty and fifty ice ages, and the two that spanned the period from 190,000 through 90,000 BCE—crucial millenni...

Lake Malawi, for instance, contained just one-twentieth as much water in 135,000 BCE as it does today. The tougher environment must have changed the rules for staying alive, which may explain why mutations favoring braininess began flourishing. It may also explain why we have found so few sites from this period; most protohumans probably died out. Some archaeologists and geneticists...

If this new theory is correct, the population crisis would have done several things at once. On the one hand, by shrinking the gene pool it would have made it easier for mutations to flourish; but on the other, if Homo sapiens bands became smaller they wou...

We should probably imagine that for a hundred thousand years tiny bands of protohumans eked out livings in Africa in unfriendly and unpredictable environments. They did not meet, interbreed, or exchange goods and information very often.

Genetic mutations flourished in these isolated pockets of people, some producing humans very like us, some not. Some groups figured out harpoons, many made beads, but most did neither, and the specter of extinction haunted them all.

These were dark days for Homo sapiens, but around seventy thousand years ago their luck changed. Eastern and southern Africa became warmer and wetter, which made hunting and gathering easier, an...

Modern Homo sapiens had been evolving for a good hundred thousand years, with a lot of trial, error, and extinctions, but when the climate improved, those populations with the most advantageous...

There were no monoliths; no Great Leap Forward; just a lot...

Within a few thousand years early humans reached a tipping point that was as much d...

Instead of dying out so often, bands of modern humans grew big enough and numerous enough to stay in regular contact, pooling their genes and know-how. Change became cumulative and the behavior of Hom...

once that happened, the days of biological distinctions between East a...

Out of Africa—Again Climate change is rarely simple, and while Homo sapiens’ homelands in eastern and southern Africa were getting wetter seventy thousa...

Our ancestors, multiplying rapidly in their home ranges, chose not to spread in that direction; instead, little bands wandered from what is now Somalia across a land bridge to...

The colonists moved fifty times faster than Homo erectus/ergaster had done when they left Africa, averaging more than a mile a year compared to the earlier ape-men’s thirty-five yards.

Between fifty thousand and forty thousand years ago a second wave of migrants probably moved through Egypt into southwest and central Asia, spreading from there into Europe.

Around 15,000 BCE humans crossed the land bridge linking Siberia and Alaska and/or sailed in short hops along its edge. By 12,000 BCE they had left coprolites (scientist-speak for dung) in caves in Oregon and seaweed in the mountains of Chile. (Some archaeologists think humans also crossed the Atlantic along the edge of ice sheets then linking Europe and America, though as yet this remains speculative.)

The situation in East Asia is less clear. A fully modern human skull from Liujiang in China may be 68,000 years old, but there are some technical problems with this date, and the oldest uncontroversial remains date back only to around 40,000 BCE. More digging will settle whether modern humans reached China relatively early or relatively late,19 but they certainly reached Japan by twenty thousand years ago.

Wherever the new humans went, they seem to have wrought havoc. The continents where earlier ape-men had never set foot were teeming with...

The first humans to enter New Guinea and Australia encountered four-hundred-pound flightless birds and one-ton lizards;...

The coincidence between the coming of Homo sapiens and the going of the giant animals is, to say the least, striking.

But there is less debate over the fact that when modern humans entered environments already occupied by ape-men, the ape-men became extinct.

Modern humans had entered Europe by 35,000 BCE, and within ten thousand years Neanderthals had vanished everywhere except the continent’s mountainous fringes.

At most sites, modern human deposits simply replace those associated with Neanderthals, suggesting that the change was sudden.

The bottom line is sex. If modern humans replaced Neanderthals in the Western Old World and Homo erectus in the Eastern regions without interbreeding, racist theories tracing contemporary Western rule back to prehistoric biological differences must be wrong. But was that what happened?

Modern Easterners, these (Western) scholars concluded, must have descended from these more primitive ape-men, while Westerners descended from the more advanced Neanderthals; and that might well explain why the West rules.

No one puts things so crudely today, but if we are serious about asking why the West rules we have to confront the possibility that Homo sapiens interbred with premodern peoples, and that Eastern populations remain biologically less advanced than Western. We will never be able to excavate copulating cavemen to see whether Homo sapiens merged their genes with Neanderthals in the West and with Peking Man in the East, but fortunately we do not need to, because we can observe the consequences of their trysts in our own bodies.

In practice, though, the fact that half the DNA in your body comes from your mother’s line and half from your father’s makes disentangling the information as difficult as unscrambling an egg.

Geneticists found a clever way around this problem by focusing on mitochondrial DNA. Rather than being reproduced sexually, like most DNA, mitochondrial DNA is transmitted solely by women (men inherit mitochondrial DNA from their mothers but do not pass it on).

Once upon a time we all had the same mitochondrial DNA, so any difference between the mitochondrial DNA in my body and that in yours must be the resu...

In 1987 a team led by the geneticist Rebecca Cann published a study of mitochondrial DNA in living pe...

They distinguished about 150 types within their data and realized that no matter how they shuffled the statistics, th...

first, that there is more genetic diversity in Africa than anywhere else; second, that the diversity in the rest of the world is just a subset of the diversity within Africa; and third, that the deepest—and therefo...

The conclusion was unavoidable: the last female ancestor shared by everyone in the world must have lived in Africa—African ...

As Cann and her colleagues observed, she was “one lucky mother.” Using standard estimates of mutation rates in mitochondrial DNA, they conc...

but no matter who redid the samples or the numbers, the results came out much the same. The only real change was to push Eve’s lifetime closer to 150,000 years ago.

African Eve got company at the end of the 1990s when technical advances allowed geneticists to examine nuclear DNA on the Y chromosome. Like mitochondrial DNA, this is reproduced asexually, but is transmitted only through the male line.

The studies found that Y-chromosome DNA also has the greatest variety and deepest lineages in Africa, pointing to an African Adam living between sixty thousand and ninety thousand years ago, and an origin f...

In 2010, geneticists added one more detail: immediately after they left Africa, Homo sapiens copulated enough with Neanderthals to pick up a trace of their DNA, and they the...

The unraveling of the full Neanderthal genome has now shown that this went too far, and that Neanderthals did once inspire enough passion among Homo sapiens to make a small mark on our DNA; but it also showed that that mark is exactly the same all the way from France to China. Everywhere in Eurasia, people (in large groups) are all much the same.

other scholars drove what looks to be the final nail into the multiregionalist coffin. Their sophisticated multiple-regression analysis of measurements from more than six thousand skulls showed that when we control for climate, the variations in skull types around the world are in fact consistent with the DNA evidence.

Our dispersals out of Africa in the last sixty thousand years wiped the slate clean of all the genetic differences that had emerged over the previous half million years.

Racist theories grounding Western rule in biology have no basis in fact. People, in large groups, are much the same wherever we find them, and we have all inherited the same restless, inventive minds from our African ance...

if the racial theories are wrong, where did East and West begin? The answer has seemed obvious to many Europeans for more than a hundred years: even if biology does not enter into it, they have confidently asserted, Europeans have just been culturally superior to Easterners ever since there were such things as modern humans. The evidence that convinced them began to appear in 1879.

Sautuola saw bison, deer, layer upon layer of multicolored animals covering twenty feet of the cave’s ceiling, some curled up, some cavorting, some leaping gaily (Figure 1.4). Each was beautifully, movingly rendered.

Sautuola’s first reaction was to laugh, but quickly he became “so enthusiastic,” Maria recalled, “that he could hardly speak.” He gradually convinced himself that the paintings really were ancient (the latest studies suggest some are more than 25,000 years old). Back in 1879, though, no one knew this. In fact, when Sautuola presented the site at the International Congress of Anthropology and Prehistoric Archaeology in Lisbon in 1880, the professionals laughed him off the stage.

Nothing quite like these cave paintings has been found anywhere else in the world. The modern human migration out of Africa had swept away all distinctions created by the Movius Line and all biological divergences between earlier species of ape-men; but should we locate the true beginning of a special (and superior) Western tradition thirty thousand years ago in a uniquely creative culture that filled northern Spain and southern France with prehistoric Picassos?