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

by Ian Morris

The answer, perhaps surprisingly, lies in the frozen wastes of Antarctica. Every year snow falls there, burying previous snows, and compressing them into thin layers of ice. These layers are like a chronicle of ancient weather. By separating them, climatologists can measure their thickness, telling us how much snow fell; establish the balance between isotopes of oxygen, revealing temperatures; and compare the amounts of carbon dioxide and methane, illuminating greenhouse effects.

The results these supermen and -women of science extracted from the ice make one thing very clear: the world the Altamira artists lived in was cold. Temperatures had started tumbling again after modern humans left Africa, and around twenty thousand years ago—when more artists were daubing ocher and charcoal on cave walls than ever before or since—the last ice age reached its chilling climax. Average temperatures stood 14°F below those of recent times.

That made a staggering difference. Mile-thick glaciers covered northern Asia, Europe, and America, locking up so much water that the sea level was more than three hundred feet lower than today. You could have walked from Africa to England, Australia, or America without ever laying eyes on the sea.

Even in the least forbidding regions, within 40 degrees of the equator, short summers, meager rainfall, and reduced levels of carbon dioxide in the air limited plant growth and kept animal (including human) populations low. Things were as bad as in the worst days before modern humans left Africa.

Life was easier in what are now the tropics than it was in Siberia, but wherever archaeologists look, they find that people adapted to the Ice Age in rather similar ways. They lived in tiny bands.

They learned when different plants ripened and where to find them; when animals migrated ahead of the seasons and where they could intercept them; and they followed both around the landscape. Those who did not learn these things starved.

Such tiny bands would have struggled to reproduce themselves. Like modern hunter-gatherers in marginal environments, they must have come together from time to time to exchange marriage partners, trade goods, tell stories, and perhaps speak to their gods, spirits, and ancestors. These gatherings would have been the most exciting social events on the calendar.

The obvious question, though, is why—if these hard facts of life applied all across Africa, Asia, and Europe—we find such spectacular cave paintings only in western Europe.

the cave paintings died out after 11,500 BCE and many millennia passed before we know of anything to equal them.

Perhaps we should ask instead why the cave paintings ended, because once we do so it starts to look like the astonishing finds from prehistoric Europe have as much to do with geography and climate as with any special Western culture.

Through most of the Ice Age, northern Spain and southern France were excellent hunting grounds, where herds of reindeer migrated from summer to winter pastures and back again. But when temperatures started rising about fifteen thousand years ago (more on this in Chapter 2) the reindeer stopped migrating this far south in winter, and the hunters followed them northward.

cannot be a coincidence that western European cave painting declined at just the same time. Fewer and fewer artists crawled under the ground with their animal-fat lamps and sticks of ocher. Sometime around 13,500 years ago the very last artist walked away. He or she probably did not realize it, but on that day the ancient tradition died. Darkness fell i...

Why did beautiful cave paintings not move steadily northward across Europe after 11,500 BCE as hunters followed the retreating reindeer? Probably for the very good reason that northern European...

Whenever this happy coincidence failed to arise, people must have gathered nearer to or even above the surface. Exposed to wind, sun, and rain for twenty thousand years, few traces of their artwork survive.

“Few traces” is not the same as “no traces,” though, and sometimes we get lucky. At the wonderfully named Apollo 11 Cave in Namibia, slabs of stone with drawings of rhinos and zebras peeled off the wall, fell to the floor, and were preserved under deposits that formed between 19,000 and 26,000 years ago,

Ice Age humans outside western Europe, lacking the conditions that made Chauvet and Altamira what they were, apparently found other outlets for their creativity.

There is precious little evidence that earlier ape-men felt any creative urges at all, but imagination seems to be hardwired into Homo sapiens.

Once again, people (in large groups) all seem to be much the same, wherever we find them. For all its splendor, Altamira did not make the West different from the rest.

Technological, intellectual, and biological differences accumulated for more than a million and a half years after the first ape-men left Africa, dividing the Old World into a Neanderthal/Homo sapiens West and a Homo erectus East.

Around a hundred thousand years ago the West was characterized by relatively advanced technology and even hints of humanity, while t...

but when fully modern humans moved out of Africa sixty thousand years ago th...

Though the cavemen shivering around their campfires twenty thousand years ago could not know it, their world had begun moving back toward warmth. Over the next ten thousand years the combination of climate change and their own superfast brains would transform geography, generating distinct regional ways of life that have continued to this very day.

East and West began to mean something.

The consequences of global warming were mind-boggling. In two or three centuries around 17,000 BCE the sea level rose forty feet as the glaciers that had blanketed northern America, Europe, and Asia melted. The area between Turkey and Crimea, where the waves of the Black Sea now roll (Figure 2.1), had been a low-lying basin during ...

Earth’s changing orbit set off a wild seesaw of warming and cooling, feast and famine.

Figure 2.2 shows how the ratios between two isotopes of oxygen in the Antarctic ice cores mentioned in Chapter 1 zigzagged back and forth as the climate changed.

Only after about 14,000 BCE, when melting glaciers stopped dumping icy water into the oceans, did the world clearly start taking two steps toward warmth for every one back toward freezing. Around 12,700 BCE these steps turned into a gallop, and within a single lifespan the globe warmed by about ...

We might do better, though, to imagine an anything-but-timeless Great Chain of Energy.

Gravitational energy structures the universe. It turned the primeval cosmic soup into hydrogen and helium and then turned these simple elements into stars. Our sun works as a great nuclear reactor converting gravitational into electromagnetic energy, and plants on Earth photosynthesize a tiny portion of this into chemical energy. Animals then consume plants, metabolizing chemical energy into kinetic energy. The interplay between solar and other planets’ gravities shapes the earth’s orbit, determining how much electromagnetic energy we get, how much chemical energy plants create, and how much kinetic energy animals make from it; and that determines everything else.

Around 12,700 BCE, Earth leaped up the Great Chain of Energy. More sunlight meant more plants, more animals, and more choices for humans, about how much to eat, how much to work, and how much to reproduce.

For every human alive around 18,000 BCE (maybe half a million) there were a dozen people in 10,000 BCE

Just how people experienced global warming depended on where they lived. In the southern hemisphere the great oceans moderated the impact of climate change, but the north saw dramatic contrasts.

For foragers in the pre–Black Sea Basin, warming was a disaster, and things were little better for people living on coastal plains. They had enjoyed some of the Ice Age world’s richest pickings, but a warmer world meant higher sea levels. Every year they retreated as waves drowned a little ...

Yet for most humans in the northern hemisphere, moving up the Great Chain of Energy was an unalloyed good. People could follow plants and other animals north into regions that were previously too cold to support them, and by 13,000 BCE (the exact date is disputed) humans had fanned out across America, where no ape-man had trod before. By 11,500 BCE people reached the continent’s so...

Plants and animals that had clustered in this temperate zone during the Ice Age multiplied wildly after 12,700 BCE, particularly, it seems, at each end of Asia, where wild cereals—forerunners of barley, wheat, and rye in southwest Asia and of rice and millet in East Asia—evolved big seeds that foragers could boil into mush or grind up and bake into bread. All they needed to do was wait until the plants ripened, shake them, and collect the seeds.

Experiments with modern southwest Asian wild grains suggest that a ton of edible seeds could have been extracted from just two and a half acres of plants; each calorie of energy spent on harvesting earned fifty calories of food. It was the golden age of foraging.

Either way, we have evolved to like one another, and our ancestors chose to exploit Earth’s movement up the Great Chain of Energy by forming bigger permanent groups. By 12,500 BCE it was no longer unusual to find forty or fifty people living together within the Lucky Latitudes, and some groups passed the hundred mark.

In the Ice Age, people had tended to set up camp, eat what plants and kill what animals they could find, then move on to another location, then another, and another.

People in China began making pottery (a bad idea if you plan to move base every few weeks) as early as 16,000 BCE, and in highland Peru hunter-gatherers were building walls and keeping them clean around 11,000 BCE—pointless behavior for highly mobile people, but perfectly sensible for anyone living in one place for months at a stretch.

The clearest evidence for clumping and settling comes from what archaeologists call the Hilly Flanks, an arc of rolling country curving around the Tigris, Euphrates, and Jordan valleys in southwest Asia. I will spend most of this chapter talking about this region, which saw humanity’s first major movement away from hunter-gatherer lifestyles—and with it, the birth of the West.

The site of ‘Ain Mallaha in modern Israel (Figure 2.3; also known as Eynan) provides the best example of what happened. Around 12,500 BCE, now-nameless people built semisubterranean round houses here, sometimes thirty feet across, using stones f...

‘Ain Mallaha has teeth of both colors, which probably means that people lived there year-round. We know of no contemporary sites like this anywhere in the world outside the Hilly Flanks.

Settling down in bigger groups must have changed how people related to one another and the world around them. In the past humans had had to follow the food, moving constantly. They doubtless told stories about each place they stopped:

Permanent villages changed the rules for rodents. Fragrant, delicious mounds of garbage became available 24/7, and sneaky little rats and mice that could live right under humans’ noses fared better in this new setting than big, aggressive ones that attracted attention.

Within a few dozen generations (a century would be plenty of time; mice, after all, breed like mice) rodents in effect genetically modified themselves to cohabit with humans. Sneaky (domestic) vermin replaced their big (wild) ancestors as completely as Homo sapiens had replaced Neanderthals.

Archaeologists long assumed that humans actively domesticated dogs, making the tamer wolf cubs into pets and breeding them to produce tamer-still pups who liked humans almost as much as humans liked themselves, but recent studies suggest that natural selection once again worked without our conscious input. Either way, though, the interaction of wolves, garbage, and humans created the animals we call dogs, which could kill the disease-bearing rodents that competed with them for scraps and even fight with true wolves, earning their place as man’s best friend.

This principle kicked in with a vengeance in the Hilly Flanks at the end of the Ice Age, creating a distinctive Western way of living, with higher social development than in any other part of the world.

which suggests that the answer to the question that has dominated this book so far—when and where we should start speaking of a Western way of life distinct from other ways—grew out of the ingenuity of women living in the Hilly Flanks nearly fifteen thousand years ago.

Wild cereals are annual plants. That is, they grow, produce seeds, and die in one season, then their seeds grow into new plants the next year. When a plant ripens, the rachis (little stalks attaching individual seeds to the plant) weaken and one by one the seeds fall to the ground, where their protective husks shatter and they germinate.

We don’t know whether sloth (not wanting to walk from stand to stand), greed (just wanting more food), or fear (of hunger or of someone else getting to the plant first) was the inspiration, but someone, very likely a woman, had a bright idea: Why not take some of the best seeds and replant them in a particularly fertile spot? Then, she presumably thought, if we look after them—turning the soil, pulling up weeds, maybe even watering the plants—we can rely on them to be there every year, and even to give us better yields. Life is good.