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

by Ian Morris

Foreseeing that the dam would flood the heart of the Hilly Flanks, the Syrian Directorate General of Antiquities launched an international campaign to study the sites that would be destroyed. In 1971 a British team explored the mound of Abu Hureyra.

Finds on the surface suggested there had been a village here around 7000 BCE, and the archaeologists documented this in rich detail; but one trench revealed that this village had been built on the ruins of an older settlement, dating back to 12,700 BCE.

If the prehistoric cultivators simply ate everything they grew this would not have mattered, but if they saved some of the seeds to plant again next year, big seeds would be slightly overrepresented. At first the difference would not be enough to notice, but if cultivators repeated this often enough, they would gradually change the meaning of “normal” as the average size of seeds slowly increased.

Archaeobotanists (people who study ancient plant remains) call these bigger seeds “cultivated,” to distinguish them from wild grains and from the fully domesticated grains we eat today.

Abu Hureyrans had replanted rye so often that it gave them bigger seeds. This must have seemed a small thing at the time, but it proved (to use one of archaeology’s worst puns) the seed from which the West would grow.

Ridges of boulders and ice that had not melted yet trapped the runoff from glaciers in vast lakes.

By 10,800 BCE Lake Agassiz covered almost a quarter-million square miles of the western plains, four times the area of modern Lake Superior. Then the inevitable happened: rising temperatures and rising waters undermined the icy spur holding the lake back.

Its collapse was a drawn-out cataclysm, in striking contrast to many modern disaster stories.

except to say that when Lake Agassiz really turned off the Gulf Stream around 10,800 BCE, things unfolded rather differently. There was no superstorm, but for twelve hundred years, while the lake drained into the Atlantic, the world slid back into ice age conditions.

(Geologists call the period 10,800–9600 BCE the Younger Dryas after the waterlogged petals of a little flower called the Arctic Dryas that is common in peat bogs of this date.)

Mankind was expelled from the Garden of Eden. Abandoning year-round villages, most people divided into smaller groups and went back to roaming the hillsides in search of their next meal, much like their ancestors at the coldest point of the Ice Age.

There has never been another catastrophe on quite this scale. To find a parallel, in fact, we have to turn to science fiction.

In 1941 Isaac Asimov, then just starting his career, published a story called “Nightfall” in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction. He set it on Lagash, a planet with six suns. Wherever Lagashians go, at least one sun is shining and it is always day—except for once every 2,049 years, when the suns line up just right for a passing moon to create an eclipse. The sky darkens and the stars come out. The terrified populace goes mad. By the time the eclipse ends the Lagashians have destroyed their civilization and plunged themselves into savagery. Over the next 2,049 years they slowly rebuild their culture, only for night to fall again and start the whole process over.

The Younger Dryas sounds like “Nightfall” revisited: the earth’s orbit generates wild swings between freezing and thawing, which every few thousand years produce disasters like the draining...

In just the same way, you cannot have the same ice age twice. The societies in the Hilly Flanks when Lake Agassiz collapsed around 10,800 BCE were no longer the same as those that had been there during the previous ice age.

Unlike Asimov’s Lagashians, earthlings did not go mad when nature turned their world upside down. Instead they applied a particularly human skill, ingenuity, and built on what they had already done. The Younger Dryas did not turn the clock back. Nothing ever does that.

Some archaeologists suggest that far from being a Nightfall moment, the Younger Dryas actu...

On the one hand, cold, dry weather made it harder to cultivate cereals; on the other, the harsher weather increased incentives to do so. Some archaeologists imagine Younger Dryas foragers carrying bags of seeds around, scattering them in promising-looking spots as insurance against nature letting them down.

No pre–Younger Dryas site has yielded anything quite this odd, but after 10,000 BCE villages filled up with all kinds of surprising things.

So when the world warmed up at the end of the Younger Dryas, around 9600 BCE, the Hilly Flanks were not the same place they had been when the world had warmed up at the end of the main ice age, three thousand years earlier. Global warming did not step into the same society twice.

Sites from the earlier period of warming, such as ‘Ain Mallaha, give the impression that people just happily took advantage of nature’s bounty, but in the villages that popped up around the Hilly Flanks after 9600 BCE people sank serious resources into religion.

Humans were not passive victims of climate change. They applied ingenuity, working to get the gods and ancestors on board in the struggle against adversity. And while most of us doubt that these gods and ancestors actually existed, the rituals may well have done some good anyway as a kind of social glue.

People who sincerely believed that big rituals in lavish shrines would win the gods’ aid were surely more likely to tough it out and stick together no matter how hard times got.

By 10,000 BCE, the Hilly Flanks stood out from the rest of the world. Most people in most places still drifted between caves and campsites, like the one excavated since 2004 at Longwangcan in China, where the only traces of their activit...

A battered piece of shale from this site might be a simple stone spade, perhaps implying that cultivation of crops had begun, but there is nothing like the fat rye seeds of Abu Hureyra, ...

A distinctive Western world was taking shape.

By 9600 BCE Earth was warming up again, and this time around, Hilly Flankers already knew how to get the most from grasses.

They quickly (by the standards of earlier times, anyway) resumed cultivation. By 9300 BCE wheat and barley seeds from sites in the Jordan Valley were noticeably bigger than wild versions and people were modifying fig trees to improve their yields. The world’s oldest known granaries, clay storage chambers ten feet wide and ten feet tall, come from the Jordan Valley around 9000 BCE.

By then cultivation was under way in at least seven pockets in the Hilly Flanks, from modern Israel to southeast Turkey, and by 8500 BCE big-seeded c...

Changes were very slow indeed by modern standards, but over the next thousand years they made the Hilly Flanks increasingly different from any other part of the world. The people of this area were, unknowingly, genetically modifying plants to create fully domesticated crops that could not reproduce themselve...

Before there were any harvesters the mutant plants died out each year because their seeds could not get into the soil, making this a most disadvantageous mutation.

women then replanted a random selection of their seeds, they would have taken mutant seeds along with normal ones; in fact, the mutants would be slightly overrepresented, because at least some normal seeds would already have fallen and been lost.

Within a couple of thousand years, instead of one plant that waited for the harvester per field of one or two million, they had only genetically modified domesticated plants.

The excavated finds suggest that even around 8500 BCE fully domesticated wheat and barley were still almost unheard of. By 8000, though, about half the seeds we find in the Hilly Flanks have the tough rachis that would wait for the harvester; by 7500, virtually all do.

Laziness, greed, and fear constantly added improvements. People discovered that planting cereals in a garden one year then protein-rich beans the next replenished the soil as well as varying their diet; i...

Crushing wheat and barley on coarse grindstones filled bread with grit, which wore people’s teeth down to stumps; so they sieved out the impurities. They found new ways to prepare grains, baking clay into waterproof pots for cooking. If we are right to draw analogies with modern agriculturalists, women would have been responsible for most or all of the...

While women tamed plants, men (probably) t...

By 8000 BCE herders in what is now western Iran were managing goats so effectively that bigger, calmer strains evolved. Before 7000 BCE herders turned the wild aurochs into something like the plac...

Across the next few thousand years they learned not to kill all animals for meat while they were still young but to keep some around for wool and milk, and then—most u...

Previously, moving anything meant picking it up and carrying it, but an ox in harness could deliver three times the draft power of a man. By 4000 BCE the domestication of pl...

People carried on tinkering, but nearly six thousand years would pass before humans added significant new energy sources to this package by harnessing the power of...

should spare a thought for female foragers, who regularly carry their infants with them as they walk thousands of miles every year gathering plants. Not surprisingly, they do not want too many children; consciously or not, they space their pregnancies by extending breastfeeding into the child’s third or fourth year (producing breast milk prevents ovulation).

Having more babies in fact became a boon, providing extra labor, and recent skeletal studies suggest that the average woman in an early farming village, staying in one place with stores of food, gave birth to seven or eight babies (of whom maybe four would survive to their first birthday and perhaps three to reproductive age) as compared to the mere five or six live births of her roving ancestresses. The more food people grew, the more babies they could feed; although, of course, the more babies they fed, the more food they had to grow.

Population soared. By 8000 BCE some villages probably had five hundred residents, ten times the size of pre–Younger Dryas hamlets such as ‘Ain Mallaha.

Settling down and raising more food increased fertility, but also meant more mouths to feed and more germs to share, both of which increased mortality. Each new farming village probably grew rapidly for a few generations until fertility and mortality balanced each other out.

Early farmers tamed the landscape, breaking it into concentric circles—at the center was home; then came the neighbors; then the cultivated fields; then the pastures, where shepherds and flocks trekked between summer and winter grazing; and beyond them the wild, an unregulated world of scary animals, savages who hunted, and who knew what monsters.

but by 8000 BCE they were building bigger, more complicated houses, each with its own storerooms and kitchens, and perhaps dividing the land into privately owned fields. Life increasingly focused on small family groups, probably the basic unit for transmitting property between generations. Children needed this material inheritance, because the alternative was poverty. Transmitting property became a matter of life and death.

Such intimacy with corpses makes most of us squeamish but clearly mattered a lot to early farmers in the Hilly Flanks. Most archaeologists think it shows that ancestors were the most important supernatural beings.

Whatever the reason, priests may have been the first people to enjoy institutionalized authority. Here, perhaps, we see the beginnings of entrenched hierarchy.

Whether that is true or not, hierarchy developed fastest within households. I have already observed that men and women had had different roles in foraging societies, the former more active in hunting and the latter in gathering, but studies of contemporary groups suggest that domestication sharpens the sexual division of labor, tying women to the home.