ACT I
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10,500 years ago the first people in the world made the transition from hunting and gathering their food to full time year round farming. That was in the Middle East, in Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.
People made that transition between the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers in China 1,000 years later. Other people made that transition in three other parts of the world thousands of years later. And maybe in four other places.
Farming produced more food than hunting and gathering. That let parents feed more children. That made population sizes grow. That led to more important changes.
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The first new thing that happened was the specialization of labor. Now that farmers were producing extra food, some people who had good talents for doing other things could eat food farmers grew and spend their time doing other things that were valuable to their societies.
Some people make things. Some people invent things. Some people are leaders. Some people keep track of information. And so on.
Every agricultural society had this. As people got practice at doing what they were best at, by working at it for hours, days, weeks, months, and years, they got better at doing it than anyone had ever been before.
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When a village was smaller than 150 people, everyone knew everyone else. Life in the village was a network of family and friends and neighbors. People looked up to older people, because they knew the most, and they had the most experience in making decisions for different things that happen in life.
When you do something with your family, you probably do it in a way you all benefit from overall. Maybe you all benefit from it individually. Or at least your family is better off as a whole.
When you do things with your friends it’s the same thing. Either you all benefit from it individually, or at least your crew is better off as a whole.
When you try to do something with a neighbor or a friend of a friend you don’t know as well, it’s still pretty easy to work together. Now you both want to benefit from it individually, but you also know you’re making things better for your community overall. And if you both know you’re going to see each other again, then you both know that if you try to cheat each other, the other person is going to find you.
When a village grew bigger than 150 people, those family and friends connections weren’t enough to keep everyone cooperating the way they used to. If you don’t know someone, that means you don’t know if you can depend on them. Or how much. Or for what.
As villages grew from 150 people to 200, to 250, to 300, to 400, to 500, the proportion of people you knew you could depend on got smaller and smaller.
But there were still the older people, who many people looked up to. Some of those people were very smart and charismatic, and were better than the others at inspiring and motivating people. Older people had always done those things. But now that maintaining cooperation and harmony in the village was getting harder generation by generation, it took up more of their time.
Eventually, farmers started giving one of them, or some of them, some of their extra food, so they could spend all their time organizing and leading the village. Now they had a full time chief, and maybe he had some assistants.
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Organizing villages that were bigger than ever before depended on the leaders organizing more information than anyone ever had before. So the chiefs got some people who were the best at remembering and thinking about that kind of information to help them. Those people got food, so they could spend all their time helping the chief keep track of everything he needed to know.
Now the village had a government with full time bureaucrats.
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People have different talents. Some people have a lot of talents for some things.
If you had more food than you needed, and there was someone in your village who was a lot better than you at making tools, or shoes, or pottery, or flutes, or beads for necklaces, or anything else you wanted, would you offer to trade them some of your food for those things?
Soon enough, talented people who made things that other people wanted were able to get all the food they needed by trading the things they made.
Full time inventors invented things that let people do new things, or do old things more easily. Full time craftsmen spent all their time creating things. They built better tools, weapons, armor, and other things that people traded for individually.
As leaders realized the value of what they were doing, they started organizing people to work full time on bigger projects, like buildings, bridges, dams, fortifications, and roads.
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Then there’s fighting wars. Some people are better at fighting than others. But when you’re off fighting a war, or training to fight in a war, it means you’re not at home farming.
Full time soldiers could spend all their time training and fighting, to defend the land, the people, and the food from outsiders, and to conquer more land. With the help of new and better weapons and armor from some of the inventors and crafters, they could fight better than they could before.
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Then there were spiritual leaders. Those are people who motivate and inspire people to keep them focused on long term and intangible goals.
Political leaders motivate people to work together for immediate goals, or for ones people can imagine producing tangible results in a few years. Full time religious leaders helped organize their societies with their stories about morality and purpose.
Now that so many people were living and working together, religious leaders started working together to develop unifying stories, to keep people cooperating with each other. This is where organized religion began.
ACT II
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The specialization of labor led to two more important developments.
The first was metal tools. The first metals people began working were copper and gold, because they’re soft and easy to work by hand. People all over the world did that.
In Mesopotamia, China, the Incan Empire, and the empires in Mexico that grew up from Mayan agriculture, people had the time and energy to invest in enough specialized labor, specialized tools, and specialized buildings to experiment with more metals. They figured out how to heat metal up enough to melt it, and reshape it.
People figured out how to mix metals together to make alloys. When they mixed tin and copper together they got bronze, which is harder than copper. That let them make much better tools and weapons than they could with stone. In Mesopotamia, they developed bronze about 5,000 years after they domesticated plants.
Forging bronze into weapons and armor made armies more powerful. It made everyone else who could switch from stone tools to bronze tools better at what they did.
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The Mesopotamians figured out how to forge iron about 2,000 years later.
Eventually that led to the development of steel. Steel is iron with a little carbon mixed in, which strengthens it.
The Chinese developed metalworking along the same lines.
The Inca also started forging bronze around 5,000 years after they domesticated plants. Since they domesticated plants about 5,000 years after the Mesopotamians, they started forging bronze about 500 years before the Europeans came.
The Aztecs and others in the Mayan area started forging bronze a few hundred years after the Inca.
So even though both groups had begun forging metal that they could use for tools, their early bronze age metals were no match for the Europeans’ steel.
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The other important development was writing.
People crowding together in cities for the first time, and the division of labor between people who produced food and people who produced other things meant that organizing societies depended on organizing more information than anyone had ever done before.
Bureaucrats organized information, and they developed better ways of organizing information. Now that farmers were giving some of the food they raised to support the government, that meant the government needed to be able to plan on how much food each farmer was giving them.
In other words, taxes.
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If a farmer owes you five baskets of wheat, you could draw a picture of a stalk of wheat and make tally marks next to it. You know how we use tally marks now, where each line is a one and a line across four other lines means five.
But how do you remember which farmer’s account this is? Do you draw a picture of his face next to the wheat? Do you have to take the time to draw a portrait of every farmer to go with their account? Or does each farm get its own symbol, like the way ranchers brand horses now? How do you keep track of when he owes his next basket of wheat?
Eventually some bureaucrats figured out a really good trick. They developed a standardized system of marks to represent words. That let them write down all the words in their language. That let a clay tablet tell you everything you needed to know.
But not only that, now that everyone used the same set of marks, that let people share information without needing to talk to each other.
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Writing gave people a big boost to their information processing.
It let kings write down laws. It also let them send orders to their generals.
It let generals send reports of battles and enemy activity to their kings, and requests for supplies and reinforcements.
It let kings and their bureaucrats send messages to each other.
It let religious leaders write down their religious stories to make sure they were all telling the same stories.
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People might’ve invented writing in China and Egypt. But there’s no way to be certain. In both of those places people didn’t start using writing until after the Mesopotamians developed it. By then they were connected to Mesopotamia by trade routes.
The people in either place could’ve developed writing on their own. Or people from either place could’ve seen writing on a clay tablet or piece of parchment from Mesopotamia. Or people could’ve seen a traveling merchant make marks to help him remember things. Or they could’ve heard rumors through their trade networks about people making marks to represent words and figured it out from that.
Ideas that can travel by word of mouth are hard for archeologists to trace.
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The Maya invented writing. They’re the only other group of people in the world who figured it out on their own. By the time the Europeans came, the cities in that area had libraries. The libraries were full of books, and the books were full of information that Natives had written down.
That’s another clue that the Maya and the Inca didn’t know about each other. Writing made the Mesopotamian, Mayan, Chinese, and Egyptian empires function much more efficiently. It would’ve made the Incan empire function more efficiently too. But the Inca didn’t start using written language until they learned it from the Spaniards.
ACT III
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Population sizes kept growing. Most people wanted to live on the good farmland, so they could be near the food. Villages grew into cities.
So many people living so close together now made it a lot easier for germs to jump from person to person. That let diseases evolve to be more powerful.
Meanwhile, animals helped plow the farmland, and helped transport the food from the farms to the cities. They helped spread diseases while they were doing it.
That was the beginning plagues.
Wherever plagues struck populations, they made the people evolve. The people who survived the plagues were the ones with the strongest immune systems. In the Middle Ages plagues killed 1/3 of the population of Europe.
When Europeans colonized other continents they infected the people who lived there with their diseases. Sometimes they did it accidentally. Sometimes they did it intentionally.
The people there hadn’t built up resistances to European plagues. So their populations were ravaged too.
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This is why I refer to the five civilizations that definitely developed agriculture as Mesopotamia, China, the Maya, the Inca, and the Mississippi River civilization.
The Cahokia Mounds, across the river from St. Louis, are the ruins of the Mississippi civilization’s largest city. Nobody today knows what the people who lived there called their city. Because it was abandoned around 1350.
At its peak it had around18,000 people. That was the size of London at the time. That was a big enough population for plagues to evolve. So that probably contributed to the city’s downfall.
Hernando DeSoto led the first European expedition that discovered the Mississippi River in 1541. They told stories of towns lining the river.
In 1673 Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet led the first European expedition to travel most of the length of the Mississippi, from near the Great Lakes to the Arkansas River and back. They passed the ruins of Cahokia and traveled through the heartland of the Mississippi society twice. They didn’t say anything about towns lining the river.
At first you might think DeSoto lied. Back then explorers lied about their discoveries all the time, to get funding for more expeditions.
But European diseases often spread through the Americas faster than the Europeans did. Towns that Mississippi agriculture made possible would’ve been especially vulnerable to European plagues.
So even though one of the five confirmed original centers of agriculture in the world was right here in the US, we hardly ever hear about it as part of American history.Because only one group of untrustworthy Europeans ever saw the society that grew up from it.
ACT IV
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Finally, farming led to over farming.
Farming started in Mesopotamia, 10,000 years ago, with the most fertile farmland in the world. Today it’s a desert.
The first people in the world to start farming had no way of knowing that over farming was possible. When they used up the nutrients in their topsoil their food production declined.
At best, that meant people had to invest more time and effort into farming than they did before to produce enough food to feed everyone. At worst it meant famines, meaning, a lot of them starving to death. And all the upheaval that comes with a lot of desperate people trying to get enough to eat when there isn’t enough food to keep everyone alive.
But by then their farming, technology, and other developments had spread into surrounding lands. That made the political power shift to places that still had good topsoil. In Europe that meant Greece, then Rome. Between Mesopotamia and China were Persia and India.
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The main competition for world-dominating political power now was between Europe and China. Mesopotamia got a thousand-year head start on farming over China, and by now all of its developments had spread into Europe.
Now look at the world map again. China is a big land mass with two large rivers running through it. Most of Europe is made of peninsulas and islands divided by seas, bays, gulfs, and channels.
Rivers are easy to travel. That made political unification in China easy. China has been a country for over 2,000 years.
Seas are much harder to travel. They made it easy for news, ideas, and inventions to travel through Europe, but they were a barrier to political unification. Empires have risen and fallen in Europe for thousands of years. The European Union wasn’t formed until 1993!
European countries competed against each other. First in thousands of years of wars, and then to build colonial empires around the world. All that time they were close enough to each other to know what each other were doing and to keep developing new ideas and technology to try to defeat each other.
China’s early political unification put them ahead of Europe in cultural developments for a long time. That’s why Marco Polo was able to bring so many strange and wondrous things from China back to Europe with him. Including gunpowder.
But eventually China’s political unification made them so powerful that no other country in that part of the world was a match for them. Meanwhile, the European countries kept competing against each other and some of them got ahead of China in the process.
England, France, and Spain all built enormous intercontinental empires. China developed trade routes all over the Pacific and Indian Oceans, but not a military empire.
ACT V
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This epic story wraps up all the main events of 10,000 years, from the beginning of farming to the early days of European colonialism, by following one theme through changing situations. Every step of the way the people involved made
the best decisions
they could think of
in the situations
they were in
for themselves
and the people
they cared about.
In this part of the story that’s very straightforward. People domesticated plants to produce more food. They domesticated animals in large part to produce more food. Their population sizes grew because they produced more food. They conquered their neighbors and moved onto their land mainly to produce more food.
Their increased food production supported the division of labor. Full time political and religious leaders focused people’s efforts toward making their societies stronger, which meant working together better, which let them produce more food. Full time soldiers defended their farmland and food, and conquered more farmland so they could produce more food. Full time inventors invented better weapons and tools to help soldiers conquer more farmland and help farmers produce more food. Full time bureaucrats invented better ways of keeping track of information to improve their societies’ food production and distribution.
Producing more food helped people live longer and let them have more children.
This is where history meets biology. This has all been just another story of organisms trying to maximize the survival rates of their genes.
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Farming was humanity’s first step in making big changes to the environment.
Wherever people managed the environment to produce more food, they changed it. Farming was the most intensive way of doing that. A field of wheat is an environment where people kill all the species of plants that grow there except for one.
Plants grow by taking nutrients out of the topsoil.
People farm so they can eat the plants.
Farming makes population sizes grow.
So in terms of biochemistry, we can say that farming is a process of converting topsoil into people.
If the people over farm their land they use up their topsoil nutrients. Then the plants don’t produce as much food.
If that leads to a famine, a lot of people die and turn back into topsoil nutrients.
ACT VI
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You can read a much, much longer version of this story in Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond.
A good book about the archeological history of the pre-colonial Americas is called 1491, by Charles Mann.
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Look at what happens when we combine biology with history. We get a history of people trying to maximize the survival rates of their genes.
A lot of the disagreement surrounding history and fields of science related to it comes from people trying to use morality to interpret the facts. If you feel that your cultural ancestors were good, it can be hard to believe that they could’ve done things that you consider to be evil. Or you believe they did them a little bit, but not as much as they really did.
That distorts your perception of history, if there are some facts about it you just aren’t willing to accept. Then what happens when you try to talk about history with someone who’s trying to cover up different facts?
We can’t change history. We can’t undo anything that people have done by feeling that it was right or wrong. The only thing we can do by morally judging people from hundreds or thousands of years ago is to pick which ones we want to be role models for ourselves and other people in making decisions now and in the future.
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Learning from history means learning how people make decisions.
For any historical person, or any historical event, look at how people felt that the decisions they made were going to give their genes a higher survival rate than anything else they could do.
Then look at why their environmental factors made them feel that.
Once we understand how people make decisions, we can talk about what we can do to create decision making factors that lead people to make decisions we like.
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We’re trying to help change Russians’ minds about invading Ukraine right now.
Think about it.
Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine to improve Russia’s environment by adding Ukraine’s land to it. But it isn’t working, because most of the rest of the world has become a worse environment for Russia. Because people all over the world are working against the Russians with sanctions and embargoes and are supporting the Ukrainians with military and humanitarian aid.
But this story goes back way further than you thought.
You know how the sunflower is Ukraine’s national flower? Not only is it one of the country’s main crops, it’s also their symbol of resistance against centuries of Russian imperialism. Because sunflowers grow tall, and always grow facing into the sunlight.
And you know how the Ukrainian flag is a light blue bar over a yellow bar? That could be a field of sunflowers under a blue sky. That’s why the video of the old Ukrainian woman handing the Russian soldiers sunflower seeds and telling them to put them in their pockets so at least they could plant some sunflowers when they died there meant so much to Ukrainians.
Do you know who domesticated sunflowers?
People in the Mississippi River civilization.
