A History of the Universe: Volume Ii: Humanity

By Henry Kong, MD

Book two of A History of the Universe starts where the first volume left off: the arid and treacherous brush of North-East Africa. It was there that a tiny tribe of nomadic primates set out on an unlikely journey of world conquest. Dr. Kong traces the steps of these intrepid early modern humans from the cradles of civilization to the great empires of antiquity: Greece, Rome, Persia, and Byzantium. Meet the masters of bygone times from Alexander to Zoroaster. Relive the great discoveries of Archimedes, the sermons of Saint Paul, the philosophy of Shankara, and the poetry of Lao Tzu. From the caveman to the Crusades, it's all here, complete with counterfactual arguments. 'Humanity' is an intellectual feast for the senses.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 28, 2007
• ISBN: 9780595872268

Henry Kong, MD

Why did civilization start in the Middle East? How did Christianity and Islam become global? What caused the downfall of Ancient Rome and classical China? These are just a few of the questions answered in the second volume of Henry Kong?s remarkable journey through space and time. His quest is none other than the story of the human race. Dr. Henry Kong studied biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, history at Oxford, and medicine at Rutgers. He is currently an Internist with a private practice in Toms River, New Jersey.

Book preview

Also by Henry Kong

More Self than Self: At Autism’s Edge

A History of the Universe Volume I: Complexity

A History of the Universe

9239.jpg

Volume II: Humanity

Henry Kong M.D.

iUniverse, Inc.

New York Lincoln Shanghai

A History of the Universe Volume II: Humanity

Copyright © 2007 by Henry Kong

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

iUniverse

2021 Pine Lake Road, Suite 100

Lincoln, NE 68512

www.iuniverse.com

1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

ISBN: 978-0-595-42889-2 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-0-595-87226-8 (ebk)

Contents

Introduction

1

Kultur

2

Civilisation

3

Christianity

4

Islam

5

China

To my brothers and sisters in North Korea. May they someday be free.

And

For my brother, Victor.

Introduction

To know the past is to understand the present. Unlike much of science, with its bedrock principles and immutable laws, human history is often a series of improbable accidents and serendipitous discoveries that seem to be, in the memorable words of a character in Allen Bennett’s History Boys, ‘one damn thing after another’. But on closer scrutiny, predictable patterns emerge. Empires open up trade routes, fostering contact between hitherto isolated peoples. Bursts of intellectual ferment coincide with periods of social unrest. Technological breakthroughs lead to the growth of economies and populations. Political conservatism is followed by radicalization or economic stagnation. Rebellions devour their parents while revolutions consume their children. The seemingly chaotic present in which we live is a logical culmination of past trends.

History should be our friend. But many of us are woefully ignorant of even basic past events. This is largely a reflection of inadequate secondary education, especially in America, whose ‘here and now’ emphasis skews students’ knowledge towards the recent and the provincial. A popular and accessible history text can give us an opportunity to learn much more. At the dawn of this third millennium, we stand at the threshold of tremendous changes in technology and geopolitics. At stake is the potential for unprecedented benefits for humanity or the possibility of catastrophe on a species-ending scale. We cannot foresee the future, but a clearer understanding of the past can help us prepare for what lies ahead.

The problem with much popular history is a lack of synthesis. There are many books focused on specific events, but not enough that take a multidisciplinary approach to answering why things are the way they are. There are some excellent exceptions: Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, and Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel come to mind. I write this book in the spirit of these earlier works.

The scope of the book is large, but it is by no means meant to be an encyclopedic compendium. Rather, it is a thematic history, where each chapter can be read as a separate long essay. As such, I sometimes take the liberty of being speculative in the interests of synthesizing certain themes. The past may be fixed, but historical interpretation is dynamic. My goal is to offer my own interpretation, not so much to persuade, but rather to promote public debate of comparative history. But as creative as the book is, I emphasize that it is a work of history, not fiction.

A note of recommendation is in order. Although this book is meant to be enjoyed and appreciated by the layperson, there are many place names with which the average reader would be unfamiliar. I strongly recommend a good historical atlas such as the Dorling Kindersley Atlas of World History as a companion volume. The reader can then continuously cross-reference the body of my text with all the wonderful maps and timelines. The educational rewards are definitely worth the trouble.

1

Kultur

ººººººººººººººººººººººººººººº

And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the children of men builded, and the Lord said, behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.

So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.

Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

—Genesis 11: 5-9

Once upon a time in a verdant Pleistocene Garden of Eden, there lived a man named Adam and a woman named Eve. They were rather unremarkable individuals. For all we know, neither one of them was particularly bright or brave or handsome even by the modest standards of their day. They were not even the first humans. Despite account of events written in the Hebrew Torah, Adam and Eve never met, let alone have sexual relations with each other. These two actually lived thousands of years and kilometers apart, possibly even at opposite ends of this vast garden we now call Africa. But in some aspects, the Old Testament story rings true. Eve really was the mother of all people alive today. And Adam’s seed really did germinate into all men. How do we know all this? Science.

As I explained in my previous book, genetic sequences change (mutate) with time. When the mutant DNA happens to lie within the sequence of a gene, it can produce changes in the individual’s anatomy or biochemistry. Usually, the change is harmful in some way, and the individual is more likely to die without offspring. Very rarely, the change is beneficial, and its carrier is likely to sire more offspring than others. Some of these offspring will carry a copy of the mutation and spread it throughout the population. This is how evolution works. But more often, a genetic misspelling happens in the DNA outside of any gene. These mutations are ‘silent’ (neither harmful nor beneficial) and their rate of accumulation depends only on the rather constant mutation rate, and on the vagaries of population dynamics.

In the late twentieth century, evolutionary geneticists realized that certain special DNA sequences could be very useful in tracking the course of human evolution. The first is the Y chromosome. Only males carry a Y chromosome, and they pass it on intact to all of their sons, but none of their daughters. Unlike all the other chromosomes, there is no shuffling of genes on the Y at conception. Thus, every male’s Y chromosome is a direct descendant of those in his paternal lineage. Aside from random mutations, its sequence is identical from generation to generation.

The other special DNA occurs inside the mitochondria. Recall that these remarkable little biochemical dynamos are the descendants of ancient bacteria that were captured and harnessed inside what became the first eukaryotes. They too have bits of DNA, which, like the Y chromosome, do not participate in genetic recombination with the bulk of the parental genes. Everyone, male and female, has mitochondria inside all of their trillions of cells. Every single one of them is a clone derived from the original ones inside the fertilized egg. Sperm contribute no mitochondria. Therefore, everyone’s mitochondrial DNA comes to her directly through her maternal lineage. Aside from random mutations, its sequence is identical from generation to generation.

When geneticists compared the sequences of Y chromosomes from men all over the world, they found that certain variations were more common than others. The uncommon ones appeared later in human history and simply didn’t have time to accumulate in the population. The more common the variant, the earlier the mutation. Similarly, mitochondrial sequences reveal patterns of variation that can be dated. Remarkably, scientists have sampled Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA from isolated human populations in many different parts of the world (a technique called haplotype analysis), and found similarities suggesting that all these people had a single male and single female ancestor: Adam and Eve. Indeed, they were found to have lived and died in Africa around 140,000 years ago.

Now, it is important to note that Adam and Eve were not the only people of their time. There probably shared the world with several thousand contemporaries. But the fact is that it was their lineage, and theirs alone, that has survived to the present day. All mitochondrial and Y chromosome haplotypes coalesce back to their time and place. All other lineages died out over the millennia.

By Adam and Eve’s time, human evolution was largely complete. As a group, Homo sapiens was anatomically and genetically less different from us than different individuals are from each other today. A few crucial pieces had yet to find their way into human brains: the genes responsible for mindreading, syntax, and self-reflection. Once their descendants ate those fruits of knowledge, their minds exploded, and the world would never be the same again.

The coalescence of haplotypes 140,000 years ago implies that humans passed through some sort of population bottleneck at that time. Perhaps an ice age or other climactic disaster drastically reduced the number of humans to near extinction levels of just a few thousand individuals. At any rate, their numbers probably didn’t rise to over 100,000 until the great exodus out of Africa some 80,000 years later. Only at that point did human culture really begin. All the art, religion, philosophy, and language that we have ever heard about happened after this time. From then on, cultural evolution overtook biological evolution. This is not to say that human biology didn’t change. All racial diversity, for instance, occurred after about 60,000 BC. But the major characteristics differentiating modern humans from all other animals were well established by then. In addition, present day gender differences (for example, the male tendency towards violence and mechanical aptitude, and the female tendency for verbal intelligence and social skill) were also largely in place. These are all gene level differences.

The first big cultural achievement was the exodus out of Africa, which, of course, set the stage for the conquest of the world. Recall that archaic humans (Homo erectus and Homo Neanderthal) had already left Africa and settled most of Eurasia hundreds of thousands of years before. When Homo sapiens left the cradle via the Sinai Peninsula 100,000 years ago, they encountered Neanderthals at a site called Skhul, in present day Israel. There, archeologists have unearthed the remains of modern humans not far from those of Neanderthals. The two groups were obviously living quite close to each other. Moreover, they were using the same type of tools. If there was a battle between the species, we don’t know about it. All we can say is that the modern humans were unable to displace the older settlers for the next 40,000 years. We were not yet ready to take over. But around 60,000 BC, the story ends quite differently. Armed with a powerful and well-organized mind, the next wave of humans was finally able to eliminate the Palestinian Neanderthals and start their exploration and exploitation of the Middle East.

Around the time modern humans and Neanderthals were confronting each other in Israel 60,000 years ago, another population of Homo sapiens was crossing the Red Sea. Actually they walked across the dry land that later became the Red Sea after the ice age ended and the sea level rose. They outflanked the Neanderthals by walking around the Indian Ocean coastline from Arabia to Persia to India to the Malay Peninsula. From there they hopped along the Indonesian Archipelago, most of which was a contiguous landmass when ice age glaciers sucked up enough water to bring down the sea level down by as much as 100 meters. They were retracing the million year old steps of Homo erectus towards Java and Flores. It is not clear if they actually met any living erectus there; they may already have died out by then. Eventually humans reached New Guinea and Australia by boat from Timor across at least 50 kilometers of the open Arafura Sea. This truly remarkable human adventure of 30,000 kilometers was completed in just five to ten thousand years. This is not as unbelievable as it sounds. It translates to between three and six kilometers per year. Hunter-gatherers routinely travel several times this distance in a single day.

Once they reached the Australia-New Guinea land mass, which were connected at the time, the early aboriginal people followed the coastline. They concentrated in the more fertile woodlands of the southeast (near today’s population centers of Adelaide, Tasmania, Victoria, and New South Wales) and the southwest (Perth), and in the rainforests of the east (Brisbane and Cape York) and the north (Darwin). These areas were settled by about 50,000 years ago.

Imagine a Paleolithic band of naked nomads armed with nothing more than boomerangs and spears tracking wallabies and wombats down the Parramatta River. They scamper up a hill expecting to find another valley but then suddenly stop in their tracks. An unexpected sight takes their breath away: Sydney Harbour, with the Pacific Ocean beyond. Australia had been conquered 50,000 years before Captain Cook. About 5000 years later, some aboriginal tribes had penetrated deep into the arid Outback (Alice Springs and Ayers Rock). These people were not only isolated from their distant cousins in Africa and Asia, but also from each other. As a result, their languages and customs split off every 100 kilometers or so. At the time of the British invasion, there were about 250 languages spoken by some 300,000 aborigines. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British and white Australian sponsored extermination and forced integration have decimated both the native people and their unique languages. Although the Aboriginal population has now grown to a quarter of a million (in a nation of some 20 million) from a low of 60,000 in the 1920’s, only about three dozen indigenous languages remain active.

In New Guinea, the situation was very different. This huge island the size of Texas is criss-crossed with rugged volcanic mountain ranges. Some of the peaks of the Owen-Stanley range peak at over 5000 meters, permitting year round glaciations at equatorial latitudes. Understandably, the first settlers stayed near the coasts. But eventually, they found passes through the mountains and learned to cultivate crops in the alpine valleys in between. Different populations separated by only a few kilometers as the crow flies, were nonetheless shut out of contact with one another by formidable geographic rugae. Today there are a million native New Guineans speaking over 750 distinct languages. Thanks largely to the malaria parasite, white men did not and could not exploit New Guinea as much as they did Australia. As a result, most New Guinean languages are still quite healthy.

Geographic isolation is responsible for the tremendous diversity in New Guinea cultures and tongues, but it was not enough to produce much genetic diversity. Genetically (i.e. physically) Australian and New Guinea aborigines are obviously closely related, and superficially, they do look a bit like the native Africans. If these people arrived in Australia overland from Africa via South Asia, then shouldn’t there be people resembling primitive Africans (such as the Bushmen) in these areas today? In fact, there are, but they are not easy to find. The dark skinned, bushy haired ‘Negroid’ people who first made that incredible coast-hugging journey 60,000 years ago were swamped by later arrivals from the Middle East about 40,000 years ago. Today, most of the people of the Middle East, India, and South East Asia are not closely related to the aborigines of Australia and New Guinea. But anthropological geneticists have recently found a few men in places like South India who have telltale Y chromosome markers identical to those previously found only in Australian natives. In addition, there are still some isolated pockets of ‘aborigines’ (who look rather like the native Australians and New Guineans) living in the Andaman Islands off the coast of Burma, and in some isolated islands in the Philippines. These are the living remnants of that great exodus out of Africa.

It is perhaps appropriate here to make a brief note on race, sex, and ethnicity. It seems that we are endlessly getting caught up in controversies about the ‘innateness’, ‘adaptability’, and even the very existence of racial, sexual, and ethnic traits. Some so called intellectuals of the ‘post-modernist’ and ‘deconstructionist’ schools such as Frenchmen Claude Levi-Strauss and Jacques Derrida claim that these differences are arbitrarily designated social conventions imposed on otherwise blank mental slates. Unfortunately, these fools and their zealous followers on both sides of the Atlantic have greatly contributed to the atmosphere of moral relativism and nihilism that polluted much of late twentieth century Western thought.

I believe that all people should be treated as unique individuals, first and foremost. But individuals often differ from one another in predictable ways. For example, women tend to be good communicators, men tend to be better mechanics, Asian people tend to be shorter, old people tend to develop arthritic joints and cataracts, and so on and on. While it is wrong to discriminate against an individual based on the average characteristics of her group, these labels can still be useful for understanding something about the individual. As long as we seek to understand and help one another rather than insult or humiliate them, categorization is not necessarily a bad thing. In that sense, group traits do exist and should not be ignored. Ignoring them would be to assume that all people are alike (at least potentially) and this risks treating people unfairly by treating them as equals. A child with low intelligence should not be taught in the same classroom as gifted