History in 100 Chapters

By Jeremy Plewes

Covering the period from when Earth began to the end of the Great War and designed for the general reader, this book aims to give a chronological account of life on Earth. It relates all parts of the world to each other for those whose acquaintance with history has been limited to short periods about different places and cultures.

Each of the chapters has been designed to be self-contained so that browsing by episodes of time or place will be informative and interesting. Scientific discoveries, cultural advances and religious milestones illuminate how the human race has developed through the ages.

The present state of the world, and our society (scientific, political and religious), is more easily understood when we understand how it came about; in this way, it is easier to comprehend present personal and national identity and morality.

For those whose knowledge of history is largely confined to short detailed periods such as those of the Romans or the Tudors, perhaps studied at school, then this account sets out to fill the gaps both in time and in geography and show how they relate to one another, and what was happening across the world in the same era.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Mar 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9781398443501

Jeremy Plewes

After qualifying in medicine from Oxford, and then becoming a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, the author has enjoyed a varied and rewarding surgical career. A longstanding interest in history and in teaching medical students has made it clear that an understanding of the past and how advances in medicine and surgery have been achieved makes it easier to follow the rationale for present treatments. This learning process seems as valid for nations, politicians and despots, even individuals, as for medical students and doctors.

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Preface

The excuse for writing a book of history when tens of thousands already exist is simply that it often seems that historical periods are taught or studied in isolation, but also that many periods of history in different parts of the world do not appear on most school or university syllabi. Thus, both for exams and for the purpose of making appealing television programmes, considerable depth is often shown for different short periods that are felt to be ‘interesting’, without the inter-relationship between periods, or indeed the relationships with contemporary global events being discussed, but instead being minimised or even ignored.

The rationale for this book is therefore to provide an overview of history which is the study of what is important about the past, and to try and illustrate the general development and progress of humankind, whilst at the same time acting as a springboard for more detailed study of events and developments by the reader.

Any account is written from an individual point of view which is necessarily slanted according to the perceptions of the age and culture from which the writer views past events, and this particular account is written from the British, and indeed English-speaking, perspective. From a Chinese, African, Indian or Russian point of view, the world probably looks quite different. Both one’s vantage point and cultural upbringing influence one’s interpretations and conclusions, and thus colour the historical landscape. Objectivity is always difficult, but nevertheless attempts must be made to put national events in perspective with world development.

In pursuit of that, this account derives from many sources, and it is to be hoped that the end result is a reasonably balanced overview which will not prove too contentious. There is thus an emphasis on context and chronology, such that readers will be able arrive at their own understanding, and will also receive sufficient pointers to guide further reading in detail about subjects which interest them. It is also important to remember that our history was once someone else’s present, and that there is a danger of judging the actions of the past with present attitudes and the advantage of our hindsight.

At the end of most chapters, I have indicated books for possible further reading, though usually limiting this to only one, or occasionally two. The books are not necessarily ones which I have used as major sources since a long list of all the works consulted might be scary or off-putting. The intention has been to choose interesting books about the period, which are both authoritative and provide a good read. One hundred books would however be an overload for most readers and the reader will doubtless choose from among those subjects or periods which have proved most interesting.

To obviate the need to buy hardback or other books, readers will often find that many of the suggested books are available very cheaply second-hand through various internet sites. It is also worth drawing attention to the Oxford University Press ‘Very Short Introduction’ series; these are both physically small and seldom much more than 100 pages; as there are now approaching 500 books in the series, most readers should be able to find some titles of interest. They are also an ideal pocket size for reading on buses or trains while commuting.

Chapters here are divided both by geography and by dates, and there may sometimes be a need to range back and forth through time to accommodate different areas and periods and the way the chapters have been arranged, but I hope this will not prove too cumbersome. Each chapter has been written to be relatively free-standing so allowing dipping into individual subjects if desired, though this does sometimes mean that there may be a small element of repetition where the same event or topic crops up under different chapter headings.

With regard to dates, there has been thought about whether to express dates in the time-honoured notation of BC and AD; since both of these abbreviations reference time to Christianity and the birth of Christ, it has been suggested that the abbreviations BCE and CE should be used to avoid offending those of non-Christian or other cultural backgrounds. It is reported that the Venerable Bede was the first to suggest this in the 8th century, and as it does not appear to have caught on through succeeding centuries, this book from a largely Christian and English-speaking world has stayed with the old terminology.

The past century has seen considerable developments in historical research which range from an increasing understanding of pre-history and archaeology thanks to techniques including radiocarbon dating, dendrochronology, ice core analysis and pollen analysis, to more recent advances, studies, finds of historical documents and most recently genetic studies by chromosome analysis. Research into ancient documents, some of which have appeared only quite recently, ranging from the Dead Sea Scrolls to medieval records, is also allowing a better understanding of all periods of history. Of necessity, many important people and events have had to be omitted and the selection of those that are included represent my own choice. Many people are mentioned, and their dates given, but time and space precludes much amplification of any individual details.

The intention of this book is therefore to stimulate interest and to encourage readers interest in distant historical periods. It is intended as a ‘sighting shot’ for the reader to get an overview of a period, country, event or trend, for which further reading will then be enjoyable and profitable. Clearly decisions have been made about which events are appropriate to be included and in how much detail, and I hope such decisions appear reasonable.

Numerous ways to pursue history in depth now exist, but for many people, and in particular for the younger generation, Wikipedia will often be a good starting point from which to fill in details that may have been omitted. I have also tried to provide short background descriptions or explanations for each event or person mentioned without assuming prior knowledge of them.

To reiterate, therefore, the book tries to show the complete jigsaw of history in miniature. Each event and development is seen in its temporal relationship to others across the world, and each individual happening may be studied and scrutinised individually later in greater detail, with its context better appreciated. I have purposely stopped one hundred years ago at the end of the First World War, and at the onset of a time when what we now call globalisation was starting to accelerate.

For the sake of completeness, there is a brief chapter in the form of an overview of the last 100 years, but there are already many more appropriate, easily available and detailed accounts of this often-contentious period, most of which still lies within the living memory of many. However, the last few chapters are an attempt to incorporate recent knowledge and bring matters up to date, thereby pulling together some of the threads and lessons from the rest of the book.

Jeremy Plewes

Withybed Green

October 2022

Chapter 1

In the Beginning

It must have been an awesome occurrence. The start of our world is thought to have resulted from what is called the ‘Big Bang’. It was an almighty explosion, for which the nearest thing we can imagine would be to be situated at the centre of a vast nuclear explosion; temperatures and pressures would have been unimaginably immense and matter would have been hurled outwards, expanding in all directions with great rapidity.

The universe is still expanding, but since that early Big Bang, the matter that was generated and thrown outwards has gradually cooled, allowing clouds of subatomic particles to coalesce and to start forming atoms. Quite what existed before the Big Bang, and what in turn caused the Big Bang, is not just beyond the scope of this book, it is also not yet understood by physicists or astronomers, and indeed may never be.

After the Big Bang, the gradual cooling that followed allowed clouds of hydrogen to coalesce by gravity to form stars. Hydrogen is the simplest atom, comprising a nucleus, made up of a neutron with no charge, and a proton with a positive electrical charge; the atom is completed by a negatively charged electron, which used to be thought of as a small mini planet orbiting the nucleus, but now seems better regarded as a negatively charged cloud around the nucleus. With further cooling heavier atoms appeared as hydrogen atoms fused, building up the elements of the modern periodic table, which indicates both their affinities and their gradually increasing size, in numbers of neutrons, protons and electrons. The organisation of elements into the periodic table was first recognised in 1869 by the Russian chemist, Dmitri Mendeleev (1834–1907).

Over the billion years following the Big Bang, quasars (massive active galactic nuclei which emit electromagnetic energy) and galaxies came into being through the coalescence of matter. Stars appeared of which our sun is one; some of these stars had collections of matter thrown off them, which became planets and orbited their star as a result of gravitational attraction. It is thought that Earth was born and formed from our sun about four and a half billion years after the Big Bang. In turn, the moon separated off from Earth, and again thanks to gravity, now orbits Earth.

The way in which we understand all this is explained by the Swiss physicist Albert Einstein’s (1879–1955) general theory of relativity published in 1905 and updated in 1917, and which in turn has been expanded and clarified by Lemaitre in 1927. Einstein thought that the universe was static, but Lemaitre (1894–1966), a Belgian priest and astronomer, first proposed the continuing expansion of the universe. This was confirmed mathematically by the American astronomer Edwin Hubble (1889–1953), after whom the Hubble space telescope is named. This continuing expansion is now generally accepted.

Gradual cooling of the universe continued. Around three and a half billion years ago, and ten billion years after Earth was initially formed, the earliest signs of life appeared. These early life forms are known as prokaryotes, and they arose from protobionts (literally meaning ‘pre-life’), which are organic molecules surrounded by a membrane, in other words, a very primitive type of possible cell. About a billion years after this, and two and a half billion years ago, there is evidence of photosynthesis, which may be regarded as the earliest true form of life.

At this time, Earth was still very hot, and the surface of the planet was devoid of its present covering of gaseous oxygen. The atmosphere then is often described as a ‘primordial soup’. The heat and the violent stormy and electrical climate produced many random chemical reactions, eventually leading to the chance production of nucleic acids, initially ribonucleic acids (RNA), and later deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).

Attempts have been made to replicate this situation in the laboratory: Miller and Wrey at the University of Chicago in 1951, were the first to do so by cycling a mixture of water, hydrogen, methane and ammonia in an atmosphere of electrical sparks; this is the nearest that the laboratory can get to simulating ‘primordial soup’. They found that under these conditions 10% of the carbon from methane and ammonia was converted to organic compounds, including amino acids. This stage in the start of evolution of life into a carbon-based from was not possible until Earth had cooled considerably.

From these simple beginnings, more organic molecules were formed, and then by a gradual process of accretion, protobionts followed. In turn, protobionts became more complicated, and gave rise to Archaea, which are the first true single cells possessing a membrane, but no nucleus. Archaea still exist and were initially discovered in harsh environments, although they have now been found widely dispersed throughout nature, including in soils and in the oceans. Alongside them, as sub-groups, are the two big classes of single-celled organisms, bacteria and eukaryotes (organisms with a membrane and a nucleus).

The first complex single cell organisms seem to have originated about one billion years ago when an archaeon engulfed, or fused with a bacterium. Bacteria subsequently became the mitochondria of later cells, producing the energy that the cell generates. Once this life was established, the photosynthesis that followed was probably the next vital development in the early appearance of life on the surface of the planet. Plants with photosynthetic ability extract carbon dioxide from the air, and return oxygen to the atmosphere after generating energy.

Over a very considerable period of time, photosynthesising plants brought the initially very low oxygen content of Earth’s atmosphere up to its current level of 21% (the remaining gases in our air are 78% nitrogen and 1% of some rare gases). The way was thus paved for the evolutionary appearance of oxygen breathing, non-photosynthesising life, mainly single celled animals, which could then in turn start to evolve. Initially, most of these very primitive animals fed on equally primitive plant cells which were able to photosynthesise their energy from the basic materials of water, carbon dioxide, mineral salts and energy from sunlight.

Evolution has only been fully recognised since Charles Darwin (1809–1882) published his world changing book in 1859, though several earlier scientists were already edging towards thinking along these lines, including Cuvier, Humboldt, Lyell, Mantell, and Darwin’s own grandfather Erasmus (chap 72). It was extremely controversial at that time in the 19th century and took a while to be accepted but is now firmly part of the explanation of our history, confirmed by the later discovery of DNA and how it works through the action of genes.

The salient points of Darwin’s teaching are fourfold – firstly, the world, and the species on it evolve, with new ones coming into existence and old ones dying out all the time. Secondly this process is gradual and not noticeable to a single human generation; thirdly all creatures and plants have a common descent and ancestors; and fourth, natural selection controls the process, ensuring the ‘survival of the fittest’ (not a phrase that Darwin himself thought of or used); this contrasts with artificial selection, which people have practiced through selective breeding of plants and animals throughout previous generations.

Since then, evolution has continued apace, but it is remarkable to note that the early simple forms of life all relied on nucleic acids; and although life has now become extremely complex, the basic building blocks, and the continued development of life, all rests on deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Plants as well as animals continued to evolve, becoming increasingly complex. There have been many separate lines of plant evolution, and most plants that we are familiar with today have become very specialised and survive under certain fairly specific climatic conditions.

In turn, the animals that have evolved live off these plants (or off other animals), so that the animals we now find around us are also limited by climatic and other conditions. Many animals are highly specific about the plants or other life that they feed upon, and therefore the conditions under which many animals are found are a reflection of their food source.

Scientists classify animals into invertebrates and vertebrates. The invertebrates are amazingly diverse and include many simple forms of life, including all the insects. Many invertebrates live in the sea and provide a basic food source for the more complex vertebrate animals, including fish and other vertebrates. Vertebrates are so called because they have a backbone made up of segments with one vertebra in each segment, and the evolutionary tree has resulted in many branches, with surprisingly different forms of animals.

However, we must note at this stage that all animals, like all plants, rely on DNA as the code for the development and growth of each individual organism, and also as the code for passing on their structure and organisation to their offspring. For the vertebrates, we must note that two common features are evident throughout the animal kingdom: first, these creatures all have a backbone, and second, they all have four limbs made up from different body segments, indicating a distant common ancestor. The backbone and limbs of vertebrates have developed in many different ways to provide us with the richness and variety of difference that we see in the creatures around us, but the basic structural pattern has remained constant.

Driving the evolution of both animals and plants are a number of different mechanisms. Internally the existence of genetic mutations, which are chance alterations in nuclear DNA, give rise to major evolutionary possibilities. It must be remembered, however, that most mutations within animal or plant DNA will turn out to be potentially lethal to the organism, and therefore that branch of the evolutionary stock of the animal or plant will die out, slowly or rapidly. Sometimes the mutation will be relatively neutral, or even beneficial, in which case it may permit life to continue under different climatic conditions, or with greater competitive advantage.

This is a subject that we can now understand thanks to the discovery of DNA in 1869 by Friedrich Miescher (1844–1895), a Swiss biologist working on white blood cells at the University of Tubingen in Germany. Although this discovery came barely ten years after Charles Darwin’s ground-breaking publication on evolution, full understanding of the microscopic workings of mutations was not possible until James Watson (b.1928), Francis Crick (1926–2004) and Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958) in Cambridge elucidated the molecular structure of DNA by 1963.

Other drivers of evolution are external to the animal, and include the competition between species, not forgetting the effect of man as a predator, and the movement of individual animals from different climatic areas to more or less favourable areas. In addition to this there are other drivers of evolution which can be large or small, and which may wipe out many whole species at a time, sometimes resulting in mass extinctions. These cataclysmic events can occur alone or as multiple interacting causes and were first postulated by Georges Cuvier (1769–1832). Cuvier was an important French naturalist who established extinction as a fact: he did not believe in evolution but thought that new creations occurred after each successive extinction due to catastrophe. In the last few hundred million years there have been some five or six truly major disasters which have each wiped out many or even most of the living species at the time.

Among the causes of catastrophe as drivers of evolution, we recognise the following:

Global cooling or warming.

Sea level changes resulting from the planet’s temperature change.

Marine anoxia in the oceans, as oxygen is removed by excessive organic matter. Acidification also occurs in oceans and lakes and is caused by absorption of carbon dioxide producing carbonic acid; in addition sulphur dioxide from volcanic output also results in acidification due to the production of sulphurous acid.

Alterations in oceanic and atmospheric circulation.

Solar radiation causing mutations.

Volcanism causing huge dust clouds which obscure the sun producing a so-called ‘nuclear winter’. Volcanism may also cause the extrusion of huge quantities of lava to engulf the landscape and form basalt rocks on cooling, two examples of which are recognised today as the Siberian Traps in northern Russia and the Deccan Traps in central India. As well as the floods of lava, considerable quantities of CO2 are released by volcanism and ancient deposits of coal, oil and gas may be released and burnt.

Bolides (meteorites and other extra-terrestrial objects) striking Earth. These may leave surface scars of huge impact craters, such as the Chicxulub crater in Central America which is 180km in diameter and is estimated to have been caused by the impact of a meteorite measuring 10km in diameter.

Most recently, humans are proving to be a devastating changer of environment.

Although these catastrophes are impressive, they are probably only responsible for a minority of extinctions, and the majority of extinctions occur with much lesser changes of environment to which a species is unable to adapt. Throughout the ages there have been several episodes of mass extinction that we can identify, and which have arisen from disturbance or damage to Earth’s crust. Three of the largest include the Great Oxygen Event 2.4 billion years ago whose cause is unknown and happened when an oxygen rich atmosphere killed many anaerobic species. The Permian-Triassic Event 250 million years ago is also known as the ‘Great Dying’, and is also of uncertain cause; and the meteor or asteroid causing the Chicxulub crater 66 million years ago which is thought to have wiped out all the land-based dinosaurs, are the other two massive events. The meteor collision is estimated to have caused an enormous tsunami up to 1,000ft high.

Earth itself is made up of a large core, which is about half the diameter of the planet, or 6,000km. The temperature in the core is extremely hot, due to the decay of radioactive elements, including uranium, but the core itself is mainly made up of iron and nickel. Around the core is a mantle, about 2,900km thick, which is much cooler, and outside the mantle is a crust that varies from 8–50km thick, mainly made of silicates, which is thinnest beneath the oceans.

The land masses we call continents are crusts effectively floating on this fluid mantle. In the wild variations of climate apparent as ice ages, the ice may build up to a thickness of several kilometres, principally in the polar icecaps. The weight of this enormous mass of ice depresses the floating continents on which it rests, and when much of the ice melts at the end of an ice age, there is a rebound of the underlying Earth’s crust, causing the land to lift as well as a rebound rise in sea levels.

Earth’s crust is in constant movement, a proposition first suggested by Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), and later formalised as a hypothesis put forward by Alfred Wegener (1880–1930), a German physicist and polar researcher, after he had compared maps of the opposing, and apparently matching, coastlines of Africa and South America. Movements are very slow in terms of human time, but the crustal motion generates events of enormous force. There are fractures in the crust which allow the plates of the crust to overlap and move above and below each other. In doing this, they generate what we experience on the surface as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis if the movements are below the ocean. This whole process of moving crustal plates is known as continental drift and is a reflection of the enormous forces generated by the gigantic plates of Earth’s crust that are moving around.

Continental drift has also influenced evolution, as is evident in the isolation of Australia and New Zealand, where the part of Earth’s crust bearing these two countries has been divorced from other parts of Earth’s crust for many millions of years, so that random evolutionary development of life has allowed very different flora and fauna to develop. As one can observe, there are no mammals in New Zealand (apart from one species of bat): there are no horses, elephants, lions or similar animals native to Australia, and similarly there are no marsupials or kangaroos elsewhere in the world. One can also observe that the animal life in North America is somewhat different from that in Europe and Asia, since recent evolution took different directions on these two continents at a time when there was no connecting land mass between them.

Of all living creatures that have ever existed, most are now extinct. We know them from the fossil record, where some of them have been preserved, but the fossil record as a whole gives us a picture of gradually increasing complexity and specialisation. Britain has only been a separate landmass from the main part of Europe for the last eight or nine thousand years, and so the time for separate evolutionary development has been minute. Even so, some species have become extinct in the British Isles, and others have developed in a way that is not found on the European mainland. Similar land bridges to that between Britain and the continent have existed elsewhere in the past, notably between Papua New Guinea and Australia, between India and Sri Lanka, between Italy, Sicily and Malta, and across the Bering Straits; as a consequence, some differences in flora and fauna are visible on each side of past land bridges.

From all this planetary cooling and crustal rearrangement, animals and plants have evolved in ever increasing forms of complexity. Humans have appeared and evolved only very recently in planetary terms. There is no absolute or precise cut-off in human evolution, and there have been very many different branches of evolutionary development. Over the last two to four million years, depending on where an arbitrary cut-off is placed in the continuous development of humans, we have arrived at our present form. During this time several different sub-species of human appeared, though all except one have become extinct, leaving Homo Sapiens alone to populate the planet over the last ten thousand years following the end of the most recent Ice Age.

Possible further reading:

The Great Extinctions by Norman MacLeod (Natural History Museum)

Life, an Unauthorised Biography by Richard Fortey (Harper Collins)

Chapter 2

African Origins

The onset of life emerged from all the chaos and chance outlined in chapter 1, first as organic matter, and then in turn as the appearance of single celled organisms. Later the advent of photosynthesis within these cells enabled the absorption of solar energy and gave rise to a gradually increasing variety of plant life. This plant life then spread across the land mass of the planet, providing a massive variety of basic foods on which evolving animal life could feed. Some of this animal life continued to be vegetarian, relying on plants for continuing sustenance, whilst other animals, both vertebrate and invertebrate, became carnivorous, feeding on the new profusion of animal life.

Amongst plant life, grass occupies a special place and first appears during the cretaceous era (145–66 million years ago) just before the extinction of the dinosaurs. The evolution of grass is a very important enabling event for two major reasons; first it allowed the subsequent evolution of grazing animals both large and small, and secondly it provided the precursor plants to appear bearing the seeds or grains which humans would later be able to domesticate and use in their transition from a foraging hunter-gatherer existence to an agricultural life.

Grass is unusual in that it grows from the base of the leaf, unlike most plants which grow from the new tip; thus when grass is cropped by grazing animals, it can rapidly regrow from the base – this allows good pasture to develop (and much later in our own time allows the development of lawns which regrow when mown.) It is noteworthy that there are over 50 cereal-producing edible grasses, of which more than half grow in the Fertile Crescent where they were available for stone age man to domesticate. In contrast there are only four varieties each native to Africa and America, and only a single one in Europe (oats).

In Africa, somewhere between two and four million years ago, our ancestors gradually evolved from their four-legged ape forefathers. Assumption of the erect posture was part of this evolutionary progress, and although the total benefit of the upright posture is a matter for speculation, clear advantages can be postulated. Using only the two hind legs for standing and walking leaves the two forelimbs free for other activities, including catching prey, or gathering food, and probably most important of all, using tools; it is also energy efficient.

It has further been suggested that in the savannah of Africa, with tall grass in most places, an upright posture would more easily allow distant vision to detect both possible prey and possible danger. What is lost by using only two limbs for locomotion, especially speed, is easily outweighed by the enormous gain in flexibility and prehension from the considerable adaptability of the forelimbs.

Early man was omnivorous, existing on a wide diet of plant and animal matter. A partial meat diet provides more calories, together with the advantage of being much less bulky than a plant diet; it also provides benefits in terms of storage and carrying food from place to place. It meant that early humans were able to spend less time foraging for nuts, seeds and berries, and had consequently more time to construct shelters, or to hunt, travel and explore.

Initially, in Africa, much of the meat in the human diet could have come from migrating animals, the herds of which were easily followed. A further advantage of a partially meat diet is that drying, and then storage of food, would have been much easier. There is evidence that early man hunted most available large animals, and the extinction of this megafauna (often before the last ice age), seems to coincide with the arrival of man the hunter and his skill at hunting these large animals in groups.

Africa, above all, provided a benign climate with plenty of food, caves to live in, seas and lakes, as well as the vast plains, full of plant foods, fish and animals. Early hominid fossils have been studied extensively and are of different types in Africa. Early stone tools have been found, together with other evidence of pre-historic habitation. Even fossilised footsteps have been found in the volcanic ash fall-out from around three and a half million years ago. Much of the recent initial research was done in the Great Rift Valley by the British archaeologist Louis Leakey (1903–1972), who was looking for evidence to confirm Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in the development of humans, as the valley seemed to be a place where early humanity might first have appeared.

The Rift Valley in Africa is a giant fault in Earth’s crust in a situation where both climate and food supply together provided an ideal situation for early human development. Within the Rift Valley, which lies in Tanzania, the Olduvai Gorge has been a prolific source of evidence about man’s early evolution with much of the early work there being pioneered by Dr Leakey from Cambridge. The Red Sea, lying to the north-east of Africa, is also a large rift valley and a big scar in Earth’s crust. These two rifts appear to have been formed eight to ten million years ago by continental drift separation.

The earliest human remains found in Africa date to somewhat later, about three and a half million years ago: when the partial skeleton of a creature, since named ‘Lucy’, was discovered by the American anthropologist Dr Donald Johanson (b. 1943) also in the Great Rift Valley some sixty years ago. Since then, archaeology has given us a much better idea of the early evolution of mankind, and several different lines, or species, of humans have now been found and are known to have evolved.

One such line, Homo Erectus is apparent about three hundred thousand years ago, and another species of hominid called Neanderthal Man also evolved in Africa. The Neanderthals were bigger and heavier than modern humans, and even had bigger brains, but they died out just before, or at the onset of the last ice age, for unknown reasons. There is a little evidence of some interbreeding between Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens with some neanderthal genes persisting in a few populations of modern humans. Traces of various other human species have been found, both in Africa and in Asia, indicating that these early humans migrated out of Africa.

However, most of these hominids died out, and a single late line of Homo Sapiens persists through to the present day, having first appeared about eighty to seventy thousand years ago. There is a ‘pinch point’ found by DNA analysis about sixty thousand years ago, when the population of Homo Sapiens dropped to only a few thousand individuals. Even fewer of these individuals are our ancestors in a direct line and it has been suggested that only a single early woman from that time may be the direct ancestor of all presently living people – accordingly, she has been named ‘mitochondrial Eve’ since the female line can be traced genetically through mitochondrial DNA, while the male line is traced through the nuclear Y chromosome.

Once Homo Sapiens had evolved, migration out of Africa became possible, although due to geography and continental drift there were only three feasible ways for African creatures to leave that continent. The first of these is across the Straits of Gibraltar, but the Straits are 14km wide, and it seems unlikely that early man was ever able to negotiate this expanse of water. In the distant past, perhaps six million years ago, and long before hominids were around, there was a land bridge between Morocco and southern Spain, and the Mediterranean as we know it did not exist, but consisted of a series of land-locked, highly salty lakes, lying below sea level like the Dead Sea.

When sea levels rose some five or six million years ago, the land bridge was breached and the Mediterranean basin was flooded from the Atlantic leaving Africa fully cut off from Europe and Asia). The second possible way for humans to have left Africa is from the northeast across the Sinai desert. The third way would be to have crossed the isthmus of sea at the southern end of the Red Sea. At the end of the Ice Age with much of Earth’s water locked up in the polar icecap, the sea level here would have been much lower and this Red Sea crossing would have been much shorter and easier, though still a considerable barrier for early humans; but the evidence indicates that this was probably the route by which early humans left Africa and spread east along the coast towards Asia.

The vagaries of the ice ages have undoubtedly influenced the various possibilities of human evolution. Frequent covering of the northern latitudes of Earth by great sheets of ice and the adjacent barren plains of arctic tundra, have severely limited the areas in which man could live. Before the onset of the last ice age, and in an inter-glacial period, Homo Sapiens had left Africa and migrated along the shores of India and Asia and up rivers, where fishing, hunting and gathering provided plentiful food and a benign climate.

Humans reached Australia fifty to sixty thousand years ago, when sea levels were very low and island hopping was possible from the Malaysian peninsula along the island chain east through Borneo and New Guinea to reach Northern Australia. It took much longer to colonise the remote Polynesian Islands and required considerable long-distance sea-faring ability; New Zealand was not reached until very recently, less than a thousand years ago.

It is possible that man spread along eastern Asian coastlines and over the Bering Straits into Alaska, and North America before the last ice age, though there may have been a pause in human migration on the northeast coast of Asia until the end of the ice age. It is also possible that this spread was halted further east on the northwest coast of America by the ice age, and that for a period of several thousand years, humans lived in ice age ‘refuges’. These refuges were areas of relatively benign climate surrounded by glacial icecaps, either in the coastal region of present British Columbia and Alaska, or further east on the slopes and plains on the east side of the Rocky Mountains.

From there, it would have been a relatively easy migration later, when the ice sheet had receded, for humans to diverge in three directions: to the north east for those humans who would become the Eskimos, to the south east for other humans who would become the ancestors of North American plains Indians, and to the south along either side of the coastal mountain chain of north, central, and then south America, to populate Central and South America as the great civilisations of central America and northern South America.

The ice ages that have had such a great influence on man’s evolution and subsequent migrations, are quite variable and cause enormous changes in climate, and in the height of sea level over the planet. At one stage of the last glacial maximum sea levels are estimated to have been three to four hundred feet lower than at present due to the water locked up as ice at the poles. The genesis of ice ages results from many factors which affect planetary temperature including:

Intermittent increases in the atmospheric ‘greenhouse gases’, mainly the levels of carbon dioxide and methane.

Changes in Earth’s orbit which oscillates on an oval path; this oscillation is known as the Milankovitch Cycle after the Serbian physicist Milutin Milankovitch (1879–1958).

The movement of tectonic plates on the crust of Earth altering the relative amounts of land to sea.

Variations in the sun’s activity and therefore changing heat radiation from the sun.

Large meteorites causing immense dust clouds and ‘nuclear winters’.

Super-volcanoes have also caused nuclear winters: the last such eruption in recent history was that of Tambora in Indonesia in 1815, which year then came to be described as the year without a summer, because the volcanic ash circling Earth cut out so much of the sun’s rays.

The last ice age, which spans the period roughly from about twenty-five thousand years to twelve thousand years ago, had its glacial maximum around 20,000 BC and left a marked local effect on British geography. Because sea levels were so low, due to all the water locked up in ice at the Poles, there was a wide land bridge between Britain and Europe, and a further land bridge between Ireland and Britain. At the last Glacial Maximum, about twenty thousand years ago, the ice sheet from the North Pole extended as far as southern Britain, where the land became barren desert tundra.

Our current climate is now much more benign as we live in an interglacial period. When the polar cap receded, the land bridge to Europe persisted for a few millennia until further warming and gradual rising of the sea level cut Britain off from the continent around 8,000 BC. It is suggested that a giant tsunami originating close to Norway helped complete the process of flooding the land bridge.

As we have previously seen, humans are not thought to have migrated out of Africa across the Straits of Gibraltar. The second route out of Africa lies at the north-eastern end of the continent, where migration across the northern Nile Basin would have been possible. Humans would have found it difficult to get to this area because of the northern African desert lying between central Africa and this route out of Africa, but there is some evidence that humans achieved this migration and came to live in the Middle East in the last inter-glacial period, however these humans then appear to have died out by the start of the last ice age.

The third possible route out of Africa is across the Straits at the southernmost tip of the Red Sea, which avoids the need for migration across the desert belt of Africa. It appears this was the most recent route taken by a few migrants, before the last Ice Age. These humans multiplied and spread east along coasts, and up rivers into the interior, as the start of waves of migration which have since peopled the world. These few individuals are the ancestors of all present living humans outside Africa. In other words, these early people, possibly no more than a thousand, then multiplied exponentially to reach the present world population of over seven billion.

We have been greatly helped in understanding human spread by the recent ability to study DNA in present populations. This new science has allowed populations of people to be traced back through their ancestors and through either the male or female line. This is possible because the DNA of cytoplasmic mitochondria within cells is only transmitted through the female line, whilst nuclear DNA in the Y chromosome of men is only transmitted through the male line. Using this recent technology, it is now possible to say that most humans originated, and are the direct descendants of a very few early people, indeed possibly a single female, previously noted as ‘mitochondrial Eve’.

Thanks to mutations altering the DNA through the generations, it is also possible to give good estimates of when and where specific populations of modern people originated. This DNA evidence has added greatly to our knowledge of ancient peoples, which was previously limited to the archaeology of their burials, monuments, painting, pottery and to the carbon dating of their artefacts.

This present understanding contrasts with the work of Archbishop and Primate of All Ireland, James Ussher (1581–1656), who calculated in 1650 that the origin of Earth occurred on 4004 BC. He arrived at this figure by tracing the generations back in the Bible to Adam and Eve, estimating the time span of each generation. Following this early intellectual attempt to estimate the start of history without any direct evidence, the Age of Enlightenment (chapter 48) produced a lot of evidence and knowledge by naturalists studying pre-historic life, events and fossils. Layered findings in caves demonstrated the succeeding historical eras, with the different cave layers demonstrating different fauna and flora: in this way it then became clear that both Earth itself, and life upon it, were very much older than the biblical account suggested.

Corroborating evidence comes from three important recent scientific developments: firstly carbon dating which measures the remaining amount of radioactive carbon14 in organic remnants since it was incorporated in a plant or animal: this is a technique invented by Willard F Libby at the University of Chicago in 1949, for which he later received a Nobel Prize. Secondly dendrochronology, the measurable pattern of tree ring growth which is now possible to assess back through time for at least 8,000 years, thanks to the discovery of some very long-lived trees and to other even older trees preserved in anoxic bogs, the tree ring growth also gives a temporal pattern of climatic variation.

Thirdly, sequential information is available from drilled ice cores in Greenland and the Arctic and Antarctic going back many millennia, and carrying contemporary evidence from dust particles, spores and such-like which settled to the ground after being caught up in rain or snow.

Possible further reading:

Out of Eden by Stephen Oppenheimer (Constable and Robinson)

The Ancestors Tale by Richard Dawkins (Houghton Mifflin)

Chapter 3

The Stone Age

The period prior to the last Ice Age is known as the Stone Age from the tools those early humans fashioned to do their different work and tasks. At various times different tribes, or populations of early people, devised differing and characteristic tools which have since been used to name and study these populations and their geographic and chronological extents. Any human population existing before the use of metal is known as Stone Age and might therefore include other hominids, including Neanderthals, who lived within the last two to three million years.

When the planet warmed up after the last ice age, a huge amount of the planet’s water remained locked up in the polar ice caps, and as a result the land bridge between Britain and Europe still allowed migration of animals and humans. At this time the River Rhine poured out of northern Europe into a land area we now know as the North Sea, and then ran south through the Straits of Dover, where it cut a very wide gorge, leaving chalk cliffs, which are still visible today on either side of the English Channel.

At the time of the last glacial maximum, 20,000 years ago, the sea level was around 100 metres lower than at present, but as the ice locked up in the poles gradually melted, the land bridge between Britain and the continent, and between Britain and Ireland, slowly flooded again. This geological accident leaving Ireland and Britain separate from Europe has been a potent influence on the development and subsequent history of the peoples inhabiting these islands as part of Europe, but at the same time separate from it.

Once the ice receded at the end of the last Ice Age exposing bare ground again, the first life to return consisted of mosses, lichens, ferns and grasses. Soil gradually built up with cold-tolerant trees (birch, willow, aspen, pine and juniper), beginning the transformation of the land to scrubby forest, which in turn thickened up with hardwoods including oak and ash; the whole process took several millennia. After a further cold spell of a thousand years from 10,800 to 9,600BC the warming resumed allowing migration across from Europe to England initially, and then farther north to Scotland after 8,500 BC.

Most of these migrating people would have been nomadic hunter-gatherers, travelling north in the summer and south again for the winter. Gough’s Cave in the Cheddar Gorge in England shows signs of both animal and human habitation back as far as 12,500BC, but much of the human activity in the south of Britain at this time could have been as summer camps for hunting.

After about 9,000 BC the receding ice cap and a period of relatively stable climate, allowed colonisation of the land, and people slowly progressed from the hunter gatherer Stone Age into becoming early farmers of both crops and animals. The period between 7,000 and 3,000 BC is known as the Holocene Optimum and was a much warmer interlude before some cooling set in once more. It is worth remarking that a further short period of warmth occurred between 800 and 1300 AD when the Vikings were able to establish colonies on coastal Greenland, and further west discovered the coast of North America, which they named Vinland because of the vines they found there. This was then followed by a much colder period known as the Little Ice Age, between 1400 and 1800 AD, when weather and winters became much more severe, and when life in Greenland became much more marginal and difficult.

The oldest Stone Age settlement found in Europe is on the banks of the Danube in Serbia at Lepenski Vir and was a planned central settlement with satellite villages dating from as far back as 9,500 BC. It was discovered in 1960 but was inadequately studied because of impending flooding by a hydro-electric scheme; although much of the site was transferred the remains were fragile and a lot of artefacts and architectural detail has been lost.

The Stone Age people who came to Britain after the last ice age were resourceful and inventive. But even before then, early cave art has been found in Europe dating from around 30,000 years ago, long before the last Ice Age. Cave art from the same time period is also known in the southern Sahara, which was not desert at that time, and further cave drawings are present in northern Australia from this time, where the early Stone Age Aboriginal people created fascinating pictures. Cave paintings are mainly of contemporary animals.

There seems to have been a cognitive revolution with a sharp increase in human thinking ability before the last Ice Age which cannot be tied in to any clear evolutionary anatomical or physiological development, but which prepared Stone Age people for the rapid development of civilisation that accelerated after the Ice Age ended.

The techniques for making and firing pottery appeared soon after the Ice Age, and pottery fragments and figurines (carved figures, usually female and produced possibly as fertility objects) are known from as long ago as 8,000 BC in Japan, and 6,000 BC in Britain. In the same way that stone age populations have been studied and classified by their tools, so pottery been used to define and differentiate more recent groups of people. Britain was eventually cut off from the continent by flooding of the land bridge due to rising sea levels around 6,000 BC: this process was possibly completed by the Storegga Slide, a giant under-sea landslide just west of the Norwegian coast, causing a huge tsunami which has left identifiable debris as far as 80km inland in Scotland; the contemporary effect on human and animal life would have been devastating.

Farming, and the early deforestation required to produce land to farm, is known from 6,500 BC onwards which falls in the middle of the Holocene Optimum, when the climate was warmer and as a result there must have been a lot of wildlife for hunting. A visit to any local British museum will allow you to see many artefacts from this Stone Age period. Flint arrow heads used for hunting are numerous, and larger flints were shaped as cutting and scraping tools for butchering animal carcasses. Other animal products were used in different ways; deer antlers were used as picks for scraping and loosening earth, and there is evidence for the use of woven baskets for carrying, wooden hurdles were used as fencing, or laid as paths across boggy areas, hides and furs for clothing were vital.

The first known community temple is at Gobeki-Tepe in Anatolia, Southern Turkey, and appears to have been built by hunter-gatherers (because there is no sign of nearby habitation) in about 9,500 BC. Farming also originated in the Anatolia region of Central Turkey when cereals were first domesticated and where summers in ancient times would have been dry and winters would have been wet. The wild grasses from which seeds were gathered were ideal for domestication, as the seeds were large and drought resistant. Barley and wheat were cultivated in the Middle East from around 10,000 BC in the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, known as the Fertile Crescent.

Rather later, millet and rice were being cultivated in China from around 6,000 BC, while at the same time maize was being cultivated in Central America. Thus, there is evidence for the synchronous and independent start of farming with domestication and selective breeding of the indigenous plants and animals across the world: in the Fertile Crescent with wheat, barley, peas, sheep and goats coming from Anatolia close by; in China with rice, millet, ducks and pigs; in Asia and India with chickens and cows; in North and Central America with maize, beans and turkeys; and in South America with potatoes and llamas. Horses were probably first domesticated in the central steppe region of Kazakhstan around the same period.

Once cultivation of crops was established, humans no longer needed to lead a migratory life following the availability of wild plants or animals, though there was undoubtedly a lot of hunting for wild animals alongside the early domestication and breeding of animals for food and skins. In this way, during the millennia after the last ice age, the early Stone Age hunters gradually changed their lifestyle from the rather insecure hunting and gathering of previous generations, to become more static farmers. In Europe some communities lived on the edge of lakes in huts known as pile dwellings or stilt houses (‘crannogs’ in Scotland), where fish would have made an important contribution to their diet, and the surrounding water would have conferred a degree of safety.

In addition to the domestication of animals for food, it seems likely that dogs were amongst the earliest animals to be domesticated, well before the last Ice Age, to provide labour, probably from strains of wolf. Wolves would have been relatively easy to domesticate because they possess a pack mentality and would have integrated well into the ‘human pack’, where they became very valuable in assisting early man to hunt, and also to herd the other domesticated animals. Herd animals were probably domesticated around this same time, though there is actually evidence for earlier controlled herding of reindeer in Lapland 20,000 years ago.

Clear evidence of social organisation amongst Stone Age people can be inferred from the large, ancient and well-preserved temple monuments they have left behind in Malta. The enormous stone circles at Avebury, Callanish, Brodgar, and Stonehenge in Britain, and the megalithic temples in Malta, all bear testament to their technical skills and interests, and also to the considerable social organisation which would have been needed to complete such vast monuments with very primitive tools, all in the fourth millennium BC.

Lesser evidence of stone age culture is frequently to be seen in the British countryside, on the western coast of France, Iberia and across the plains of Europe. Tombs, present as tumuli, mark the burials of Stone Age people throughout Europe. Some tombs were the site of many burials and can be seen as chambered tombs. Once again, many of these are present along the west coasts of Britain, Ireland and France, as well as in Spain and Portugal. In addition to this, single standing stones, or megaliths, are dotted around the British and French countryside.

Further to the east in Europe, the steppes show evidence of elaborate social organisation in burial mounds known as kurgans. The relatively similar design and construction of these Stone Age monuments indicates that Neolithic man was capable of travelling considerable distances, both by water and on land to trade and interact with other tribes and settlements. The monuments along the Atlantic coasts of France, Britain and Ireland, confirm the ability of ancient peoples to travel and trade. There is further evidence of Stone Age travel from the presence of axe heads and jewellery hundreds of miles from their source of origin.

Much evidence of early people no longer exists because the wood and plant materials that they used for their huts and other purposes has usually rotted away. Figurines and small carvings offer insights into Neolithic thoughts and priorities, but as writing was yet to develop, we have to infer most of what we understand about Stone Age culture from the tools, monuments and occasional stone buildings that have come down to us. A further source of information comes from middens; these are the rubbish tips of Neolithic man, which contain particularly the food residues that were of no use, including bones and seashells; pollen analysis on plant remains can also provide valuable insights. Cave drawings and megalithic decorations point us to important aspects of Neolithic culture.

The most decorated megalithic tomb in Europe, dating to around 3,800 BC, is on the small island of Gavrinis in the western French Bay of Morbihan. This megalithic tomb is a long passage grave, and the carvings are very similar to another very large passage grave at New Grange in Central Ireland. These passage graves were all aligned so that at the mid-winter solstice, when the sun is at its nadir, the passage was lit by the early morning sun shining down the passage into the central tomb chamber. There is a third equally impressive and large passage grave, at Maes Howe in the Orkney Islands.

It has been suggested – and it seems to fit well with the figures and information that we have – that technological advances, including farming, occurred when populations and their density reached a certain size, thereby perpetuating knowledge and skills and allowing cross-fertilisation and development of ideas.

The building of stone circles began around 3,200 BC and there are more than a thousand of them known in the British Isles, though many are small and relatively insignificant by comparison with Stonehenge. The enormous task of building of these stone circles can be gauged from the fact that the Sarsen stones at Stonehenge were brought from the Marlborough Downs, 30km away, and weighed around 25 tonnes each, others came from the Prescelly Mountains even further away in South Wales. The manpower required for this task would have been immense. There is evidence of celestial alignment in the stone circles, and they are thought in some way to have astronomical significance, though this is far from fully understood.

The favourable climate of the Holocene optimum existing between 7,000 and 3,000 BC must have been a great boon to the early settlers. By about 2,000 BC much of Europe had already been partially deforested for use as building materials and as firewood. In Britain even forests on the higher areas like Dartmoor and Exmoor, were being cleared to provide arable space for farming communities. To this day, small settlements of up to a dozen Stone Age huts can still be seen on Dartmoor, together with somewhat later evidence of field boundaries.

Once the trees were cleared from these areas, there would have been some years of reasonable cultivation, but after this time there were no tree roots left to help draw moisture from the soil, so the water drained downwards into the subsoil, making an impermeable layer which became sodden and too acid for earthworms, and where bacterial decomposition did not occur due to anoxia. On the flatter peaks, the sodden ground gradually turned into peat bogs, and in all probability the small hamlets gradually became untenable because of the lack of reasonable land for farming. However, the acidic and anaerobic conditions of these boggy areas have resulted in peat formation and some remarkably well-preserved archaeological finds have been discovered within the peat.

The invention of the wheel seems to date from around 2,500 BC and would have been used with early carts. In North America, where the wheel did not appear, the American Indians used small drawn platforms without wheels, called travois. Some of these technological inventions were undoubtedly conceived in several places at once, but in Europe other technology spread outwards from the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia. Carbon dating of early European Neolithic sites shows the gradual fanning out of advances in farming and technology from the Middle East at a rate that seems to correspond to about 18km every generation, or 25 years.

It is, however, quite likely that the generational interval in those times would have been nearer 20, or even 15 years, rather than the postulated 25. In the meantime, the fertile crescent in the Middle East had fallen victim to change in climate and over-use of the land, so it had become desertified by comparison with the previously lush days of 2,000 BC. Mesopotamia (the Fertile Crescent, that land around and between the two great rivers Euphrates and Tigris,) is often quoted as the birthplace of civilisation. Recent years, however, have shown a similar progress of Neolithic people towards farming and living in villages, to have occurred in other places as well.

Thus, Egypt around 3,100 BC, and the Indus Valley in India around 2,500 BC, are now recognised as at least partly independent areas where first farming, and subsequently civilisation, evolved. The Minoan civilisation in Crete and southern Greece and Turkey, around 2,000 BC, may also have been a moderately independent area for this evolution.

China, cut off by mountain ranges from the rest of the world, was going through the same process around 1500 BC. Early civilisation started much later in America, both in Central and Southern America, and in the centre of what is now the United States, this was probably in part due to the lack of draft animals for load carrying, and in part because the wheel did not appear in the Americas. In isolated parts of the world pockets of Stone Age culture have continued to exist up to the 20th century, such as the natives of New Guinea, the Ainu Tribe in Northern Japan, and the Eskimos in Northern Canada.

The world’s oldest continually settled community is probably Jericho in Mesopotamia, founded possibly as far back as 10,000 BC in a venerable area which can claim the first writing and literature, together with the first numeracy, accounting, astronomy, architecture and brewing, as well as the appearance of early monotheistic religion.

Possible further reading:

Home by Francis Pryor (Penguin)

Europe Between the Oceans by Barry Cunliffe (Yale University Press)

Chapter 4

The Bronze Age

It was a huge