A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [19]
There’s a direct connection between the first appearance of people and the last appearance of many, if not all, of the large mammals in North America. You can trace this sort of connection across the world, wherever modern Homo sapiens turns up. It’s almost invariable that large mammals disappeared – and not just some animals but a large proportion, in North America something like two thirds to three quarters.
By around 12,000 years ago, the Clovis people and their descendants had not only spread across North America, but had also reached the southernmost tip of South America. Not long after this, warming climate and melting ice raised sea levels sharply so that the land bridge that had brought humans from Asia flooded once again. There was no way back. For the next 10,000 years or so, until the onset of sustained European contact in the sixteenth century AD, the civilizations of the Americas would develop on their own.
So about 12,000 years ago we had reached a key moment in human history. With the exception of the islands of the Pacific, human beings had settled the whole habitable world, including Australia. We seem to be hard-wired to keep moving, always wanting to find out what’s beyond the next hill. Why? The broadcaster and traveller Michael Palin has covered a good deal of the globe – what does he think drives us on?
I’ve always been very restless and, from when I was very small, interested in where I wasn’t, in what was over the horizon, in what was round the next corner. And the more you look at the history of Homo sapiens, it’s all about movement, right from the very first time they decided to leave Africa. It is this restlessness which seems a very significant factor in the way the planet was settled by humans. It does seem that we are not settled. We think we are, but we are still looking for somewhere else where something is better – where it’s warmer, it’s more pleasant. Maybe there is an element, a spiritual element, of hope in this – that you are going to find somewhere that is wonderful. It’s the search for paradise, the search for the perfect land – maybe that’s at the bottom of it all, all the time.
Hope as the defining human quality – an encouraging thought. What stands out for me in our journey so far of nearly two million years is the constant human striving to do things better, to make tools that are not only more efficient but also more beautiful, to explore not just environments but ideas, to struggle towards something not yet experienced. The objects I’ve described have tracked that move – from tools for survival not so different from what other animals might use, to a great work of art and the possible beginnings of religion. My next chapters examine how we began to transform the natural world by starting to farm. In the process, we changed not just the landscape, but plants, animals and, above all, ourselves.
PART TWO
After the Ice Age: Food and Sex
9000–3500 BC
The development of farming occurred independently in at least seven different parts of the world at the end of the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago. This slow revolution took many centuries and had profound implications. Tending crops and domesticating animals meant that humans had for the first time to settle in one place. Farming created a food surplus that allowed larger groups of people to live together and changed not just how they lived but how they thought. New gods were developed