Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

2024-08-26

Prehistoric humans were insignificant animals with no more impact on their environment than gorillas or jellyfish.

In homo sapiens, the brain accounts for 2-3 percent of body weight but it consumes 25 percent of energy (brains of other apes require only 8 percent of energy). We paid for this higher energy requirement by spending more time in search of food and atrophied muscles.

Another singular strait is we walk upright in two legs. It gave us the advantages of using freed hands for other purposes like signalling, throwing and also making it easier to scan savannah for games or enemies. But our skeleton was only developed to support a creature which walks on all four. We paid for this by back aches and stiff necks. Woman paid extra - an upright gait required narrower hips but the babies head were getting bigger. Women who gave birth earlier when the infant's brain and head were relatively small and supple fared better and lived to have more children. Thus, natural selection favoured earlier births. But this also resulted in human babies takings years for their development.

For millions of years, humans hunted small creatures and we were at the middle of the food chain. But now we are at the top of the food chain. A significant step on to our way to the top was the domestication for fire. It allowed us to cook food, which along with killing parasites and germs, also made it easier for digest. When a chimp spent 5 hours a day chewing raw food, a single hour suffices for people to eat cooked food.

Humans first evolved in East Africa 2.5 million years ago and left their homeland to settle North Africa, Europe and Asia. Humans in Europe and western Asia evolved into Neanderthals, the most eastern region of Asia was populated by Homo Erectus. Neanderthals had more muscular features and could survive in cold climates.

About 100,000 years ago, some Sapiens group encountered Neanderthals but failed to secure a firm footing. But then, when Sapiens band left Africa 70,000 years ago, they drove Neanderthals and all other human species from Earth. How? The most commonly believed theory is that Sapiens brain got an accidental genetic mutation which allowed the brain to communicate. But what makes it different from communication of other animals? The unique feature about this is they were able to transmit information about things which did not exist at all - things which exist only in our imagination.

1. They were able to gossip, which meant reliable information can shared about other Homo Sapiens, allowing small bands to expand into larger bands.
2. They were able to communicate prodigious amount of information about the surrounding world - like, the lion is near the river today, so don't go there.

Without an ability to compose fiction, Neanderthals were unable to cooperate effectively in large numbers. With cognitive revolution, Sapiens were able to change their behaviour quickly and transmit more information. This new ability allowed Sapiens to plan and carry out complex actions, build larger and more cohesive groups and cooperate between very large number of strangers resulting in rapid revolution of social behaviour.

An alpha male in a bunch of chimps wins his position not because he is physically stronger, but because he leads a large and stable coalition. For chimpanzees to cooperate, members of the group should know each other intimately. Ties between coalition members are via intimate contact - hugging, touching, kissing in chimps. But such a coalition sustains only to a certain threshold size of group (100 - 150). When the group grows too large, its social order destabilizes and the band splits. But humans can cooperate in large numbers. It is the due to the ability to hold myths and imagine.

Bees don't setup Republic of Bees because their brains can't imagine what does not exist. People imagined limited liability companies, nation, empires, legal systems, gods and demons. They all exist only in our imagination and these myths are the intrinsic fabrics which hold the society together. An imagined reality is something that everyone believes in and as long as this communal belief persists, the imagined reality exerts force in the world.

The first big imprint of Homo Sapiens on other species was 45,000 years ago in Australia. The Australian sub-continent was not inhabited by any Sapiens until then. A theory suggests that Sapiens living in Indonesian archipelago developed the first seafaring societies and reached Australia. But when the first Sapiens reached Australia, within a few thousand years, they wiped out large marsupials and other gaints living in Australia, like gaint koalas, dragon-like lizards, giant diprotodon etc. About 90 percent of Australia's megafauna disappeared.

Whereas in other parts of the land Homo Sapiens and other animals co-evolved, when humans set their foot first in Australia, these animals there were not used to humans. Having mastered fire, Sapiens faced with the threat of large giants burned forest to suit their needs, thus changing the ecology. Since the large animals also had long pregnancy, it made their extinction easier. This is the First Wave of Extinction by Homo Sapiens. As Homo Sapiens settled in various parts of the planet, like in Americas, Australia and other smaller places like Cuba, it was also accompanied by ecological disaster.

Until 10,000 years ago, Sapiens continued to live by gathering wild plants and hunting wild animals. Then, Sapiens began to devote all their time and effort to manipualitng the lives of a few animal and plant species. Thus, the agricultural revolution began changing the way humans lived. It turned foragers into farmers.

We don't know much about the foragers because the horizon of possibilities is very broad. The only thing we can safely say about them is that they lived in small bands numbering several dozen or at most several hundred individuals. They foraged for food, materials and knowledge - to survive, they need a detailed mental map of their territory, to know the growth patterns of each plant and the habits of animals, food which were nourishing, which made you sick etc. The average foraged had wider, deeper and more varied knowledge of her immediate surrounding than most of her modern descendants.

Evidence from fossilised skeletons indicate that ancient foragers were less likely to suffer from starvation or malnutritions than their peasant descendants. Their secret of success is their varied diet whereas farmers tend to eat a very limited and unbalanced diet. They also suffered from less diseases as lot of diseases originated from domesticated animals and were transferred to humans only after agricultural revolution.

During the time of foraging, a few hours a day were spent on foraging and the rest of the time was used for social activities. But as we become farmers, we tilled soil, carried water buckets, plucked weeds from dawn to dusk. When we are foragers, we had a higher supply of nutrients as we ate a wider variety of plants and animals but it changed with farming as our diet primarily become rice, wheat, potatoes and others resulting in lower supply of nutrients. Farming caused people to settle in places, resulted in congested town and cities which also lead to spread of infectious diseases from domesticated animals. Farming helped us to increase our population though the children were more malnourished and starved than children of foragers. Child deaths were common.

Then, why did we farm? The rise of farming was a very gradual affair spread over centuries and millennia. The change proceeded by stages, each of which involved just a small alteration in daily life. About 18, 000 years ago, the last ice age gave way to a period of global warming. As temperature rose, so did rainfall and wheat multiplied and spread. As people begin eating wheat, they inadvertently spread its growth - since its impossible to eat wheat without first winnowing, grinding and cooking, people who gathered them to carry them to their camps also spread them. When humans burned forest, it also helped wheat as it allowed wheat to grow faster. At first, humans might have camped for four weeks during harvest. A generaltion later, as wheat multiplied and spread, the camp must have lasted for five weeks, then six weeks and finally, it became a permanent village. Though settlements were hot bed for infectious diseases, bulging granaries tempted thieves and enemies, compelling them to start building walls and doing guard duty, humans didn't abandon farming. Why? Generation of small changes accumulated and transformed the society. By then, nobody remembered that they had ever lived differently. It was an accumulation of mistakes over generation and soon, people forgot that their old way of foraging and farming was the only way which remained.

Luxuries are trap - farming suggested that higher hard work will lead to more harvest and then we stopped doing what we liked doing and more time was spent working hard. Luxury tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.

Agricultural revolution left farmers life generally more difficult and less satisfying than foragers. Though the sum total of food at disposal of human-kind enlarged, the extra food didn't translate into a better diet or more leisure. Who was responsible? Neither kings nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. Wheat didn't like rocks and pebbles. Sapiens broke their back clearing fields, irrigating them etc. Cultivating wheat provided much food per unit of territory and it allowed Homo Sapiens to multiply exponentially and at the same time, it kept more people alive under worst conditions.

History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing field and carrying water buckets.

Of the thousands of species that our ancestors hunted and gathered, only a few were suitables candidates for farming and herding. Those few specied lived in particular places and those are the places where agricultural revolutions occured. As we domesticated animals, we also altered the constitution of the herds on which we preyed. In a bunch of sheeps, the sheep which was hard to control and the sheeps which were thin was slaughtered first. With eash passing generation, the sheep becamse fatter and more submissive. This selective hunting of sheeps and the evolution of remaining lead us to a more controlled set of sheeps which are fatty and easy to control.

Domesticated animals are also the most miserable creatures. They are slaughtered early (why keep a cock for three years if it has reached its maximum weight in three months?). Farmers developed techniques to lock animals inside pens and cages etc.

As people settled and came to closer contact with animals, it also resulted in more diseases and epidemics. When we were foragers, epidemics were rare because a group was small.

During this time, we also started thinking about the future. The agricultural revolution started bringing about worries of the future in human mind - when will it rain, build up reserves etc.

All cooperation networks - from cities to empires are imagined orders and the social norms that sustained them were based neither on ingrained instincts of humans to stick together nor on personal acquintaces but rather on belief in shared myths. For example, the Americans believes in the American founding document. The American Declaration of Independence says, all men are created but biology says people have evolved. It says about liberty, rights but there is no such thing in biology. These values exists only in our imagination and it is an imagined order. It is not objectively true but believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society.

Imagined orders are embedded in the material world, it shapes our desires as we take instructions from the dominant myth of the day and it is inter-subjective. The imagined orders also created social hierarchies, an another product of human imagination resulting in unjust discrimnation. During the period of Hamurabi, the hierarchy was superiors, commoners and slaves.

There always existed Us vs Them - Homo Sapiens were evolved to think this way. These are social hierarchies created in the mind. How did social hierarchies come into existence? Social hierarchies were first created by a chance historical event and then it starts a vicious cycle in which the social hierarchy gets deeply embedded into the social system. For example, blacks are poor, they get poor education and face discriminatory laws and because of these, as adults they end up poor.

The one hierarchy which existed in all societies is the hierarchy of gender. Why are most societies patriachial than matriachial? Though there are plenty of theories, none of them gives a convincing answer.

Memory overload - our natural brain is not adapt to handle numerical quantities. It is more adapt to handle information like where can food be found, what berries can cure stomach ache and other such information. Evolution pressures have adapted the human brain to store immense quantites of botanical, zoological, topographical and social information.

Empires cannot function without collecting taxes, keeping account of transactions, inventories and food grains which are required for its functioning. But how do we account for these information in an empire-size database? Thus came the first writing system - a method of storing infromation through material signs. The early writing could communicate only numerical information (the amount of grains etc.) and not poems or stories. Hence, they are called as partial scripts.

A critical step was the invention of a new partial script - the numbers from 0 to 9. They were invented by Hindus and Arabs got the credit when they invaded India and spread it througout Middle East and to Europe.

Stories like the Hindu Mahabaratha, Greek Iliad began as oral works. Soon, as the need for storing more information grew, full scripts were developed. Full scripts allowed people to write poetry, romance, dramas etc. The new writing system was a cognitive burden on the brain and schools for scribes, clerks, accountants were opened.

The immense diversity of imagined realities that Sapiens invented and the resulting diversity of behavior patterns are the main components of what we call cultures. It can be the set of myths which we hold together, the way we do certain things, etc. Once cultures appear, the way they develop and change is called as 'history.'

Every culture today is a mix of other cultures. There is no pure culture. When British ruled India, Indians adopted western values and habits like eating with forks, democracy, freedom and self-individualism. With these new-found values, they asked the British to respect their new values of freedom.

Is the Indian culture before British the authentic Indian culture? No, it is a mix of the Mughal culture and the Indian culture which existed before Mughal and so on. Every culture has its typical beliefs, norms and values but these are in constant flux.

Contradictions exist in a culture and these contradictions serve as a engine of cultural development, responsible for the creativity and dynamism of our species.

History has a direction and that direction is towards unity. It is a long term process and to understand it, we should look at the scale of millenia rather than centuries. Before long, there existed a number of seperate human worlds at any given moment on planet Earth. Today, the planet is a single unit.

Over the last few centuries, all cultures were changed almost beyond recognition by a flood of global influences. Tomatoes are Mexican origins, potatoes reached Poland no more than 400 years ago etc. The global unification occured as empires grew and trade intensified. This global unification was fuelled by money, empire and religion.

Money is first big unifier. The followers of Christ and Allah fought wars, killing thousands and turned cities into ruins - all for the greater glory of Chrish or Allah. As the Christians gained upper hand, they issued new gold and solver coinds bearing the cross to mark their victory. The Muslim merchants in North Africa conducted business using these Christian coins.

Before money, there was barter system. And before coins, there existed many other forms of money like cowry shells and grains.

Money is an universal medium of exchange, allowing people to convert almost anything to anything else. Because money can convert, store and transport wealth easily and cheaply, it made a vital contribution to the appearance of complex commercial networks and dynamic markets.

Cowry shells and dollars have value only in our common imagination. Their worth is not inherent in their physical properties like shape, color. They succeeded because of trust in the collective imagination. I trust money because my neighbor trust it. My neighbor trust it because I trust it. We all trust it because the government trust it and demands them in taxes.

How did gold become valued across different cultures? Let's assume that Mediterranean merchants values gold and Indian's don't. Then, finding gold to be cheap in India, they can buy more gold in India cheaply and sell it dearly. This demand for gold in India will cause its value to increase in India as well and within a short time, the value of gold in India and Mediterranean would be similar. The trade between two groups made gold valuable to both of them.

Two universal principles of money: universal convertibility, universal trust. People spoke different languages, worshipped different gods but all believed in gold and silver coins. Of the $60 trillion money, only $6 trillion is cash. The rest of it lies in electronics servers.

The second unifier is empires - a political order ruling over distinct people with different cultural identies and territies along with flexible borders and a potentially unlimited appetite. As empires were created, they absorbed the tribes and people in that region, gradually obliterated the unique characteristics of numerous people, forging out of them new and much large groups. The acculturation and assimilation of various empires practices forged into today's political, social and cultural practices. For example, as Europeans conquered much of the globe, Indians, Africans and others learned English and adopted Western ideologies like capitalism, communism, feminism. Indians are passionate cricket players and tea drinkers, both of which are British legacies. The fall of an empire gave raise to another empire.

Religion can be defined as a system of human laws that is founded on a belief in superhuman laws.

A leading theory on the origin of gods says that when humans were not able to communicate with the goats asking it to be more fertile, god took centre stage as a mediator between the humans and the mute plants and animals. The earliest religion are animist religion where people prayed to tress, rocks and other inanimate objects.

Monotheism was not able to solve evil (what gives rise to evil if there is only one god who is good?). It could explain diseases, famines etc only in a case when it believes that there is only one god and that is evil.

Polytheism is conducive to religious tolerance as they believe on one supreme and completely disinterested power on one hand and on the other hand, gods with partial and biased powers, like rain god, war god. The Hindus believed in Atman - the one supreme power and many other gods like Lakshmi and Saraswathi. Monotheists tended to be far more fanatical and missionary than polytheists.

Capitalism, communism are also a kind of religion. They are established on a myth and they exist only in our imagination. Islam, Buddhism, Communism are all religions because all are systems of human norms and values that are founded on belief in super-natural order.

Humanist religion sanctify Homo Sapiens. Humanism is a belief that Homo Sapiens has a unique and sacred nature, which is fundamentally different from the nature of all other animals and phenomena. But scientist studying human organsim has found no soul there and they increasingly argue that human behavior is determined by genes, hormones and synapses rather than free will - the same forces that determine the behavior of chimpanzees, wolves and ants.

History has hindsight fallacy. It is non-deterministic and it can't be predicted as it is chaotic. An event of past will seem obvious if viewed from the future but at present, it has many paths forward. So many forces are at work and their interactions are so complex that extremely small variations in the strength of forces and the way they interact produce huge differences in outcomes.

History is a level-two chaotic system. The action of predicting history itself make the prediction false - like a stock market.

There is no proof that history is working for the benefit of humans because we lack an objective scale to measure such benefit. For example, arms race spreads from one country to another. At the end, the balance of power remains same but billions of dollar which could have spent on education or health gets wasted. The pattern of behavior in arms race only benefits itself.

Modern science differs from previous traditions of knowledge in three critical ways:

1. the willingness to admit ignorance.
2. the centrality of observation and mathematics.
3. the acquisition of new powers.

If scientific evidence shows that many of the myths are doubtful, how can we hold society together? One way is take a scientific theory and unscientifically, declare it as the final and absolute truth or leave science out of it and live in accordance with a non-scientific absolute truth.

Science is an expensive affair and it is shaped by economic, political and religious interests. Why does someone fund a project? Because they believe it can help attain some power like political, economic or religious goal. The ideology helps in justifying the cost of the research. Science, industry and military technology intertwined only with the advent of capitalist system and the industrial revolution.

In 1770, Europeans had no significant technological advantage over Muslims, Indians and Chinese. In 1775, Asia accounted for 80 percent of the world economy. How did they manage to control the world economy by 1900? How did they manage to open a gap between themselves and rest of the world in the 19th century? Why did the military-industrial-scientific complex blossom in Europe rather than India? The non-Europeans lacked the values, myths, judicial apparatus and sociopolitical structure that took centuries to form and mature in the West and which could not be copied and internalised rapidly. Europeans were used to think and behave in scientific and capitalist ways even before they enjoyed any significant technological advantages. They admitted that I don't know what's out there and felt compelled to go out and make new discoveries.

The conquest of territory and the conquest of knowledge was tightly intertwined in Europe. In the 18th and 19th CE, every military expedition to distant lands also had on board scientists who set out to make scientific disocveries.

When the Muslims conquered India, they did not bring anthropologist to study the culture or geologist to study the Indian soils. But the British did all these - they launched the Great Survery of India in 1802 which lasted 60 years.

Behind the meteoric rise of science and empire is capitalism. What is the foundation of capitalism? It is the credit system. Credit is backed by a trust in the future that the borrower will be able to pay a higher amount tomorrow when the borrowed money is used to bring in real economic growth. The economic growth further increases the trust in future, opening the way for even more credit. The sacred commandment in capitalism is The profits of production must be reinvested in increasing production.

The capitalist argues that greed is good as a shoemakers who makes profit will reinvest the profit to make more shoes, thereby helping people around. Capitalism resulted in slavery, blinding people to anything that might stand in their way for profits. Examples are the the Atlantic slave trade, Great Bengal Famine.

Markets by themselves offer no protection against fraud, theft or violence. It is the job of political system to ensure trust by legislations and to enforce law. Without this, it leads to loss of trust, dwindling credit and economic depression.

How did the Dutch won over Spaniards and Portugese in conquering colonies? The Dutch was backed a powerful financial system. How did they win the trust of the financial system?

1. They were sticklers in repaying loans.
2. The country's judicial system protected private property rights.

The Spain king took money from people - there was no legal judicial system to protect individuals. The Dutch had the system and the Dutch traders were able to protect their money against the thiefs and cheaters. Capital trickles away from dictatorial state that fails to defend private individuals and their property. The Dutch merchants financed conquest by getting loans and also by selling shares in their companies that entitled their holders to receive a portion of the company's profit.

The Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC for short is a Dutch join-stock company chartered in 1602, which sold shared to raise money, build ships and bring back goods from other countries. It also financed military actions against competitors and pirates. In this way, when VOC merchants first arrived in Indonesia in 1602 for commercial purposes, to secure their commerical interest and maximize profit of shareholders, the merchants began to fight against local potentates who charged inflated tariffs as well as against European competitors. It recruited mercanaries, built forts and conducted full-scale battle and seiges. VOC ruled Indonesia for 200 years and the Dutch state took control of Indonesia only in 1800.

Credit rating indicates the probability the country will pay its debts. In addition to economical data, political, social and cultural factors are also taken into account. A country with despostic government, endemic warfare and a corrupt judicial system will usually receive low-credit rating and with a low rating, it can't raise necessary capital.

Energy and raw materials are the wheels of the industry. Long ago, the only kind of energy conversions which we know was the muscle power. We ate plants, our body converted it to energy and plants in turn got their energy from the sun. Heat energy was converted into motion in the steam engine.

Industrial production methods leads to mechanisation of plants and animals. Egg-laying hens have a complex world of behavioural needs and drive but the egg industry locks the hens inside tiny coops. A cattle as soon as it is born is put in a cage, where a machine feeds it with nutrients, medicines and another machine milks it. The cattle is soon butchered as young steaks are more tasty. Animals also show social and psychological needs, which is completely ignored by modern farm industry. An infant monkey showed preference for an dummy monkey resembling a real monkey mother but not providing it any material for sustenance over a monkey made of metal-wire and fittled with a milk bottle from which the infant could stuck.

Someone must buy the products otherwise the industrialists and investors will go bust. Thus came a new ethic - consumerism which sees the comsumptions of ever more products and services as a positive thing. Excessive consumerism's effect is most clearly found in the food market as obesity.

State and market have taken precendence over family and community. During the medieval time, when you are unwell, the community helped you. Now, the state and market helps us by giving health insurace and healthcare facilities.

Nation is an imagined community of the state. The consumer tribe is the imagined community of the market.

An empires spreads to gain more natural resources. Over the last century, the world was the most peaceful. The fatalities due to human crimes like violence and war were at their historical lowest. Why? The cost of war increased and peace become more lucrative. If California was invaded in the past, the invader could have got its gold mines. But if California is invaded now, they would gain very little for its wealth today resides in the minds of engineers, doctors, directors etc.

Money brings happiness only up to a point and beyond that point, it has little significance. Family and community seem to have more impact on our happiness than money and health. Happiness also depends on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective realities. If you want a bullock cart and you got a bullock cart, you are content. But if you want a Ferrari and you got a Fiat, you feel deprived.

Happiness is also a part of our biological system. Some people are genetically programmed to be more happy than others. It is in part dictated by our DNA.

If you have a why to live, you can almost bear any how.