Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

In so far as ideographic, hieroglyphic and alphabetical systems of writing vary in their rhetorical, logistical and grammatical possibilities, does this difference help account for the different trajectories of the disparate civilisations around the world? Does the physical form of writing affect thinking in a fundamental way? The trivium was based on the idea that dispute – argument – was a trainable skill. Was it this which, at base, would provide the crucial difference between the West and the rest, which is the subject of Parts Three, Four and Five of this book, and did it encourage the assault on religious authority, the all-important break with mythic thinking? It is something to keep in the back of one’s mind as we proceed.

3

The Birth of the Gods, the Evolution of House and Home

As we have seen, for Merlin Donald the great transformation in human history was the change from episodic thinking to mimetic, because it allowed the development of culture, ‘the great escape from the nervous system’. Before this book reaches its conclusion we shall have encountered many other candidates for the single most important idea in history: the soul, the experiment, the One True God, the heliocentric universe, evolution – each of them has passionate supporters. Some of these ideas are highly abstract concepts. For most archaeologists, however, humans’ ‘greatest idea’ is a far more down-to-earth practical notion. For them, the domestication of plants and animals – the invention of agriculture – was easily the greatest idea because it produced what was by far the most profound transformation in the way that humans have lived.

The domestication of plants and animals took place some time between 14,000 and 6,500 years ago and it is one of the most heavily studied ideas in pre-history. Its origins at that time in history are intimately related to the climatological record of the earth. Until, roughly speaking, 12,000 years ago, the average temperature of the earth was both much colder and more variable than it is now. Temperature might vary by as much as 7° in less than a decade, compared with 3° in a century now.¹ Around 12,000 years ago, however, the earth warmed up considerably, as the last ice age finally ended and, no less important, the climate stabilised. This warming and stabilisation marks the transition between the two major periods in earth’s history, the Pleistocene and the Holocene. This was in effect the ‘big trigger’ in history and made our world possible.²

It is safe to say that while we are now fairly clear about where agriculture began, how it began, and with what plants and animals, there is no general agreement, even today, about why this momentous change occurred. The theories, as we shall see, fall into two types. On the one hand, there are the environmental/economic theories, of which there are several; and there are the religious theories, of which at the moment there is only one.

The domestication of plants and animals (in that order) occurred independently in two areas of the world that we can be certain about, and perhaps in seven. These areas are: first, south-west Asia – the Middle East – in particular the ‘fertile crescent’ that stretches from the Jordan valley in Israel, up into Lebanon and Syria, taking in a corner of south-east Turkey, and round via the Zagros mountains into modern Iraq and Iran, the area known in antiquity as Mesopotamia. The second area of undoubted independent domestication lies in Mesoamerica, between what is now Panama and the northern reaches of Mexico. In addition, there are five other areas of the world where domestication also occurred but where we cannot be certain whether it was independent, or derived from earlier developments in the Middle East and Mesoamerica. These areas are the highlands of New Guinea; China, where the domestication of rice seems to have had its own history; a narrow band of sub-Saharan Africa running from what is now the Ivory Coast, Ghana and Nigeria across to the Sudan and Ethiopia; the Andes/Amazon region, where the unusual geography may have prompted domestication independently; and the eastern United States.³