The World

Enheduanna lived a long time ago, yet the human family was already very old in her time. It probably started in Africa. We do not know how exactly humans evolved and we probably never shall. All we know is that all humans were originally Africans, that the nurturing of children required teams that we call families and that the story of humanity from the beginning to the twenty-first century AD is an invincibly exciting and complicated drama. Historians have long debated when history began.^* It is easy to point to footprints, chiselled tools, dusty walls and bone fragments, but for the purposes of this book history started when war, food and writing coalesced to allow a potentate, usually a male one like Sargon but sometimes a female like Enheduanna, to harness power and promote his or her children in order to keep it.

Seven to ten million years ago, while our planet, itself four to five billion years old, was in the grip of ice ages that receded and returned, hominins of a currently unknown genus separated from chimpanzees. By about two million years ago, in east Africa, a creature who walked upright on two feet had evolved. This was Homo erectus, who lasted most of the next two million years – the longest period of human existence – and who lived by foraging and hunting. Soon afterwards, some of these creatures migrated out of Africa into Europe and Asia, where different climates caused them to develop into different branches to which scientists have given Latin names such as antecessor, neanderthalensis and heidelbergensis after the places where their bones were discovered. DNA suggests most were dark-skinned with dark eyes. They already used stone axes. By 500,000 years ago, from South Africa to China, they were hunting large animals and perhaps using fire to cook, and there is evidence of both caring and violence from the start: some disabled individuals lived to a good age, suggesting social care, while on the other hand several skulls found in a northern Spanish cave had head injuries inflicted 430,000 years ago – the first confirmed murders. Some 300,000 years ago, they started to make offsite fires, changing landscapes for the first time, and using wooden spears and traps to hunt large animals.

Hominin brains nearly tripled in size, requiring an ever-richer diet. Larger-headed babies were harder for females to deliver: the tightness of the female pelvis – a compromise between the form necessary to walk upright and that needed to deliver a baby – made childbirth dangerous for both the mother and the baby, a vulnerability that helped shape the family in history. We guess this meant that they needed a group of related people to help raise their babies – and, if correct, these small blood-related communities became the defining unit of human history, the family that we still need today even though we are masters of the planet, dominators of every other species and the creators of remarkable new technologies. Anthropologists love to project that families were a certain size, that men did one task, women another, but all this is guesswork.

Most likely, there was a mosaic of many different-looking hominin species, coexisting, sometimes isolated from each other, sometimes interbreeding, sometimes fighting. By about 120,000 years ago, as earth was in a warming period (so warm that hippopotami were bathing in the Thames), modern humans – Homo sapiens, wise man – emerged in Africa. Sixty thousand years later, some of these humans migrated into Asia (Europe came later), where they encountered the other hominin species on the way eastwards. The reasons for their travels are mysterious, but most likely they were a combination of quests for food and land, climate and environmental changes, spasms of disease, religious rites and love of adventure. Crossing seas as wide as 100 miles in boats, they reached Indonesia, Australia and the Philippines between 65,000 and 35,000 years ago. Then they ventured into the Pacific, island by island.