The World

Sapiens coexisted with the other hominin families: over 100,000 years, they fought and killed some Neanderthals and raised families with others. Today Europeans, Chinese and Native Americans are 2 per cent Neanderthal in their DNA while some indigenous Australians, Melanesians and Filipinos have an additional 6 per cent of DNA, inherited from an enigmatic, ancient Asian population first identified from fragmentary fossils and DNA recovered from the Denisova Cave in Siberia. This pattern of migrating, settling and conquering – the mass movement of existing families and the generation of new ones by competition (sometimes murderous), nurturing and mixing – is the perpetual dance of human creation and destruction: it started early, is repeated throughout history and continues today. The humans who emerged were almost uniform – gracile faces, globular skulls, little noses, biologically almost identical. Yet the tiniest differences have justified centuries of conflict, oppression and racism.

By 40,000 years ago, Homo sapiens had outcompeted, killed or absorbed other hominins, and wiped out many large animals. Long before this, they had developed vocal cords that allowed them to talk, and brains that sparked the wish and ability to tell stories. Somehow the appetite for comfort, the need for safety, the instinct to raise children and perhaps even the enjoyment of companionship encouraged people to settle in clusters of families. They lived by hunting and gathering, worshipping the spirits of nature, expressing their beliefs through paintings in caves – the earliest in Indonesia and Australia dating from over 40,000 years ago – carving figures of curvaceous women and lion-headed men, and ritualistically burying some people in graves with jewels and beads. They made the first linen cloth, which replaced animal skins as clothing; bows and arrows improved hunting; dogs were trained for hunting and then domesticated. These hunter-gatherers were tall and fit, their teeth strong, undecayed by grain or sugar. But throughout history the fate of an individual was decided by geography and timing: some lived in lush abundance, some eked out meagre lives in icy tundras.

Sixteen thousand years ago, the climate began to warm, the ice to recede, grasses and legumes along with herds of deer and cattle became more plentiful in some regions. Some bands of these hunter-gatherers crossed the icy land bridge between Asia and Alaska and entered the Americas, where in a glimpse of perilous existence, 13,000 years ago, the footsteps of a woman in New Mexico show her holding a child, sometimes putting it down and lifting it up again, as she was stalked by sabre-toothed tigers. Her footsteps came back alone. The tigers may have devoured the child.

Humans started to build first wooden then stone structures: in Russia and Ukraine, close to the edge of the ice, they raised wooden enclosures sometimes embellished with mammoth tusks and bones, possibly to celebrate hunts. They buried a few people in elaborate graves, many of them with physical deformities, perhaps regarded as sacred. The people of the Amazon used ochre to paint their world of mastodons, giant sloths and horses; those of Australia depicted bilbies and dugongs. In Japan, people made pottery; in China, they fired their pottery so that they could cook over fires. These were now fully formed people, not apes. Their families, like ours, probably shared sacred rituals and useful knowledge while nursing hatred for their close relatives and distant rivals. It is tempting to impose our wishful thinking that women for example were powerful, but actually we know virtually nothing about them.