The World

The thawing of the ice accelerated 11,700 years ago; this marked the dawn of a warm age that is still continuing, and the rising waters cut off America and Australia from Asia, and Britain from continental Europe. Now there were perhaps four million people on earth. After most of the ice had melted, around 9000 BC, a few lucky ones found that they lived in regions where they could cultivate animals and plants. But even by 8000 human hunting and management of forests started to drive the large mammals – mammoths, mastodons, indigenous horses in America – to extinction. For several millennia, many people still lived seasonally, hunting game in one season, gathering grasses and fruits in another. Yet even before agriculture was fully organized, people across the world – from Japan to Finland and the Americas – were raising monumental structures that were both sacred and social. The temples acted as calendars linked to celestial bodies, and people possibly just gathered there to celebrate successful harvests, then returned to their hunting-foraging life. In south-east Türkiye, at Göbekli Tepe, structures that looked like temples, pillars topped with sculpted foxes, snakes and scorpions, were built by hunter-gatherers who did not yet farm yet already shared religious rites. Nearby, at Karahan Tepe, they built another monumental temple embellished with sculptures of people – including a small room featuring eleven statues of phalloi. Starting around 9500 BC the temples, built 4,500 years before Stonehenge, were used for over 1,500 years.

People started settling in villages – one of the earliest was at Jericho in Canaan (Palestine) – before agriculture became their chief source of nourishment: they still foraged and hunted. Contrary to the traditional image of a ‘revolution’, there was no sudden switch: many peoples moved back and forth between agriculture and hunting, fishing and foraging. Even though it only takes between 30 and 200 years to domesticate a crop, it took 3,000 years (the difference between today and the pharaohs) from the beginnings of cultivating cereals to full agriculture, and another 3,000 before the real emergence of states – while in most parts of the world such states never developed at all.

At first, this meant the diet of most individuals was worse, not better: these agrarian planters were shorter, weaker, more anaemic, their teeth worse. Women worked with the men, developing strong upper arms – along with deformed knees and bent toes – from working the land and grinding grain. Life may have been better before farming, but it worked because it was more efficient for the species. Competition was ferocious; farmer villages vanquished hunter bands who coveted their food stores. For unknown reasons, the Göbekli and Karahan Tepe temples were filled in and buried. In Jericho, the thousand inhabitants built the first walls to protect themselves. Under their houses, they buried their dead and sometimes, after removing the flesh, they remoulded the faces with plaster and placed stones in the eye sockets – skull portraits that were popular from Israel to Iraq, more confirmation that humans could mentalize supernatural and magical beings and recognize the difference between body and spirit.

Starting around 7500 BC, the villagers of Çatalhöyük (central Türkiye) – which housed over 5,000 inhabitants – lived by planting cereals and rearing sheep while starting to hammer copper into useful tools. Near Raqqa, Syria, villagers in Tell Sabi Abyad built granaries for their food stores and used clay tokens to record how much they possessed. The oldest intact cloth, found in Çayönü, (Türkiye) dates to 7000 BC. Safe in walled villages, women had more children who could be weaned and fed porridge, but 50 per cent of them died young because they lived in intimate proximity to people and animals which made them prey to diseases: then as now, epidemics were symptoms of the species’ success, not its failure. But they required more settlements to organize the growing of more food: between 10,000 and 5000 BC, the world population scarcely grew from four million to five million. For most of history – the next eight and a half millennia – life expectancy was around thirty.

Small towns developed in Iraq, Egypt and China, followed by Pakistan/India where fecund, moist riverine soils along with the most useful breeds of domesticated animals gave these four regions a boost in the formation of sophisticated societies that would grant them supremacy over Eurafrica for many millennia.