CHAPTER 104: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 30,000 – 3,000 YEARS AGO

This chapter tells the story of a 10,000-year break in the ice ages and its eventual culmination in the world’s first , such as Egypt. A 10,000-year hourglass would stand 400 feet tall, nearly as tall as Giza’s Great . (See camel caravan for further sense of scale).

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Contents I. Introduction And Timeline ...... 3 II. Ice Subsides, Americans Arrive ...... 5 A. The Last Glacial Maximum and the Present Interglacial ...... 5 B. The First Americans ...... 6 C. Worldwide Human Evolution after 30 TYA ...... 8 1. Grandparents ...... 8 2. Settler-cultivators...... 9 3. Toward today’s racial spectrum ...... 10 III. Agriculture ...... 12 A. of Plants and Animals ...... 12 B. Population Density ...... 14 C. Wealth and Power ...... 15 D. Language Families and the Proto-Indo-Europeans ...... 17 IV. ...... 20 A. Country, Nation, and State ...... 20 B. The Population Dilemma ...... 21 C. Organized Religion ...... 22 D. Cradles of Civilization ...... 24 1. The fertile crescent ...... 25 2. China ...... 26 3. The Indus Valley ...... 27 4. American Civilizations ...... 27 E. Three Key Inventions ...... 28 1. Metallurgy ...... 28 2. The wheel ...... 29 3. Writing ...... 30 V. Summary ...... 31 VI. Gallery ...... 33 VII. Citations ...... 38

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I. Introduction And Timeline

If all humans are created equal, then why don’t we treat each other that way? Must there be a small class of wealth and power, while most of us struggle to make ends meet? Is race a social construct? Why do religions exhibit such a manic-depressive combination of kindness and contempt? These burning contemporary questions all have their origins in the last few ten thousand years. Modern humans settled their last great frontier, the , as the ice age’s last great glaciers melted away. Then, fortuitous climate change brought the present interglacial, which utterly revolutionized the human experience. Settlement, social inequality, agriculture, and civilization all gradually emerged as a result. Written history began; we will now encounter some of the first individuals still known by name. This chapter is organized around the two milestones of agriculture and civilization. Section II concludes humanity’s pre-agricultural highlights. Section III describes the period during which people were agricultural but not yet “civilized”. Finally, the beginnings of civilization are the subject of section IV. Language and organized religion are two of the main attributes that divide the social sphere into “us” and “them”. “Why do the nations so furiously rage together?” 2 Why do some people zealously clamor for a national religion? And hey … what’s the deal with so many different languages that share scripts and similar words? The timeline shows the standard accepted archaeological and geological terms for this time scale. The archaeological dates are typical but not universal.

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 Pleistocene Epoch / MIS 2 Holocene Epoch / Present Interglacial / MIS 1 Geological scale above, archaeological below Chapter 3  Upper Paleolithic Mesolithic Neolithic Bronze Age

30 TYA 20 TYA 10 TYA

Today

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II. Ice Subsides, Americans Arrive

A. The Last Glacial Maximum and the Present Interglacial

Modern humans emerged in the middle of the last ice age, a 100,000-year glacial that probably postponed agricultural lifestyles. This ice age peaked in the last glacial maximum about 20,000 years ago. Canada and Northern were almost entirely covered in glaciers three to four kilometers thick. The Antarctic ice sheet was larger than it is today. With a sizeable fraction of Earth’s water locked up in land ice, sea levels were up to 100 meters lower than at present. This exposed a large land bridge in Beringia, between Russia and Alaska, which persisted from 30 to 11 TYA. 4 Significantly, Beringia had dry climate. Alaska did not experience enough snowfall to form glaciers. 5 It remained an Arctic desert, a steppe with grassland ecosystems. Animals such as camels, elk, and horses traversed Beringia regularly; it was all one continent to them. The last glacial maximum impacted more than just the highest latitudes. The entire planet became colder and drier. The habitable zone was more restricted than usual, even by ice age standards. Most northern plants and animals, including humans, were forced to migrate southward, making populations denser and more diverse. There was a time when reindeer lived alongside armadillos in the southern United States, 6 and plants that normally exist only high in the mountains crept down toward sea level. 7 Wildlife was confused for thousands of years. Milankovitch Cycles brought increasing sunlight back to the planet after 16,000 years ago. 8 Northern hemisphere glaciers began to subside from their maximum extent, while the Antarctic ice sheet shrank considerably. As these continental ice sheets melted, their waters returned to the global ocean, ultimately flooding Beringia and once again separating North America from Asia. The flow of glacial water to the seas was a dramatic event on land, too. As glaciers melted in North America, they filled thousands of lakes including the Great Lakes. The current course of the Mississippi River was shaped by glacial water gushing toward the sea in torrents. 9 By about 13,000 years ago, the northern hemisphere was well on its way into an interglacial. Then cold climate momentarily resurged in an event known as the Younger Dryas. It was probably caused by a sudden influx of fresh melt water into the Atlantic Ocean, which disrupted the normal flow of the Gulf Stream and its heat content. 10 Temperatures returned to ice CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 6 age levels for a full millennium, with abrupt changes at both the beginning 11 and the end 12 of this interval. The Younger Dryas was only a northern hemisphere phenomenon, and was apparently unique to the last interglacial, making this one different from earlier ice ages. 13 This anomaly could help explain a tragic and mysterious circumstance surrounding the end of the last ice age – the mass extinction of many large mammals, megafauna, from North America. For millions of years, North America had been a veritable wild animal park, roamed by museum favorites including woolly mammoths and mastodons, giant sloths, saber-toothed cats, camels, horses, woolly rhinos, dire wolves, and short-faced bears. They survived every ice age except the last one, when they all suddenly vanished. The Younger Dryas is one frequently cited factor behind these extinctions. After all, the Dryas event itself is named after its drastic ecological shift, when woods were replaced by prairies of arctic Dryas flowers. The end of the Younger Dryas event around 11,500 years ago is used as a convenient marker to end the ice age. Glaciers retreated almost everywhere, with holdouts remaining only in Antarctica, Greenland, and the highest mountain ranges. The most recent geological epoch is technically called the Holocene but is more informally known as the present interglacial. As this name suggests, we would expect today’s balmy climate to be just one lucky warm period in a continuing cycle of (long) ice ages and (short) interglacials – provided that human influences do not overwhelm the natural cycle. * 14

B. The First Americans

The details of exactly where, when, and how the first human beings reached America are fiercely debated questions in today’s archaeological community. Whoever they were, the first Americans are now called Paleo-Indians. † They were nomadic and sparsely populated, leaving behind few traces of their existence. Almost all experts now agree that Paleo-Indians walked across the most recent land bridge in Beringia, from Siberia to Alaska, less than 30 TYA.

* Modern industrial greenhouse gases are now accumulating almost 200 times faster than the natural rate. See citation. † Scholars and even many native American descendants themselves seem unable to shake the mistake of referring to pre-Columbian Americans as “Indians”, which they simply were not. I will beat them and join them by using the accurate label INDIgenous AmericaNS, or “Indians” for short. CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 7

During the last glacial maximum, Beringia was a rare “refuge” from northern glaciation. For perhaps thousands of years, Paleo-Indians were isolated in arid Alaska, blocked by glaciers from entering Canada. As the world warmed, this obstacle melted away. The Pacific coast was clear 16,000 years ago. 15 A few millennia later, an ice-free corridor opened up through inland Canada. 16 Once they broke out of their ice trap, Paleo-Indians settled the Americas rapidly. The famed Monte Verde site in – almost at the southern tip of – is dated conservatively to 14,500 years ago. That would mean that it took humans less than two millennia to cross all of the Americas, ten times their pace in Asia. Various hypotheses speculate about this blazing fast settlement. Some Paleo-Indians could have boated down the coast. This would have given them a mode of transportation faster than walking. Hunting and fishing implements found on the Channel Islands, 30 km off the coast of California, lend credence to the boating hypothesis. 17 The shoreline is difficult to study because sea levels are much higher now, and the sites where Paleo-Indians would have set up camp on the beach are now submerged. The oldest human remains in the Americas, possibly up to 14,000 years old, are found in marine caves 30 meters underwater in Mexico. 18 Another possible explanation for fast American colonization is the migrating-herd hypothesis. Paleo-Indians hunted large herd animals like bison and mammoths. If those animals migrated extensively and / or quickly resettled America as it de-glaciated, then the humans would follow. In fact, this is another commonly cited factor behind the extinction of the megafauna. Some scientists believe that mammoths and mastodons, giant beavers, and sloths were overhunted and / or crowded out by humans, leading to the demise of the carnivorous cats, bears, and wolves. 19 These questions are far from satisfactorily answered. Too many mysteries remain. Could Paleo-Indians really have settled the Americas at such breakneck speed, or did some actually sneak into North America before the glacial maximum? 20 Neither climate change nor human activity seems sufficient to account for the megafauna’s mass extinction. Was it a deadly one-two punch, or were there other crucial factors? The peopling of the Americas is a high-profile niche of archaeology, so these questions are heavily researched, and the scientific consensus is sure to shift rapidly. CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 8

The first culture to be widespread in the Americas was the Clovis people. Clovis artifacts are found in a broad region (concentrated in the southeastern US) within a curiously narrow time span at precisely 13 TYA. The Clovis people were genetically traceable to Siberian origins, and they were more closely related to today’s Native Americans (especially South – Central Americans) than to any other populations. 21 The remnants that Paleo-Indians left behind at their sites include stone tools and hunting weapons, fire pits, and butchered animals. Monte Verde is a unique site where marshy conditions have preserved organic artifacts. Wooden hut foundations, tent stakes, ropes, and even scraps of have been recovered there, alongside a human footprint over 14 TYO. 22 The gate from Asia closed 11 TYA. It is certainly possible that multiple waves of migrants colonized America during Beringia’s 20,000-year exposure. In the Holocene, American migration was strictly intracontinental. By 2000 BCE, even the Canadian arctic was settled by Paleo- Eskimos, who followed eastward migrations of the bowhead whale.

C. Worldwide Human Evolution after 30 TYA

1. Grandparents

Human fossils reveal a striking demographic trend 30,000 years ago. For the first time, humans were routinely living to more than twice the age of sexual maturity – old enough to become grandparents! 23 Longevity is valuable in an environment where knowledge, transmitted through the generations, benefits the survival of the clan. 24 Many species have grandparents. What is unique to humans is the life phase of menopause: as women age, they stop having children of their own. At first glance, menopause might seem like a biological mystery. How could older women have any evolutionary advantage after reproductive age? One plausible answer is that post-menopausal women generally focus on feeding and caring for their grandchildren, especially their daughters’ children. 25 A grandmother’s care not only nourishes her grandchildren but shortens nursing time, allowing her daughter to have more children. Grandma’s genes succeed, including her genes for longevity, even when she is no longer having children of her own! 26 CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 9

By remembering and transmitting cultural knowledge and caring for the young, grandparents revolutionized the family unit. Clans became larger and cousins remained closer. This was a huge step in making hunter-gatherer cultures more complex. Grandma – she’s more than just a woman to love!

2. Settler-cultivators

For millions of years, humans were hunter-gatherers, traveling in family units. It was necessary to be on the move. Animals migrated, plants were seasonal, and bands of hostile humans were all around. It was a big step to settle down in one spot year-round, especially for years on end. Though they were literally sitting targets, settlements had the advantage of supporting larger populations for defensive strength. The earliest evidence of settlements appears 15 TYA. From eastern Europe to central Asia, there are numerous finds of huts made from mammoth bones, presumably covered with skin at the time. The Natufians of the Levant built houses with stone foundations, probably covered with sticks. Chile’s Monte Verdeans built wooden huts. Settlement required cultivation, the caretaking of local plants for ongoing food supplies. Cultivation goes a step beyond gathering; it involves acts such as selective weeding and burning. It does not go as far as agriculture, which is characterized by methodically isolating crops, selecting and planting seeds, breeding animals, and controlling water. However, the settler-cultivator way of life would make an easy and natural transition to agriculture. 27 Hunter-gatherers were characterized by egalitarianism. The earliest settlements already showed signs of social inequality. A minority of Natufians wore expensive seashell jewelry and were honored with special burial treatment. 28

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3. Toward today’s racial spectrum

To this point in the book, it has been fair to use the term “our” ancestors. More than 15,000 years ago, my genealogical ancestors were identical to yours and to those of every person alive today. 29 As we pass the point of worldwide identical ancestry and come closer to the present, the evolution of continents and then of nations becomes increasingly isolated. Your ancestors start to look, sound, and behave more like you and less like me. “Race” has recently taken on a social significance that far exceeds its biological basis. That’s why many scientists now describe race as a social construct, something that matters only if we make it matter. Yet we can’t deny the obvious differences between people from, say, Nigeria and Japan. To escape this cognitive dissonance, we must properly characterize racial differences as they appear in the real and imagined worlds. When populations are isolated, they evolve in response to different environments, which may pressure them into assuming different appearances. Coloration is the most visible and well- known form of racial differentiation. The dark skin of equatorial peoples is an effective sunscreen; it was probably sapiens’ original hue. Lighter skin is an adaptation to higher latitudes, making the skin more sensitive to sunlight for the photosynthesis of vitamin D. Some populations have adapted to unique environmental challenges by evolving tall / lean or short / stout bodies, resistance to local pathogens, lactose tolerance, etc. These adaptations have not made any groups of people “better” than anyone else, except when it comes to being healthy in their pre-industrial native environments. Other characteristics are health-neutral, like the way that some Asians’ eyelids fold. In the short term, such distinctions will cluster locally. By and large, they now serve as visual markers associated with regions on the map. That’s where the psychology takes over. The skin tones and eyelid folds, which may or may not have served some biological function, now play an overinflated social role because people relate more to those who look like themselves. On a grander scale, we still evolve multiregionally, and this means that we all partake of the same gene pool. Some genes are denser in some parts of the pool than others, but there are no genes that are unique to one part of the world. CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 11

Most people tend to mentally categorize humans into just a few physical types, 30 something like this palette (these colors are obviously metaphorical).

The red race The orange The yellow The green The blue race The purple race race race race

The socially constructed fiction comes in two parts: first, that people come in such fixed and discrete categories, and second that these physical differences are socially important. The underlying diversity is real, but it is continuous, like this spectrum. 31

It’s not surprising that our mind perceives a small number of categories, because the underlying psychological motivation is simply to distinguish “us” from “them”; we don’t care that much about the variation in outsiders. Real human diversity is more like a three-dimensional spectrum. We can map it across Earth’s two-dimensional surface.

Visualizing a two-dimensional snapshot of the racial spectrum *

* See the 3D animated spectrum at http://www.TheEvolutionOfHuman.com/section-04-II/#C3 CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 12

The third dimension is time, because this spectrum is constantly churning and mixing. 32 Unless you are reading this book in print, you can animate the full 3D spectrum by clicking the map above. We would probably recognize the racial spectrum of 3,000 years ago. It was completely different 30,000 years ago and will be unrecognizable again in another 30,000 years. * Prehistorically, race was not much on people’s minds, because they interacted locally and hardly ever encountered people from different continents. In fact, I include this discussion not because race was salient 10,000 years ago but because it is endlessly fascinating to present-day readers. Racial politics are only an issue of post-colonial times, when intercontinental migration became common. For today’s sake, it’s important to understand what racial diversity is, how it evolves, and how to think and talk about it.

III. Agriculture

A. Domestication of Plants and Animals

The domestication of plants and animals is universally recognized as one of the most profound turns of events in . Millennia ago, Jewish scripture taught reverently that God gave man “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” 33 Today’s scientists are not nearly so florid, but we still describe domestication as the agricultural (or Neolithic) revolution. Domestication arose out of cultivation; the boundary is fuzzy. The term domestication suggests human involvement in the reproductive cycle, in a conscious effort to raise organisms that are suited to human needs. Because humans breed for their favorite traits, most domesticated species eventually evolve into forms not quite found in . All breeds of house dog, for example, evolved from the wolf. The role that humans now play in guiding evolution is termed

* Mass migration has already made it difficult to predict where someone lives based on physical characteristics alone. As mating across haplogroups continues to increase, it is conceivable that future humans could converge toward one uniform appearance – that is, until small groups of emigrants colonize other worlds. If facial morphing is any indication, tomorrow’s blended humanity will be a better-looking species overall. CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 13 artificial selection. In other words, farmers have been genetically modifying organisms for 10,000 years! The advantages to our species hardly need stating. Domestic plants and animals provided food and drugs, clothing and other materials, transport, muscle power, and military assistance. By making crops and livestock immediately available, the first farmers made their own lives drastically more efficient. The sacrifice was an imbalance of nature. Agriculture is characterized by isolating crops so that each plot of land supports only one plant type. This simplified ecosystems and reduced nutritional diversity in the human diet. 34 Clearing out fields often required deforestation. Some organisms have become so domesticated that they can no longer survive without human care and breeding. 35 Corn, cannabis, silkworms, and some aquarium fish are prime examples. The first agriculture appeared early in the Holocene Epoch, 10 – 12 TYA. The revolution was not immediately global but occurred independently in just a few localities. The Fertile Crescent, from Egypt to Syria to Iran, was the world’s most influential cradle of agriculture. It was not only the first but also the largest Not all historians include Egypt in the Fertile Crescent. I do because and most diverse, and it was this was all one continuous region both geographically and culturally. situated in a critically central location. Resources available here included wheat, flax and legumes, sheep and goats, pigs, cattle, and cats. * 36 Today’s “European” cattle may all descend from a small herd of about 100 oxen domesticated in the Neolithic Fertile Crescent. Only three other spots on Earth are undisputed cradles of agriculture. Paleo-Chinese cultures farmed along the Yangtze and Yellow River Valleys. They domesticated wheat, millet,

* Though the cat, true to character, self-domesticated by inviting itself to human habitations. ^..^~ See citation. CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 14 rice, soy, dogs, chickens, and pigs. Silk was a uniquely Chinese resource, harvested from silkworms. Meanwhile, agriculture appeared in Mexico and the of . Mesoamerican farmers are renowned for creating corn from wild teosinte, a grass whose “ears” look like hard tufts of wheat. 37 The Andeans bred potatoes from a small, toxic wild ancestor. 38 Agriculture propagated outward from the Old-World centers at a rate of about 1 kilometer per year. 39 The agriculture of the Fertile Crescent expanded northwest into Europe and east to India. Chinese influence spread southward and eastward, from Japan to New Guinea. North-south spread was more problematic than east-west, because crops are sensitive to latitude. This consideration, as well as other geographical barriers, presented challenges in America and Africa. 40 Agriculture did not reach Australia until the 2nd millennium. Plant domestication intensified the production of drugs as well as food. Beer and wine are almost as ancient as domesticated grains and fruit. American sites show traces of coca leaves and hallucinogenic cacti and dating as far back as 11 TYA. 41 Poppy, the natural source of opiates, was domesticated in the Mediterranean region before 7 TYA. 42 Asian farmers later bred marijuana for its high THC content. 43

B. Population Density

Agricultural people lived a radically different lifestyle from their hunter-gatherer forebears. The most immediate consequence of agriculture was a concentration of people into higher population densities. This is not only because farmers stopped wandering and settled down in one spot. It’s also because they were able to feed greater numbers. They even harvested more food than they could eat all at once and had to store or trade surpluses. Another consequence of food surplus was that not everyone had to spend all their time feeding themselves. While most people continued to farm at least part-time, some were free to specialize in the crafts, trades, and services that made town life possible. Some specialists made pottery and baskets for carrying food and water. Others built structures. The oldest known in the world, Jericho, had houses and defensive walls 10,000 years ago. Other buildings included granaries and temples. They were made of stones and semi-permanent substances like tar, plaster, and wood. Some settlements even started to use elementary metals such as gold, silver, 44 and CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 15 copper 45 as early as 5000 BCE. These are all emergent properties of population density – things that people can do only when they live together in communities. The oldest towns in the world, 5 – 10 TYA, dotted Eurasia from Ireland to China. They typically covered about 10 – 30 acres and supported a few thousand inhabitants. Other than Jericho, the oldest and best-known sites are in Turkey. Catal Hoyuk was an egalitarian complex of plaster houses decorated with interior murals and bull horns. Göbekli Tepe was the site of impressive temples. With the first dense human settlements came the first epidemics. Deadly diseases such as smallpox, tuberculosis, measles, and flu are closely related to variants in animals. These pathogens likely jumped from domesticated animals (including self-domesticated rodents) to humans and then evolved to human form. 46 Epidemics had never been possible when people lived in small bands. Now that they lived in close quarters, humans became much better vectors for spreading these diseases. Smallpox in particular has been the human species’ most prolific killer of all time, 47 with a cumulative death toll on the order of a billion! 48 Over time, of course, some people developed better immune responses and survived epidemics to pass their resilient genes on to their children. Native Americans and Australians never encountered these diseases until Europeans suddenly introduced them last millennium. With no immunity, these populations were especially vulnerable, and their numbers were decimated quickly after European contact. 49

C. Wealth and Power

It was in the middle Neolithic period, around 5 – 10 TYA, that some communities started transforming into non-egalitarian, rank-based societies. While most people still struggled to survive, a tiny proportion became wealthy and powerful. Wealth is an accumulation of private property. The concept of personal property arose in the first villages with houses, granaries, bounded fields, and livestock. 50 Food was the essential resource. A family that was able to accumulate herds of cattle and stores of grains had advantages and bargaining power over others who had less. At the same time, growing population centers faced new needs. They required law and order, defense, diplomacy, and trade with neighboring villages. It seems that the most practical CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 16 solution to redistribute wealth for public spending was through a central leader, a chief, who would collect tributes or taxes from the villagers. The chiefdom was a polity intermediate between the egalitarian tribe and the full-blown kingdom. Every ancient state grew out of a preliminary chiefdom phase. 51 Unlike the smaller and more ancient tribes, in chiefdoms leadership was permanently vested in one nuclear family. Hereditary title provided stability by preventing uncertainty about who was in charge. Primogeniture kept the ruling family from diffusing over the generations. A chief and his clan ruled over one village or a few satellite villages. As the chiefdom grew, so did the leader’s inner circle. Eventually, even the government got too large for everyone to know everyone, and at this point it was growing into a state. Since the mid-Neolithic, then, there have been four means to exert influence in human affairs: positions of authority, wealth, arms, and organized numbers. Concentration of wealth and arms empowered rulers to resist the numbers that may have organized against them. On the other hand, the wealthy did not become solely exploitative but also assumed the burdens of leadership. A scion relies on his base, and he will maintain it best when he defends his realm and manages a healthy economy. These considerations help align his interests somewhat with those of his subjects. Power and leadership did not necessarily have to evolve together, but they invariably did. This would indicate that integrating privilege and responsibility in the same ruling class offered strong survival advantages for the cultures that did so. How did the first chiefs earn their titles? In the cultures that have been observed making a transition from egalitarian tribes to ranked chiefdoms, preeminence usually had a basis in historic seniority: “We were here first” or “We descend from the senior lineage.” 52 Without written records, these claims were often based on flimsy evidence, and it was easy to revise history or religion. 53 When the people accepted a chief, they regarded him as imbued with sacred power, making his authority unquestionable. Some chiefs were even exalted as gods. 54 The chief was in charge of the community’s religion. Myths and rituals reinforced his rank. On the opposite end of the power spectrum, slavery also dates to the first chiefdoms. The need for slaves only came about when agriculture created a demand for labor. Slaves were usually “outsiders” but could also be criminals or even lost-cause debtors. Rulers valued slave labor so highly that they often raided neighboring villages for them. Most villagers had a rank somewhere CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 17 between chief and slave. Social status was determined not strictly by birthright but also skill set, especially military prowess. 55

D. Language Families and the Proto-Indo-Europeans

Starting about 5 – 6 TYA, pre-historians are able to supplement their archaeological and genetic evidence with linguistic analysis. Grossly speaking, languages have phylogenies much like species. As the speakers of a language become diffuse and isolated, their dialects “speciate” into distinct but related languages. By studying similarities in words and grammar, linguists are able to trace today’s large language families to their theoretical ancestral mother tongues. There are thousands of languages today, as there surely were in the Neolithic. However, most living languages are classified into fewer than ten major language families. This suggests that most Neolithic languages are now extinct, while about ten of them were successful enough to spread throughout the world. These dominant proto languages were largely associated with successful farming / ranching cultures, which had much greater capacity for large-scale influence than hunter- gatherer societies. 56 There is more than one way to measure the size or success of a language family. There are over 1,000 living languages in the Niger-Congo family, all concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa. The proto-Niger-Congo language originated with yam farmers in western Africa. 57 The continent’s lingering diversity reflects the fact that sub-Saharan Africa was never subsumed by a major empire. A billion people speak the world’s largest single language, Mandarin, or a closely related tongue. This Sino-Tibetan family can be traced back 6,000 years to the eastern Himalayas, 58 and its spread was associated with millet agriculture. 59 Other major language families include Afro-Asiatic (Arabic and its relatives) and Austronesian, which spread from Taiwan to all the South Pacific islands in the last 5,000 years. As measured by the number of speakers, number of countries, or land area, the Indo- European language family is by far today’s largest. It is also the most widely studied, as it was the first language family to be recognized. 60 As its name suggests, this family was already spread far and wide before globalization, from Western Europe to India. The number of languages in this family is now relatively small, only about 100, due to persistent contact among Eurasians. They CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 18 include English, Spanish, Hindi, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, and French – seven of today’s ten most populous languages. 61 This is a diverse spectrum of languages, yet the fact that they share many similar words and grammatical conventions indicates that they share a common origin. For instance, the word for field is agros in Greek, ager in Latin, akrs in Gothic (an extinct Germanic language), and ajras in Sanskrit (an Indian language). With knowledge of how sounds change from one language to another, we can reconstruct the theoretical original Proto-Indo-European (PIE) word *agras – the original root of our words agriculture and acre. 62 * Today’s best evidence indicates that the PIE occupied the steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas, present-day Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine, in the 5th to 3rd millennia BCE. 63 They probably coincided with what archaeologists call the Yamna or pit-grave culture. 64 Language and architecture tell us that the PIEs were pastoralists with a few crops, that they worshipped a sky god and made animal sacrifices, domesticated horses and honeybees, and organized themselves into patrilineal chiefdoms. 65

* An asterisk is used to indicate a reconstructed PIE word such as *agras. CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 19

The dark green region is the likeliest PIE homeland. Light green shows the extent of overland Indo-European expansion (which goes beyond this map). Indo-European languages are co-dominant with other language families in cross-hatched regions.

The successful spread of the Indo-Europeans may have involved some military force but was probably by-and-large a gradual cultural diffusion. 66 PIE culture introduced some extremely valuable goods and resources. The earliest evidence for domestication of the horse is traced to Kazakhstan about 6 TYA, two millennia before the rest of Europe. 67 Some of the oldest bronze artifacts and wheeled vehicles are also traced to this place and time. The PIEs’ language and legends may have survived well because of their penchant for poetry. The saga of the first three men, *Manu, *Yemo, and *Trito, was an important part of PIE heritage. After an evil serpent stole their cattle, these men solicited help from the gods to slay the serpent and reclaim the cattle. The men were so grateful that they sacrificed a share to the gods, and so the cycle of giving continued. This narrative justified the significance of sacrifice and the priests who performed it – a predominant theme in early organized religion. 68

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IV. Civilization

A. Country, Nation, and State

Scholars all agree that social organization reached the scale of “states” or “civilizations” by 5,000 years ago, though they have not standardized the definitions of these terms. One quality that all early civilizations had in common, and that distinguished them from what came before, was sheer size. This book will consider a civilization to be any stably unified polity with population on the order of 100,000 or more, including at least one city on the order of 10,000 or more. Each civilization is identified with its land, its people, and its government, respectively defined as its country, its nation, and its state, which reinforce each other in forming a community identity. People who conceive of themselves as a nation speak a common language. National identity transcends a human lifespan, forming a collective consciousness of a shared past (history, mythology, birthright) and future (destiny, offspring). At the same time, the class structure is even more stratified than in chiefdoms. The upper and lower classes are so distinct that it is easy to forget that they are interdependent. A state is a government capable of sustaining a civilization. It is necessarily large and complex. With few exceptions, states had their apex at a single executive, a monarch. The monarch delegated authority to a multi-layered bureaucracy of civil servants (for earthly affairs) and priests (for sacred rituals). One of a state’s most important privileges is its monopoly of force. In pre-civilized societies, individuals had commonly judged for themselves when they were wronged and how to retaliate. Murder had been much more prevalent 69 , largely due to endless cycles of revenge killings. 70 States now formulated laws to decree matters of right and wrong, and they established courts to adjudicate them. State governments also centralized military decisions. Public dispute resolution is one of the hallmarks of what we call a “civilized” society, though many governments certainly abused this power too. How did the first civilizations form out of chiefdoms? If we accept the definitions given here, then the answer is outwardly simple: they grew! All of the remarkable achievements that CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 21 we associate with civilizations are only found in large populations, so they could well be natural consequences of organization on the 100,000-person scale. Complex bureaucracies and legal codes were necessary to manage all levels of society. Magnificent palaces and temples proved claims to power. * Feats of engineering were undertaken to solve problems of scale (“how do we irrigate all these fields?”) and were enabled by the social apparatus they served (full-time engineers, a broad tax base, and large slave labor forces). 71

B. The Population Dilemma

But just because a population grows doesn’t guarantee that it will remain organized as a coherent unit. In fact, population growth quickly surpasses the limit of what psychologists call stable social relationships. These are group relationships in which, essentially, everyone knows everyone’s business. Consider a family of four. There are six relationships within this family: Mom-Dad, Mom-Son, Mom-Daughter, Dad-Son, Dad-Daughter, and Son-Daughter. Each family member can easily keep track of all six relationships. As a group grows, the number of relationships grows more quickly than the number of people. A family of five has ten relationships. An extended family of 20 or 30 cousins includes hundreds of relationships. By the time we get to 150 villagers, they have over 10,000 pairwise relationships! † That’s about all that a human mind can process. 72 That creates a significant qualitative difference between small and large groups, defined by approximately 150 people. Smaller groups can cohere by virtue of trust alone. They feel instinctively like unified communities. Larger groups have blind spots, relationships that not everyone can see. Individuals feel less connected to the whole. A large group cannot coordinate itself on autopilot, much as a large orchestra loses its way without a conductor. In the absence of a supervening force, large groups will simply splinter into smaller units. Before chiefdoms, the natural social unit was the band, a hunter-gathering group of fewer than 150 people from a handful of families. We need two more key ingredients to understand the history of unification: a need and a mechanism. Consider the environment in which civilizations evolved. They grew out of regions

* Who would ever listen to a king without a palace? † The number of relationships follows the pattern of “triangle numbers”. CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 22 crowded with warring chiefdoms. They had to cooperate inwardly to compete outwardly. 73 A group that was larger or more internally organized could subsume a smaller or more unstable neighbor. Multiple chiefdoms could ally together to rout a competitor. In that cutthroat setting, each political body had only two options: cooperate or be conquered. The chiefdoms that survived were those that cohered. But how?

C. Organized Religion

Cooperation is built on trust. Before people can trust each other, they must have a shared reality, a common vision of the world. They must play by the same rules, follow the same leader, and envision the same problems, goals, and enemies. The earliest large-scale shared realities emerged as organized religion. 74 Every early civilization * had one. Today, we are familiar with brands and trademarks as emblems of trust. When you see a McDonald’s or Starbucks in an airport, you immediately know what to expect, even if it’s in Timbuktu. One important function of organized religion was to serve as a brand of trust. Brand loyalty is a strong bond. I’m sure you know sports fans who have a lifelong, unwavering loyalty to their chosen teams. Likewise, when people are away from home, but they see familiar religious symbols or rituals, they can form instant bonds of community and trust – strong enough to offer loans to strangers. 75 Matters of trust, law, and order are fundamentally down-to-earth, so isn’t it interesting that every civilization built its brand around a cosmology? With an evolutionary approach to psychology, it is easy to understand how god-given morality offered advantages for state stability and defense. Gods are more effective judges, juries, and executioners than mere mortals. Gods have unlimited power of patrol, reward, and punishment, and there’s nothing we can do to usurp them. Now, here’s the slick trick: these godly advantages inhere whether the gods themselves are real or not. All that matters is that we believe in them. And as we have seen, the human brain comes prepackaged with an unquestioning instinct for animism.

* And every civilization, ever, until the USA. CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 23

In organized religion, then, the concept of spirits mentally evolved into personal gods with publicly recognizable trappings. Gods kept an eye on individual behavior and meted out appropriate justice. Personal gods were clearly a mental representation of the greater good, 76 omnipresent agents of the state. Belief in personal thought-police gods encouraged the kind of behavior that sustained the community 77 and helped societies become more complex. 78 As these cooperative civilizations grew, so did their belief in moralizing gods. 79 Consider the ten Hebrew commandments as a well-known example (albeit younger than this chapter). At least five commandments demanded loyalty to the Hebrew God and tradition. 80 The others proscribed lying, cheating, stealing, killing, 81 and even the temptation to transgress. 82 We know that they applied only within Judaism, because God sometimes commanded Hebrews to kill, enslave, and steal from outsiders. 83 The commandments are cloaked in godly language, but their effect is no more nor less than Hebrew stability. Church and state were a match made in heaven. Kings did not invent religion, but they had great power to organize it. People viewed kings and their priestly courts as agents of the gods, an incontestable source of power. Fear of god made it much less likely for subjects to challenge the king or question his law. This might offend our sensibilities in the age of freedom of religion, but it has proven the simplest way to achieve law and order. A social construct like morality is useful only to the extent that people believe it. Beyond the religious instinct, dogma evolved an increasing pressure to believe. Religions can offer extravagant rewards for conformity (from peace of mind to eternal paradise) and severe punishment for heresy (from ostracism to torture to eternal damnation). 84 So … why do we believe? Is it because our religion is true? That can’t be the case for most people, because no religion is a majority. Or is it because organized religious beliefs and “brands” helped certain civilizations hold themselves together, grow, and pass down their cultures through the generations? Organized religions arose out of settlements and farming communities, giving them some unique characteristics to distinguish them from natural hunter-gatherer religion. Civilizations synchronized their religious traditions with agricultural cycles. Animal sacrifice became a common way to bargain with the gods. 85 It was one of the most important state functions. 86 Mythology became increasingly tied to the nation, country, and state. People believed in their god-given rights to land, resources, and kings. CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 24

This presented a quandary whenever two groups claimed conflicting rights. Should they share, or should they fight? Demonizing outsiders offered two evolutionary advantages: a self- defense instinct and the need to assimilate conquered people into the dominant religion. The history of the last 10,000 years has involved a never-ending tug-of-war between the forces of integration and insularism. When small groups unite to form a larger one, there are undeniable advantages including peace and productivity. * This socioeconomic force is pulling us inexorably toward global society, yet that pull just barely outpaces the psychological counterforce of xenophobia. Today, most of us live in secular societies where “separation of church and state” is axiomatic. It’s easy to forget the extent to which organized religion defined reality for 10,000 years. Though we still call many religions “organized”, they have mostly become untethered from earthly power. This paradigm is new and exceptional in the grand scheme of things. The old order still lives strongly in our collective memory. Many conservative communities still haven’t adjusted to the idea of state without a state religion. They still desire that sense of certainty and privilege, and some are still willing to fight for it.

D. Cradles of Civilization

There are only a few spots on Earth where chiefdoms grew spontaneously into and states. They were all located in the previously identified cradles of agriculture, nurtured by rivers. Their countries are today called Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan, China, Mexico, and Peru. No Old-World civilization remained completely isolated from all the others, so they all developed under some mutual influence in the long term. However, their earliest city-states were localized and appear to be largely independent. The New World civilizations were clearly isolated from the Old and most likely independent of each other.

* For example, the United States has greater economic strength as one nation than as 50 separate states. Peace in Europe and the Pacific has benefited greatly from the post-World-War-II system of unions and treaties. CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 25

1. The fertile crescent

Mesopotamia is a geographic term meaning “between the (Tigris and Euphrates) Rivers”. The region was agriculturally fertile but poor in other resources, necessitating constant trade between the river valleys and the highlands and war over access to metal, wood, and stone. This bustling activity stimulated several civilizations, starting with in the 4th millennium BCE. Sumer was known for its advanced women’s rights, including the rights to conduct business and declare divorce. Uruk, one of the world’s first cities, was an important Sumerian power center. Though long gone, its name still survives in the form Iraq. The subsequent Akkadian civilization was multi-national and was thus considered the world’s first empire. Mesopotamian culture peaked with the Babylonian civilization of the 1st and 2nd millennia BCE. Babylon’s cultural heritage still lives on in its astronomy, literature, and mathematics. Babylonians invented the sixty- second minute and the concept behind the dreaded quadratic formula. Egypt traces its identity to the unification of the upper and lower Nile Valley civilizations in the 4th millennium BCE. For thousands of years, it was as stable as its iconic . It benefited from a predictable river, natural geographic defenses, and a “provider state” system that kept civil unrest to a minimum. 87 Egypt’s rulers, the pharaohs, were completely deified. The pyramids were elaborate tombs for a series of pharaohs in the 3rd millennium BCE. Egyptians embalmed their dead to preserve their bodies for the afterlife. * 88 Though we often associate Egypt with its extinct exotica, it was a pragmatic civilization that produced several fundamental innovations still used today. Egyptian contributions included surveying and the Pythagorean Theorem, ink and papyrus, police, and surgery. The Fertile Crescent was one continuous cultural zone. Its history remains influential today, as it shaped the world view that was eventually expressed by Hebrews in the bible. Many biblical tales, including the stories of Eden 89 and the fall of man 90 , Noah’s flood 91 , infant Moses 92 , and Job 93 have elements found millennia earlier in Mesopotamian narratives. The ancient Israelites originally worshipped many regional gods, including El and Yahweh. These two gods’ identities would eventually merge into the single God of Israel.

* Only the wealthiest mummies were wrapped in linen; see citation. CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 26

2. China

The earliest Chinese state known by name was the Shang Dynasty of the 2nd millennium BCE Yellow River Valley. Chinese lore tells of an earlier Xia Dynasty, but this is questionable history written centuries later, blatantly wrapped up in legend and myth. Enticingly, archaeologists have indeed identified a civilization that predates the Shang. They call it the Erlitou culture, and its existence is undeniably attested by advanced bronze work and roads rutted with wheel tracks. 94 It is not yet known if Erlitou culture can be associated with the Xia Dynasty. The Shang Dynasty was founded by King Tang, a benevolent ruler, and persisted over a period of prosperity punctuated by famine. The general state of abundance enabled construction of countless towns and a few great cities such as Erligang and Angyang. Shang craftsmen excelled at bronze and jade objects and the production of musical instruments. Compared to the other classic civilizations, China stands out as being the most continuous and humanistic. No foreign empire has ever erased the foundations of Chinese culture. Dynasties have come and gone, but the Chinese identity is traced without interruption to the Shang and beyond. The Shang practiced divination, the art of communicating with ancestral spirits for guidance. One common form of divination was oracle bones. A diviner would crack an animal bone or turtle shell with fire and would then interpret the pattern of fractures as messages from the spirit world. Only ancestral spirits could communicate directly with Shangdi, the most powerful spirit, who directly controlled the weather and earthly fortunes. However, the Shang did not ascribe creative powers to Shangdi. They believed that humans made their own advances in civilization and technology. This “optimistic humanism” has always been central to Chinese philosophy. 95

CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 27

3. The Indus Valley

The first civilization in South Asia occupied Pakistan’s Indus River Valley in the 3rd millennium BCE. Like the Erlitou, this civilization is known only from archaeology, not written history, so it often goes by the name given to it by modern archaeologists, the Harappan civilization. The Harappans were a standout for their urban planning. They constructed wide streets laid out in neat grids. They excelled at brick work, and their cities had wells and extensive sewers. Many mysteries remain. Their political structure is unknown; large-scale organization is inferred by their massive public buildings, widespread standards, and far-flung trade with China and . They had a written language, but it is found only in fragments and has never been deciphered. They probably spoke a language from the Dravidian family, now associated with southern India. 96 Most mysteriously, this civilization vanished. * In the 2nd millennium BCE , Indo-European speakers called Aryans migrated into northern India. They established a system of social classes or castes that socially isolated themselves from the Dravidians. The Aryan literary tradition is remembered as the Vedas, verses that honor the gods and ritualize ceremonies from weddings to animal sacrifice. Vedic religion was the precursor to Hinduism.

4. American Civilizations

The Norte Chico civilization was found in the river deltas of coastal Peru as long ago as the 4th millennium BCE. Norte Chico architecture included platform mounds, sunken plazas, and terracing, features that remained prevalent in the region for millennia. What little remains of this civilization’s artifacts includes , musical instruments, and possibly an early example of a , a system of ropes tied in knots to represent numbers. 97 Most intriguingly, as of yet there is no evidence of war in pre-ceramic Norte Chico archaeology, making this possibly the world’s only civilization to grow peacefully. 98

* When a civilization “vanishes”, it is not necessarily the people themselves who disappear, but rather the state apparatus. Although people most surely continued to live there, they were no longer organized into a whole, and they ceased to create public works that we would associate with a civilization. CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 28

By contrast, Mexican chiefdoms were highly belligerent. There is no clear consensus on which one was the first to achieve the scale of “civilization”. The (2nd millennium BCE) are the most ancient commonly cited candidate, based on large gulf coast settlements. The Olmecs left behind captivating stone sculptures, including the famous “colossal heads”. They also exhibited early appearances of Mesoamerican icons such as the were-jaguar, the feathered serpent, and the ceremonial ball game. 99 Even if the Olmecs were not the first Mesoamerican civilization, they are the best-known representatives of its culture.

E. Three Key Inventions

Civilization greatly accelerated the pace of invention. Basic necessities such as , clocks and calendars, “intermediate” mathematics * , and codes of law date to this period. Other critical inventions included the sailboat and the plow. I recognize three especially far-reaching innovations as having revolutionized the human experience.

1. Metallurgy

Metals as they occur in nature are difficult to exploit. Most are rare and / or stubbornly difficult to extract from the earth. Due to such challenges, metal working did not exist until the Neolithic period, and only about ten elementary metals were ever known before modern chemistry. Gold, silver, and copper were mined and used to some extent in early villages, even before civilization. These precious metals are soft and effective only for luxurious jewelry and art. True metallurgy began with the controlled melting of metals, which dates back as surprisingly far as 7 TYA (Serbia and Turkey). 100 An early application was the creation of bronze by blending copper with a secondary metal. Bronze, unlike pure copper, is hard and rigid enough to use as tools, weapons, and armor. It became gradually more refined and widespread throughout the Old World 101 , with tin becoming the secondary metal of choice. The impact on formative civilizations was so great that archaeologists refer to this period as the Bronze Age. Bronze found numerous applications in art and music, ships, and even mirrors. Bronze fishhooks and metal-

* Fractions, algebra, and geometric measurement CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 29 tipped plows were vastly superior to their organic precursors. And only with the availability of chisels, saws, and rivets did it become possible to craft wooden wheels! 102 In Eastern Europe and Southwest Asia, iron began to overtake bronze in the 2nd millennium BCE. Iron was stronger than bronze and much more plentiful, though it required difficult new techniques for smelting and shaping. Iron swords, armor, and arrowheads were a critical part of the war package that swept through the Fertile Crescent at the end of this “Chapter 4” period.

2. The wheel

The earliest wheeled vehicles are found in central Europe, Mesopotamia, and the northern Caucasus. These findings all date to the late 4th millennium BCE. Because of their proximity in time and place, it is probable that they all derived from one single invention, most likely in the Proto-Indo-European homeland. 103 Wheels rolled across the entire Old World over the next two millennia. Vehicles were hand-made and personalized. They were among the most common possessions buried with the dead. We must conclude that Bronze Age owners cherished their cars just as much as we do today. Despite the deceptive simplicity of the wheel, neither its conception nor its construction was trivial. The real breakthrough was not the wheel per se but the axle that affixed it to a vehicle. Aside from the matter of having metal tools on hand, a wheelwright must balance considerations of weight, speed, friction, durability, ease of steering, availability of wood, and simplicity of construction. After all that, most terrains are still more difficult to traverse by wheel than on foot. Vehicles must have come into being only where specialized needs made them worth the trouble. (Tellingly, Olmecs made wheeled toys but never scaled them up). The first vehicles may have found utility as mining carts in the mountains or ox-pulled covered wagons on the steppe. 104 By the 2nd millennium BCE, wheel craft had progressed to veritable mechanical engineering with the spoked wheel and the chariot. Horse-drawn chariots, especially when bearing archers, were formidable and unstoppable weapons. They shaped the military history of the Fertile Crescent and became the status symbol of choice for kings and gods alike.

CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 30

3. Writing

The concept of writing grew out of the ages-old art of drawing. Since some words sound like others, pictures can assume multiple meanings:

I CAN SEE YOU

This rebus principle hinted at the idea that visual symbols could represent sounds regardless of meaning. When special symbols came to represent the elementary sounds of speech – syllables, consonants, and vowels – they became the first systems of full writing. Writing was probably invented independently by only two civilizations: the Sumerians and Olmecs. 105 Egyptians and Indians borrowed the idea from Mesopotamia. 106 Egyptian hieroglyphics was the first system to use alphabetic characters, later extracted by Phoenicians into the strictly alphabetic scripts used by most of the world today. Chinese writing followed millennia later, and (though hotly debated) the preponderance of evidence suggests that the Chinese also adopted writing from western Asia. 107 The earliest writing was mostly for mundane record-keeping. Merchants wrote bills of sale while scribes recorded the accomplishments of their kings. Such records give us the first known individual names, from Egypt’s Scorpion King to a slave named Enpap-X. 108 Still, scant literature survives from before 1000 BCE. Writing had enormous impact not only for the people who used it, but for present perceptions of the past. Until recently, the only known evidence of ancient civilizations was their written records. Since writing seemed to come from nowhere about 5,000 years ago, there was absolutely no conception of pre-history. The creation myths recounted in the earliest written literature were taken at face value, and most people alive today still believe them. Committing religion to writing made it inflexible. Oral traditions can change quickly and fluidly to keep up with conventional wisdom. 109 Scripture is (sometimes literally) carved in stone, forcing it to eventually grow old-fashioned. CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 31

In any event, writing disseminated and preserved knowledge like never before. In the historic age, there are now five ways to change the world: authority, wealth, arms, organized numbers, and ideas.

V. Summary

The end of the last ice age was the crucial climatic change that enabled all of the nearly miraculous transformations that Homo sapiens made in the rest of this chapter. It opened up a whole new hemisphere for the first native Americans after the last glacial maximum of 20 TYA. The warmer, wetter climate also opened up the temperate latitudes for permanent settlement and easy cultivation of plants. Settler-cultivators gradually progressed to the world’s first farmers, ranchers, and herders by 10 TYA. As population densities increased, humans became a hyper-social species, cooperating in communities of hundreds, thousands, and millions – well beyond the natural limit of family bands. Collective action magnified the power of the human mind immensely. Technology abruptly advanced from stone tools and thatched huts to metal, masonry, and vehicles. For the first time, some people were able to take breaks from food production in order to develop diverse skills and trades. Written history began in the 4th millennium BCE, though the surviving written record from this period is limited. Large-scale cooperation was a complete overhaul of human sociality. It necessitated a ruling class and an organized hierarchy. This invariably led to social inequality, yet cooperation required a sense of common purpose. Communities standardized their spiritual instincts into organized religions. Religion channeled the emotional connection from individual to group. This cohesive force was strong enough to hold nations together peacefully. At the same time, organized religion provided the ultimate basis for a leader’s authority. Wealth, power, and organized numbers evolved together to strike a balanced solution whereby rulers served their own selfish needs while also managing collective welfare. The first civilizations – nations, countries, and states – emerged in the cradles of agriculture. Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and China all had advanced historic civilizations by 1000 BCE. The Mesoamerican and Peruvian civilizations also started to come into their own by that time. CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 32

Civilizations have always engaged simultaneously in war and trade, a perpetual disequilibrium determined by each state’s needs and capabilities. They competed in a tournament without rules. State-organized religion helped to unify “us” into ever-larger nations, while at the same time making “them” all the more foreign.

CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 33

VI. Archaeology Gallery

After 30 TYA, more artifacts made of organic materials are left behind. Craftsmen got increasingly meticulous with small precision tools. Needles, fishhooks, and harpoons were common. 110

Harpoon tips made of reindeer antler. France, 15 - 20 TYA.

The bow-and-arrow was a powerful stone-age weapon. These “fluted” Clovis arrowheads are among the oldest artifacts found in America. 111

CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 34

The Neolithic (“new stone”) period is partly defined by the appearance of polished stones, like this Japanese axe. 112

Pottery and basketry appeared more than 20 TYA. 113 The best surviving artifacts are under 10 TYO. 114

Pottery from Iran c. 7,000 years ago CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 35

The oldest known man-made shelters were huts made of mammoth bones. 115

Museum replica of a mammoth bone hut, Russia, 15 - 20 TYA

Towns similar to modern apartment complexes appeared a little over 10 TYA. 116

Reconstruction of Catal Hoyuk, Turkey

CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 36

As agriculturalists, people began breeding new varieties of existing species, many of them no longer recognizable as their natural forms. 117

Genetically modified mustard: An example of several new "man-made" life forms bred from one natural species.

Megaliths – arrangements of giant stones – were common in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages. They were so difficult to erect that we can infer they must have been important. They probably served as temples, cemeteries, and other exalted community spaces. 118

Stonehenge, England, 3rd millennium BCE CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 37

King Tut’s golden chariot embodies many highlights of this chapter: Civilization, metallurgy, wheels, and the domestication of animals. 119

Museum replica Since the 4th millennium BCE, writing has been capturing history and mythology so that we can remember it to this day. 120

This stone tells part of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a legend that has influenced other classics, including the bible. CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 38

VII. Citations

1 Pyramid image by Kim Heimbuch, https://pixabay.com/vectors/pyramids-egypt-egyptian-desert-1496253/. Camel caravan image by Gordon Johnson, https://pixabay.com/vectors/camels-caravan-silhouette-animals- 5059946/. Pyramid and camels Pixabay License (both accessed, saved, and archived 10/04/20). Hourglass image from https://www.uokpl.rs/rsmax/hTxxJhR/ (accessed, saved, and archived 9/20/20). Eye Of Horus Egypt Ancient Times - Free vector graphic on Pixabay by Doreen Sawitza (accessed, saved, and archived 1/17/21). Scarab Bug Wings - Free vector graphic on Pixabay by OpenClipArt-Vectors (accessed, saved, and archived 1/17/21). Chain Gold Jewelry - Free vector graphic on Pixabay by Clker-Free-Vector-Images (accessed, saved, and archived 1/17/21).

2 George Frideric Handel, “The Messiah”, adapted from Psalms 2:1. 3 Map America Usa - Free image on Pixabay by Dsndrn-Videolar (accessed, saved, and archived 1/17/21). Artistic image of Native American clipart. Free download transparent .PNG | Creazilla by OpenClipArt (accessed, saved, and archived 10/04/20). Bloodline Icons - Download Free Vector Icons | Noun Project (thenounproject.com) by Silviu Ojog (accessed, saved, and archived 1/17/21). Corn Field Agriculture - Free image on Pixabay by josemairing (accessed, saved, and archived 1/17/21). Wagon Ox Wheels - Free image on Pixabay by ArtsyBeeKids (accessed, saved, and archived 1/17/21). Priest and temple image Aztec Mayan Temple - Free image on Pixabay by Venita Oberholster (accessed, saved, and archived 1/17/21).

4 Aixue Hu et al., “Influence of Bering Strait flow and North Atlantic circulation on glacial sea-level changes”, Nature Geoscience 3, 118 – 121 (1/10/2010), http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v3/n2/full/ngeo729.html (accessed and saved 1/18/20).

5 Ned Rozell, “Why was interior Alaska green during the last ice age?” University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, 9/25/2014, http://www.gi.alaska.edu/alaska-science-forum/why-was-interior-alaska-green-during-last-ice- age (accessed and saved 7/02/17, archived 1/18/20).

6 Sharon Levy, Once and Future Giants, Oxford University Press (2011), p. 15.

7 Craig D. Allen, Julio L. Betancourt, and Thomas W. Swetnam, “Land Use History of North America (LUHNA): The Paleobotanical Record”, USGS (12/09/2016), https://geochange.er.usgs.gov/sw/impacts/biology/paleobotany/ (accessed, saved, and archived 12/20/20).

8 David Meltzer, First Peoples in a New World: Colonizing Ice Age America, University of California Press (Kindle eBook edition, 2009), location 1205.

9 Pat Middleton et al., “Glaciers Left Their Mark on the Mississippi River” (c. 1997), http://greatriver.com/Ice_Age/glacier.htm (accessed and saved 7/09/2017, archived 1/18/20).

10 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “The Younger Dryas” (c. 2016), https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/abrupt-climate-change/The%20Younger%20Dryas (accessed and saved 7/09/2017).

11 European Science Foundation, “Big freeze plunged Europe into ice age in months”, Science Daily (11/30/2009), https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091130112421.htm (accessed, saved, and archived 1/18/20).

12 R.B. Alley et al., “Abrupt increase in Greenland snow accumulation at the end of the Dryas event”, Nature 362, 527 – 529 (4/08/1993), https://www.nature.com/articles/362527a0 (accessed and saved 1/18/20).

13 Wallace Broecker, “Was the Younger Dryas Triggered by a Flood?” Science 312(5777):1146-1148 at 1147 (5/26/2006), https://science.sciencemag.org/content/312/5777/1146/tab-figures-data (accessed and saved 7/09/2017). CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 39

14 Owen Gaffney and Will Steffen, “The Anthropocene equation”, The Anthropocene Review, Vol. 4, Issue 1 (2/10/2017), http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2053019616688022 (official pay site), https://www.slideshare.net/owengaffney/the-anthropocene-equation-2017-gaffney-steffen (free low-res copy posted by author, accessed and saved 7/09/2017, archived 1/18/20).

15 Lauriane Bourgeon, Ariane Burke, and Thomas Higham, “Earliest Human Presence in North America Dated to the Last Glacial Maximum: New Radiocarbon Dates from Bluefish Caves, Canada”, PLoS ONE 12(1): e0169486 (01/06/2017), https:doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0169486 (accessed and saved 7/16/2017).

16 Mikkel Pedersen et al., “Postglacial viability and colonization in North America’s ice-free corridor”, Nature 537, 45-49 (9/01/2016), http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v537/n7618/full/nature19085.html (abstract accessed and saved 7/23/2017).

17 Jon M. Erlandson et al., “Paleoindian seafaring, maritime technologies, and coastal foraging on California’s Channel Islands”, Science Vol 331, issue 6021, pp. 1181-1185 (3/04/2011), http://science.sciencemag.org/content/331/6021/1181.long (accessed and saved 1/19/20).

18 Arturo Gonzalez et al., “The Arrival of Humans on the Yucatan Peninsula: Evidence from Submerged Caves in the State of Quintana Roo, Mexico”, Current Research in the Pleistocene vol. 25, 2008, Special Report pp. 1 – 24, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/310750546_The_arrival_of_humans_on_the_Yucatan_Peninsula_Evidenc e_from_submerged_caves_in_the_state_of_Quintana_Roo_Mexico (accessed and saved 1/19/20).

19 This was the hypothesis of Paul Martin, who compiled a lifelong summary of his research as Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America, University of California Press (2005). Most experts believe that human presence contributed to the mass extinction, but that overhunting alone could not have killed so many animals so quickly.

20 David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here, Pantheon Books (Kindle eBook edition, 2018), locations 1271 – 1280.

21 Morten Rasmussen et al., “The genome of a late Pleistocene human from a Clovis burial site in western Montana”, Nature 506, 225-229 (2/13/2014), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4878442/ (accessed and saved 7/16/17).

22 Tom D. Dillehay et al., “New Archaeological Evidence for an Early Human Presence at Monte Verde, Chile”, PLOS ONE (11/18/2015), http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0141923 (accessed and saved 7/16/2017).

23 Rachel Caspari and Sang-Hee Lee, “Older age becomes common late in human evolution”, PNAS vol. 101, no. 30 (July 27, 2004), https://www.pnas.org/content/101/30/10895 (accessed and saved 7/23/2017). This paper describes a sudden increase in longevity in the “early Upper Paleolithic.” In a follow-up article, Caspari specified that the Paleolithic sample was 20 – 30 TYO and that “grandparents … first became common around 30,000 years ago.” “The Evolution of Grandparents”, Scientific American 22(1):38-43 (Dec., 2012), https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-evolution-of-grandparents-2012-12-07/ (accessed and saved 1/19/20).

24 Rachel Caspari and Sang-Hee Lee, “Is Human Longevity a Consequence of Cultural Change or Modern Biology?” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 129:512-517 (2006), http://faculty.ucr.edu/~shlee/Publications/06%20OY%20W%20As%20(AJPA).pdf (accessed and saved 7/23/2017).

25 Kristen Hawkes et al., “Hadza Women’s Time Allocation, Offspring Provisioning, and the Evolution of Long Postmenopausal Life Spans”, Current Anthropology vol. 38 no. 4 (August – October 1997), 551-577, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/204646 (accessed and saved 1/20/20). CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 40

26 Mirkka Lahdenperä et al., “Fitness benefits of prolonged post-reproductive lifespan in women”, Nature vol. 428 (3/11/2004) 178 – 181, https://www.nature.com/articles/nature02367 (accessed and saved 1/20/20).

27 Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors, Penguin Press (Kindle eBook edition, 2006), location 2234.

28 Ibid. at location 2264.

29 Douglas Rohde, “Modelling the recent common ancestry of all living humans”, Nature 431:562-566 (9/30/2004), https://www.nature.com/articles/nature02842 (accessed and saved 1/20/20). Supplement at https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/48ac/fefc93b65bc7313ce072be946ad6132a33bc.pdf (accessed, saved, and archived 1/20/20). Rohde’s computer model indicates that humanity’s identical ancestry point could have occurred 5 – 15 TYA. Bearing in mind the realities of American isolation, it would have occurred at the earlier end of this range.

30 The Hebrew bible described three human races. 18th century German historians invented the five-color system “white, black, yellow, red, brown.” Even today, the United States census has five racial categories, corresponding roughly to the continents.

31 Image: “Colours of the visible light spectrum” by Meganbeckett27, CC BY-SA 3.0 (accessed and saved 12/06/20). 32 David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here, Pantheon Books (2018) maps out the details of this churning racial spectrum, an overview of 21st-century ancient-DNA genomics. The terms “racial spectrum” and “3D spectrum” are my own.

33 Genesis 1:26, King James Bible

34 George Armelagos, “Brain Evolution, the Determinates of Food Choice, and the Omnivore’s Dilemma”, Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition vol 54, issue 10, pp. 1330 – 1341 (2/24/2014), https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10408398.2011.635817 (accessed and saved 1/20/20).

35 Kyle Chamberlain, “The Domestication Spectrum: How Our Relationships with Plants and Animals Define Our Existence”, Permaculture Research Institute, 3/04/2010, https://permaculturenews.org/2010/03/04/the- domestication-spectrum-how-our-relationships-with-plants-and-animals-define-our-existence/ (accessed and saved 8/13/2017, archived 1/20/20). Non-academic; a good plain-English read.

36 Claudio Ottoni et al., “The palaeogenetics of cat dispersal in the ancient world”, Nature Ecology & Evolution 1, article no. 0139 (2017), https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-017-0139 (accessed and saved 8/5/17).

37 Yoshihiro Matsuoka et al., “A single domestication for shown by multilocus microsatellite genotyping”, PNAS vol. 99 no. 9 (4/30/2002), http://www.pnas.org/content/99/9/6080.long (accessed and saved 8/05/17).

38 Donald Ugent, Shelia Pozorski, and Thomas Pozorski, “Archaeological potato tuber remains from the Casma Valley of Peru”, Economic Botany 36:182-192 (Apr., 1982), https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF02858715 (accessed 1/20/20).

39 Christopher Seddon, Humans: from the beginning, Glanville Publications (2014), p. 226.

40 This is one of the central theses in Jared Diamond’s popular-science account Guns, Germs, and Steel, W.W. Norton, 1997.

41 Elisa Guerra-Doce, “Psychoactive Substances in Prehistoric Times: Examining the Archaeological Evidence”, Time and Mind 8(1):91-112 (1/02/2015), https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1751696X.2014.993244 (accessed and saved 1/20/20). CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 41

42 Ferran Antolin and Ramon Buxo, “Chasing the traces of diffusion of agriculture during the early Neolithic in the western Mediterranean coast”, Rubricatum: revista del Museu de Gavà [en línia], 2012, Núm. 5 , pp. 95-102. http://www.raco.cat/index.php/Rubricatum/article/view/269300/356849 (accessed and saved 8/13/2017).

43 Bakel et al., “The draft genome and transcriptome of Cannabis sativa”, Genome Biology 2011, 12:R102, https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-2011-12-10-r102 (accessed and saved 8/13/2017).

44 Alfred Lucas and J. Harris, Ancient Egyptian Materials and Industries, Dover Publications (1926, 4ed 2012), p. 41 (accessed and saved 8/27/2017).

45 Miljana Radivojevic et al., “On the origins of extractive metallurgy: new evidence from Europe”, Journal of Archaeological Science 37(11):2775-87 (Nov., 2010), https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440310001986 (accessed and saved 8/27/17).

46 Aidan Cockburn, “Where did our infectious diseases come from?” CIBA Foundation Symposium no. 49 (Wiley, 1977), p. 111 (accessed and saved 8/27/2017). For a more detailed smallpox study, see Yu Li et al., “On the origin of smallpox: Correlating variola phylogenics with historical smallpox records”, PNAS 104(40):15787-92 (8/15/2007), http://www.pnas.org/content/104/40/15787.full (accessed and saved 8/27/2017).

47 Nicolau Barquet and Pere Domingo, “Smallpox: the triumph over the most terrible of the ministers of death”, Annals of Internal Medicine 127:635-42 (10/15/1997), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9341063 (accessed and saved 1/23/20).

48 The estimate of 300 – 500 million deaths in the 20th century is commonly quoted, though I have not yet traced this figure to its source.

49 America: Lois Magner, “The Impact of European Diseases on Native Americans”, Science and Its Times: Understanding the Social Significance of Scientific Discovery (2001). http://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/impact-european-diseases- native-americans (accessed and saved 8/27/2017, archived 1/23/20).

Australia: Judy Campbell, “Invisible Invaders: Smallpox and Other Diseases in Aboriginal Australia, 1780 – 1880”, Melbourne University Press (Carlton, 2007).

50 National Center for History in the Schools, “Key Theme Four: Haves and Have-Nots”, http://worldhistoryforusall.ss.ucla.edu/themes/keytheme4.php (accessed and saved 9/10/2017, archived 1/23/20).

51 Robert Wright, “The Age of Chiefdoms”, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (Pantheon Books, 2000), Chapter 7, https://web.archive.org/web/20190401141650/http://www.nonzero.org/chap7.htm (accessed and saved 1/23/20).

52 Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire , Harvard University Press (Kindle eBook edition, 2012). Flannery and Marcus use the phrase “We were here first” six times in this book, and “senior lineage” seven times.

53 Flannery and Marcus cite numerous examples of tribes or chiefdoms revising their creation stories to justify changing social relations. One such example is taken from M.J. Meggitt, Desert People: A Study of the Walbiri Aborigines of Central Australia (Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1962) wherein the Walbiri creation myth explained the godly source of “sections”, a sociological structure that they had only been using since 1850.

54 Examples are given by Brij Lal and Kate Fortune in The Pacific Islands: An Encyclopedia, Vol. 1 , University of Hawaii Press (2000), p. 135. https://books.google.com/books?id=T5pPpJl8E5wC&pg=PA135#v=onepage&q&f=false (Accessed and saved 1/23/20). CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 42

55 Irving Goldman, Ancient Polynesian Society, University of Chicago Press (1970).

56 Colin Renfrew and Peter Bellwood, editors, Examining the Farming / Language Dispersal Hypothesis, Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research (2002). Summarized by Jared Diamond and Peter Bellwood, “Farmers and Their Languages: The First Expansions”, Science 300(5619):597-603 (4/25/2003), http://science.sciencemag.org/content/300/5619/597.long (accessed and saved 9/23/2017).

57 Jared Diamond and Peter Bellwood, “Farmers and Their Languages: The First Expansions”, Science 300(5619):597-603 (4/25/2003), http://science.sciencemag.org/content/300/5619/597.long (accessed and saved 9/23/2017).

58 UC Berkeley STEDT team, “The Sino-Tibetan Language Family”, Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus (c. 2017), https://stedt.berkeley.edu/about-st#homeland (accessed and saved 12/17/2017, archived 1/24/20).

59 E. N. Anderson, Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China, University of Pennsylvania Press (2014), p. 22, https://books.google.com/books?id=LJRuBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA22 (accessed and saved 9/24/2017).

60 Frederick J. Newmeyer, “The History of Modern Linguistics”, Linguistic Society of America (2012), https://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/history-modern-linguistics (accessed and saved 9/24/2017).

61 Native speaker statistics: Gary F. Simons and Charles D. Fennig (eds.), Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 20ed, SIL International (Dallas, 2017), https://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size (accessed and saved 9/30/2017). Second-language statistics: Apparently also from Ethnologue (a pay site), summarized on Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers (accessed and saved 9/30/2017, archived 1/24/20).

62 August Schleicher (1821 – 1868), summarized by J.P. Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology, and Myth, Thames and Hudson (London, 1989), pp. 14 – 16.

63 Marija Gimbutas, The Prehistory of Eastern Europe. Part I: Mesolithic, Neolithic and Copper Age Cultures in Russia and the Baltic Area, Peabody Museum (Cambridge, MA, 1956). As summarized and updated by David Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, Princeton University Press (Kindle ebook edition, 2007).

64 Wolfgang Haak et al., “Massive Migration from the Steppe Was a Source for Indo-European Languages in Europe”, Nature 522:207-11 (3/02/2015), https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14317 (accessed and saved 1/12/20).

65 Mallory (1989) and Anthony (2007) both discuss these points.

66 Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, Princeton University Press (Kindle eBook edition, 2007), location 6159 (Ch. 14 conclusion).

67 Alan Outram et al., “The Earliest Horse Harnessing and Milking”, Science 323(5919):1332-1335 (3/06/2009), https://science.sciencemag.org/content/323/5919/1332 (accessed and saved 1/24/20).

68 J.P. Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans, Thames & Hudson (London, 1989), pp. 137 – 138.

69 Max Roser, “Ethnographic and Archaeological Evidence on Violent Deaths”, Our World in Data (2013), https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-evidence-on-violent-deaths (accessed, saved, and archived 12/12/20).

70 Christopher Boehm, “Retaliatory Violence in Human Prehistory”, The British Journal of Criminology 51(3):518- 534 (May, 2011), https://www.jstor.org/stable/23640324?seq=1 (abstract accessed 12/13/20). CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 43

71 Charles Spencer, “Territorial expansion and primary state formation”, PNAS vol. 107 no. 16 (4/20/2010), pp. 7119-7126, http://www.pnas.org/content/107/16/7119.full (accessed and saved 10/04/2017).

72 Robin Dunbar, “Co-Evolution of Neocortex Size, Group Size and Language in Humans”, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16(4):681-694 (Dec., 1993), https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain- sciences/article/coevolution-of-neocortical-size-group-size-and-language-in- humans/4290FF4D7362511136B9A15A96E74FEF (accessed and saved 1/22/20). Though the famous “Dunbar number” of about 150 was proposed with a grain of salt and has not been rigorously tested, it is found to be consistent with many typical foraging bands and maximal self-managing teams.

73 The field of multi-level selection, or competition at the group level, is traced at least to Richard D. Alexander, The Biology of Moral Systems (Routledge, 1987), https://www.amazon.com/Biology-Systems-Evolutionary- Foundations-Behavior/dp/0202011747 . It is often justified by the statistical Price Equation. As a caveat, the whole principle of group selection is highly controversial. However, that resistance comes mostly from biologists, who do not incorporate group-vs-group competition into their models. I find it plausible if not compelling that, when groups must cooperate to compete, there is a non-genetic evolutionary pressure toward intra-group cooperation.

74 Emil Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912). Durkheim described religion as “a system of ideas by means of which individuals imagine the society of which they are members.” 1995 translation by Karen Fields, https://www.amazon.com/Elementary-Forms-Religious-Life/dp/0029079373 , p. 227.

75 Richard Sosis, “Religious Behaviors, Badges, and Bans: Signaling Theory and the Evolution of Religion” (2006). Chapter 4 (pp. 61 – 86) of P. McNamara (Ed.), Psychology, religion, and spirituality. Where God and Science meet: How brain and evolutionary studies alter our understanding of religion (Vol. 1): Evolution, genes, and the religious brain. Praeger Publishers. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.527.8723 (accessed and saved 5/23/21). See pp. 10 – 11 of the isolated PDF or p. 66 – 67 in the book.

76 Such observations are traceable at least to Emil Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912). In fact, Durkheim wrote that, even before gods, rituals and totems symbolized the collective and were held as sacred.

77 Quentin Atkinson and Pierrick Bourrat, “Beliefs about God, the afterlife and morality support the role of supernatural policing in human cooperation”, Evolution and Human Behavior 32(1):41-49 (Jan., 2011), https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513810000899?via%3Dihub (accessed and saved 1/22/20).

78 Joseph Watts et al., “Broad supernatural punishment but not moralizing high gods precede the evolution of political complexity in Austronesia”, Proc. R. Soc. B. 282(1804): 20142556 (4/07/2015), http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/282/1804/20142556 (accessed and saved 9/17/2017).

79 Franz Roes and Michael Raymond, “Belief in moralizing gods”, Evolution and Human Behavior 24(2):126-135 (Mar., 2003), https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513802001344?via%3Dihub (paywall; abstract accessed 1/25/20). Summarized in Franz Roes, “Moralizing Gods and the Arms-Race Hypothesis of Human Society Growth”, The Open Social Science Journal, 2009(2):70-73 (7/05/2009), https://benthamopen.com/ABSTRACT/TOSSCIJ-2-70 (accessed and saved 1/25/20).

80 Exodus 20:1 – 12. The commandments are not numbered 1 - 10 in the bible, so there are different versions of the numbering.

81 Exodus 20:13 – 16. 82 Exodus 20:17. 83 Deuteronomy 20:10-20, Joshua 6:16-21, Numbers 21:2-3, Psalm 106:34. 84 Samuel Johnson defined religion in part by “expectation of future rewards and punishments.” A Dictionary of the English Language (1806), p. 620, CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 44

https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=z3kKAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb_hover&pg=GBS .PA606

85 Nicholas Wade, The Faith Instinct, Penguin Press (Kindle ebook edition, 2009) location 712. 86 The words “sacred”, “sacrifice”, and “sacerdotal” (priestly) have the same root. 87 Barry J. Kemp, Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization, 2nd edition, Taylor and Francis (2005), Part II.

88 Herodotus, The Histories Book 2 Chapters 86-88. English translation by Henry Cary, Herodotus: A New and Literal Version, Harper & Brothers (New York, 1859), pp. 126 – 127, https://archive.org/stream/herodotusnewlite00hero#page/126/mode/2up (accessed and saved 11/07/2017).

89 Archibald H. Sayce, Lectures on the Origins and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by the Religion of the Ancient Babylonians, AMS Press (New York, 1887) pp. 237-241, https://archive.org/stream/LecturesOnTheOriginAnd#page/n247/mode/2up (accessed and saved 11/07/2017).

90 “The Myth of Adapa”, -4th millennium Akkadian myth, translated by R.W. Rogers, Cuneiform Parallels to the Old Testament, Oxford University Press (London, 1912) pp. 67-76, https://archive.org/stream/cuneiformparalle00rogerich#page/66/mode/2up (accessed and saved 11/07/2017).

91 “The Babylonian Flood Story”, translated by R.W. Rogers, Cuneiform Parallels to the Old Testament, Oxford University Press (London, 1912) pp. 90 - 102, https://archive.org/stream/cuneiformparalle00rogerich#page/90/mode/2up (accessed and saved 11/07/2017).

92 Similar to the infancy of Emperor Sargon of Akkadia. Analyzed by Otto Rank, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1914), Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Company (New York, 1914), translated by F. Robbins and Smith Ely Jelliffe, http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/mbh/index.htm . See specifically Sargon and Moses (both accessed, saved, and archived 1/25/20).

93 “Man and His God”, Sumerian, c. -2000. Translation with original transliteration and sources at http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section5/tr524.htm (accessed and saved 11/07/2017, archived 1/25/20).

94 Li Liu and Hong Xu, “Rethinking Erlitou: legend, history and Chinese archaeology”, Antiquity 81(314):886-901 (12/01/2007), https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003598X00095983 (accessed and saved 11/07/2017).

95 Paul S. Ropp, China in World History, Oxford University Press (New York, 2010) p. 1.

96 Asko Parpola, “A Dravidian solution to the Indus script problem”, lecture notes from World Classical Tamil Conference (6/25/2010), https://www.harappa.com/sites/default/files/pdf/Parpola-2010-Coimbatore.pdf (accessed, saved, and archived 1/26/20).

97 Charles C. Mann, “Unraveling Khipu’s Secrets”, Science 309:1008-9 (8/12/2005), https://science.sciencemag.org/content/309/5737/1008 (accessed and saved 1/26/20).

98 Jonathan Haas et al., “Power and the Emergence of Complex Polities in the Peruvian Preceramic”, Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 14(1):37-52 (Jan., 2004), http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/ap3a.2004.14.037/abstract (accessed and saved 11/07/2017).

99 For a good gallery of Olmec art and artifacts, see Anirudh, 10 Interesting Facts On The Ancient Olmec Civilization | Learnodo Newtonic (learnodo-newtonic.com) (2/16/2018; accessed, saved, and archived 12/20/20).

100 Miljana Radivojevic et al., “On the origins of extractive metallurgy: new evidence from Europe”, Journal of Archaeological Science 37 (2010) 2775-2787, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2010.06.012 (accessed and saved 11/19/2017). CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 45

101 Christopher Thornton et al., “On Pins and Needles: Tracing the Evolution of Copper-base Alloying at Tepe Yahya, Iran, via ICP-MS Analysis of Common-place Items”, Journal of Archaeological Science 29 (2002), 1451- 1460, https://doi.org/10.1006/jasc.2002.0809 (accessed and saved 11/19/2017).

102 David Anthony as interviewed by Natalie Wolchover, “Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel”, Live Science 3/02/2012, https://www.livescience.com/18808-invention-wheel.html (accessed and saved 11/12/2017, archived 1/26/20).

103 Asko Parpola, “Formation of the Indo-European and Uralic (Finno-Ugric) language families in the light of archaeology: Revised and integrated ‘total’ correlations”, A Linguistic Map of Prehistoric Northern Europe, Suomalais-Ugrilaisen Seuran Toimituksia, ed. By Riho Grünthal & Petri Kallio (Helsinki 2012), 119-184 at 125- 127. http://www.sgr.fi/sust/sust266/sust266_parpola.pdf (accessed and saved 11/11/2017).

104 Richard Bulliet, The Wheel: Inventions & Reinventions, Columbia University Press (New York, 2016), chapters 3 & 4.

105 Carmen Rodriguez Martinez et al., “Oldest Writing in the New World”, Science vol. 313 Issue 5793, pp. 1610- 1614 (9/15/2006), http://science.sciencemag.org/content/313/5793/1610 (accessed and saved 12/03/2017).

106 Steven Roger Fischer, A History of Writing, Reaktion Books (Kindle eBook edition, 2001), location 413.

107 Steven Roger Fischer, A History of Writing, Reaktion Books (Kindle eBook edition, 2001), location 2335.

108 Cuneiform tablet # OIM A2513, in possession of the Oriental Institute Museum, Chicago, IL. Translated and analyzed by Christopher Woods, “The Earliest Mesopotamian Writing”, in Visible Language, ed. Woods et al., Oriental Institute Museum Publications (2015), p. 39. https://oi.uchicago.edu/sites/oi.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/shared/docs/oimp32.pdf (accessed, saved, and archived 1/26/20).

109 Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, The Creation of Inequality, Harvard University Press (Kindle eBook edition, 2012), pp. 59 - 60.

110 Harpoon photo: Muséum de Toulouse, CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0), https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Harpons_de_Fontal%C3%A9s_MHNT.PRE.2011.0.654.jpg (accessed, saved, and archived 1/26/20).

111 Arrowheads photo: Billwhittaker at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by- sa/3.0), https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Clovis_Rummells_Maske.jpg (accessed, saved, and archived 1/26/20).

112 Axe photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%E7%A3%A8%E8%A3%BD%E7%9F%B3%E6%96%A7- Polished_Stone_Axe_(Masei_sekifu)_MET_LC-1975_268_265_001.jpg (accessed, saved, and archived 1/26/20).

113 James M. Adovasio, Olga Soffer, and Bohuslav Klima, “Upper Palaeolithic fibre technology: interlaced woven finds from Pavlov I, Czech Republic, c. 26,000 years ago”, Antiquity 70(269):526-534 (Sep., 1996), https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/upper-palaeolithic-fibre-technology-interlaced-woven- finds-from-pavlov-i-czech-republic-c-26000-years-ago/CD78BC4A39E2DD6958ACA29BA1BA30DA (paywall, abstract accessed 1/26/20). As summarized by Shanti Menon, “The Basket Age”, Discover (12/31/1995), https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-basket-age (accessed, saved, and archived 1/26/20).

114 Pottery photo: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Public domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Prehistoric_Painted_Pottery_Vessel_LACMA_M.76.174.156.jpg (accessed, saved, and archived 1/26/20). CHAPTER 4: THE LAST FEW TEN THOUSAND YEARS 46

115 Mammoth hut photo: Nandaro, CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0), https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mammoth_House_(Replica).JPG (accessed and saved 1/26/20).

116 Village reconstruction photo: Wolfgang Sauber, CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0), https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MUFT_-_Catal_H%C3%B6y%C3%BCk_Modell.jpg (accessed and saved 1/26/20).

117 Mustard image: Liwnoc, CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0), https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wild_Mustard_Plant_Selective_Breeding.svg (accessed, saved, and archived 1/26/20).

118 Stonehenge photo by Howard Walsh, Pixabay License, https://pixabay.com/photos/stonehenge-travel-tourist- england-4614639/ (accessed and saved 1/26/20).

119 King Tut chariot photo by Carsten Frenzl, CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Replica_of_Tutankhamun%E2%80%99s_chariot_(side_view).jpg (accessed, saved, and archived 1/16/20).

120 Gilgamesh photo by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg), CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0), https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tablet_V_of_the_Epic_of_Gilgamesh.jpg (accessed, saved, and archived 1/26/20).