If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways (2 page)

Elaine
. Yes.

Daniel
. If I gave you a sharp cutting tool, a strong needle, some strong thread, and a wide sheet of supple leather, could you make yourself a leather skirt?

Elaine
. I think so.

Daniel
. But suppose you had none of these tools and materials. For example, could you make a cutting tool sharp enough to cut leather?

Elaine
. No.

Daniel
. Could you make a needle strong enough to pierce the leather?

Elaine
. From scratch? No.

Daniel
. Could you make some thread strong enough to hold the leather together?

Elaine
. Again, from scratch, no. I wouldn't even know where to begin.

Daniel
. And of course, most critically, could you produce the leather?

Elaine
. No.

Daniel
. Stone Age peoples have all the tools they need to support themselves in a comfortable lifestyle
— not a lifestyle that you or I might find comfortable but one that
they
found comfortable. They had not only the tools — hundreds of them — but the knowledge of how to
make
the tools. Whereas you and I, along with 99.99 percent of our population, have none of this knowledge. I myself couldn't even make a
piece of string from scratch.

Elaine
. Right.

Daniel
. So what would happen in the event of a nuclear holocaust? Would we be blasted back to the
Stone Age?

Elaine
. No.

Daniel
. We'd be blasted back to an age that has no name at all.
Homo habilis
, our earliest ancestors, had more skills than we would have, because they
evolved
with those skills. Without them, they couldn't have evolved in the first place.

Elaine
. Yes, I can see that.

Daniel
. This may seem like a rather trivial point, but it's only a starting point — my own personal starting point. Making this observation was the beginning of my career as a Martian anthropologist. The
question I asked myself — and it's an anthropologist's question — was "What are these people thinking when they say that we'd be blasted back to the Stone Age in a nuclear holocaust?"

Elaine
. What are they
thinking
?

Daniel
. What's the mindset
behind
the statement?

Elaine
shakes her head
.

Daniel
. What's their imaginary picture of the Stone Age condition?

Elaine
. Okay, I see where you're going. Or I think I do. What they're seeing when they think of the Stone Age is: no electricity, no radios, no televisions, no central heating, no computers, no telephones.

Daniel
. An absence. A nothingness. I'm not talking about
informed opinion
here. But even the well informed would be shocked ten years later, when Marshall Sahlins wrote a seminal book calling Stone
Age peoples "the first affluent society." But I'm not talking about
ill-informed
opinion, either. Well-educated people — readers of sophisticated magazines like
The New Yorker
— expected to see cartoons depicting our ancestors living in caves, the males armed with clubs, dragging their mates home by the
hair. This was the general, cultural impression.

Elaine
. I don't think it's changed much.

Daniel
. You're probably right. I haven't really been checking.

Elaine
. You say this was the general, cultural impression. Why wasn't it yours?

Daniel
. It wasn't mine only because I questioned the received wisdom that a nuclear holocaust would throw us back to the Stone Age. I knew that we wouldn't be so lucky. It would throw us back into an age
of total helplessness, where not one in ten million of us would know even as much as how to make a
piece of string from scratch.

Elaine
. But why did that
occur
to you?

Daniel
. That I can't say. It doesn't seem to me to represent a stroke of genius. I doubt that I ever even mentioned it to anyone. If I had, they probably would have wondered why an intelligent person would
expend mental effort on such a trivial matter.

Elaine
. True.

Daniel
. But you might say that discovering this bit of nonsense awakened the Martian anthropologist in me. It was just a loose thread, but pulling on it I began to unravel the fabric of our culture's received
wisdom. This impression of nothingness that attached to the people from whom we ascended wasn't
limited to the matter of nuclear holocaust. It was part of our general understanding of the human story.

Like everyone else, I'd had world history as a required course, and I'd retained into adulthood
only one striking, world-shaking event: the Agricultural Revolution. If something had come before it, it
was at best a hazy nothingness. There obviously had to be people there, but they were of no
consequence. What was of consequence was the Agricultural Revolution. That was It. That was the
single most momentous event in human history. It was the beginning of everything that happened of
human importance... I began to take note of capsule tellings of the human story, in books, newspapers,
and magazines. Some of these were written by or quoted from actual historians. They went something
like this: "Humans lived as hunter-gatherers for some three million years, then, about ten thousand years ago they abandoned hunting-gathering for the agricultural life, laying the groundwork for civilization."

Elaine
. Uh-huh.

Daniel
. And what does that "uh-huh" mean?

Elaine
. It means, let's see... It means I recognize that telling of the story.

Daniel
. And do you recognize what's wrong with it?

Elaine
. It implies that humanity itself, as a whole, abandoned the hunting-gathering life and took up agriculture about ten thousand years ago.

Daniel
. Which is obviously false. Ninety-five hundred years after humanity supposedly abandoned the hunting-gathering life, about three-quarters of the earth's landmass was still occupied by hunter-gatherers who had never heard of or participated in the Agricultural Revolution. Eight or ten years ago I
read an article in
Scientific American
that in its introductory paragraphs repeated almost verbatim the conventional description of humanity's abandonment of the hunting-gathering life ten thousand years
ago. It didn't occur to me at the time that I might at some future date have use for it, so I'm afraid I didn't make a note of the issue. I wrote a letter to the editors, pointing out the evident absurdity of the
description, but of course it wasn't printed. The conventional fable was good enough science for them.

Elaine
. Martian anthropologists need not apply.

Daniel
. I guess not. But where are we at this point? We know that the story of "world history" generally accepted in our culture is false to facts. Even historians who should know better recite it without giving it a second thought. A respected scientific journal sees no reason not to include it as the introduction to an article. Where does a Martian anthropologist go from here? What is his next question?

Elaine
[
after giving the question some thought
]. I'd say his next question is... No, I have to say I don't know.

Daniel
. Think about this. Aside from a relatively small minority of religious fanatics, the story of the universe as told by present-day science is generally accepted by the people of our culture. The universe
was born in a "big bang" some thirteen billion years ago, and our own planet was formed about five billion years ago. Is that right?

Elaine
. Is what right?

Daniel
. That the people of our culture generally accept this story of the universe, which is not a
mythological story or a religious story but a scientific one.

Elaine
. Yes, I'd say so, except, as you say, by a few religious fanatics.

Daniel
. This story, as far as the most brilliant minds of our time can tell us, is not false to facts.

Elaine
. That's right.

Daniel
. But the people of our culture accept a story of "world history" — world
human
history — that
is
false to facts. What does a Martian anthropologist think of this?

Elaine
. That it's odd.

Daniel
. And his question is... ?

Elaine
. Why? How did it come about that...

Daniel
. Take your time.

Elaine
. How did it come about that the same people who accept without question a scientific history of the universe also embrace a false version of human history?

Daniel
. The true version of human history is that humanity did not all at once, ten thousand years ago, abandon the hunting-gathering life for the agricultural life. The hunting-gathering life persisted over
three-quarters of the globe until some five hundred years ago — and still persists where it hasn't as yet
been stamped out. What is there in this true version of events that alarms us?

Elaine
thinks about this.

Daniel
. What is there in it that disturbs our settled vision of ourselves?

Elaine
sighs in frustration.

Daniel
. Don't be distressed if the answers to these questions don't pop right out at you. It took me years to work them out... Let's come at it from a different angle. When did we begin to put together our
version of the human story?

Elaine
. I would guess not more than twenty-five hundred years ago.

Daniel
. That's when the foundation thinkers of our culture began to appear: Herodotus, Thucydides,
Socrates, Aristotle, and so on.

Elaine
. Yes, that's what I was thinking.

Daniel
. But of course the fundamental outline of the story might have been in place for thousands of years before that. Everyone in the civilized world knew that there was a human past of
some
kind. The cities the Sumerians inhabited in 3000 BC weren't built in the previous generation or the generation
before that. And they could see that the cities were growing and developing technologically. From this,
they could logically project backward to a time when the cities were just villages and technologies were
very primitive. But what they could not possibly imagine was that these villages were born in a
revolution, the one we call the Agricultural Revolution. They couldn't possibly imagine that, before
people became farming villagers, they had lived for millions of years in an entirely different way. The
hunting-gathering lifestyle was five thousand years in the past, totally forgotten by now. Not even a
rumor of it could have survived for that long.

Elaine
. Yes, I see that. You called this the Great Forgetting in
The Story of B
.

Daniel
. So it had to seem to them that the human story must have begun just a few thousand years
before, that being the period of time between those first farming villagers and themselves. On this basis, what conclusion would it have been reasonable for them to draw about the nature of humans as a
species?

Elaine
. I'm afraid I can't begin to guess what you're getting at here.

Daniel
. It's safe to assume that these ancients were as knowledgeable about the creatures around them as we are — probably more so. For example, they must have known that birds hunt insects and build nests.
What conclusion would it have been reasonable for them to draw about the nature of birds as a species?

Elaine
. I'm tempted to say that they would conclude that it's the nature of birds to hunt insects and build
nests.

Daniel
. Of course. Birds had been doing that for as long as anyone knew. They must also have known
that bees gather nectar and build hives. And what would they conclude from that?

Elaine
. That bees are nectar gatherers and hive builders.

Daniel
. That's what bees had been doing for as long as anyone knew. And what had humans been doing
for as long as anyone knew?

Elaine
. Planting crops and building cities.

Daniel
. And from that what would they reasonably conclude about the nature of humans?

Elaine
. That they are agriculturalists and civilization builders.

Daniel
. To them, planting crops and building cities had to seem as innate to humans as gathering nectar and building hives is to bees.

Elaine
. Yes.

Daniel
. The idea that humans had come into being as tribal hunter-gatherers — planting no crops and building no cities for millions of years — would have seemed preposterous to them.

Elaine
. I'd have to think so.

Daniel
. Of course we can only conjecture that the Sumerians believed that Man was just a few thousand years old and had been born an agriculturalist and a civilization builder. But it's not conjecture that this story was still in place in our culture four thousand years later, and for centuries of years beyond that. It was the prevailing belief right through the eighteenth century that Man was just a few thousand years
old and had been an agriculturalist and a civilization builder from birth.

Elaine
. Not quite from birth, but the very first human, Adam,
became
an agriculturalist.