The Rational Optimist (6 page)

In truth, far from being unsustainable, the interdependence of the world through trade is the very thing that makes modern life as sustainable as it is. Suppose your local laptop manufacturer tells you that he already has three orders and then he is off on his holiday so he cannot make you one before the winter. You will have to wait. Or suppose your local wheat farmer tells you that last year’s rains means he will have to cut his flour delivery in half this year. You will have to go hungry. Instead, you benefit from a global laptop and wheat market in which somebody somewhere has something to sell you so there are rarely shortages, only modest price fluctuations.

For example, the price of wheat approximately trebled in 2006–8, just as it did in Europe in 1315–18. At the earlier date, Europe was less densely populated, farming was entirely organic and food miles were short. Yet in 2008, nobody ate a baby or pulled a corpse from a gibbet for food. Right up until the railways came, it was cheaper for people to turn into refugees than to pay the exorbitant costs of importing food into a hungry district. Interdependence spreads risk.

The decline in agricultural employment caused consternation among early economists. François Quesnay and his fellow ‘physiocrats’ argued in eighteenth-century France that manufacturing produced no gain in wealth and that switching from agriculture to industry would decrease a country’s wealth: only farming was true wealth creation. Two centuries later the decline in industrial employment in the late twentieth century caused a similar consternation among economists, who saw services as a frivolous distraction from the important business of manufacturing. They were just as wrong. There is no such thing as unproductive employment, so long as people are prepared to buy the service you are offering. Today, 1 per cent works in agriculture and 24 per cent in industry, leaving 75 per cent to offer movies, restaurant meals, insurance broking and aromatherapy.

Arcadia redux

Yet, surely, long ago, before trade, technology and farming, human beings lived simple, organic lives in harmony with nature. That was not poverty: that was ‘the original affluent society’. Take a snapshot of the life of hunter-gathering human beings in their heyday, say at 15,000 years ago well after the taming of the dog and the extermination of the woolly rhinoceros but just before the colonisation of the Americas. People had spear throwers, bows and arrows, boats, needles, adzes, nets. They painted exquisite art on rocks, decorated their bodies, traded foods, shells, raw materials and ideas. They sang songs, danced rituals, told stories, prepared herbal remedies for illnesses. They lived into old age far more frequently than their ancestors had done.

They had a way of life that was sufficiently adaptable to work in almost any habitat or climate. Where every other species needed its niche, the hunter-gatherer could make a niche out of anything: seaside or desert, arctic or tropical, forest or steppe.

A Rousseauesque idyll? The hunter-gatherers certainly looked like noble savages: tall, fit, healthy, and (having replaced stabbing spears with thrown ones) with fewer broken bones than Neanderthals. They ate plenty of protein, not much fat and ample vitamins. In Europe, with the help of increasing cold, they had largely wiped out the lions and hyenas that had both competed with and preyed upon their predecessors, so they had little to fear from wild animals. No wonder nostalgia for the Pleistocene runs through many of today’s polemics against consumerism. Geoffrey Miller, for example, in his excellent book
Spent,
asks his readers to imagine a Cro-Magnon mother of 30,000 years ago living ‘in a close-knit clan of family and friends ... gathering organic fruits and vegetables ... grooming, dancing, drumming and singing with people she knows, likes and trusts ... the sun rising over the six thousand acres of verdant French Riviera coast that her clan holds.’

Life was good. Or was it? There was a serpent in the hunter-gatherer Eden – a savage in the noble savage. Maybe it was not a lifelong camping holiday after all. For violence was a chronic and ever-present threat. It had to be, because – in the absence of serious carnivore predation upon human beings – war kept the population density below the levels that brought on starvation. ‘
Homo homini lupus
’, said Plautus. ‘Man is a wolf to man.’ If hunter-gatherers appeared lithe and healthy it was because the fat and slow had all been shot in the back at dawn.

Here is the data. From the !Kung in the Kalahari to the Inuit in the Arctic, two-thirds of modern hunter-gatherers have proved to be in a state of almost constant tribal warfare, and 87 per cent to experience annual war. War is a big word for dawn raids, skirmishes and lots of posturing, but because these happen so often, death rates are high – usually around 30 per cent of adult males dying from homicide. The warfare death rate of 0.5 per cent of the population per year that was typical of many hunter-gatherer societies would equate to two billion people dying during the twentieth century (instead of 100 million). At a cemetery uncovered at Jebel Sahaba, in Egypt, dating from 14,000 years ago, twenty-four of the fifty-nine bodies had died from unhealed wounds caused by spears, darts and arrows. Forty of these bodies were women or children. Women and children generally do not take part in warfare – but they are frequently the object of the fighting. To be abducted as a sexual prize and see your children killed was almost certainly not a rare female fate in hunter-gatherer society. After Jebel Sahaba, forget the Garden of Eden; think Mad Max.

It was not just warfare that limited population growth. Hunter-gatherers are often vulnerable to famines. Even when food is abundant, it might take so much travelling and trouble to collect enough food that women would not maintain a sufficient surplus to keep themselves fully fertile for more than a few prime years. Infanticide was a common resort in bad times. Nor was disease ever far away: gangrene, tetanus and many kinds of parasite would have been big killers. Did I mention slavery? Common in the Pacific north-west. Wife beating? Routine in Tierra del Fuego. The lack of soap, hot water, bread, books, films, metal, paper, cloth? When you meet one of those people who go so far as to say they would rather have lived in some supposedly more delightful past age, just remind them of the toilet facilities of the Pleistocene, the transport options of Roman emperors or the lice of Versailles.

The call of the new

None the less, you do not have to be starry-eyed about the Stone Age to find aspects of modern consumer society obscenely wasteful. Why, asks Geoffrey Miller, ‘would the world’s most intelligent primate buy a Hummer H1 Alpha sport-utility vehicle’, which seats four, gets ten miles to the gallon, takes 13.5 seconds to reach 60 mph, and sells for $139,771? Because, he answers, human beings evolved to strive to signal social status and sexual worth. What this implies is that far from being merely materialist, human consumption is already driven by a sort of pseudo-spiritualism that seeks love, heroism and admiration. Yet this thirst for status then encourages people to devise recipes that rearrange the atoms, electrons or photons of the world in such a way as to make useful combinations for other people. Ambition is transmuted into opportunity. It was allegedly a young Chinese imperial concubine in 2600
BC
who thought up the following recipe for rearranging beta pleated sheets of glycine-rich polypeptides into fine fabrics: take a moth caterpillar, feed it mulberry leaves for a month, let it spin a cocoon, heat it to kill it, put the cocoon in water to unstick the silk threads, carefully draw out the single kilometre-long thread from which the cocoon is made by reeling it on to a wheel, spin the thread and weave a fabric. Then dye, cut and sew, advertise and sell for cash. Rough guide on quantities: it takes about ten pounds of mulberry leaves to make 100 silkworm cocoons to make one necktie.

The cumulative accretion of knowledge by specialists that allows us each to consume more and more different things by each producing fewer and fewer is, I submit, the central story of humanity. Innovation changes the world but only because it aids the elaboration of the division of labour and encourages the division of time. Forget wars, religions, famines and poems for the moment. This is history’s greatest theme: the metastasis of exchange, specialisation and the invention it has called forth, the ‘creation’ of time. The rational optimist invites you to stand back and look at your species differently, to see the grand enterprise of humanity that has progressed – with frequent setbacks – for 100,000 years. And then, when you have seen that, consider whether that enterprise is finished or if, as the optimist claims, it still has centuries and millennia to run. If, in fact, it might be about to accelerate to an unprecedented rate.

If prosperity is exchange and specialisation – more like the multiplication of labour than the division of labour – then when and how did that habit begin? Why is it such a peculiar attribute of the human species?

He steps under the shower, a forceful cascade pumped down from the third floor. When this civilisation falls, when the Romans, whoever they are this time round, have finally left and the new dark ages begin, this will be one of the first luxuries to go. The old folk crouching by their peat fires will tell their disbelieving grandchildren of standing naked mid-winter under jet streams of hot clean water, of lozenges of scented soaps and of viscous amber and vermilion liquids they rubbed into their hair to make it glossy and more voluminous than it really was, and of thick white towels as big as togas, waiting on warming racks.

I
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WAN
Saturday

One day a little less than 500,000 years ago, near what is now the village of Boxgrove in southern England, six or seven two-legged creatures sat down around the carcass of a wild horse they had just killed, probably with wooden spears. Each took up a block of flint and began to fashion it into a hand axe, skilfully using hammers of stone, bone or antler to chip off flakes until all that remained was a symmetrical, sharp-edged, teardrop-shaped object in size and thickness somewhere between an iPhone and a computer mouse. The debris they left that day is still there, leaving eerie shadows of their own legs as they sat and worked. You can tell that they were right-handed. Notice: each person made his own tools.

The hand axes they made to butcher that horse are fine examples of ‘Acheulean bifaces’. They are thin, symmetrical and razor-sharp along the edge, ideal for slicing through thick hide, severing the ligaments of joints and scraping meat from bones. The Acheulean biface is the stereotype of the Stone Age tool, the iconic flattened teardrop of the Palaeolithic. Because the species that made it has long been extinct we may never quite know how it was used. But one thing we do know. The creatures that made this thing were very content with it. By the time of the Boxgrove horse butchers, their ancestors had been making it to roughly the same design – hand-sized, sharp, double-sided, rounded – for about a million years. Their descendants would continue to make it for hundreds of thousands more years. That’s the same technology for more than a thousand millennia, ten thousand centuries, thirty thousand generations – an almost unimaginable length of time.

Not only that; they made roughly the same tools in south and north Africa and everywhere in between. They took the design with them to the Near East and to the far north-west of Europe (though not to East Asia) and still it did not change. A million years across three continents making the same one tool. During those million years their brains grew in size by about one-third. Here’s the startling thing. The bodies and brains of the creatures that made Acheulean hand axes changed faster than their tools.

To us, this is an absurd state of affairs. How could people have been so unimaginative, so slavish, as to make the same technology for so long? How could there have been so little innovation, regional variation, progress, or even regress?

Actually, this is not quite true, but the detailed truth reinforces the problem rather than resolves it. There is a single twitch of progress in biface hand-axe history: around 600,000 years ago, the design suddenly becomes a little more symmetrical. This coincides with the appearance of a new species of hominid which replaces its ancestor throughout Eurasia and Africa. Called
Homo heidelbergensis
, this creature has a much bigger brain, possibly 25 per cent bigger than late
Homo erectus
. Its brain was almost as big as a modern person’s. Yet not only did it go on making hand axes and very little else; the hand-axe design sank back into stagnation for another half a million years. We are used to thinking that technology and innovation go together, yet here is strong evidence that when human beings became tool makers, they did not experience anything remotely resembling cultural progress. They just did what they did very well. They did not change.

Bizarre as this may sound, in evolutionary terms it is quite normal. Most species do not change their habits during their few million years on earth or alter their lifestyle much in different parts of their range. Natural selection is a conservative force. It spends more of its time keeping species the same than changing them. Only towards the edge of its range, on an isolated island, or in a remote valley or on a lonely hill top, does natural selection occasionally cause part of a species to morph into something different. That different sport sometimes then spreads to conquer a broader ecological empire, perhaps even returning to replace the ancestral species – to topple the dynasty from which it sprang. There is constant ferment of change within the species’ genes as it adapts to its parasites and they to it. But there is little progressive alteration of the organism. Evolutionary change happens largely by the replacement of species by daughter species, not by the changing of habits in species. What is surprising about the human story is not the mind-bogglingly tedious stasis of the Acheulean hand axe, but that the stasis came to an end.

The Boxgrove hominids of 500,000 years ago (who were members of
Homo heidelbergensis
) had their ecological niche. They had a way of getting food and shelter in their preferred habitat, of seducing mates and rearing babies. They walked on two feet, had huge brains, made spears and hand axes, taught each other traditions, perhaps spoke or signalled to each other grammatically, almost certainly lit fires and cooked their food, and undoubtedly killed big animals. If the sun shone, the herds of game were plentiful, the spears were sharp and diseases kept at bay, they may have sometimes thrived and populated new land. At other times, when food was scarce, the local population just died out. They could not change their ways much; it was not in their natures. Once they had spread all across Africa and Eurasia, their populations never really grew. On average death rates matched birth rates. Starvation, hyenas, exposure, fights and accidents claimed most of their lives before they were elderly enough to get chronically ill. Crucially, they did not expand or shift their niche. They remained trapped within it. Nobody woke up one day and said ‘I’m going to make my living a different way.’

Think of it this way. You don’t expect to get better and better at walking in each successive generation – or breathing, or laughing, or chewing. For Palaeolithic hominids, hand-axe making was like walking, something you grew good at through practice and never thought about again. It was almost a bodily function. It was no doubt passed on partly by imitation and learning, but unlike modern cultural traditions it showed little regional and local variation. It was part of what Richard Dawkins called ‘the extended phenotype’ of the erectus hominid species, the external expression of its genes. It was instinct, as inherent to the human behavioural repertoire as a certain design of nest is to a certain species of bird. A song thrush lines its nest with mud, a European robin lines its nest with hair and a chaffinch lines its nest with feathers – they always have and they always will. It’s innate for them to do so. Making a teardrop-shaped sharp-edged stone tool takes no more skill than making a bird’s nest and was probably just as instinctive: it was a natural expression of human development.

Indeed, the analogy with a bodily function is quite appropriate. There is now little doubt that hominids spent much of those million and a half years eating a lot of fresh meat. Some time after two million years ago, ape-men had become more carnivorous. With their feeble teeth and with finger nails where they should have had claws, they needed sharp tools to cut the skins of their kills. Because of their sharp tools they could tackle even the pachydermatous rhinos and elephants. Biface axes were like external canine teeth. The rich meat diet also enabled erectus hominids to grow a larger brain, an organ that burns energy at nine times the rate of the rest of the body. Meat enabled them to cut down on the huge gut that their ancestors had found necessary to digest raw vegetation and raw meat, and thus to grow a bigger brain instead. Fire and cooking in turn then released the brain to grow bigger still by making food more digestible with an even smaller gut – once cooked, starch gelatinises and protein denatures, releasing far more calories for less input of energy. As a result, whereas other primates have guts weighing four times their brains, the human brain weighs more than the human intestine. Cooking enabled hominids to trade gut size for brain size.

Erectus hominids, in other words, had almost everything we might call human: two legs, two hands, a big brain, opposable thumbs, fire, cooking, tools, technology, cooperation, long childhoods, kindly demeanour. And yet there was no sign of cultural take-off, little progress in technology, little expansion of range or niche.

Homo dynamicus

Then there appeared upon the earth a new kind of hominid, which refused to play by the rules. Without any changes in its body, and without any succession of species, it just kept changing its habits. For the first time its technology changed faster than its anatomy. This was an evolutionary novelty, and you are it.

When this new animal appeared is hard to discern, and its entrance was low-key. Some anthropologists argue that in east Africa and Ethiopia the toolkit was showing signs of change as early as 285,000 years ago. Certainly, by at least 160,000 years ago a new, small-faced ‘sapiens’ skull was being worn on the top of the spine in Ethiopia. Around the same time at Pinnacle Point in South Africa, people – yes, I shall call them people for the first time – were cooking mussels and other shellfish in a cave close to the sea as well as making primitive ‘bladelets’, small flakes of sharp stone, probably for hafting on to spears. They were also using red ochre, perhaps for decoration, implying thoroughly modern symbolic minds.

This was during the ice age before last, when Africa was mostly a desert. And yet apparently nothing much came of this experiment. Consistent evidence of smart behaviour and a fancy toolkit peters out again. Genetic evidence suggests human beings were still rare even in Africa, eking out a precarious existence in pockets of savannah woodland when it was dry, or possibly on the margins of lakes and seas. In the Eemian interglacial period of 130,000–115,000 years ago, the climate grew warmer and much wetter and sea level rose. Some skulls from what is now Israel suggest that a few slender-headed Africans did begin to colonise the Middle East towards the end of the Eemian, before a combination of cold weather and Neanderthals drove them back again. It was during this mild spell that a fancy new toolkit first appeared in caves in what is now Morocco: flakes, toothed scrapers and retouched points. One of the most extraordinary clues comes in the form of a simple estuarine snail shell called
Nassarius
. This little winkle keeps popping up in archaeological sites, with unnatural holes in its shells. The oldest certain
Nassarius
find is at Grottes des Pigeons near Taforalt in Morocco, where forty-seven perforated shells, some smeared with red ochre, date from certainly more than 82,000 years ago and perhaps as much as 120,000 years ago. Similar shells, harder to date, have been found at Oued Djebanna in Algeria and Skhul in Israel, and perforated shells of the same genus but a different species are found at Blombos cave in South Africa from about 72,000 years ago along with the earliest bone awls. These shells were surely beads, probably worn on a string. Not only do they hint at a very modern attitude to personal ornament, symbolism or perhaps even money; they also speak eloquently of trade. Taforalt is 25 miles and Oued Djebanna 125 miles from the nearest coast. The beads probably travelled hand to hand by exchange. Likewise, there are hints from east Africa and Ethiopia that the volcanic glass known as obsidian may have begun to move over long distances around this time too, or even earlier, presumably by trade, but the dates and sources are still uncertain.

Just across the strait of Gibraltar from where these bead-wearing, flake-making people lived were the ancestors of Neanderthals, whose brains were just as big but who showed no signs of making beads or flake tools, let alone doing long-distance trade. There was clearly something different about the Africans. Over the next few tens of millennia there were sporadic improvements, but no great explosion. There may have been a collapse of human populations. The African continent was plagued by ‘megadroughts’ at this time, during which desiccating winds blew the dust of extensive deserts into Lake Malawi, whose level dropped 600 metres. Only well after 80,000 years ago, so genetic evidence attests, does something big start to happen again. This time the evidence comes from genomes, not artefacts. According to DNA scripture, it was then that one quite small group of people began to populate the entire African continent, starting either in East or South Africa and spreading north and rather more slowly west. Their genes, marked by the L3 mitochondrial type, suddenly expanded and displaced most others in Africa, except the ancestors of the Khoisan and pygmy people. Yet even now there was no hint of what was to come, no clue that this was anything but another evolutionary avatar of a precariously successful predatory ape. The new African form, with its fancy tools, ochre paint and shell-bead ornaments, might have displaced its neighbours, but it would now settle down to enjoy its million years in the sun before gracefully giving way to something new. This time, however, some of the L3 people promptly spilled out of Africa and exploded into global dominion. The rest, as they say, is history.