Why the West Rules--For Now (151 page)

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One Harvard anthropologist greeted the publication of the Neanderthal genome by suggesting that a mere $32 million investment would allow us to genetically modify modern human DNA and insert it into a chimpanzee cell to yield a genuine Neanderthal baby. The necessary technology is not—yet—available, but even when it is, we might hesitate to apply it; as my Stanford colleague Richard Klein, one of the world’s leading paleoanthropologists, asked a journalist: “Are you going to put [the Neanderthals] in Harvard or in a zoo?”

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Some isolated groups, like the Flores “hobbits,” possibly survived until recently. When Portuguese sailors reached Flores in the sixteenth century they claimed to have seen tiny, hairy cave dwellers who could barely talk. More than a hundred years have now passed since a sighting has been claimed, but it is said that similar little people still exist on Java. One of their hairs was recently produced, but on testing, its DNA turned out to be fully human. Some anthropologists believe that we will eventually encounter these last relics of premodern humanity in the shrinking Javanese forests. I have to admit I am skeptical.

^†
Homo sapiens
who stayed in Africa, however, did not interbreed with Neanderthals, and modern Africans have no Neanderthal DNA. The implications of this have yet to be explored.

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Mao Zedong coined this phrase in 1957 to describe his radical experiment in industrialization and collectivization in China. It was one of the worst disasters in world history, and by the time Mao called it off in 1962 maybe 30 million people had starved (I return to it in
Chapter 10
). This makes “Great Leap Forward” rather an odd term to describe the emergence of fully modern humans, but it has caught on.

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Some Chinese archaeologists think modern humans evolved independently in China. I discuss this idea below.

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If it sounds odd that African Adam lived a hundred thousand years after African Eve, that is because the names do not mean anything. These were not the first
Homo sapiens
man and woman; they are just the most recent ancestors to whom everyone alive today can trace genes. On average, men have just as many offspring as women (obviously, since we all have one father and one mother), but the number of children per man varies more around that average than does the number of children per woman, since some men father dozens of babies. The relatively large pool of men with no children means that men’s genetic lines die out more easily than women’s, and the surviving male lines therefore converge on a more recent ancestor than the female ones.

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In their 1999 book
Noah’s Flood
, the geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman suggested that the Black Sea flood did inspire the Bible story. They dated the flood around 5600
BCE,
but more recent studies have shown that the basin was probably flooded by freshwater between 16,000 and 14,000
BCE
and then turned salty after the Mediterranean broke through, somewhere around 7400
BCE.
It is unlikely that such an early catastrophe inspired the Noah story, and the submergence of what is now the Persian Gulf may be a more plausible source for the flood narratives in ancient literature.

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Some people believe that wondrous civilizations, richer than Atlantis, flourished on the coastal plains of the Ice Age but were forgotten after 12,700
BCE
when the rising sea engulfed them. Archaeologists generally ignore this idea, not because they are trying to hide the truth, but because it is just not plausible. Apart from anything else, it requires us to believe that no one from the interior highlands (that is, areas that still lie above the water) ever traded with the lost cities or imitated their achievements. Despite more than a hundred years of excavations, no wonderful works from lost civilizations have turned up. Trawlers regularly dredge up Ice Age stone tools and mammoth bones from the seabed but advanced artifacts stubbornly refuse to come to light.

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A touching scene, so long as we do not ask how the puppy came to be available for burial at just the same time as its mistress.

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Some archaeologists tell a different story. Tiny beads of glass, carbon, and iridium found on several North Americans sites dating to around 11,000
BCE
could only, they suggest, have been produced by intense heat—the kind of heat we would get if debris in a comet’s tail hit the earth. These archaeologists picture not gradual melting of glaciers but a sudden blast at the North Pole turning the Gulf Stream off. Not even that, though, would have produced
The Day After Tomorrow
’s superstorm.

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This sounds like an obvious thing to do, but yoking animals so they can pull carts without strangling themselves while also remaining under a driver’s control is a lot harder than it looks.

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As opposed to nonfood crops—a 2005 DNA study suggests that the first colonists of the Americas brought with them from Asia cultivated bottle gourds, which they used as containers.

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Like Peking Man, discussed in
Chapter 1
, Peking University has kept the older form of its name. In this case, administrators made a conscious decision in the 1980s to keep translating “Beijing Daxue” into Western languages as “Peking University.”

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The mean difference was just under 1,700 years; the median, 2,250 years.

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That said, Darwin’s vision of evolution was rather different from Spencer’s. Spencer believed that evolution applied to everything, was progressive, and would perfect the universe; Darwin restricted evolution to biology and defined it as “descent with modification,” the modifications supplied by random genetic mutations and therefore directionless, sometimes producing complexity out of simplicity and sometimes not.

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Stanford recognized this in 2007 and staged a shotgun second wedding, putting the two anthropologies back together.

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Psychologists use the term “social development” very differently, to refer to children learning the norms of the societies they grow up in.

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When a member of the Royal Astronomical Society in London tried to compliment Eddington by calling him one of only three people in the world who really understood Einstein’s theory, Eddington fell silent; “
I’m just wondering
,” he finally said, “who the third might be.”

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I also collected data on the size of population within the largest political unit, standards of living (using adult stature as a proxy), speed of transportation, and scale of largest buildings. Each of these had problems (overlap with other traits, gaps in the data) that made them seem less useful than the four traits I ended up with; but each of them also followed much the same pattern as the four traits I selected.

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www.ianmorris.org.

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The figure of 35 million I gave for Tokyo on p. 149 was for the year 2009—and means that between 2000 and 2009 the East’s score for organization/urbanism soared from 250 to 327.72 points. I will come back to the acceleration of social development in the twenty-first century, taking Eastern and Western scores well beyond 1,000 points, at the end of this chapter and in
Chapter 12
.

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I have made only one substantial modification to Cook’s numbers; I think he overestimated the rate of increase in energy capture in southwest Asia after the beginnings of plant domestication, and that his “early agricultural” figure of 12,000 kilocalories per person per day fits better around 3000
BCE
than around 5000
BCE,
where he placed it.

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The 1,000-point maximum score I set for the year 2000
CE
does not, of course, mean that that is the highest development will ever rise. By my calculations, between 2000 and 2010, the year in which I am writing, Western development climbed from about 906 to about 1,060 points, and Eastern from about 565 to about 680 points.

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Confusingly for those of us used to modern maps with north at the top, Egyptians thought in terms of the Nile; the river flowed down from “Upper Egypt” in the south toward “Lower Egypt” in the north.

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The
Scorpion King
movies, sad to say, bear not even a passing resemblance to the little we know of the real Scorpion King.

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This is partly because our archaeological data are very coarse-grained and partly for technical reasons. Because the data are so patchy, I have measured social development in the third millennium
BCE
at quarter-millennium intervals, and the points at 2250 and 2000
BCE
happen to miss much of the chaos. Second, the Western region had two separate cores, one in Mesopotamia and one in Egypt, where the collapses followed slightly different rhythms. In 2100
BCE
Egyptian social development was lower than it had been in 2200
BCE
, but Mesopotamia had recovered from its initial collapse; by 2000
BCE
Mesopotamia had collapsed again, but Egypt had recovered.

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Ancient historians generally call the land that is now Turkey by the Greek name Anatolia (meaning “Land of the East”), since the Turks—who originally came from central Asia—settled Anatolia only in the eleventh century
CE
.

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Springs and Autumns
was a popular name for Chinese history books, meaning in effect “Years.” “Annals” might be a good translation.

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I say “according to legend” because the trail leading to Zhoukoudian, the great prehistoric site discussed in
Chapter 1
, is said to have begun the same year in much the same way, when a German naturalist, trapped in Beijing by civil unrest, recognized a “dragon bone” in a druggist’s store as an early human tooth. The coincidence is slightly suspicious.

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I’d like to thank Dr. Demetrius Schilardi of the Archaeological Society of Athens once again for his generosity in inviting us onto his excavation from 1983 through 1989.

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The only real difference is that Chinese chariots had more spokes in their wheels than Western ones.

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Horses, that is.

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The Western core’s main tin source was in southeastern Anatolia.

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I’d like to take this opportunity to thank once again for all their support my codirectors Sebastiano Tusa (formerly superintendent of archaeology for Trapani Province), Kristian Kristiansen (University of Gothenburg), Christopher Prescott (University of Oslo), Michael Kolb (Northern Illinois University), and Emma Blake (University of Arizona), superintendents Rossella Giglio and Caterina Greco, the people of Salemi (especially Giovanni Bascone and Nicola Spagnolo), the many donors who made the Stanford project possible, and all the students and staff who took part in the project.

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Historians conventionally call the years 1046–771
BCE
the Western Zhou period; the period from the royal family’s eastward migration in 771 until 481, 453, or 403
BCE
(different historians choose different end-points) they speak of as the Eastern Zhou. To make things more confusing, historians also regularly call 722–481
BCE
the Spring and Autumn period after the main chronicle of these years,
The Springs and Autumns of the State of Lu
, and call 480–221
BCE
the Warring States period.

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If it’s true, that is. Most historians suspect that Darius actually murdered the genuine Smerdis and overthrew a priestly clique around him.