15 GA. "If you don't know history, you will always remain a child"

Quote from Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106 - 43 BC

This will be the introductions to investigations on the origin of language. What has language meant to humanity? (I hope you’ll find it interesting.)

Each generation builds upon the knowledge and experiences of those who came before, allowing us to progress and grow. Without an understanding of our roots, our intellectual, cultural, and societal development remains stunted. We become confined to a narrow perspective, limited by our own experiences and lacking the wisdom gained through the lessons of history.

Cicero's quote challenges us to break free from the constraints of our own limited experiences and embrace the vast wealth of knowledge that history offers. It urges us to seek the lessons of the past and apply them to our present and future endeavors.  (4,600 words)

WHICH HISTORY??

Should we know who got bombed last night in Gaza?
More details about the Maiden Cue in 2014 in Kiev?
The Vietnam war and the Korean war, WWII and WWI?
About America conquering the west and the Monroe Doctrine?
About 400 years of European colonialism?
About Charlemagne or going back through the Roman Empire?
The Greek heritage?
About the cradle of civilization in the fertile crescent or in Egypt?

I propose a series to investigate both the origins of humanity, and the origin of language.  (1^st of the series)

How did words develop, and is it language that allows us to "think", or is language just a communication medium?  With a careful selection of words, can we reach deeper conclusions about life?

Even Marcus Tullius Cicero was considering a belief that time is not linear, but it is cyclical. 

Do we keep going back, and re-creating the same conditions during some kind of period, maybe over 1,000's of years?  Of course, if we are not able to select a new series of words, (make a different meaning), we will recreate the same conditions.

Epilogue: ‘The Blessings of Civilization’ (from After the Ice, by Steven Mithen.  Please be sure to follow the 18 footnotes attached at the end.)

Past, present and future impacts of global warming on human history

In each continent he visited, John Lubbock’s book, 1865, stepped into the history of the world at 20,000 BC and left it 15,000 years later. His research travels have enabled me to write a narrative about human lives rather than just a catalogue of archaeological finds. When they began, it was a time of global economic equality when everyone lived as hunter-gatherers in a world of extensive ice sheets, tundra and desert. By their end, 5,000 BC, many were living as farmers. Some people grew wheat and barley, others rice, taro or squash. Some lived by herding animals, some by trade and others by making crafts. A world of temporary campsites had been replaced by one with villages and towns, a world with mammoths had been transformed into one with domesticated sheep and cattle. The path towards the huge global disparities of wealth with which we live today had been set.

Many hunter-gatherers survived but their fate had been sealed when agriculture began. The new farmers, eager for land and trade, continued to disrupt hunter-gatherer lives. They were followed by warlords and then nation-states building empires in every corner of the world. Some hunter-gatherers survived until recent times by living in those places where farmers could not go: the Inuit, the Kalahari Bushmen and the Desert Aborigines. But even these communities are no-more, effectively killed-off by the twentieth century.

It is no coincidence that human history reached a turning point during an early period of global warming. All communities were faced with the impact of environmental change – sudden catastrophic floods, the gradual loss of flooded coastal lands, the failure of migratory herds, the spread of thick and often unproductive forest. And along with the problems, all communities faced new opportunities to develop, discover, explore and to colonize.

The consequences were different on each continent. Western Asia, for example, happened to have a suite of wild plants suited to cultivation. North America had wild animals that were liable to extinction once human hunting combined with climate change. Africa was so well endowed with edible wild plants that this cultivation had not even begun there by 5000 BC. Australia likewise. Europe lacked its own potential cultivars but it had the soils and climate in which the cereals and animals domesticated elsewhere would thrive. South America had its vicuña (like the llama) and North Africa its wild cattle; Mexico its squash and teosinte, (also called zea, a grain or corn like plant), the Yangtze valley its wild rice.

Zea plants

Continents, and regions within continents, also had their own particular environmental history, defined by their size, shape and place within the world. The people who lived in Europe and western Asia had the most challenging roller-coaster ride of environmental change. Those living in the central Australian desert and the Amazonian Forest had the least. The type of woodland that spread in northern Europe favored human settlement, while that in Tasmania caused the abandonment of its valleys. The melting of the northern ice sheets caused the loss of coastal plains throughout the world from rising sea water, with the exception of the far north, where precisely the opposite occurred when the land, freed from its burden of ice, rose faster than the sea.

Although the history of any region was conditioned by the type of wild resources it possessed and the specific character of its environmental change, neither of these determined the historical events that occurred. People always had choices and made decisions from day to day, albeit with little thought or knowledge of what consequences might follow. No one planting wild seed in the vicinity of Jericho or Pengtoushan, tending squash close to Guilá Naquitz or digging ditches at Kuk Swamp, anticipated the type of world that farming would create.

Human history arose from accident as much as by design, and the paths of historical change were many and varied. In western Asia, hunter-gatherers settled down to live in permanent villages before they began to farm, just as they did in Japan and on the Ganges plain. Conversely, plant cultivation in Mexico and New Guinea led to domesticated plants and farming long before permanent settlement appeared. In North Africa, cattle came before crops, just as vicuña came before quinoa in the Andes. In Japan and the Sahara the invention of pottery preceded the start of farming, whereas it occurred simultaneously with the origin of rice farming in China; its invention in western Asia came about long after farming towns had begun to flourish.

Who could have predicted the course that history would take? At 20,000 BC, Southwest Europe set the cultural pace with its ice-age art, by 8000 BC it was an entirely undistinguished region. At 7500 BC, western Asia had towns housing more than a thousand people, but within a millennium, itinerant pastoralists were making campsites within their ruins. Who would have imagined that the Americas, the last continent to be colonized, the last to begin a history of its own, would have become the most powerful nation on planet earth today, its culture pervading every corner of the world? (Really the European culture) Or that the very first civilization would have arisen in Mesopotamia? Or that Australia would remain a land of hunter-gatherers while farming flourished in New Guinea?

While the history of each continent was unique, and has required its own specific mix of narrative and causal argument to explain, some forces of historical change were common to all. Global warming was one. Human population growth was another; this occurred throughout the world as people were freed from the high mortality imposed by ice-age droughts and cold and required new forms of society and economy irrespective of environmental change.

A third common factor was species identity. All people in all continents at 20,000 BC were members of Homo sapiens, a single and recently evolved species of humankind. As such, they shared the same biological drives and the means to achieve them – a mix of co-operation and competition, sharing and selfishness, virtue and violence. All possessed a peculiar type of mind, one with an insatiable curiosity and new-found creativity. This mind – one quite different to that of any human ancestor – enabled people to colonize, to invent, to solve problems, and to create new religious beliefs and styles of art. Without it, there would have been no human history but merely a continuous cycle of the adaptation and re-adaptation to environmental change that had begun several million years ago when our genus first evolved. Instead, all of these common factors combined, engaging with each continent’s unique conditions and a succession of historical contingencies and events, to create a world that included farmers, towns, craftsmen and traders. Indeed, by 5000 BC there was very little left for later history to do; all the groundwork for the modern world had been completed. History had simply to unfold until it reached the present day.

Artist reconstructions

John Lubbock, 1834 – 1913, sits on a hilltop in southern England, one close to where I myself live and work.[1] It is a summer’s day in 2003. He reads the final chapter of “Prehistoric Times” and finds his Victorian namesake extolling the ‘blessings of civilization’ over the life of a savage, one who was ‘a slave to his own wants, his own passions …’, one who can ‘depend on no one, and no one can depend on him’[2] . As my own book has shown, the development of modern-day archaeology has proved such views to be entirely wrong. Prehistoric hunter-gatherers were no more the starving, morally decrepit savages depicted in Prehistoric Times than they were the Noble Savages proposed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau a century before.

There are two main reasons for archaeology’s success in exposing the error of such views and revealing the true nature of prehistoric times.[3] First and foremost is the commitment of its practitioners, all the way from those distinguished academics I have named within my text to the thousands of volunteers who have dug holes and washed finds ever since the discipline begun. Second, and not far behind, is the use of science: that which allows us to identify cotton inside a corroded copper bead, reconstruct the pattern of prehistoric migrations from the genes of people alive today, specify ice-age temperatures from beetle wings and – most especially – establish the order of events by the use of radiocarbon dating.

Victorian John Lubbock had valued science, not only for its role in the nascent discipline of archaeology which he himself helped to create, but as one of the great ‘blessings of civilization’ that farming and industry had delivered to humankind. He lavished praise on the telescope and the microscope as having improved the eye and provided ‘fresh sources of interest’ for enquiring minds. He praised the printing press, which ‘brings all who choose into communion with … the thoughts of a Shakespeare or a Tennyson, the discoveries of a Newton or a Darwin … the common property of mankind’. He cited chloroform to illustrate how the progress of science has diminished the extent of human suffering.[4]

We have no cause to challenge such claims – the idea of living permanently in a hunter-gatherer world without books and medicines is quite appalling. But when one sits upon a hilltop in southern England and looks across the devastated landscape that modern farming has delivered, one must be less sanguine than Victorian John Lubbock. At 12,500 BC southern England had been an ice-age tundra frequented by reindeer, snowy owl and arctic hare; by 8000 BC it was smothered in lush woodland within which red deer browsed and wild boar rooted on the forest floor. Even in 1950 it had been a richly textured landscape of woods and fields, of ponds, paths and pastures. But in 2003, there are vast expanses of southern England where hardly a tree or bush exists, from which wild animals and birds have been almost entirely expelled by the industry of modern farming. There are very few hills from which traffic below and airplanes above cannot be heard.

Its polluted air requires one to ponder the circularity of history. Farming and industry were products of a history brought about by global warming. Now they themselves are the cause of renewed global warming that has already had a sizeable impact upon the world and will condition the future history of humankind. Mass deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels have increased the level of greenhouse gases and planet earth is becoming warmer than nature intends. During the last few decades, glaciers on all continents have receded, snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere has reduced dramatically, and the Antarctic ice shelf is on the verge of collapse.[5]

Just as in prehistoric times, the natural world is undergoing change. The flowering calendar of many plants have already advanced, birds are breeding earlier and changing their habitats. Once again insects have been some of the first species to respond: flights of aphids are arriving earlier in the United Kingdom while the butterflies in North America and Britain are being found at higher altitudes and further north.

The next century of human-made global warming is predicted to be far less extreme than that which occurred at 9600 BC. At the end of the Younger Dryas, mean global temperature had risen by 7°C in fifty years, whereas the predicted rise for the next hundred years is less than 3°C; the end of the last ice age led to a 120-metre increase in sea level, whereas that predicted for the next fifty years is a paltry 32 centimeters at most, rising to 88 centimeters by AD 2100.[6] However, while future global warming may be less extreme than that of 9600 BC, the modern world is in a far more fragile state owing to environmental pollution and the resource requirements of six billion people. As a consequence, the threats to human communities and natural ecosystems are far more severe than those of prehistoric times. When the vast low-lying regions of the ice-age world were flooded, many were uninhabited; those settlements that did exist – such as the 7000-BC town of Atlit-Yam on the Israeli coast – housed a few hundred people at most. Today, 120 million people live in the delta regions of Bangladesh, six million of them on land less than one meter above current sea level, and 30 million below three meters. Rising sea level will be accompanied by devastating storms and the penetration of salt into their freshwater supplies.[7]

When global warming made the Tasmanian valleys uninhabitable after 14,000 BC and the Sahara Desert after 5000 BC, their people found other places to live – the world was still quite empty of human settlement. But where will the new displaced populations be able to go now? Those from the flooded delta regions; those from inundated low-lying islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans[8]; those from Sub-Saharan Africa where the frequency and intensity of drought will become too severe to be relieved by any amount of international aid?

The global warming that brought the ice age to its close created localities of abundant resource which people claimed as their own and were prepared to fight for, such as in the Nile valley at 14,000 BC, northern Australia at 6000 BC and southern Scandinavia at 5000 BC. Such conflicts were trivial affairs in comparison to those that we know today; but our modern world seems destined to become yet more violent as the impacts of renewed global warming are felt.

Shortage of fresh water will become a major source of conflict. Its supplies are already under pressure owing to the demands of modern farming and daily human need. Such pressure will become severe with the predicted reductions of rainfall and increased evaporation in the key catchments of the world. Water will eclipse land, politics and even religion as the source of dispute between Middle Eastern states – a development that has already begun.[9] Moreover, global warming will likely exacerbate the existing extremes of wealth and poverty in the world: agricultural productivity in the developed nations is predicted to increase, while the reverse will happen in the developing world. Global terrorism is bound to thrive.

It is ironic that the continent that became habitable as a consequence of the natural global warming after the LGM, (Last Glacial Maximum), is now the one doing most to make vast areas of the world uninhabitable for others by its excessive contribution to the cause of renewed global warming: America is the main polluter of our skies.

John Lubbock looks beyond the traffic at the countryside of southern England. It is bleak. Much of the Early Holocene oak woodland had already been cleared in prehistoric times. But this region only took on its now desolate appearance during the last fifty years: ponds were left to silt-up and soon disappeared, copses were removed, hedges grubbed-up, small farms replaced by factory-like enterprises that specialized in growing wheat and harvesting government subsidies.[10] Today’s prairie-like landscape suffers from soil erosion and has been polluted by an excess of fertilizer and pesticide.[11] As with so much other farmland in the Western world, it produces far more food than we require.[12] And yet we live within a world blighted by hunger. Eight hundred million people live close to starvation – a number predicted to increase with the new global warming. Over the next hundred years, an additional 80 million people are likely to become hungry and malnourished because of environmental change.[13] Some believe that the only way to end world hunger is by genetically engineering existing crops to increase their yields, improve their pest resistance and make them tolerant of salt-ridden soils.[14]

Human-induced genetic modification of plants first arose from the attempts of hunter-gatherers in western Asia to cope with the droughts of the Younger Dryas and to feed the gatherings at Göbekli Tepe and elsewhere. Their cultivation of wild cereals unknowingly created genetic change and produced the domesticated wheat and barley we grow today. The genetics of other species were also changed by human action, creating domesticated squash, maize and beans, rice, quinoa, taro and potatoes. Such plants supported the Early Holocene increase in human population, and now, via plant breeding and crop management, support our vast global population. But a further two billion people will need feeding during the next quarter-century.[15]

Some scientists believe that the genetic engineering of plants at the molecular level – the deliberate insertion of DNA from one species into another – is simply the next step forward in this history of plant manipulation for human need.[16] Because new genetic variants solved a food crisis brought about by past climate change, they argue, additional genetic variants might do the same for us today.

This may indeed be the case, but archaeology has given us another, and perhaps a far more important lesson from the past. As soon as farming had begun, the surpluses arising from the new, high-yielding genetic variants had come under centralized control, as is evident from the buildings at Jerf el Ahmar in 9300 BC, Beidha in 8200 BC and Kom K in 5000 BC. From the very start of farming, food had become a commodity, a source of wealth and power for those who controlled its distribution. And so, one should suspect that the already existing inequities of global food supply are likely to become enhanced by the creation of yet more genetic variants with even higher yields. Those who guarded the grain silos in prehistoric times are being reincarnated as the biotechnology companies who patent such plants and distribute their seeds.[17]

The defiled landscape of southern England, and that of so many other regions of the modern world, poses another question about biotechnology. As has been evident from this history, when archaeologists study a past environment they invariably find a far greater diversity of plants and animals than are known in the same locality today. The flora of the forest steppe in the vicinity of Ohalo at 20,000 BC and the fauna of North America at 15,000 BC are just the most obvious examples of a far richer and more varied natural world in prehistoric times. Biodiversity was reduced by climate change – the increasing zonation of vegetation types in northern latitudes favored the few specialists over the many generalists. But the consequences of farming for biodiversity have been far more severe, as can be appreciated by either imagining the devastated landscape around ‘Ain Ghazal in 6500 BC or by looking at that of any intensively farmed region of the world today.

Will the cultivation of new genetic variants, plants unnaturally resistant to pests and disease, take the loss of biodiversity to a new extreme? Will such plants invade and overrun the communities of wild species that still survive? Will the remaining refuges of the natural world, especially the precious wetlands and salt marsh, also be turned into agricultural land, just as happened to the woodlands of southern England when people had the first genetic variants to sow?[18]

(FOR SURE)

There are no answers. Biotechnology might be the greatest blessing we have and lead to the end of world hunger; disease-resistant, genetically engineered crops might protect biodiversity by reducing the need for chemical sprays. A common need for water might unite the warring factions of the Middle East. The predicted extent and impact of global warming might be quite wrong. Our politicians might devise both the will and the means to curb pollution, to distribute resources fairly throughout the world, to provide new homes for displaced populations, and to preserve the natural world. They might do all these things. But they probably won’t.

So, what about the ‘blessings of civilization’? Are the delights of the microscope, the thoughts of Darwin, the poetry of Shakespeare and the advances of medical science, sufficient recompense for the environmental degradation, social conflict and human suffering that ultimately derive from the origin of farming 10,000 years ago? Would it have been better if we had remained as Stone Age hunter-gatherers forsaking the development of literature and science? The answer is in our hands; it depends upon what we choose to do during the next hundred years of global warming – our future, that of planet earth, remains within our control. All we can know for sure is that by the end of the twenty-first century the world will be quite different from how it is today – perhaps as different as the world of 5000 BC was from that of the LGM.

John Lubbock turns his page and reads the final paragraph of Prehistoric Times. He finds words that remain entirely appropriate for today:

Even in our own time we may hope to see some improvement, but the unselfish mind will find its highest gratification in the belief that, whatever may be the case with ourselves, our descendants will understand many things which are hidden from us now, will better appreciate the beautiful world in which we live, avoid much of the suffering to which we are subject, enjoy many blessings of which we are not yet worthy, and escape many of those temptations which we deplore, but cannot wholly resist.

John Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, 1865, p. 492

FOOTNOTES for Epilogue: ‘The Blessings of Civilization’

1. The specific hill is of no consequence, but I am thinking of one close to my home in Berkshire, England.

2. Lubbock (1865, p. 484).

3. I recognize the controversial nature of the word ‘true’ within this sentence. Thankfully it is too late in my book to get into discussions about the nature or otherwise of historical truth. For those who wish to pursue this topic, see Evans (1997) for a critique of postmodernist history.

4. Lubbock (1865, pp. 487–8).

5. McCarthy et al. (2001) document a vast range of environmental and ecological changes that have occurred during the last fifty years that can be directly attributed to global warming, ranging from the melting of glaciers to the changing distributions of butterflies and birds. Barnacle geese, for instance, have invaded agricultural land as they move further north in Norway, while in Antarctica penguins have reduced in numbers and altered where they live in response to a warmer climate.

6. These predicted figures are taken from McCarthy et al. (2001, p. 27, table TS-1) – the volume of the 2001 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that is concerned with impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. More specifically, the predicted rise of temperature for the next hundred years is between 0.8 and 2.6°C, and the rise of sea level between 0.05 and 0.32 m, rising to a maximum estimate of 0.88 m. by AD 2100.

7. These figures regarding population numbers and farming land in delta regions are taken from Houghton (1997). As they are at least five years old they are likely to be underestimates.

8. McCarthy et al. (2001) evaluate the impact of sea-level rise on small island states. As an example, an 80-cm sea-level rise could inundate 66% of the Marshall Islands and Kiribati in the Pacific, and a 90-cm rise 85% of Male, the capital of the Maldives.

9. Houghton (1997) provides a particularly succinct summary of the likely impact of global warming on freshwater supplies, which is examined at length in McCarthy et al. (2001). The Ataturk Dam in southeast Turkey has substantial impacts on freshwater supplies in Syria.

10. This has, of course, been common in much of southern England and beyond. For a study of how the countryside has changed in a typical area, a 20-sq. km area of west Berkshire, see Bowers & Cheshire (1983, chapter 2).

11. This is not my subjective opinion but that coming from the government-supported Environment Agency, as detailed in their report on the state of the environment in England and Wales (Environment Agency, 2000).

12. There is a vast literature that details the crisis in food production and supply. I have found the most informative work to be the anthology entitled The Paradox of Plenty, Hunger in a Bountiful World (Boucher, 1999).

13. This figure is quoted from McCarthy et al. (2001, p. 938).

14. See Borlaug (2000). Norman Borlaug is a US plant breeder who developed new strains of rice and wheat for the underdeveloped countries. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his part in the ‘green revolution’ and seems as ready to extol the new science of biotechnology as was Victorian John Lubbock to praise the new science of his day.

15. Borlaug (2000) quotes a figure of 8.5 billion for the expected world population in 25 years’ time. McCarthy et al. (2001) quote figures of 8.4–11.3 billion for 2050, and 7.1–15.1 billion for 2100.

16. See Borlaug (2000, p. 489). Some would vehemently disagree with this, believing that the new genetically modified organisms are qualitatively different from anything that has come before. As far as we know, the first cultivators/farmers did not engage in any plant breeding at all; they simply (unconsciously) favored some existing genetic variants over others. Moreover, biotechnology often moves genes between very different organisms, something which could not have been done by conventional plant breeding or unintended selection. Also, a single gene, or a small number, are often moved between organisms; in plant breeding (deliberate or unintended) this is impossible and whole chromosomes containing many thousands of unknown genes are transferred.

17. I do not mean to imply that Borlaug (2000) is unaware of the seriousness of this issue. Indeed, he himself writes that as so much of biotechnology is being undertaken in the private sector, the issue of intellectual property rights must be addressed and accorded adequate safeguards by national government: “The more important matters of concern by civil societies should be equity issues related to genetic ownership, control, and access to transgenic agricultural products” (p. 489).

18. For a debate about the ecological impacts of genetically modified organisms see Nature web site.

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