This wee book – 692 pages, including 166 pages of footnotes – was a present from my son, who knows my taste in literature – is, despite its size and density, worth a read by anyone with a taste for history from the last ice age to the present. It presents that history as shown by the increasingly sophisticated findings of archaeology, and pretty much puts an end to the narrative of the evolution of civilization, a false narrative constructed out of no actual facts back in the 1700s-1800s by European thinkers.
You know the story – simple, unsophisticated hunters and gatherers lived a life of innocence and relative freedom (or a brutish, short life, depending on your political leanings) then they suddenly got agriculture, which led inevitably to towns, cities and the increasing concentration of wealth and centralized power leading to the modern nation-states, with European thinkers, science and economic thought leasing the way.
The story is wrong, and I’ve inveighed against it for years just on the basis of my own gut feeling and smatterings of knowledge in a variety of fields. I call the old theory of the development of civilization the “Stupid Ancient People” theory. What science seems to show is that Homo Sapiens has not changed significantly as a species; our brains work exactly in the same way now as they did for a few hundred thousand years. The original hunter gatherer way of life was not simple (or particularly brutish, either). Ancient peoples practiced science and technology in the same basic way we do today, with the available tools and knowledge transmitted between people, and they not only developed new technologies – in longer time spans, of course – but they thought about how to live together and developed a number of systems for doing so far more inventively than we do today. Civilization didn’t begin with cities or city-states; things were built gradually, and in different ways, and that history is far more varied than the evolutionary “Stupid Ancient People” model.
To take a theory I find particularly irksome: the peopling of the Americas has been argued for hundreds of years, eventually settling on the idea that people would have been unable to reach the Americas until there was a path through the Bering Strait land bridge free of ice. This is, consciously or not, a version of the “Stupid Ancient People” theory. Peoples who had lived in the Arctic for centuries would have been unable to manage a long trip across the ice, right? And certainly too stupid to have used boats, with which they were familiar, to cross the relatively short stretch of open water, living off things they were already using for food, to make that trip. It’s only recently that this theory has crumbled into bits with continuing new discoveries and almost put an end to the increasingly strained theories of how these stupid ancients, who couldn;t figure out how to make relatively straightfoward trips before the end of the ice age, suddenly kicked into high gear and managed to make it from Alaska to the East Coast and down to the West Coast of Soth America and establish working societies practically the next day.
But so much for my own historical pet peeves. The book is an actual scholarly study, based on clear evidence, and meticulously noting when some speculation must come into play, and how credible that speculation may be in the light of newer discoveries when compared to the speculation based on less evidence. It’s as bit too comprehensive to do justice to here, but to state the premise, it is that ancient groups of people were sophisticated enough to form a variety of societies before agriculture became predominant, and before cities began to grow larger, and that the process was not a smooth progression. There were cities – or large villages – much earlier than those of Mesopotamia, and they arose and fell as people shifted between those concentrations and back into hunter-gatherer tribes as circumstances changed. There was not a single “Agricultural Revolution” – people living in hunter-gatherer groups knew how to grow crops as well as harvest from the wild, and did so in small seasonal gardens long before sedentary agriculture made sense as a lifestyle – and they still abandoned the sedentary life when circumstances or preferences called for it.
History – and -prehistory – is far more complex and interesting than the narrative we have learned in schools (and which is still being taught). And several relatively recent books I’ve read have helped build a new sense of that history, with this one adding a lot of weight (2.2 pounds in hardcover).
I recommend it highly for those with a serious interest, along with these others, all offering recent science and discoveries, and not all agreeing 100% or presenting the same arguments with this book, but with equally valuable insights:
After the Ice – Stephen Mithen, 2006
Four Lost Cities, Annalee Newitz, 2021
Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest, Susan Sleeper-Smith (especially for those local to Indiana and the Ohio Valley), 2021
A Diary of Interesting Times 