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New Yorker Magazine, 9/18/2017
HOW CIVILIZATION STARTED.
By: JOHN LANCHESTER
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
Was it even a good idea?
Science and technology: we tend to think of them as siblings, perhaps
even as twins, as parts of STEM (for "science, technology, engineering,
and mathematics"). When it comes to the shiniest wonders of the modern
world—as the supercomputers in our pockets communicate with
satellites—science and technology are indeed hand in glove. For much of
human history, though, technology had nothing to do with science. Many
of our most significant inventions are pure tools, with no scientific
method behind them. Wheels and wells, cranks and mills and gears and
ships' masts, clocks and rudders and crop rotation: all have been
crucial to human and economic development, and none historically had any
connection with what we think of today as science. Some of the most
important things we use every day were invented long before the adoption
of the scientific method. I love my laptop and my iPhone and my Echo and
my G.P.S., but the piece of technology I would be most reluctant to give
up, the one that changed my life from the first day I used it, and that
I'm still reliant on every waking hour—am reliant on right now, as I sit
typing—dates from the thirteenth century: my glasses. Soap prevented
more deaths than penicillin. That's technology, not science.
In "Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States," James C.
Scott, a professor of political science at Yale, presents a plausible
contender for the most important piece of technology in the history of
man. It is a technology so old that it predates Homo sapiens and instead
should be credited to our ancestor Homo erectus. That technology is
fire. We have used it in two crucial, defining ways. The first and the
most obvious of these is cooking. As Richard Wrangham has argued in his
book "Catching Fire," our ability to cook allows us to extract more
energy from the food we eat, and also to eat a far wider range of foods.
Our closest animal relative, the chimpanzee, has a colon three times as
large as ours, because its diet of raw food is so much harder to digest.
The extra caloric value we get from cooked food allowed us to develop
our big brains, which absorb roughly a fifth of the energy we consume,
as opposed to less than a tenth for most mammals' brains. That
difference is what has made us the dominant species on the planet.
The other reason fire was central to our history is less obvious to
contemporary eyes: we used it to adapt the landscape around us to our
purposes. Hunter-gatherers would set fires as they moved, to clear
terrain and make it ready for fast-growing, prey-attracting new plants.
They would also drive animals with fire. They used this technology so
much that, Scott thinks, we should date the human-dominated phase of
earth, the so-called Anthropocene, from the time our forebears mastered
this new tool.
We don't give the technology of fire enough credit, Scott suggests,
because we don't give our ancestors much credit for their ingenuity over
the long period—ninety-five per cent of human history—during which most
of our species were hunter-gatherers. "Why human fire as landscape
architecture doesn't register as it ought to in our historical accounts
is perhaps that its effects were spread over hundreds of millennia and
were accomplished by 'precivilized' peoples also known as 'savages,' "
Scott writes. To demonstrate the significance of fire, he points to what
we've found in certain caves in southern Africa. The earliest, oldest
strata of the caves contain whole skeletons of carnivores and many
chewed-up bone fragments of the things they were eating, including us.
Then comes the layer from when we discovered fire, and ownership of the
caves switches: the human skeletons are whole, and the carnivores are
bone fragments. Fire is the difference between eating lunch and being lunch.
Anatomically modern humans have been around for roughly two hundred
thousand years. For most of that time, we lived as hunter-gatherers.
Then, about twelve thousand years ago, came what is generally agreed to
be the definitive before-and-after moment in our ascent to planetary
dominance: the Neolithic Revolution. This was our adoption of, to use
Scott's word, a "package" of agricultural innovations, notably the
domestication of animals such as the cow and the pig, and the transition
from hunting and gathering to planting and cultivating crops. The most
important of these crops have been the cereals—wheat, barley, rice, and
maize—that remain the staples of humanity's diet.
