Most likely, there was a mosaic of many different-looking hominin species, coexisting, sometimes isolated from each other, sometimes interbreeding, sometimes fighting. By about 120,000 years ago, as earth was in a warming period (so warm that hippopotami were bathing in the Thames), modern humans – Homo sapiens, wise man – emerged in Africa. Sixty thousand years later, some of these humans migrated into Asia (Europe came later), where they encountered the other hominin species on the way eastwards. The reasons for their travels are mysterious, but most likely they were a combination of quests for food and land, climate and environmental changes, spasms of disease, religious rites and love of adventure. Crossing seas as wide as 100 miles in boats, they reached Indonesia, Australia and the Philippines between 65,000 and 35,000 years ago. Then they ventured into the Pacific, island by island.
Sapiens coexisted with the other hominin families: over 100,000 years, they fought and killed some Neanderthals and raised families with others. Today Europeans, Chinese and Native Americans are 2 per cent Neanderthal in their DNA while some indigenous Australians, Melanesians and Filipinos have an additional 6 per cent of DNA, inherited from an enigmatic, ancient Asian population first identified from fragmentary fossils and DNA recovered from the Denisova Cave in Siberia. This pattern of migrating, settling and conquering – the mass movement of existing families and the generation of new ones by competition (sometimes murderous), nurturing and mixing – is the perpetual dance of human creation and destruction: it started early, is repeated throughout history and continues today. The humans who emerged were almost uniform – gracile faces, globular skulls, little noses, biologically almost identical. Yet the tiniest differences have justified centuries of conflict, oppression and racism.
By 40,000 years ago, Homo sapiens had outcompeted, killed or absorbed other hominins, and wiped out many large animals. Long before this, they had developed vocal cords that allowed them to talk, and brains that sparked the wish and ability to tell stories. Somehow the appetite for comfort, the need for safety, the instinct to raise children and perhaps even the enjoyment of companionship encouraged people to settle in clusters of families. They lived by hunting and gathering, worshipping the spirits of nature, expressing their beliefs through paintings in caves – the earliest in Indonesia and Australia dating from over 40,000 years ago – carving figures of curvaceous women and lion-headed men, and ritualistically burying some people in graves with jewels and beads. They made the first linen cloth, which replaced animal skins as clothing; bows and arrows improved hunting; dogs were trained for hunting and then domesticated. These hunter-gatherers were tall and fit, their teeth strong, undecayed by grain or sugar. But throughout history the fate of an individual was decided by geography and timing: some lived in lush abundance, some eked out meagre lives in icy tundras.
Sixteen thousand years ago, the climate began to warm, the ice to recede, grasses and legumes along with herds of deer and cattle became more plentiful in some regions. Some bands of these hunter-gatherers crossed the icy land bridge between Asia and Alaska and entered the Americas, where in a glimpse of perilous existence, 13,000 years ago, the footsteps of a woman in New Mexico show her holding a child, sometimes putting it down and lifting it up again, as she was stalked by sabre-toothed tigers. Her footsteps came back alone. The tigers may have devoured the child.
Humans started to build first wooden then stone structures: in Russia and Ukraine, close to the edge of the ice, they raised wooden enclosures sometimes embellished with mammoth tusks and bones, possibly to celebrate hunts. They buried a few people in elaborate graves, many of them with physical deformities, perhaps regarded as sacred. The people of the Amazon used ochre to paint their world of mastodons, giant sloths and horses; those of Australia depicted bilbies and dugongs. In Japan, people made pottery; in China, they fired their pottery so that they could cook over fires. These were now fully formed people, not apes. Their families, like ours, probably shared sacred rituals and useful knowledge while nursing hatred for their close relatives and distant rivals. It is tempting to impose our wishful thinking that women for example were powerful, but actually we know virtually nothing about them.
The thawing of the ice accelerated 11,700 years ago; this marked the dawn of a warm age that is still continuing, and the rising waters cut off America and Australia from Asia, and Britain from continental Europe. Now there were perhaps four million people on earth. After most of the ice had melted, around 9000 BC, a few lucky ones found that they lived in regions where they could cultivate animals and plants. But even by 8000 human hunting and management of forests started to drive the large mammals – mammoths, mastodons, indigenous horses in America – to extinction. For several millennia, many people still lived seasonally, hunting game in one season, gathering grasses and fruits in another. Yet even before agriculture was fully organized, people across the world – from Japan to Finland and the Americas – were raising monumental structures that were both sacred and social. The temples acted as calendars linked to celestial bodies, and people possibly just gathered there to celebrate successful harvests, then returned to their hunting-foraging life. In south-east Türkiye, at Göbekli Tepe, structures that looked like temples, pillars topped with sculpted foxes, snakes and scorpions, were built by hunter-gatherers who did not yet farm yet already shared religious rites. Nearby, at Karahan Tepe, they built another monumental temple embellished with sculptures of people – including a small room featuring eleven statues of phalloi. Starting around 9500 BC the temples, built 4,500 years before Stonehenge, were used for over 1,500 years.
People started settling in villages – one of the earliest was at Jericho in Canaan (Palestine) – before agriculture became their chief source of nourishment: they still foraged and hunted. Contrary to the traditional image of a ‘revolution’, there was no sudden switch: many peoples moved back and forth between agriculture and hunting, fishing and foraging. Even though it only takes between 30 and 200 years to domesticate a crop, it took 3,000 years (the difference between today and the pharaohs) from the beginnings of cultivating cereals to full agriculture, and another 3,000 before the real emergence of states – while in most parts of the world such states never developed at all.
At first, this meant the diet of most individuals was worse, not better: these agrarian planters were shorter, weaker, more anaemic, their teeth worse. Women worked with the men, developing strong upper arms – along with deformed knees and bent toes – from working the land and grinding grain. Life may have been better before farming, but it worked because it was more efficient for the species. Competition was ferocious; farmer villages vanquished hunter bands who coveted their food stores. For unknown reasons, the Göbekli and Karahan Tepe temples were filled in and buried. In Jericho, the thousand inhabitants built the first walls to protect themselves. Under their houses, they buried their dead and sometimes, after removing the flesh, they remoulded the faces with plaster and placed stones in the eye sockets – skull portraits that were popular from Israel to Iraq, more confirmation that humans could mentalize supernatural and magical beings and recognize the difference between body and spirit.