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WORLD VIEW:Decisions made in next 40 years will be the most important in history of the world
A RECENT item about the distribution of world languages in this newspaper's Science Today page (April 21st) caught the imagination. Research by New Zealand biologist Quentin Atkinson, published in Science, shows language complexity diminished when humans moved out of Africa about 50,000 years ago to spread around the world.
The number of phonemes or distinct sounds used by Kalahari bushmen now (140 plus) is greatest among 504 languages studied, whereas English needs about 45, German has 41, Mandarin 32, while Piraha Amazonian tribesmen use only 11.
Atkinson argues firmly that all languages are related to each other, having originated perhaps 100,000 years ago in Africa. This accords with the latest genetic evidence, which shows the new species homo sapiensoriginated in the same timescale and then spread all round the world, completely replacing the previous homo erectus, the Neanderthals. The biological unity of humankind is thus established, displacing former accounts that implied a racial hierarchy based on differential evolution.
These rough dates of 50,000 or 100,000 years ago stuck in my mind and were greatly reinforced when I recently had occasion to read Ian Morris's large volume Why the West Rules – For Now, published last year. Subtitled The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future, this is a really ambitious work.
Morris is an archaeologist, historian and classicist teaching at Stanford and is therefore able to bring these millennia to life from recent research better than those less familiar with the whole span of human history.
He illustrates these strengths by recalling how the historian Geoffrey Elton used to argue that documentary history amounts to no more that 200 generations – roughly 5,000 years if a generation lasts 25 years. It is therefore hazardous to detect big patterns in the past. Morris says that if we widen our perspective to include the evidence now provided by archaeology, genetics and linguistics, we get a whole lot more history – about 500 generations or 12,500 years.
That falls well short of the perhaps 2,000-4,000 generations homo sapienshas existed – or the 25,000 of the Neanderthal species. But it is only in the last generation that technical revolutions allow us understand these time scales more exactly.
This allow us discern definite patterns in human history. He uses biology to explain why human beings push social development forward, sociology to tell us how they do so, and geography to explain why the West rather than some other world region has dominated the globe for the last 200 years.
In summary, historical change “is caused by lazy, greedy, frightened people (who rarely know what they’re doing) looking for easier, more profitable and safer ways to do things”.
He develops an index of social development – defined as the ability of societies to get things done and shape their environment – based on energy capture, urbanisation, war-making and information technology, drawing on a huge range of studies.
Geography, he argues, conferred a remarkable advantage on the western part of the globe after the end of the last Ice Age about 15,000 years ago. The so-called hilly flanks of southwest Asia (an arc curving through present day Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran around the Tigris, Euphrates and Jordan valleys) became the first area to domesticate cereals and animals through farming and to create the first villages and then cities, states and empires over the next 200 generations.
They thus enjoyed an average 2,000-year advantage over the eastern part of the globe, where most of these developments happened independently but later, until the sixth century AD.
The fall of the Roman empire then, influenced by what Morris calls the five horsemen of human history – famine, disease, migration, state collapse and climate change – led to a 1,200-year period in which the East (largely China) led the West (based on superior performances with ships, rice, iron, science and guns), until the 18th century when the industrial revolution based on coal and steam conferred a new geographical advantage on the West.
He is remarkably precise about dates: 14,000 BC – 531 AD; 531-1773 AD; and 1773 to 2103, when on present trends of his development index the East (again largely China) will overtake the West to become the world’s dominant region.
One can say this index is too reductionist and materialist or underestimates cultural and intellectually creative factors in human history. Morris argues, with Marx, that each age gets the thought it deserves because men make their own history, but not under circumstances of their own choosing.
But it is difficult to dispute the case he makes that using the time scale evoked by these measurements “we are approaching the greatest discontinuity in history”. The next 40 years “will be the most important in history”. They will see a momentous choice between a “singularity” that abolishes the East/West geography in favour of global solutions and a “nightfall” that sees those five horsemen return with unparalleled force to destroy our world – this time led by climate change.