www.UsHumans.net
The Story of Us Humans,
From Atoms to Today's Civilization
Robert Dalling
For my parents, family, friends, and community and the comprehendible fortune of being a certain collection of molecules, with certain ways, for a few decades.
Part One
How and when the universe and the Earth began
Scientists measure everything from motion to society, even love
Newton's motion equation, and the gravitational force
The electric force and light waves
Chapter 3
How and when the Universe began
Measuring the distance, speed, and chemical composition of stars
Gravitational formation of stars and planets
How and when atoms first formed
Star formation and stellar fusion
Chapter 4
How and when the Earth began, and the effects of its moving continents on life
Initial formation of the Earth
Moving tectonic plates and the factors that affect climate
Liquids and gasses in the development of life on Earth
Part Two
The nature of a human
Electrical binding in atoms is the physical basis of the molecules of life
DNA naturally duplicates itself
DNA naturally builds and operates entire individuals
Science, living matter, and religion
The sequence of life forms that have evolved on the Earth
Chapter 6
The emergence of humans
The transition to the human variety of ape
Food packet size determines social size
Behaviors associated with mating
Chapter 8
Primate social systems, and the origins of our emotions, morals, and language
Social system of nonprimate mammals
Complex social systems promote bigger brains, sympathy, empathy, and self-awareness
The social systems of common chimpanzees and Bonobos
What do these primate social systems tell us about ourselves?
Matrilineages, patrilineages, and cross-cousin marriages
Scientific studies of language ability in apes
Origin and purpose of our feelings and emotions
Origin and purpose of our morals
Chapter 9
The gatherer-hunter way of life, and some cultural details of the Canela Indians of Brazil
Food getting, and agricultural ceremonies
Shaman cure, but witchcraft causes misfortune
Part Three
Origin and development of religion, government and civilization
Chapter 10
The religion of gatherer-hunter peoples: the power in the bush
Deities and the power in the bush
Chapter 11
Human Political Forms: bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states
Ranked and socially stratified society
Chapter 12
The origin of farming, cities, and civilization
Plant and animal domestication
Farming villages and irrigation
King and queen, palace, and government
Invention of war: by the leader, for the leader
Our modern religions of moral behaviors
Some views of the people of the Hindu faith
Some views of those of us humans who are Christian
Some views of those of us humans who are Buddhists
People who are humanists celebrate humanity
Chapter 14
Our civilization, from ancient to modern
Astronomy, mathematics, and reading tea-leaves
The Ancient Greeks present our first explanations of nature not given in terms of deities
Confucian respect for helpful elders binds families, society, and government
Emperor, administration, and a bureaucratic system based on merit
Religious festivals, deities, and the ancestor cult
Bathing, cosmetics, and clothing
Servants, laborers, and peddlers
State monopolies, taxes, and currency
Old age, death, and inheritance
Holidays, entertainment, and clothing
The feudal and manorial system, the Baron’s revolt and Magna Carta, and the peasant’s revolt
Growing wool industry expands trade
Europeans inherit knowledge expanded in Islamic lands
Our ideas for specific liberties resulting from specific injustices
Worth of individuals over states
Government by and for the people
Balancing the spread powers of government
Constitution of the United States
Numerous travelers talk of other cultures
Social affects of factory life
Colonial beginnings and immigrants from the world
Rapid westward expansion of twenty miles per year
Social and economic classes and enslaved people
Food, food-storing, and cooking
Families bartered goods at the General Store
Agricultural and social events
Mutually beneficial exchange of help among community members
Mining, ore processing, and blacksmithing
Lead, tin, pewter, copper, brass and silver working
English mechanics were sought to build the first U.S. factories
Debate of benefits and drawbacks of industrialization
Debate over the role of government in any coming industrialization
Production techniques mixed as industrialization requires power and decades to mature
No employees exist for the first factories
Corporations for pooling business funds
Lowell mills operated by northeastern girls, then immigrants
Factory clothing replaces homemade
Handmade shoes and instruments
Varieties of products fill our homes
The South chooses to remain agricultural
Many of us factory workers struggle to earn money for bread and rent
Interrelated elements of the economy
Exchanges and occupations change
Peddlers, freight haulers, and entertainers
Canals transport people and goods between east and west
Cities and industry grow and spread Westward
Industrialization, urbanization, and commercialization
Labor strikes of the 1880s and 1890s
The role of government and courts in industrialization
When a nation chooses to industrialize today
Movies, sports, and other entertainment
Part Four
Today's society, business, and government
Chapter 17
The computer and its uses
Chapter 18
Today's global business
Global corporations from Europe, Japan, and the U.S.
Global manufacturing blurs imports and exports
Political power of global corporations
Global corporations and governing one's national economy
Global corporations search the world for the cheapest labor
Products of global corporations sold mostly to people within the richest nations
Entertainment, book, news, and record businesses
Electrically measuring customer and voter emotions
Monitoring and analyzing each customer's purchases
Today's worldwide migration of 75 million job-seekers per year
Franchises and preferential agreements between corporations
Global products but not global culture
Globalization is not yet global
Governing global corporations with independent, sovereign nations
Reasons for a people to change their political leadership
Authoritarian governments of Eastern Europe from 1945-1989
Taiwan's conversion from authoritarian to democratic government
African government before, during, and after independence
Guiding principles for U.S. foreign policy
A global, democratic assembly of democratic nations
Chapter 20
How Washington shares power today
Branches of government in the U.S.
Political power and legislation through consensus-building, exchanges, and pressure
The president can set the agenda
Abuse of presidential power and legislative reactions
Congress and its recent further spreading of power, and the power of congressional staff
Role of television and marketing in politics
Campaign marketing, and the talents needed to campaign compared with those needed to govern
Lobbies, political action committees, and issue marketing
Chapter 21
Today's big-city way of life for two boys in Chicago
Chapter 22
The science of government through measurements of the success of government's efforts
Some specific social health indicators
Rates of child neglect and abuse
Putting the indicators to work measuring the success of our efforts to govern
National and global surveys of social-health indicators
Social and economic indicators in the daily news
Importance of social-health indicators
Well-being and the quality of life in the past
Acknowledgments
A special thanks to the students of the Maine School of Science and Mathematics for improving the text. I want to thank Megan Gill for creating the artwork of the cover. Humans enjoy making and experiencing art; it’s one of the things we do.
Ralph Linton's 1932 description of the global diffusion of techniques and inventions is quoted below. What has taken me five hundred pages to say, Dr. Linton accomplished in about five hundred words. I thank John Azer of Normandale Community College for bringing Dr. Linton's article to my attention.
This book consists of nothing but summaries of other books written by experts describing their own fields (their books are listed in the chapter sources). Each of these books provides a portion of our story and is simply combined here to give a glimpse of the whole at once. Reading this book is an incomplete shortcut to reading fifty or so of the books that these specialists have written.
The facts presented in this book have been taken directly from these other books. I have not created any of the understandings presented here, I simply serve the role of the reporter–except that this book is a less accurate summary of the material presented by these experts. As I remove the technical terms from the writings of these experts, I am also removing the precise meaning of their statements. The authors have very clearly presented their fields of study. I apologize to them now for not presenting their understandings as well, or as accurately, as they had earlier expressed them. I decided that it would not be appropriate in this book to quote the page numbers from which each fact has been taken because every sentence here would then have such a reference. I have instead acknowledged sources within the text of the paragraphs. It is hoped that the reader will become interested in reading some of their books in order to gain a more complete understanding of the story of all of us humans.
I insert occasional paragraphs to emphasize the human aspect of these facts. Whenever I have done this, I have tried to make it obvious that the statement contains my own interpretation. I am sure those summarized specialists will not want anyone thinking that they had made such a silly statement. In such cases, I often state that the sentence contains my own guess about a possible detail of life by using the phrase "I can guess." The reader is encouraged to make further studies to increase the details of the existing facts. At best, my wrong guesses may serve the purpose of spurring further discussion. The discussion needs your investigations and contributions, too.
In addition, these authors have shown that they are wiser than I am by sticking to their own field. They know that persons who write about subjects not within their own specialty always make fools of themselves. But it is also true that nonspecialists have no career to risk and are free to rush into areas that the specialist avoids. This means that I am more free to state silly guesses, hoping to spur debate among the readers.
You might like to visit www.UsHumans.net to download the latest internet version of this text.
Robert Dalling,
January 2007
Namaste. As my friends Prem and Raz say, the humanness in me greets the humanness in you. This is the story of us humans: we’ll discuss how we got here, what we are, and where we are today. Knowing something about what we are and where we've been helps us choose where next to take our civilization. An outline of this story is presented through brief descriptions of the natural universe, the nature of a human, human culture, and the flow of civilization. I'll describe the stepping stones of our development including the beginning of the universe, the formation of the Earth and its sequence of plants and animals, including parenting mammals, social primates, and then cultural humans with our three ways of life–gathering-hunting, farming, and wage-earning–and our civilization of farming, cities, business, religion, and government. This book contains a description of the emotions and behaviors of us parenting and social humans and a description of the origin, development, and current ways of our neighborhoods, religion, government, science, and business because these things form the largest aspects of our lives, our history, and our future. This book contains a summary of our understanding of nature, of our own nature, and of our societies, history, and civilization. An improved understanding of the natural universe and of the nature of a human leads to more accurate notions of what it means to be human and of our own place in the universe. We can then see that our religions, governments, and other institutions are necessarily matched to our own human nature and we can then see that the goals we are choosing for our 10,00-year-old human civilization are becoming increasingly matched to the nature of a human.
This book is a celebration of the peoples of the Earth and tries to be about all of the humans of the world. Humanity consists of 10,000 cultures, past and present, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups, but we have had just three basic ways of life: gatherer-hunters, farmers, and wage-earners. The ways of representative people from each of these three lifestyles will be described to illustrate our nature, our idea of civilization, and something of the flow of civilization through its 10,000-year development. For brevity, the peoples of just a handful of representative times and places of the world receive a detailed description. I'll describe the way of life of a group of gatherer-hunters because we humans lived this way for millions of years–with incremental changes that made this lifestyle increasingly sophisticated. We are biologically prepared to be gatherer-hunters and to live in small social groups of a few nuclear and extended families. For most of our past we have lived in groups of twenty to one or two hundred persons, and we knew each of those persons well enough to be able to predict their behavior. (It is no coincidence that still today, this is the number of persons that we can know that well.) These groups would include a handful of unrelated, extended families. Neighboring groups frequently met to hold ceremonies and such; we often first met our spouse during such a meeting. For millions of years our way of life did not fundamentally change until we became full-time farmers about 10,000 years ago. For this reason, I'll describe the first farmers and city-builders of Ancient Mesopotamia. We’ll look at the democracy and rational thought of Ancient Athens and then the ways of Medieval China and Europe. Nothing about today's neighborhoods, business, or government makes any sense until we understand the social changes that occur as a people switch from working their own family farms to working in factories. As an example of this transition, we'll look closely at the changing way of life for the people of the United States in the early nineteenth century.
People everywhere, and at all times in the past, have asked the following questions. How and when did the world begin? Where did we come from? How did we learn to make tools, use fire, grow crops, build homes, and find and prepare food? How did we learn to perform the ceremonies and rituals for births, weddings, cures, and deaths? These things make up our daily life. For each aspect of our daily life we have had a creation myth that explains its origin. Each group of persons have had their own collection of unique myths. These colorful myths have been handed down and modified through the generations. They are accepted as sacred truths and form the basis of our oldest religions. In past centuries, as our children became old enough to ask about our origins we would teach them those mythical stories. Lehmann explains that these myths give meaning to a people and satisfy certain basic emotional needs for security in an insecure world of mysterious phenomena, food collecting needs, illness, enemies, and death.
More recently, we have come to understand much of the workings of nature and have developed a more accurate picture of our origins. This emerging picture turns out to be much more incredible than any of the myths that our imaginations had produced in the past and is the subject of this book. Through our own efforts, we now have a general understanding of how we got here: from the beginning of the universe and the formation of atoms–including the atoms inside your body at this very moment–to the formation of the Earth with its moving continents, changing climates, and liquid seas leading to life forms (little molecule machines) changing through time in order to remain matched to their surrounding but ever changing environment of climate, predators, and food. We now understand much of our own nature and much of our own history.
In the last five hundred years, but especially in the last one hundred years, tens of thousands of scientists have spent their entire lifetimes measuring literally billions of facts about millions of natural phenomena. (Whenever you hear the word "science" you should think of "facts and understandings learned from repeatable measurements.") As each new fact is found, it is shared with everyone on the planet by being recorded in one of the scientific magazines–for example, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London began publication in 1665, see www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ilej for on-line copies. Today’s scientific and technological knowledge consists of all of the facts that have been gathered by all of the people of the world along with the sum of all the procedures that all of the world's people have developed. This book consists of a summary of just those facts that have been found to be directly related to the development of humans and of human civilization. Our entire story is explained in this report through nine thousand ideas or paragraphs consisting of about 27,000 facts or sentences.
At first those millions of studied phenomena seemed to be unrelated but they are now understood to be different aspects of a few more-fundamental phenomena and are explained by just a few laws of nature. In fact, there may be just one law of nature. It will be explained below how all physical phenomena may be described by a single law of nature and how this law also governs the chemical and biological processes that occur within the atoms of our bodies. We have begun to see the simple underlying principles of nature and have begun to understand the nature of our own past.
What is our own nature? We find that people everywhere and at all times of the past are the same in that we simply want to care for our children and spouse, the members of our extended family, our friends and neighbors, and for our community and its health. That is, we just want to laugh and joke with our spouse, family, friends and neighbors, pursue life and the limits of our talents, and raise children. We live in social groups glued together by our innate agreement to do as the other did. In practice, this occurs as we exchange help to accomplish most any daily task deemed larger than can be handled by the efforts of one individual. We expect our society to be mutually beneficial for all of us and we will react against any unfairness or injustice in any interaction within our community. We live for our children. We gauge success in life in terms of healthy and happy children and communities. What is a human? Most every thought or action of every human involves his or her children, spouse, family, community, and justice. That’s about all there is to us.
We better understand our own nature by considering those things that we are able do without having to first think about them. We do not have to decide that these are things we want to do, we just do them. We realize the core nature of a human by noticing the things that come naturally to us without having to first struggle learning to perform them. One purpose of this book is to give you a chance to think carefully about what is a human. Can you think of any things that are as important to you as are your children, extended family, friends, community, and justice? You might like to stop now and make a list of the most important things in your life. You might also like to list those things you find are effortlessly accomplished. The largest elements of our naturally evolved heritage are most apparent while doing those activities found to be the most effortless to do, and so they are also those activities being the most taken for granted, from breathing to the production and comprehension of speech. (While traveling in foreign countries, I’m amazed at the rapid rate at which one person produces strange sounds and another person comprehends them.) We effortlessly notice social incidents, including things like the sudden increase in time that two particular persons are spending together or simply the simultaneous absence of two particular individuals. Without any mental concentration, such as that needed to arithmetically divide two numbers, you know how far each member of your extended family and group will go for you, how far you will go for each of them, and how much each person will let you get away with. While you and another person are interacting as a pair of individuals, we know how the presence of any third person will change that interaction and how that change differs for each specific third person. We readily notice when we are in danger of being socially swindled by other persons. We are uplifted when singing at the top of our lungs. We are happiest when our family and group members are happiest and when we have their approval. We effortlessly recognize a face or learn a new geographic layout. We observe the details of the natural world around us, including such things as plant cycles and animal behaviors. Beginning a few million years ago, our intelligence enabled us to be successful gatherer-hunters. While other animals hunt with their feet and teeth, we find exploitable behaviors in our prey. We don’t hunt by simply wandering a field while carrying a club and hoping to come across an animal; we notice the exploitable behaviors of the animal residents of our neighborhood and continue to take a portion of their population. In the example of the animal harvesting tactics of the Amahuaca hunter given in Chapter 8, we’ll see how our brains have evolved to readily notice the exploitable behaviors of other animals. (“Harvesting,”not hunting, may be a more accurate description of our food-getting technique, making the term harvester more accurate than the term hunter-gatherer.)
Whenever unequipped for the task at hand, we naturally look around for something to fashion into a tool. We create a tool for every need, and each new tool invented means that our way of life has changed a little. Our first tools were sticks and stones. Later on, we modified rocks to cut, poke, and scrape. Since then, farming and industrialization have been our two most life-altering tools. As the human species spread throughout the world, nomads became sedentary and began obtaining a small portion of their food by planting seeds around their home. It takes considerable knowledge of plants for farmers to successfully live off their cultivated plants, as we began to do some 10,000 years ago. We’ll see that it took a few thousand years for farming to spread around the planet and that it has taken the last two hundred and fifty years for industrialization to spread throughout much of the planet. The knowledge and use of each newly invented tool quickly spreads around the planet to everyone else experiencing a need for that solution. Today’s science and technology is the combined sum of all the facts, tools, and procedures ever discovered or invented by anyone throughout the planet. What will be our next life-altering tool?
We form a community or society because of the unspoken certainty we have that the mutually beneficial exchange of help makes for a better life than going it alone; it is unspoken because it is innate. We don't have to think about it first and then decide to be a member of society: this is what we do naturally. Today, our society is beginning to include everyone on the planet in a single group. Our global civilization is another name for our most inclusive society.
We all agree about the proper behavior between the family, friends, and neighbors forming our society. This proper behavior is often described as the predisposition to do as the other did and to expect the other to do what you did (as we'll see is explained by De Waal). This agreement is synonymous with our primate social system because it is the social glue that creates that system. It is no accident that it forms the basis of the major religions of today's groups of millions of persons. You might like to stop now and describe the most important elements of "proper behavior" and then compare your description with that from each of several other persons.
There are also fascinating differences in the details of the ways of life (the culture) of each group of persons. We want to put ourselves in the place of our past ancestors, and we want to learn something of the way of life of our fellow humans. We will meet a few groups of persons in this book. When we understand the ways of others then we better understand the uniqueness and arbitrariness of our own ways. We can then begin to see our own culture from the eyes of an outsider and gain more respect for ourselves and for all other humans. It has been said that the best hope for humanity is a respect for humanity along with a belief in the fundamental good of each human. In the coming chapters we will see how "good behavior" simply means the behavior that is common to all of us because of our common humanness. “Bad behavior” is that which is uncommon or aberrant. (Notice that one bad person can kill ten others: If we were all bad by nature then our species would not be here.) Good behavior falls in the middle of a bell-shaped occurrence curve, while bad behavior falls on the edges–no matter the species.
There are two points to this book: first, to understand how humans are a natural result of the simple, fundamental workings of nature, and second, to see that our civilization is an extension of human nature. Together, we control every aspect of our mutual civilization. It is built by us and will be anything we choose to make of it. We choose first to make of it a tool to care for our children. (This is not yet fully the case because of our being occasionally sidetracked into less meaningful pursuits benefitting fewer of us.) Understanding our own nature, along with something about the flow of civilization, helps us form a more clear idea of our place in the universe and helps us to together choose where next to take our civilization by choosing goals that best match our own nature. Civilization is our mutual collection of tools and procedures meant not only to make life better for all of us but to better-enable us to pursue the limits of human potential. What do you want out of life? How do you gauge success in life, and what priorities and goals do you have for your own life and for your community, nation, and planet-wide civilization? How should we measure the success of our attempts to reach these goals? Our children should be continually asked to think about what they want out of life and what they feel are meaningful priorities and goals for themselves and for the mutual efforts of our civilization. You might like to write down your answers to these questions and discuss them with your family and friends. In fact, we might like for each of us to periodically submit answers to be combined into a public report to help prioritize our goals. (Today, a small computer has the capacity to do such a chore as this.) Democracy works best with such public debate. Most everyone agrees that, first of all, we want healthy and happy children and communities. About 10,000 years ago, people's farming practices allowed population increases that led to cities, states, and our civilization. The combined efforts of all of us humans have produced our rapidly developing civilization (which has also been our tool for organizing numbers of us greater than our innate band of twenty to one or two hundred persons). It is an increasingly larger-scale, social community. Nature made us human and made us able to form culture and civilization but it has less control over the details of the culture or civilization that results; that is up to us. The only limits on our choice occur because we cannot act outside our own nature. Our current civilization includes the ideas of history, mathematics, science, technology, the factory, business, economic and social justice, and government that protects our liberty. What sorts of changes will occur in our civilization in the coming decades and centuries and which goals will we choose for it? Together, we will choose our future.
We will see that, at any time or in any place around the planet, whenever hundreds of us humans get together to form a tribe or chiefdom we will build structures like earthen mounds, irrigation systems, and stone monuments. One of the first things such a group of people will do is to try to find how big a rock they can carve or move or how large a mound of earth they can create. Whenever tens of thousands of us get together we build temples, palaces, cities, and city-states. The earth and rock structures we build express our inner drives and our inner view of the world. During construction, each person within the group typically spends one week per month working on these structures. After finishing these structures we all stand back and admire our accomplishment. What can billions of us build? Make a list. Discuss your list with others. What are we now building?
The following snapshot of today's understanding of nature and of the nature of a human begins with a description of the underlying physics of the atoms of biology and then proceeds with a discussion of our own biological ancestry and development. We'll especially compare the characteristics and behaviors of humans, primates, and mammals. As we begin to see the differences and similarities between ourselves and these other animals we gain a more accurate idea of what we are–and also what are our family, religion, and civilization.
In this book, we will look at what astronomy, physics, geology, biology, chemistry, anthropology, history, religion, social science, and political science tell us about ourselves. This is a summary of everything in our world, including the history of civilization. The origins, history, and current ways of our neighborhoods, government, business, science, technology, and religions is described so that we can better understand today’s world. We begin the story of our origins with the observations that astronomers have made about the origin of the universe, the formation of molecules, and the formation of the Earth. A summary is given of the geologist's understanding of the Earth's moving continents and changing climates, the biologist's findings concerning the origin and evolution–from molecular forms to mammals–of life on Earth, and of the anthropologist's story of the evolution of primates and humans. The behaviors of mammals and of primates are described so that we have a better picture of the similarities and differences between us and these other animals. We will look closely at the origins of our emotions and at our increased intelligence and language abilities, and we will look closely at the way of life of people at representative times and places around the world. Onto these things, we’ll add some history.
The first two chapters of this book contain a description of science and of the scientific method. We want to know about science because much of our understanding of our nature has been obtained through its approach, results, and conclusions. We will also discuss the way in which many seemingly unrelated phenomena are described by a single law of nature. This helps us to see how each fundamental aspect of nature is simple and that each complicated end product–for example, a human–consists of a large number of these more-simple underlying phenomena. I will often point out the tremendous number of facts accumulated by our scientific studies. You will then know that when a scientist states a conclusion–for example, that the Earth's continents are slowly moving around the surface of the planet–that it is based on the results of millions of observations and measurements. It is not merely a statement that scientists think would be neat if it were found to be true. After the discussion of science, the remaining sequence of chapters is arranged to follow the historical order of the events of our past.
The evolution of living matter began with the first self-duplicating molecule. Life consists of collections of molecules that naturally operate and duplicate themselves and that also produce the sequence of chemicals that grow an entire individual out of its surrounding and ingested chemicals. Life grew from an initially-molecular size. For a few billion years, the molecules of life increased in length at a rate of about one additional atom per year. (By the way, in the United States–and in this book, too–the number "one thousand-million" is referred to as "one billion," while in England the term billion refers instead to one million-million.) Bacteria were the first single-celled organisms to develop and are too small to be seen without a microscope; soon after they first developed, the size of living creatures grew rapidly. The sequence of stepping-stone animal forms that have developed in the last 750 million years includes non-boned invertebrates with eyes and a sense of touch, fish with bony skeletons and hearts and brains, amphibians who left the oceans for the land, egg-laying reptiles, parenting mammals, social primates who cooperate as extended families, and then us humans with our increased language and culture, and our civilization.
We will see that we naturally have the feelings and emotions to go with our animal, mammal, primate, and human heritage; our biological heritage includes each of these elements. Many of our behaviors are common to all mammals or to all primates. We are mammals with a monogamous parenting strategy and a nuclear family. Again, we live for our children. We are social primates who care first for our extended family and then for the other members of our society, and we care for our society. We are aware of who is related to whom and which persons are the friends of which others. Both parenting and the extended family form a large part of being human, as do our senses and emotions. We humans are naturally equipped with the feelings, behaviors, emotions, and morals to go with our animal, parenting, extended family, and social ways. These things form the core of what it is to be human. We'll also see how they necessarily form the core of our religion and government.
Today, most of us live in a city and do not understand the cultures of the rest of the world's people–even the culture of our great-grandparents can be mysterious. Though culture changes every one hundred years and every one hundred miles (160 km), we'll look closely at the way of daily life for a just few of our past times and places. We’ll look at illustrative, specific groups of gatherer-hunters, village farmers, and factory workers, including the Amazonian Canela, the Ancient Mesopotamians, the democrats of Ancient Athens, the Medieval Chinese and Europeans, the Cahokians and Yoruba, and the people of nineteenth-century New England.
The way of life of gatherer-hunters is first described so that we might know something about how all of us lived before we developed farming (about 10,000 years ago) and then cities (about 5,000 years ago). We’ll see that we lived in bands of a few extended families who cooperated in life, that everyone made their own tools and clothing from readily available materials, that most of our food was obtained by gathering plants, and that our hunting techniques relied on finding exploitable behaviors of other animals. The religions of our gatherer-hunter times concerned the mysterious powers of the world.
We’ll see that the Mesopotamians of Ancient Iraq were the people who first began to build our civilization because they were the first to became full-time farmers and the first to build cities. The early forms of government emerged, often as bands became tribes and chiefdoms to handle surplus crop (or in response to one of many other causal agents). These governmental forms will be described so that we know something about how our political units began and matured. Since farming turns out to be the key to abundance, the Mesopotamians were also the first to build cities, states, and written history. The development of cities and states is synonymous with the beginnings of business, technology, religions of morals, and of our political systems that would eventually develop into nations. (We are beginning to make continent-wide economic and political structures and will no doubt form global structures within a number of decades.) We’ll look closely at the way of life in Mesopotamian cities and find that we share much in common with them as we live in today’s big cities.
We’ll see that it took 5,000 years for Mesopotamian farming villages to grow from hamlets of a few extended families to cities of 100,000 persons and that people lived in peace throughout this span of time. War and its mass murder was not invented until we invented the empire, about 4,000 years ago, as city-states began interacting and overlapping. It is not a coincidence that this is also the time in which our religions began to concern moral behavior rather than the powers of nature. The populations of our largest cities grew from 300 persons 7,500 years ago, to 30,000 persons 5,000 years ago, to 300,000 persons 4,000 years ago, to one million persons 1,000 years ago, and to ten million today. Still, about 90% of us lived in small villages working as farmers until about 250 years ago when we began to become factory workers (in the U.S. today, just 1% of us are farmers).
After a glance at democracy in Ancient Athens and a medieval sojourn, we’ll see how our invention of the factory around the year 1760 began the Industrial Revolution. We’ll look closely at the changes in the way of life that occurred when the people of early nineteenth-century New England switched from farming to factory work. Nothing about today's business, government, and neighborhoods makes any sense until we see the changes in our way of life that occurred as we made this switch. We’ll see that wage-earners both produce and purchase factory goods and that this system results in increased numbers of tools, utensils, and decorations for our homes but that it also decreases the directly visible social ties within the community. Our civilization today operates only through the combined efforts of each and every one of us working our daily jobs–as is made visible by the traffic that occurs as we all go about our daily business. Our switch from farming to factory work also meant that each of us individuals came to hold less-control over our own continued well-being. We’ll see that the role of government increases in an always reluctant and late-in-coming response to the social consequences of the shift from self-reliant farming to wage-dependent and economic-cycle-dependent factory work dominated by our ever-larger business organizations geared mainly to increase profit. Keep in mind that these profits are simply the income of those of us who own the corporation and whose income is among the upper 1% of us. Social and economic inequality grows first with urbanization and greatly increases with industrialization. These changes are rapidly occurring in those nations making this switch today.
Not many decades ago, one in six of us died before reaching the age of one, and many of us died in early adulthood from minor ailments, such as simple cuts that became infected. In recent decades, we have become more likely to survive our first year of life and then live a healthier and longer life because of our newly found practice of sanitation and use of simply antibiotics and such. One hundred years ago, if a person made it to age twenty then they were likely to live to age sixty or so. The scientific and technological knowledge that we have accumulated in the field of medicine, now means that instead of dying of our first serious illness at age sixty, we now undergo a life-saving operation that enables us to live another ten years. (This operation typically costs $50,000 in the U.S. but in other nations it might cost one-half or one-tenth that amount.) Some meaningful goals for the mutual efforts that form our civilization include access to water, food, shelter, toilets, health care, and education. But more than that, we want to be able to pursue the limits of our individual–and combined–talents and passions so that we can continually improve ourselves and our mutual civilization..
Through much of history, the concerns of our governments of kings and queens have often been nothing except the concerns of kings and queens: the maintenance or expansion of their own territory, wealth, and power. In response to particular injustices of certain medieval kings and queens, we demanded written, institutionalized lists of rights and liberties. It is in our social nature to demand a mutually beneficial community and it is in our nature to react against any injustice within our community. Through the last few centuries of effort, we have been redirecting the concerns of our leaders from the maintenance and expansion of their own power and territory to the concerns of a person: having a quality life for ourselves and for our children, spouse, extended family, and community. For example, today our governments more often debate healthcare rather than the annexation or colonization of foreign lands. Most of us measure success in life simply in terms of happy and healthy children and communities–not wealth or power. How do you measure success in life?
We'll have a glimpse of government in today's nations and examine the cultural ingredients for initializing and maintaining a stable democracy. We’ll see that democracy is more than just voting and free speech; it is a spread and balance of power among many persons, and it is a blending of views and priorities that partially satisfies everyone. Since nothing happens without a sufficient consensus, much of daily politicking involves the attempt to persuade a portion of the population over to one’s side. In contrast, authoritarian governments outlaw all views besides their own; imagine the direction your nation would take if only one of its parties were allowed to choose priorities and actions. As for our future, is it likely that we will develop a global, democratic assembly of democratic nations in order to solve today's global problems that are beyond the control and borders of a single nation.
We'll have a glimpse of the social life of our elite and also of the everyday life of some of our children who live in poverty today. We will look at the ways of business and government today and see how the interacting components of our whole society are involved in our well-being and in the quality of our lives. We can now measure hundreds of aspects of our well-being and of the quality of our lives, and these measurements can help to verify the success of our efforts in building the mutual civilization we choose for ourselves.
To choose goals for our civilization we have only to decide what are the most important things in our lives. You might like to make a list of what you feel are the most important things in life. To decide what life is about we examine ourselves and the nature of a human. The goals of human civilization can be nothing else than the goals of a single human: the care of our family and society, to pursue life and the limits of our talents, and to raise children. We simply want to be able to laugh and joke with our spouse, family, friends, and neighbors, to pursue life, and to raise children.
As you read of the development of our civilization try to gauge our progress in technological matters, business practices, the maintenance of social and economic justice, equal access to education and the benefits of civilization, having healthy lives that are not unnecessarily shortened from a simple illness or accident, having a sense of belonging to a community, maintaining our family's quality of life, and having a feeling of control over our own lives and over our own continued well-being. Do you think the things in life that are most important to us depend on the century in which we live or on the level of our technology? Has the level of our happiness changed with technology and time? What makes you happy? How do you measure your own well-being and the quality of your own life? As you read on, you might like to compare these aspects of life for gatherer-hunters, the first farmers of Ancient Mesopotamia, the people of Medieval China and Europe, the Yoruba people and the people of Cahokia, and today's factory workers. How do we maximize the benefits of civilization for as many of us as possible?
If a chapter contains more facts than are of interest for an initial reading then you might choose to read just the first and last pages of that chapter, or just the first sentence of each paragraph, and save the remainder for a second reading. The large number of facts presented here are not meant to be memorized; they are meant to illustrate the depth of our scientific, social, and historical knowledge.
The chapter questions are meant to help you gain an understanding of the "big picture" of the story of us humans and do not ask you to have memorized every fact given in the text. The questions are mostly meant to encourage further thinking and study. Some might help you form a better idea of what it is to be human and what it is not to be human–for example, by asking you to compare humans with other things. The questions are not meant for you to repeat the statements of the text but as a place for you to write down your own conclusions so that you can begin to further test your own conclusions. As you answer the questions, try to decide what you should next measure to test your answers. We have all heard that each newly answered question leads to many additional questions. If a specific aspect of our past doesn't have a clear answer then it will appear in this report as a question. This means that many of the questions do not yet have an answer, which is all the more reason for you to be thinking about them; you might choose to contribute in finding their upcoming answers.
Suggestions for further reading
For an earlier summary of "how we got here," see The World and Man As Science Sees Them edited by Forest Ray Moulton, 1937, The University of Chicago Press. The general picture has hardly changed since its publication in 1937, but some finer details are now known. The expansion of the universe was measured by Edwin Hubble and published in 1929. This measurement led to the Big Bang scenario but it was too new to be mentioned in that book.
A summary of events from the Big Bang through the beginnings of history is given in A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson, 2003, Broadway Books, New York, New York.
The Human Story, Our History, From the Stone Age to Today, James C. Davis, 2004, HarperPerrenial, New York, New York.
You might follow that book with The Human Story, Our history from the Stone Age To Today, James C. Davis, 2004, HarperCollins, New York, New York.
The Sciences, An Integrated Approach, James Trefil and Robert M. Hazen, 2004, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ. This is a one-year college course in the fundamentals of physics, astronomy, chemistry, geology, and biology.
For the discussion of the functions of religion and the value of understanding other cultures, read the forward and the first chapter of the book Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion An Anthropological Study of the Supernatural 4th Edition Edited by Arthur C. Lehmann and James E. Myers, 1997, Mayfield Publishing, Mountain View CA. Also read the introduction to The Spanish Frontier in North America, David J. Weber, 1992, Yale University Press.
A Briefer History of Time, From the Big Bang to the Big Mac, Eric Shulman, 1999, St. Martin’s Press. For more information, visit http://members.bellatlantic.net/~vze3fs8i/bhtes/index.html. A one-minute video can be seen at http://real21mt.audiovideoweb.com/ramgen/nj20real2550/nsf/universe.smi.
Questions
1. Make a list of the thoughts and actions you have today and then decide which of these are or are not motivated by your concern for your children, spouse, extended family, or your community.
2. We insist that our community is mutually beneficial and just. This means that love and children, family and friends, community and justice cover about every thought we have and every action we take. Do you agree?
3. To begin thinking about "what a human is" you might like to begin listing things you see many persons do in a similar manner. In the same way that we see many cats behaving similarly while in similar situations–they exhibit "catness"–we wonder what would they see to be typical human behavior or "humanness."
Do many of us act in similar ways whenever we unexpectedly meet a friend, as we inhale to speak, or as we are about to yawn or sneeze? Do we act similarly in the way we quickly look around for the source of an unexpected sudden noise, or the way we drop open our mouths when surprised, or the way we raise our arms upward as we take large downward steps, or the way we step away from a potentially harmful animal? Is it in our nature to look around for something to fashion into a tool when unequipped for the task at hand? In what situation will many of us roll-up our eyes? Do we all throw our sleeves in the same way to look at our wristwatch? Do we act the same when we first push on a door that needed to be pulled and then stand back to determine whether or not the store is open for business? What is it in our nature that makes us do that one-eyed open-mouth lip-curl when aiming cameras and such? Do we all carry our infants on our hips? Do those infants all rub their eyes in the same way when they are sleepy?
In certain ways, the members of some age groups act in similar ways. For example, we often speak of "the terrible twos," or the "what is that years," or the "teenage years." Is there infantness, parentness, older brotherness, or older sisterness? We also talk of bullies, do-gooders, know-it-alls, phony kiss-ups, and kind people. What sorts of behaviors can be fairly uniform among the humans of the world?
How and when the universe and the Earth began
Science
The purpose of this chapter is to describe something about scientists and to explain the scientific process. The facts given throughout the first two parts of the book have been obtained through science, so we want to know something about the technique of science. We may then be better able to determine the general validity of the scientific process and of its results. The general public is already familiar with the practical benefits of science because, every few minutes, each of us reaches for a machine or a medicine. In addition to those benefits, the knowledge and understanding obtained from science is mentally and spiritually rewarding. Science and art are both intellectual pursuits that are rewarding in themselves. They are things we humans do as we celebrate life. We humans are curious creatures. We have an innate capacity to notice, remember, understand, and predict patterns. These things are often described as memory, learning, and reasoning and are large parts of what it is that makes us human.
We have heard of those funny people called "scientists," but the only scientists most of us know are those strange persons found in a movie. What percentage of scientists dress funny and are forgetful, socially awkward, and unaware of the weekday? It is natural that those of us who make movies know far more about other movie makers than we do about scientists or of the scientist's passion for the knowledge of nature. Scientists show the same range of personalities and characteristics as occurs in all other persons.
Our understandings of nature and of us humans have been obtained by these scientists. Each scientist takes the results of the previous generation of scientists, adds something to it, and passes the increased knowledge on to the next generation. As we strive to understand a newly discovered aspect of nature, we usually fumble around in the dark for a while as we try to make sense of it. Once it is understood, soon everyone else on the planet also knows about it, and we never un-learn anything. Throughout history, the use of each new tool soon spread around the planet. Today’s science and technology is the sum of all the facts, procedures, and understandings ever obtained by any person on the planet.
Scientists do science because they want to understand how the world works. More than that, they feel that they cannot live without coming to understand the world. They are happy only when they are learning more. Many scientists work to acquire knowledge and understanding much more than they work to acquire money. You might suspect that your children will become scientists if you often see them intently observing "simple" things such as a butterfly or a drop of water. (In the past such behavior might have seemed strange enough to get some of us locked in the attic.)
Many scientists will work eighty hours per week for years with a single-minded obsessiveness in pursuit of this knowledge. You know that feeling of confusion you have as you are trying to figure out a complicated problem; it is like a painful knot inside your head. The obsessed scientist has this feeling throughout most of the day and sort of becomes addicted to it. The end of a good day's work means that you are so mentally exhausted that voices dance on their own through your head (this is nirvana). These obsessed workers are aware of each minute that they are not working and become panicked if just a few minutes are spent away from their work for "no good reason." Such an obsession is not anything new. For example, it was the cause of the death of Archimedes. He lost his life while working on a mathematical problem and refusing to pay due attention to a Roman soldier who was anxious to question him (see Watchers of the Sky, by Patrick Moore).