A History of the World Read Online Free

telling the story of the first tiny mammals, our ancestors, and how they took advantage of the disappearance of the great lizards, or dinosaurs. More conventionally, we could chart what we know of the complex and delicate family tree of early apes and hominids from which we spring.
    Any one of these starting-points would be informative and useful. Our human history, as it is told today, is only a final page after a vast preface of intense astrophysical events, chemical reactions and evolutionary changes. It does not start with a creator moulding men and women from mud or blood with his own hands, nor in the Garden of Eden. What follows here is a history of the social, global human, however:so let’s begin with a woman, and a birth; to put it poetically, an African Eve.
    Mother
     
    She had a different name. No one has known it for around seventy thousand years. She had one; for she lived among talkative and highly social people. ‘Mother’, for reasons that will become obvious, will do. She was probably young, tough, stocky and dark-skinned. She was a traveller, part of a people always on the move. She was also heavily pregnant. Her tribespeople were hunters and expert gleaners of berries, shellfish, roots and herbs. They carried tools and hides and a couple of babies with them, tied with sinews and skins around adult backs, but there were surprisingly few children in the group. Those who didn’t learn early to walk, keep quiet and keep up tended to die, picked off by predators following the group.
    In their own way the travellers were, however, formidable, armed with spears and razor-sharp chipped-stone cutting edges that had been developed over around a hundred thousand years of hunting, and (if they were anything like later hunter-gatherers) while fighting rival tribes. Their average age was relatively young, something that would remain true of all human societies until very recent history. But there would have been people in their fifties or sixties. It is now thought that the female menopause may have been a useful evolutionary adaptation to provide grandmothers, who could care for the young while younger women were breeding: tribes with grandmothers would be able to support more children to adulthood, and therefore would grow at the expense of tribes without older women.
    The men would have been marked by hunting scars but would be vocal and thoughtful tacticians, experienced in tracking game and exploiting their understanding of other animals. The oldest, the father of this clan, might be in his sixties. Hunters in their thirties or forties may have been the most effective food-gatherers. This group had been moving for years, slowly north through what are now called Kenya and Somalia, towards a strip of water that looked possible to cross. The flow of water was lower than it used to be, leaving dry patches of land. Wading between them would have been a risk worth taking,because the game and the vegetation around them was getting harder to find. Life would be easier on the other side.
    The group would have had no idea they were about to leave one continent where all humans originated; nor any notion of just how far their descendants would walk, working their way along beaches, a mile or two every year, clearing out the shellfish and the crabs in rock pools, gorging on a beached whale, spearing ridiculously incurious goats. All life was a journey. Always, a new track must be made. Ahead of them and behind them, once they had moved on, the easier prey would return, but to stay put in a single place would be unnatural and dangerous. Declare anywhere ‘home’, and you would die of hunger. So though the water was a challenge, and everyone was watching everyone else as they waded – for the group had a language and talked about their plans – this was just another day.
    They were probably clothed, in some way: a study of body-lice DNA suggests that they were infesting clothing around a hundred thousand years ago and it