A History of the World Read Online Free Page A

is thought humans lost most of their own fur millions of years ago. This group, much larger than a single family, would be accustomed to sharing out tasks; and this was directly related to the problems that started again with Mother’s labour pains. Like all women, she knew the birth would be painful. Ever since anyone could recall, human babies had been born with surprisingly large heads, so big that to force them out through the vagina was agonizing. Mother would give birth standing up, surrounded by her sisters. Her baby would be helpless, a wobbling, vulnerable thing, for far longer than the children of other animals.
    It was a puzzle, about which many things would be said during the long nights of storytelling. But the vulnerability of the modern human child was a long-term strength because it forced families and tribal groups to share out work and to cooperate. Today’s hunter-gatherer societies generally have a clear division of labour between male hunters and females gathering plants, and it is likely this was already happening by Mother’s time. It would be many tens of thousands of years before people realized that the big head, the relative helplessness and the consequently painful birth added up to an evolutionary triumph, producing animals able to tell stories.
    Historians of human evolution also suspect that our warlike, xenophobic and mutually hostile character likewise evolved in Africa, and forthe same reasons. Tribes, extending beyond family groups, are at an advantage if everyone works together, ‘for the good of the tribe’, even if what they do is dangerous or unpleasant for them at the time. This means that tribal bonding is very important; without a sense of belonging and mutual dependence, the tribe falls apart. The other side of this is that, in a world where human tribes are moving around, searching for game, the tribal bonding is likely to be reinforced by hostility to other tribes. This obviously continues to matter.
    Everywhere on the planet, early human societies seem to have worked hard to differentiate themselves from their neighbours, wearing different headdresses, jewellery, clothing and, above all, speaking different languages. The British zoologist Mark Pagel points out that, even today after so much cultural homogenization, there are seven thousand different languages spoken by humans, almost all of which are mutually unintelligible. Why? Other animals are not like this. He argues that our good qualities – our capacity to be kind, generous and friendly, allowing us to evolve cooperative and bigger groups, to ‘get along with each other’ – have to be set against bad qualities, ‘our tendencies to form competing societies often not far from conflict’. In hunter-gathering groups competing for land, conflict is common and tribal war often a fact of life.
    We have been hunter-gatherers, we humans, for far, far longer than we have been farmers – at least ten to fifteen times as long. We are only now becoming a species that mainly lives in cities; but if we say we have been dominated by cities for a century or two, then our hunter-gathering trail is a thousand times longer. So it would be literally unnatural if much of our behaviour did not relate in some way to that inheritance; above all in our combination of sociability and mutual suspicion. And so back to Mother.
    For she was the mother of almost all of us. (There is another earlier, even mistier, figure: ‘Mitochondrial Eve’, who would be the mother of everyone, Africans included, far earlier in the human story, perhaps some 200,000 years ago; but her story is less well understood.) Our character’s maternal achievement is to be understood literally, rather than as a parable. There are arguments about this, as there are about every aspect of early society, but the balance of probabilities is that she is your super-Mother. If you are a New York lawyer, she is where you came from. If you are an aboriginal Pacific Islander