Life on Earth began about 3.5 billion years ago. All life shares a universal genetic code; this strongly supports the premise that all living things share a universal ancestor.  Evolution through various forms of selection (natural, sexual, and cultural) led to increasingly complex organisms over billions of years, culminating in the primates that were our evolutionary ancestors

 

3.  Life

We don’t know exactly when the first life forms came to exist on Earth.

We can only trace back to the point where we have evidence of life and assert that life originated sometime before that time.  The earliest direct evidence of life on Earth (so far) are microfossils of microorganisms mineralized in 3.465-billion-year-old Australian Apex rocks.  The illustration below shows the photographs of these life forms, along with drawings to help visualize their shapes.

 

QQQ 13 microbes shapes.

 

 

Universal Common Ancestry

What happened to cause more complex animals to exist?  What happened to cause humans to exist?

In 1859, Charles Darwin published the book on The Origin of Species. This book proposed that it is possible (Darwin uses the term ‘not incredible’) that all life on earth started with a common primordial form, and evolved from there due to the process of natural selection.  He writes:

 

 

Recently, scientists given a formal name to the theory Darwin described.  They call it the ‘Universal Common Ancestry’ theory, or “UCA.” Understanding the UCA theory is important because it provides a foundational understanding of the realities of the world before evolution began, which can then be used to test this theory of evolution itself.

Before we look at evolution, let’s first explore how scientists have confirmed the UCA theory and the evidence supporting its validity.  This evidence comes from an the analysis of DNA.

DNA, or ‘deoxyribonucleic acid,’ is a molecule in the nucleus of the cells of all living things that have cells.  In 1954, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin, and Charles Watson built models of DNA that revealed it contained coded messages within its structure.

 

 

DNA is made up of sequences of amino acids that code for proteins and other complex molecules that are needed for life.  The coding molecules are incredibly tiny, and it took roughly a half century for scientists to build machines that could read these codes.  These machines are called ‘gene sequencers.’

In the early 2000s, Douglas Theobald and a team of researchers at the University of Colorado obtained funding to use gene-sequencing techniques and statistical analysis to evaluate the UCA theory.  If different organisms had different origins — in other words, if they were not all ‘descended from a single primordial form’ — we would expect different coding methods to be used to code for complex molecules in different life forms.

Scientists can investigate the Universal Common Ancestor (UCA) by analyzing DNA sequences for various proteins across different organisms.  For instance, they might sequence the genes of Treponema pallidum, the bacteria responsible for syphilis, and then sequence human DNA, often using their own DNA as samples.  By comparing these genetic codes, they can draw conclusions about the origins of these species.  If the species had entirely separate origins, we would expect them to use different genetic coding mechanisms.  If their origins were similar but not identical, some parts of the coding mechanisms would match while others would differ.  However, if the coding mechanisms are found to be identical, it would strongly suggest that both the syphilis bacteria and humans share a common ancestor.

Scientists can investigate the Universal Common Ancestor (UCA) by analyzing DNA sequences for various proteins across different organisms.  For instance, they might sequence the genes of Treponema pallidum, the bacteria responsible for syphilis, and then sequence human DNA, often using their own DNA as samples.  By comparing these genetic codes, they can draw conclusions about the origins of these species.  If the species had entirely separate origins, we would expect them to use different genetic coding mechanisms.  If their origins were similar but not identical, some parts of the coding mechanisms would match while others would differ.  However, if the coding mechanisms are found to be identical, it would strongly suggest that both the syphilis bacteria and humans share a common ancestor.

If scientists sequenced a wide range of life forms and found similarities in some of them, but not all of them, it would suggest evidence for common ancestry among those with all these similarities.  The more similarities they found, the higher their confidence would be in a shared ancestry.  If they discovered that every single code was identical, they would be virtually certain that all these life forms share common ancestry.

Scientists can investigate the Universal Common Ancestor (UCA) by analyzing DNA sequences for various proteins across different organisms. For instance, they might sequence the genes of Treponema pallidum, the bacteria responsible for syphilis, and then sequence human DNA, often using their own DNA as samples. By comparing these genetic codes, they can draw conclusions about the origins of these species. If the species had entirely separate origins, we would expect them to use different genetic coding mechanisms. If their origins were similar but not identical, some parts of the coding mechanisms would match while others would differ. However, if the coding mechanisms are found to be identical, it would strongly suggest that both the syphilis bacteria and humans share a common ancestor.

The team published their findings in 2010.  They found that the gene sequences for various proteins were not just similar but identical in all living things.  They used statistical tests to determine how likely this is to be a coincidence.  Here are the findings from their paper:

 

 

If scientists sequenced a wide range of life forms and found similarities in some of them, but not all of them, it would suggest evidence for common ancestry among those with all these similarities. The more similarities they found, the higher their confidence would be in a shared ancestry. If they discovered that every single code was identical, they would be virtually certain that all these life forms share common ancestry.

This means that the probability of observing such genetic similarities by chance is approximately 1 in 10^2,860 —a number so large defies human comprehension.   To put this in perspective, let's consider some astronomical numbers:

There are estimated to be about 10⁸² atoms in the observable Universe, and, if the universe did in fact have a ‘big bang’ origin, about 10¹⁷ seconds have passed since the Universe's estimated beginning. If you had all of the necessary materials and could create DNA-based life in as many different places as there are atoms in the Universe, and you repeated this process once each second for all the time since the Big Bang, you would have created life 10⁹⁹ times. Even with this astronomical number of attempts, the chances of producing the observed genetic similarities by coincidence are vanishingly small.

In fact, you would need to repeat this entire experiment—creating life 10⁹⁹ times—approximately 102,860 times before you would have a 50/50 chance of producing one world with these similarities purely by coincidence. This number, 10^2,860, represents a 1 followed by 2,860 zeros—a number so large it defies human comprehension.

In other words, it is not a coincidence that all life forms on Earth use the same genetic coding sequence in our DNA. We can conclude that we have a common ancestry with a greater degree of certainty than we know just about anything else in science. This puts the theory of Universal Common Ancestry among the most well-supported ideas in all of science, comparable to fundamental theories in physics or chemistry.

Dating Artifacts

When Darwin was alive, scientists didn’t have any scientific tools that would give accurate dates on artifacts.

People had to rely on inference from the things they accepted and believed.  Western scientists, trained as many of us, were taught that nothing in the Universe is older than 4,004 BC.  For most of the last several thousand years, people in the Western world were required to accept this belief; those who did not, were guilty of heresy and could be put to death.  While the rigidity of this requirement eased during Darwin’s time, it was still uncommon for people to openly claim that anything was older.  Naturally, if nothing is older than 4,004 BC, then all artifacts were assumed to have come to existence sometime between that date and today.

In 1949, while working at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory at the University of California in Berkeley, William Libby discovered the first truly scientific dating method.  This process uses the radioactive decay cycle of carbon and is called ‘radiocarbon dating.’ (See textbox below for more information.)

 

 

Scientists began using this method in 1950 and found it to be extremely reliable.  To determine just how reliable it was, they needed to find other events that occurred at a known time in the past and test artifacts from those events to see if they obtained the expected results.

We know from many sources that Mount Vesuvius in Italy erupted on August 24, 79 AD.  This eruption buried many towns before the people could escape, encasing them in lava with the exact date of their death recorded on their date books and calendars.  We can test the radiocarbon dating method by dating artifacts left by Mount Vesuvius.  Other known eruption dates allow us to verify dates going back a very long way.  This process has been tested many times and is virtually 100% accurate giving us great confidence that this method determines accurate dates.

Over the 65 years since radiocarbon dating was perfected, scientists have developed many other scientific dating methods.  Radiocarbon dating is most effective for items of recent origins (less than 50,000 years).  Older artifacts can be tested with a similar method that measures the breakdown of potassium into argon.  By cross-referencing the results of many different tests, we can determine and have determined that these tests are extremely accurate.

As of 2024, scientists have come up with  many reliable and useful dating techniques based on other elements with extremely long decay cycles.  Most of these techniques only work for organic artifacts—those that were once alive—by determining when they stopped taking in air, water, and food, meaning when they died.  New methods such as optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), are being developed to measure the amount of exposure that rocks, and anything has had to light.  By cross-referencing results from various tests using different technologies, scientists can get increasingly accurate scientific dates for artifacts of all kinds.

Evolution

The chart below lists the ages of the oldest samples of various living things dated so far.  We don’t know exactly when these organisms first appeared on Earth; they may have been here significantly longer than shown.  However, the figures below represent the minimum time we know for certain that these life forms have been on Earth:

 

 

How did one life form change into another?

Darwin’s theory, which is more than 150 years old, has held up and remains consistent with the discoveries made since.  Darwin describes the process of “natural selection,” the most important underlying process of evolution, in this way:

 

 

Over time, beings with advantageous traits replaced those without them.  The basic capabilities of the most capable beings on earth increased steadily, over billions of years.  By 60 million years ago, primates existed—Primates being the ‘family’ that includes humans.  Our ancient ancestors were present in this world 60 million years ago.

Paleogenomics

The field of Paleogenomics is the study of the evolution of DNA.  It is a brand-new field.  This is an excerpt from a 2019 article about the field:

 

 

Paleogenomics is a new field and so far, it hasn’t produced any results that conflict with the evolutionary analysis of other sciences.  The lack of conflict, however, is an important finding.  If the previous work on evolution had been incorrect, the DNA results would have shown discrepancies.  The fact that there are “no conflicts” gives us great confidence that the researchers who have studied evolutionary processes were on the right track and that all the basic processes that Darwin proposed are indeed operating.

Primates

Mammals had already existed for 140 million years before the first primates emerged.  Over this immense period, nature selected mammals with higher intelligence for survival.  The gradual increase in intelligence eventually led to animals that were so different from than their predecessors that they were an entirely new classification of beings.  Sometime between 65 million and 60 million years ago, the highly intelligent mammals that are classified as “Primates” came to exist.

Primates are mammals with these specialized features:

 

 

Incomplete remains of primates have been found and dated to 60 million years while the oldest complete skeletons go back 55 million years.  These skeletons were discovered by scientists at Beijing’s Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in 2013.

Evolution did not stop when the first primates emerged.  All primates reproduce sexually, and sexual reproduction creates new combinations of genes—and entirely new animals—with each birth.  Once these new generations existed, they had to compete with their peers for resources.  Those with lesser intellectual skills and abilities were less likely to perish before they could mate, while those with greater skills were more likely to carry on the species.

Every 1,000 years about 500 generations had the opportunity to surpass their peers.  Over the span of a million years, some 500,000 generations had this same opportunity.

The individual changes didn’t need to be large.  Over this immense period, tiny incremental changes accumulated to bring about enormous differences.

 

 

New Perspective Series

 

The New Perspective Series look at key realities of the world from a non-conventional perspective.  For pretty much all of history, humans have looked at realities of this little blue world as if it is the center of the universe, the only world in existence, the only world that could exist.  Religious people have come to the conclusion that it is the work of a higher power, the only thing of any real importance that the higher power created and cared about and the center of attention of this (for monotheists who think there is only one) or these (for polytheists, who have dominated the world for most of  history) deities.   There is only one way of looking at events here on Earth:  they are the only events that matter anywhere. 

We are used to looking at events here on Earth from the perspective of insiders for a simple reason:  We are insiders.  This world may be nothing but an insignificant speck of blue cosmic dust to outsiders, looking at us from some remote world.  But to us, it is everything. 

We were all born here. 

Our people are from here. 

The way of life here on Earth is the only way of life we know. 

As far as we are concerned, it is all that exists.

The highest species on this world, humans, currently have a lot of problems.  But we don’t see them as ‘the problems that a species living on a little blue speck of cosmic dust may have.’  We see them as divine, momentous, and the result of factors that appear to be above us all, and far more complex than we (the plaything creations of some power that is unimaginably more intelligent than we are) could possibly understand.   

We can’t be objective about events here on Earth because we are too close to these events.  We look at these events through a lens, the lens of insiders.  We have our families to worry about, our bills to pay, loyalties to honor.  We live in societies that are based on the division of the human race into the entities we call ‘countries.’   Countries play a large role in the world around us.  We are raised and educated to believe we owe our allegiance to our country, that we must defend and protect it even if we must do horrible things to protect it.  For example, we may be asked to contribute to a fund that supports a military complex to build bombs that are used to kill children, by paying taxes.  We are raised to believe this is a solemn obligation we have that we must never question.  Protecting the country may require that we make incredible sacrifices, giving up our loved ones (who die or whose lives are ruined in wars) or even our own lives to fulfill this obligation.   We take this obligation for granted.  All people on Earth have an obligation to their countries.  It is the way this world, the only world we know, works. 

What are we protecting the entities called ‘our countries’ from?

We take it for granted that our leaders understand this.  We have enemies.  These enemies rape the part of the world they control to get resources to make weapons to harm us.  We can’t compete with them unless we do the same.  So, we must do this.  We have no choice. 

This would probably be seen as a very strange situation to an outsider on a world that had developed differently.  But, to us, from our perspective, it is normal.  It is the only way things have ever worked, or at least the only way we have been told things ever work.  (The truth is different, as Fact Based History shows.  The subject we are taught called ‘history’ in school is not a true, objective, and unbiased representation of past events that all members of the world would agree actually happened, and that the human race could use to build a better world for the future.) 

The books in the New Perspective Series look at key realities of the world around us as would outsiders.  These outsiders have no stake in events on this world; they have no national allegiances, they have no affiliation with any Earth religion, they have no need for the things we use for money on this world and no need to worry about the details we have to worry about.   

          Are there outsiders?   New space space-based telescopes including the Webb are showing us that there are numerous other worlds in star systems all around us.  Scientists can interpolate this data to come up with some idea of the number of other worlds that may be capable of supporting the kinds of life that exist here.  Current estimates lead to a number of about 2 septillion.  (That is 2 with 21 zeros after it). 
          By counting galaxies in a few seconds of arc in space that have no nearby stars to interfere, and multiplying by the total arc seconds in a sphere, scientists have determined there are about 2 trillion galaxies.  They have about 100 billion star systems each and the number of worlds per star system averages 1, so there are about 200 septillion worlds in the part of the universe we can see from this part of the galaxy.  If 1% of these worlds is in the ‘Goldilocks zone’ there are about 2 septillion such worlds.
          If we look closely at Earth based life forms (something done in another book in the New Perspective Series, The Meaning of Life) we can see that it came to exist here under conditions that are, well, far from optimal.  The first life forms were actually fantastically complex; they are built on the exact same genetic code as humans.  We know that they came to exist on Earth before the Earth had cooled enough to have a solid rock surface or was even close to being cool enough to support liquid water (a requirement to be in the Goldilocks Zone).  If we accept this evidence, we must conclude that whatever forces led to life existing on Earth can take place and are highly likely to have taken place on many other worlds.   

The books in the New Perspective Series look at key aspects of human existence from the perspective of outsiders.  If there are other worlds with the same kind of life we have here on Earth (life that evolves; see text box above), we would not expect the beings on these other worlds to make exactly the same decisions that we made here on Earth. 

We have a very long history, as Fact Based History shows.   (The evidence exists that show the length, but the people who claim to be historians don’t really want to accept it because it shows that just about everything people have believed about history in the past—including the foundational information they were taught in school—is wrong.  They are the experts and can decide which evidence to ignore, so they ignore almost all real evidence about past events.  Fact Based History goes over this evidence and shows it paints an entirely different picture of our past than conventional historians paint for us.)  

Events that took place millions of years ago have impacts on the way our societies operate today. 

We would not expect the exact same events to have taken place exactly the same way on other inhabited worlds.  They would have been through a different history and would look at existence from a different perspective.  The New Perspective Series is designed to look at key aspects of the realities of life for us here on Earth as would outsiders.  Specifically, it looks at these events from the perspective of objective scientists from a remote world. 

They have access to certain information about how Earth works, the same basic information you and I have. 

          Radio waves travel at the speed of light which, as far as we know, is a fixed speed that is the same for all electromagnetic waves, including light waves.  Every signal from your smart phone, every question you ask the search engines and every response you get, all signals from your WiFi, all signals from the routers of every person on Earth, all satellite signals from both civilian and military transit goes, at some stage, through radio.  These signals all spread out in all directions from Earth at a fixed speed
          We live in a very remote part of the galaxy.  It is very unlikely there are other beings with radio technology in his remoteness.  However, about 20,000 light years away is a part of the galaxy with billions of worlds that are very close together.  The radio waves our devices emit in 2025 will reach these worlds in the year 22,025 AD by our calendar.  If they have the right technology, they can receive and decode these messages.  If they wanted, they could recreate our internet on their world.  They wouldn’t be able to communicate with our internet, of course, but they could ask it questions and get the same answers we get here on Earth today. 

 The New Perspective Series is an attempt to look at important realities of existence here on Earth from this other perspective.  How would they see us? What would they think of the things we consider important? 

The book Possible Societies is about the different arrangements of existence, or societies, that are possible for beings that have evolved to a level of intellect comparable to modern humans.  We may expect that evolving beings on other worlds faced entirely different realities than we did here on Earth.  We would expect that they would evolve differently in response to these different realities.  What are the options?  Possible Societies deals with them from the perspective of beings that in a more densely populated part of the universe than we are here and who therefore have data about a great many worlds with life forms that have more or less the same general capabilities of Earth humans.  It shows that such beings can organize themselves in many ways.  Some are highly destructive and dangerous.  But others work in ways that allow the beings to live in harmony with each other and the world around them. 

The book Preventing Extinction looks a key aspect of human existence from the outside perspective.  We, the members of the human race, are currently facing existential threats.  It is pretty easy to simply give up and live as if these threats don’t exist, because we don’t have a frame of reference that would help us see there is any other option. 

Preventing Extinction on the principles of Fact Based History, Preventing Extinction, and the other books to explore the steps that the beings who live on a world that has taken the path through time that we have taken on this world would need to take to move them off of this path and onto a different path.  The book Possible Societies explains a type of society called ‘socratic societies’ that are very similar to current earth societies, but which work in ways that turn what would otherwise be a collection of billions of individual humans, all acting independently to advance their own interests, to work together to advance their common interests.  Preventing Extinction explains the steps a group of people who are in the situation we are on here on could take to turn their segmented, fragmented, and conflict-based world into one that is under the control of the beings themselves, who have tools they can use to act collectively to meet their common needs.  It shows that the problems that threaten the human race can’t be solved if they are structured as they are now, and the human race has no tools to allow its members to work together.  However, if we create these tools, we are in a position to take steps to change the path through time on which we are now traveling. 

The New Perspective Series is not about a random set of observations that an outsider would make about earth realities.  It is intended to provide practical information.  Fact Based History shows very clearly that humans are not fully evolved and totally rational beings at this point in time.  We are still very primitive in many ways.  We want to believe that we are far more capable than we actually are.  This arrogance prevents us from seeing defects in our genetic and cultural structures that must be removed if we are to survive as a race. 

The New Perspective Series is designed to open mental doors that, I hope, will allow people to see that there really is hope for our race. 

This is important.  From the perspective of insiders, the problems we face don’t appear to have any solutions.  We feel we can’t solve them.  If we feel there is nothing we can do, we won’t even try to do anything.  I do not claim that we are certain to succeed, even if we try our hardest.  I do claim, however, that if we don’t try, we have no chance at all.  The New Perspective Series is designed to help people see that it is worth exploring these issues.  It is worth trying. 

Territorial Sovereignty Societies

 

Humans are very capable beings. 

We can organize our existence in many different ways.

One option involves dividing our species into different groups that act like teams in a massive sport.  We can then divide the land into different territories with borders.  We can then create a set of rules that grant absolute rights to—or sovereignty over—everything  inside each of these bordered territories to one of these teams. 

Additional rules can include the standard foundation of international law called the ‘right of conquest.’   Under this principle, any land that a team conquers from another team belongs to the conqueror, together with anything on or under that land in a pie shaped wedge that goes to the center of the Earth.  They can also include the rights of bequest:  the rights of the current team members transfer to their heirs and assigns for the rest of time. 

The books of the New Perspective Series use the term ‘territorial sovereignty’ to refer to the above principle.  All societies built on the principle of territorial sovereignty are called ‘territorial sovereignty societies.’  Territorial sovereignty is one of the possible foundations that can support societies of both animals and humans. 

Humans did not invent the above principle.  It was a foundational principle of many animal societies for millions of years before humans evolved.  Obviously, these other animals did not have formal written rules for the definitions of the teams and rights they had as we humans have, but they clearly had societies that were built on the above principle.  Many breeds of wolves, for example, have societies that clearly reflect the principle of territorial sovereignty.  The breed called ‘Painted Wolves,’ for example, have fixed territories with well marked borders. (Humans wont be able to identify the borders because our sense of smell isn’t keen enough, but other wolves know exactly where they are.)  The team patrols the borders.  If they detect any members of their species that are not members of their packs in their territory, they track them down and kill them. 

Wolves are noted for their teamwork, both in hunting and defense of their territory.  If a pack of wolves has territorial disputes with another pack, the conflict closely resembles human wars.  The different packs attack each other and kill without remorse or compassion.  Often, they fight until every last member of one of the packs is dead.  There is a very good video of this in the BBC documentary ‘Dynasties, The Painted Wolves’.

 

 

These identities of the animals that are in each pack change over time as older animals die and are replaced by younger pack members.  But the pack has an identify that continues indefinitely (until the pack loses a war and gets wiped out; then the territory belongs to the conquering pack).  This works very much like the human entities called ‘countries:’ the identities of the individuals within each country changes as time passes, but the identify of the country remains the same.  (Again, this lasts until the country is conquered, at which time the conquering country gains control of that land under the principle of right of conquest.) 

Why do wolves do this?  

We can actually understand this but, before we consider it, lets look at one thing we can exclude:   Wolves do not have meetings where they get together and conduct scientific discussions of the different kinds of societies that wolves and other animals can have, then decide ‘this one is for us.’  We know wolves don’t do this because they don’t have the intellectual capability needed for this kind of analysis. 

The term ‘instinct’ basically means anything that motivates animal behavior that can’t be explained by logical analysis or intentional decisions.  This means that all animal behavior falls into the category of instinct.  Humans also have instincts, of course, but not all of our behavior is instinctive.  There are times when our instincts tell us to do one thing and our logical minds tell us to do something else.  But this conflict doesn’t come up for wolves.  Something in their genetic or cultural heratige pushes them to divide their species into packs, divide the land into territories, and allocate each territory to whichever pack can control it with force. 

 

          There is a reason for this kind of instinct.  Fact Based History goes over it in detail, but here is a quick description:  Some land is rich and can support animals under conditions that allow them to remain there and live off of a fairly small territory for their entire lives, without ever having to leave.  Anthropologists call these parcels of land ‘monopolizable.’  If a land can be monopolized by an apex animal, it must be monopolized.  Here is the reason: 
          Imagine first a piece of rich hunting land (from the perspective of a wolf) that is not being monopolized.  Any wolf can come and hunt there.  Since it is rich, a lot of wolves will show up and start hunting.  Say that, at first, the wolves are tolerant and let other wolves come to the territory.  Eventually, there will be more wolves there than the land can support.  At this point, they will start to fight.  Wolves that aren’t willing to fight (those that are easily intimidated) will be removed by more aggressive animals.  Some of the aggressive animals will form into packs that work together.  These packs will be able to easily remove individuals or smaller packs.  The packs that are better at working together will win and remove the less-organized packs.  Eventually, each territory will be controlled by a very well organized pack whose members act as a team both to exploit the resources of that territory and protect their borders.  In the right conditions, nature (the laws of evolution) will require territorial sovereignty in areas that meet certain requirements, for certain animals.
          Animals born into these areas will be raised and trained to be aggressive and possessive.  Any that have genes that prevent these behaviors will be the first to die in battles.  Their genes will go away.  Any that resist the training and are unable to work together well in fights will also perish preferentially.  Over time, only those that have the ‘instincts’ that are needed to help the pack protect its land will be left.  No matter where they come from, the instincts will be passed from generation to generation. 

 

Many animals evolve under conditions that force them into this particular ecological niche.  They divide into teams (packs, troops, teams, tribes, or ‘countries’) and fight over territory.  

Wolves provide a pretty obvious example, but many animals have territorial sovereignty societies.  This includes several species of the genus ‘Gorilla’ and several species of the genus ‘Pan,’ our closest animal ancestors.   (We share about 99% of our DNA with the Pans.) 

Some of our evolutionary ancestors clearly had societies built on territorial sovereignty.  Those on the ‘pre-human animal’ side of the evolution progression would not have been able to use logic and reason, so the forces that pushed them to act this way would be ‘instinctual,’ by definition.  As time passed (millions of years), these animals competed with each other for resources.  Some were smarter:  they had genes that cause them to grow slightly larger and more complex brains, capable of processing more information.  They were able to meet their needs better than their peers and had better chances of living long enough to breed and pass these genes to the next generation.  Each step was probably very tiny.  But over a long period of time, these improvements compounded.  If you could watch a ‘fast forward’ version of this multi-million year period, you would see that there was progress.  The intelligence level of the average member of the Pan genus got higher and higher. 

 

Evolution

 

They used their greater intelligence to do the things their instincts told them to do better than their ancestors had done.  Their instincts told them to form into tight-knit loyal troops (the name for ‘a grouping of members of the Pan genus) and fight over territory.  As they got smarter, they were able to make better and better tools to use as weapons.  They were also able to organize themselves better so they could work as teams. 

We now have tools we can use to trace the progress of our ancestors almost generation by generation.  (DNA sequencing allows us to determine when new genes are overlaid on existing genes.  We can tell which came first.)   We have dating tools we can use to understand when these animals passed certain key milestones in their progress.  (The use of fire, for example, the use of clothing, the exit from Africa to ‘the rest of the world,’ the progress across ‘the rest of the world,’ the assertion of domination over lower species, and the use of complex language are ‘milestones.’)  We can understand where they lived and how they lived at each stage in development.

Fact Based History traces this progress.  It shows that the principle of territorial sovereignty was the foundational element of the societies of some of our ancient ancestors (specifically the highly territorial Pans that are commonly called ‘Chimpanzees).  This system was still with them when some of them, living close to oil pits that were always on fire, mastered the use of this fantastic tool.  It was still with them when they took advantage of this tool to allow them to live in areas where they couldn’t live without fire, allowing them to leave Africa and travel to remote parts of Asia and Europe.  It was still with them when they built the first fortress states and walled states and then the first massive city states.  (Artifacts of these ancient city states are all over Europe, Asia, and North Africa.)  This kind of system got a great boost when horses were domesticated; with horses, they could defend far larger areas and the city states turned into the large entities that we now call ‘countries.’  The countries evolved in a very understandable way from the early systems of 6,000 years ago to the systems we have today. 

 

Territorial Sovereignty Societies 

 

The books in the New Perspective Series use the term ‘territorial sovereignty societies’ to refer to societies built on this simple premise:  the group of animals/humans is divided into teams; the land is divided into territories, and each of the teams winds up in charge of one of the territories.  If their control over the territory is absolute they have ‘sovereignty’ over it.  All societies with this absolute control of territory are called ‘territorial sovereignty societies.’ 

There are many ways that humans can organize their societies.   We can live like territorial animals if we want:  we have this capability.  But we don’t have to do this.  We can live other ways also. 

Excerpts about Education and Nations
From Πολιτεία (Politica) by Socrates and Plato

 

 

 

Education

 

 

Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in story-telling,
and our story shall be the education of our heroes.

By all means.

And what shall be their education?  Can we find a better than the traditional sort?–and this has two
divisions, gymnastic for the body, and music for the soul.

True.

Shall we begin education with music, and go on to gymnastic
afterwards?

By all means.

And when you speak of music, do you include literature or
not?

I do.

And literature may be either true or false?

Yes.

And the
young should be trained in both kinds, and we begin with the false?

I do not understand your meaning, he said.

You
know, I said, that we begin by telling children stories which, though not
wholly destitute of truth, are in the main fictitious; and these stories are
told them when they are not of an age to learn gymnastics.

Very true.

That was my meaning when I said that we must teach music
before gymnastics.

Quite right, he said.

You
know also that the beginning is the most important part of any work, especially
in the case of a young and tender thing; for that is the time at which the
character is being formed and the desired impression is more readily taken.

Quite
true.

And
shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which may be
devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds ideas for the most
part the very opposite of those which we should wish them to have when they are
grown up?

We cannot.

Then
the first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction,
and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the
bad; and we will try our best to get mothers and nurses to tell their children
the authorized ones only.

Let them fashion the mind with such tales, even more fondly
than they mould the body with their hands; but most of those which are now in
use must be discarded.

Of what tales are you speaking?  he said.

You may find a model of the lesser in the greater, I said;
for they are necessarily of the same type, and there is the same spirit in both
of them.

Very likely, he replied; but I do not as yet know what you
would term the greater.

Those, I said, which are narrated by Homer and Hesiod, and
the rest of the poets, who have ever been the great story-tellers of mankind.

But which stories do you mean, he said; and what fault do
you find with them?

A fault which is most serious, I said; the fault of telling
a lie, and, what is more, a bad lie.

But when is this fault committed?

Whenever an erroneous representation is made of the nature
of gods and heroes,–as when a painter paints a portrait not having the shadow
of a likeness to the original.

Yes, he said, that sort of thing is certainly very
blamable; but what are the stories which you mean?

First of all, I said, there was that greatest of all lies in
high places, which the poet told about Uranus, and which was a bad lie too,–I
mean what Hesiod says that Uranus did, and how Cronus retaliated on him.

The
doings of Cronus, and the sufferings which in turn his son inflicted upon him,
even if they were true, ought certainly not to be lightly told to young and
thoughtless persons; if possible, they had better be buried in silence.

But if
there is an absolute necessity for their mention, a chosen few might hear them
in a mystery, and they should sacrifice not a common (Eleusinian) pig, but some
huge and unprocurable victim; and then the number of the hearers will be very
few indeed.

Why, yes, said he, those stories are extremely
objectionable.

Yes, Adeimantus,
they are stories not to be repeated in our nation; the young man should not be
told that in committing the worst of crimes he is far from doing anything
outrageous; and that even if he chastises his father when he does wrong, in
whatever manner, he will only be following the example of the first and
greatest among the gods.

I entirely agree with you, he said; in my opinion those
stories are quite unfit to be repeated.

Neither, if we mean our future guardians to regard the habit
of quarrelling among themselves as of all things the basest, should any word be
said to them of the wars in heaven, and of the plots and fightings of the gods
against one another, for they are not true.

No, we shall never mention the battles of the giants, or let
them be embroidered on garments; and we shall be silent about the innumerable
other quarrels of gods and heroes with their friends and relatives.

If they would only believe us we would tell them that
quarrelling is unholy, and that never up to this time has there been any
quarrel between citizens; this is what old men and old women should begin by
telling children; and when they grow up, the poets also should be told to
compose for them in a similar spirit.

But the narrative of Hephaestus binding Here his mother, or
how on another occasion Zeus sent him flying for taking her part when she was
being beaten, and all the battles of the gods in Homer–these tales must not be
admitted into our nation, whether they are supposed to have an allegorical
meaning or not.

For a
young person cannot judge what is allegorical and what is literal; anything
that he receives into his mind at that age is likely to become indelible and
unalterable; and therefore it is most important that the tales which the young
first hear should be models of virtuous thoughts.

There
you are right, he replied; but if any one asks where are such models to be
found and of what tales are you speaking–how shall we answer him?

I said
to him, You and I, Adeimantus, at this moment are not poets, but founders of a nation:
now the founders of a nation ought to know the general forms in which poets
should cast their tales, and the limits which must be observed by them, but to
make the tales is not their business.

 

Now Socrates argues that the old religions are not suitable for the
operation of a nation.  A new religion
must be created to create the right state of mind for the defense of a
nation. 

 

 

Very true,
he said; but what are these forms of theology which you mean?

Something
of this kind, I replied:–God is always to be represented as he truly is,
whatever be the sort of poetry, epic, lyric or tragic, in which the
representation is given.

Right.

And is he
not truly good?  and must he not be
represented as such?

Certainly.

And no good
thing is hurtful?

No, indeed.

And that
which is not hurtful hurts not?

Certainly
not.

And that
which hurts not does no evil?

No.

And can
that which does no evil be a cause of evil?

Impossible.

And the
good is advantageous?

Yes.

And
therefore the cause of well-being?

Yes.

It follows
therefore that the good is not the cause of all things, but of the good only?

Assuredly.

Then God,
if he be good, is not the author of all things, as the many assert, but he is
the cause of a few things only, and not of most things that occur to men.

For few are
the goods of human life, and many are the evils, and the good is to be
attributed to God alone; of the evils the causes are to be sought elsewhere,
and not in him.

That
appears to me to be most true, he said.

Then we
must not listen to Homer or to any other poet who is guilty of the folly
of saying that two casks ’Lie at the threshold of Zeus, full of lots, one of
good, the other of evil lots,’ and that he to whom Zeus gives a mixture of the
two ’Sometimes meets with evil fortune, at other times with good;’ but that he
to whom is given the cup of unmingled ill, ’Him wild hunger drives o’er the
beauteous earth.’ And again– ’Zeus, who is the dispenser of good and evil to
us.’ And if any one asserts that the violation of oaths and treaties, which was
really the work of Pandarus, was brought about by Athene and Zeus, or that the
strife and contention of the gods was instigated by Themis and Zeus, he shall
not have our approval; neither will we allow our young men to hear the words of
Aeschylus, that ’God plants guilt among men when he desires utterly to destroy
a house.’

And if a poet writes of the sufferings of Niobe–the subject
of the tragedy in which these iambic verses occur–or of the house of Pelops, or
of the Trojan war or on any similar theme, either we must not permit him to say
that these are the works of God, or if they are of God, he must devise some
explanation of them such as we are seeking; he must say that God did what was
just and right, and they were the better for being punished; but that those who
are punished are miserable, and that God is the author of their misery–the poet
is not to be permitted to say; though he may say that the wicked are miserable
because they require to be punished, and are benefited by receiving punishment
from God; but that God being good is the author of evil to any one is to be
strenuously denied, and not to be said or sung or heard in verse or prose by
any one whether old or young in any well-ordered commonwealth.

Such a fiction is suicidal, ruinous, impious.

I agree with you, he replied, and am ready to give my assent
to the law.

Let this
then be one of our rules and principles concerning the gods, to which our poets
and recites will be expected to conform,–that God is not the author of all
things, but of good only.

That will
do, he said.

And what do you think of a second principle?  Shall I ask you whether God is a magician,
and of a nature to appear insidiously now in one shape, and now in
another–sometimes himself changing and passing into many forms, sometimes
deceiving us with the semblance of such transformations; or is he one and the
same immutably fixed in his own proper image?

I cannot answer you, he said, without more thought.

Well, I said; but if we suppose a change in anything, that
change must be effected either by the thing itself, or by some other thing?

Most certainly.

And things which are at their best are also least liable to
be altered or discomposed; for example, when healthiest and strongest, the
human frame is least liable to be affected by meats and drinks, and the plant
which is in the fullest vigor also suffers least from winds or the heat of the
sun or any similar causes.

Of course.

And will not the bravest and wisest soul be least confused
or deranged by any external influence?

True.

And the same principle, as I should suppose, applies to all
composite things– furniture, houses, garments: when good and well made, they
are least altered by time and circumstances.

Very true.

Then everything which is good, whether made by art or
nature, or both, is least liable to suffer change from without?

True.

But surely
God and the things of God are in every way perfect?

Of course
they are.

Then he can
hardly be compelled by external influence to take many shapes?

He cannot.

But may he not change and transform himself?

Clearly, he said, that must be the case if he is changed at
all.

And will he then change himself for the better and fairer,
or for the worse and more unsightly?

If he change at all he can only change for the worse, for we
cannot suppose him to be deficient either in virtue or beauty.

Very true, Adeimantus; but then, would any one, whether God
or man, desire to make himself worse?

Impossible.

Then it is impossible that God should ever be willing to
change; being, as is supposed, the fairest and best that is conceivable, every
God remains absolutely and for ever in his own form.

That necessarily follows, he said, in my judgment.

Then, I
said, my dear friend, let none of the poets tell us that ’The gods, taking the
disguise of strangers from other lands, walk up and down countries in all sorts
of forms;’ and let no one slander Proteus and Thetis, neither let any one,
either in tragedy or in any other kind of poetry, introduce Here disguised in
the likeness of a priestess asking an alms ’For the life-giving daughters of
Inachus the river of Argos;’ –let us have no more lies of that sort.

Neither
must we have mothers under the influence of the poets scaring their children
with a bad version of these myths– telling how certain gods, as they say, ’Go
about by night in the likeness of so many strangers and in divers forms;’ but
let them take heed lest they make cowards of their children, and at the same
time speak blasphemy against the gods.

Heaven forbid, he said.

But although the gods are themselves unchangeable, still by
witchcraft and deception they may make us think that they appear in various
forms?

Perhaps, he replied.

Well, but can you imagine that God will be willing to lie,
whether in word or deed, or to put forth a phantom of himself?

I cannot say, he replied.

Do you not know, I said, that the true lie, if such an
expression may be allowed, is hated of gods and men?

What do you mean?  he
said.

I mean that no one is willingly deceived in that which is
the truest and highest part of himself, or about the truest and highest
matters; there, above all, he is most afraid of a lie having possession of him.

Still, he said, I do not comprehend you.

The reason is, I replied, that you attribute some profound
meaning to my words; but I am only saying that deception, or being deceived or
uninformed about the highest realities in the highest part of themselves, which
is the soul, and in that part of them to have and to hold the lie, is what
mankind least like;–that, I say, is what they utterly detest.

There is nothing more hateful to them.

And, as I was just now remarking, this ignorance in the soul
of him who is deceived may be called the true lie; for the lie in words is only
a kind of imitation and shadowy image of a previous affection of the soul, not
pure unadulterated falsehood.

Am I not right?

Perfectly right.

The true lie is hated not only by the gods, but also by men?

Yes.

Whereas
the lie in words is in certain cases useful and not hateful; in dealing with
enemies–that would be an instance; or again, when those whom we call our
friends in a fit of madness or illusion are going to do some harm, then it is
useful and is a sort of medicine or preventive; also in the tales of mythology,
of which we were just now speaking–because we do not know the truth about ancient
times, we make falsehood as much like truth as we can, and so turn it to
account.

Very true, he said.

But can any of these reasons apply to God?  Can we suppose that he is ignorant of
antiquity, and therefore has recourse to invention?

That would be ridiculous, he said.

Then the lying poet has no place in our idea of God?

I should say not.

Or perhaps he may tell a lie because he is afraid of
enemies?

That is inconceivable.

But he may have friends who are senseless or mad?

But no mad or senseless person can be a friend of God.

Then no motive can be imagined why God should lie?

None whatever.

Then the superhuman and divine is absolutely incapable of
falsehood?

Yes.

Then is God perfectly simple and true both in word and deed;
he changes not; he deceives not, either by sign or word, by dream or waking
vision.

Your thoughts, he said, are the reflection of my own.

You agree with me then, I said, that this is the second type
or form in which we should write and speak about divine things.

The gods are not magicians who transform themselves, neither
do they deceive mankind in any way.

I grant that.

Then, although we are admirers of Homer, we do not admire
the lying dream which Zeus sends to Agamemnon; neither will we praise the
verses of Aeschylus in which Thetis says that Apollo at her nuptials ’Was
celebrating in song her fair progeny whose days were to be long, and to know no
sickness.

And when he had spoken of my lot as in all things blessed of
heaven he raised a note of triumph and cheered my soul.

And I thought that the word of Phoebus, being divine and
full of prophecy, would not fail.

And now he himself who uttered the strain, he who was
present at the banquet, and who said this–he it is who has slain my son.’ These
are the kind of sentiments about the gods which will arouse our anger; and he
who utters them shall be refused a chorus; neither shall we allow teachers to
make use of them in the instruction of the young, meaning, as we do, that our guardians, as far as men can be,
should be true worshippers of the gods and like them.

I entirely agree, he said, in these principles, and promise
to make them my laws.

 

The use of Religion in war

 

Such
then, I said, are our principles of theology–some tales are to be told, and
others are not to be told to our disciples from their youth upwards, if we mean
them to honor the gods and their parents, and to value friendship with one
another.

Yes;
and I think that our principles are right, he said.

But if
they are to be courageous, must they not learn other lessons besides these, and
lessons of such a kind as will take away the fear of death?  Can any man be courageous who has the fear
of death in him?

Certainly not, he said.

And can
he be fearless of death, or will he choose death in battle rather than defeat
and slavery, who believes the world below to be real and terrible?

Impossible.

Then we
must assume a control over the narrators of this class of tales as well as over
the others, and beg them not simply to revile but rather to commend the world
below, intimating to them that their descriptions are untrue, and will do harm
to our future warriors.

That will be our duty, he said.

Then, I
said, we shall have to obliterate many obnoxious passages, beginning
with the verses, ’I would rather be a serf on the land of a poor and
portionless man than rule over all the dead who have come to naught.’ We must
also expunge the verse, which tells us how Pluto feared, ’Lest the mansions
grim and squalid which the gods abhor should be seen both of mortals and
immortals.’ And again:– ’O heavens! verily in the house of Hades there is soul
and ghostly form but no mind at all!’ Again of Tiresias:– ’(To him even after
death did Persephone grant mind,) that he alone should be wise; but the other
souls are flitting shades.’ Again:– ’The soul flying from the limbs had gone to
Hades, lamenting her fate, leaving manhood and youth.’ Again:– ’And the soul,
with shrilling cry, passed like smoke beneath the earth.’ And,– ’As bats in
hollow of mystic cavern, whenever any of them has dropped out of the string and
falls from the rock, fly shrilling and cling to one another, so did they with
shrilling cry hold together as they moved.’ And we must beg Homer and the other
poets not to be angry if we strike out these and similar passages, not because
they are unpoetical, or unattractive to the popular ear, but because the
greater the poetical charm of them, the less are they meet for the ears of boys
and men who are meant to be free, and who should fear slavery more than death.

Undoubtedly.

Also we shall have to reject all the terrible and appalling
names which describe the world below–Cocytus and Styx, ghosts under the earth,
and sapless shades, and any similar words of which the very mention causes a
shudder to pass through the inmost soul of him who hears them.

I do
not say that these horrible stories may not have a use of some kind; but there
is a danger that the nerves of our guardians may be rendered too excitable and
effeminate by them.

There is a real danger, he said.

Then we
must have no more of them.

True.

Another and a nobler strain must be composed and sung by us.

Clearly.

And shall we proceed to get rid of the weepings and wailings
of famous men?

They will go with the rest.

But
shall we be right in getting rid of them?
Reflect: our principle is that the good man will not consider death
terrible to any other good man who is his comrade.

Yes; that is our principle.

And
therefore he will not sorrow for his departed friend as though he had suffered
anything terrible?

He will
not.

Such an one, as we further maintain, is sufficient for
himself and his own happiness, and therefore is least in need of other men.

True, he said.

And for this reason the loss of a son or brother, or the
deprivation of fortune, is to him of all men least terrible.

Assuredly.

And therefore he will be least likely to lament, and will
bear with the greatest equanimity any misfortune of this sort which may befall
him.

Yes, he will feel such a misfortune far less than another.

Then we shall be right in getting rid of the lamentations of
famous men, and making them over to women (and not even to women who are good
for anything), or to men of a baser sort, that those who are being educated by us to be the
defenders of their country may scorn to do the like.

That will be very right.

Then we will once more entreat Homer and the other poets not
to depict Achilles, who is the son of a goddess, first lying on his side, then
on his back, and then on his face; then starting up and sailing in a frenzy
along the shores of the barren sea; now taking the sooty ashes in both his
hands and pouring them over his head, or weeping and wailing in the various
modes which Homer has delineated.

Nor should he describe Priam the kinsman of the gods as
praying and beseeching, ’Rolling in the dirt, calling each man loudly by his
name.’ Still more earnestly will we beg of him at all events not to introduce
the gods lamenting and saying, ’Alas! my misery! Alas! that I bore the bravest
to my sorrow.’ But if he must introduce the gods, at any rate let him not dare
so completely to misrepresent the greatest of the gods, as to make him say– ’O
heavens! with my eyes verily I behold a dear friend of mine chased round and
round the city, and my heart is sorrowful.’ Or again:– Woe is me that I am
fated to have Sarpedon, dearest of men to me, subdued at the hands of Patroclus
the son of Menoetius.’ For if, my sweet Adeimantus, our youth seriously listen
to such unworthy representations of the gods, instead of laughing at them as
they ought, hardly will any of them deem that he himself, being but a man, can
be dishonored by similar actions; neither will he rebuke any inclination which
may arise in his mind to say and do the like.

And instead of having any shame or self-control, he will be
always whining and lamenting on slight occasions.

Yes, he said, that is most true.

Yes, I replied; but that surely is what ought not to be, as
the argument has just proved to us; and by that proof we must abide until it is
disproved by a better.

It ought not to be.

Neither
ought our guardians to be given to laughter.

For a
fit of laughter which has been indulged to excess almost always produces a
violent reaction.

So I believe.

Then persons of worth, even if only mortal men, must not be
represented as overcome by laughter, and still less must such a representation
of the gods be allowed.

Still less of the gods, as you say, he replied.

Then we shall not suffer such an expression to be used about
the gods as that of Homer when he describes how ’Inextinguishable laughter
arose among the blessed gods, when they saw Hephaestus bustling about the
mansion.’ On your views,
we must not admit them.

On my
views, if you like to father them on me; that we must not admit them is
certain.

Again, truth should be highly valued; if, as we were saying,
a lie is useless to the gods, and useful only as a medicine to men, then the
use of such medicines should be restricted to physicians; private individuals
have no business with them.

Clearly not, he said.

 

He discusses the role of the lie, the fact that politicians are not just
allowed to lie they are expected to lie, and non-politicians are to be
considered to be traitors if they lie.

 

Then if any
one at all is to have the privilege of lying, the rulers of the nation should
be the persons; and they, in their dealings either with enemies or with their
own citizens, may be allowed to lie for the public good.

But nobody else should meddle with anything of the kind; and
although the rulers have this privilege, for a private man to lie to them in
return is to be deemed a more heinous fault than for the patient or the pupil
of a gymnasium not to speak the truth about his own bodily illnesses to the
physician or to the trainer, or for a sailor not to tell the captain what is
happening about the ship and the rest of the crew, and how things are going
with himself or his fellow sailors.

Most true, he said.

If, then,
the ruler catches anybody beside himself lying in the nation, ’Any of the
craftsmen, whether he be priest or physician or carpenter,’ he will punish him
for introducing a practice which is equally subversive and destructive of ship
or nation.

Most certainly, he said, if our idea of the nation is ever
carried out.

In the next place our youth must be temperate?

Certainly.

Are not the chief elements of temperance, speaking generally,
obedience to commanders and self-control in sensual pleasures?

True.

Then we
shall approve such language as that of Diomede in Homer, ’Friend, sit still and
obey my word,’ and the verses which follow, ’The Greeks marched breathing
prowess, ...in silent awe of their leaders,’ and other sentiments of the same
kind.

We shall.

What of this line, ’O heavy with wine, who hast the eyes of
a dog and the heart of a stag,’ and of the words which follow?  Would you say that these, or any similar
impertinences which private individuals are supposed to address to their
rulers, whether in verse or prose, are well or ill spoken?

They are ill spoken.

They may very possibly afford some amusement, but they do
not conduce to temperance.

And
therefore they are likely to do harm to our young men–you would agree with me
there?

Yes.

And then, again, to make the wisest of men say that nothing
in his opinion is more glorious than ’When the tables are full of bread and
meat, and the cup-bearer carries round wine which he draws from the bowl and
pours into the cups,’ is it fit or conducive to temperance for a young man to
hear such words?  Or the verse ’The
saddest of fates is to die and meet destiny from hunger?’ What would you say
again to the tale of Zeus, who, while other gods and men were asleep and he the
only person awake, lay devising plans, but forgot them all in a moment through
his lust, and was so completely overcome at the sight of Here that he would not
even go into the hut, but wanted to lie with her on the ground, declaring that
he had never been in such a nation of rapture before, even when they first met
one another ’Without the knowledge of their parents;’ or that other tale of how
Hephaestus, because of similar goings on, cast a chain around Ares and Aphrodite?

Indeed,
he said, I am strongly of opinion that they ought not to hear that sort of
thing.

But any
deeds of endurance which are done or told by famous men, these they ought to
see and hear; as, for example, what is said in the verses, ’He smote his breast,
and thus reproached his heart, Endure, my heart; far worse hast thou endured!’
Certainly, he said.

In the next place, we must not let them be receivers of
gifts or lovers of money.

Certainly not.

Neither must we sing to them of ’Gifts persuading gods, and
persuading reverend kings.’ Neither is Phoenix, the tutor of Achilles, to be
approved or deemed to have given his pupil good counsel when he told him that
he should take the gifts of the Greeks and assist them; but that without a gift
he should not lay aside his anger.

Neither will we believe or acknowledge Achilles himself to
have been such a lover of money that he took Agamemnon’s gifts, or that when he
had received payment he restored the dead body of Hector, but that without
payment he was unwilling to do so.

Undoubtedly,
he said, these are not sentiments which can be approved.

Loving Homer as I do, I hardly like to say that in
attributing these feelings to Achilles, or in believing that they are truly
attributed to him, he is guilty of downright impiety.

As little can I believe the narrative of his insolence to
Apollo, where he says, ’Thou hast wronged me, O far-darter, most abominable of
deities.

Verily I would be even with thee, if I had only the power;’
or his insubordination to the river-god, on whose divinity he is ready to lay
hands; or his offering to the dead Patroclus of his own hair, which had been
previously dedicated to the other river-god Spercheius, and that he actually
performed this vow; or that he dragged Hector round the tomb of Patroclus, and
slaughtered the captives at the pyre; of all this I cannot believe that he was
guilty, any more than I can allow our citizens to believe that he, the wise
Cheiron’s pupil, the son of a goddess and of Peleus who was the gentlest of men
and third in descent from Zeus, was so disordered in his wits as to be at one
time the slave of two seemingly inconsistent passions, meanness, not untainted
by avarice, combined with overweening contempt of gods and men.

You are quite right, he replied.

And let us equally refuse to believe, or allow to be
repeated, the tale of Theseus son of Poseidon, or of Peirithous son of Zeus,
going forth as they did to perpetrate a horrid rape; or of any other hero or
son of a god daring to do such impious and dreadful things as they falsely
ascribe to them in our day: and let us further compel the poets to declare
either that these acts were not done by them, or that they were not the sons of
gods;–both in the same breath they shall not be permitted to affirm.

We will not
have them trying to persuade our youth that the gods are the authors of evil,
and that heroes are no better than men–sentiments which, as we were saying, are
neither pious nor true, for we have already proved that evil cannot come from
the gods.

Assuredly not.

And further they are likely to have a bad effect on those
who hear them; for everybody will begin to excuse his own vices when he is
convinced that similar wickedness are always being perpetrated by– ’The
kindred of the gods, the relatives of Zeus, whose ancestral altar, the altar of
Zeus, is aloft in air on the peak of Ida,’ and who have ’the blood of deities
yet flowing in their veins.’ And therefore let us put an end to such tales,
lest they engender laxity of morals among the young.

By all means, he replied.

But now
that we are determining what classes of subjects are or are not to be spoken
of, let us see whether any have been omitted by us.

The manner in which gods and demigods and heroes and the
world below should be treated has been already laid down.

Very true.

And what shall we say about men?  That is clearly the remaining portion of our subject.

Clearly so.

But we are not in a condition to answer this question at
present, my friend.

Why not?

Because, if I am not mistaken, we shall have to say that about
men poets and story-tellers are guilty of making the gravest misstatements when
they tell us that wicked men are often happy, and the good miserable; and that
injustice is profitable when undetected, but that justice is a man’s own loss
and another’s gain–these things we shall forbid them to utter, and command them
to sing and say the opposite.

To be sure we shall, he replied.

But if you admit that I am right in this, then I shall
maintain that you have implied the principle for which we have been all along
contending.

I grant the truth of your inference.

That such things are or are not to be said about men is a
question which we cannot determine until we have discovered what justice is,
and how naturally advantageous to the possessor, whether he seem to be just or
not.

Most true, he said.

Enough
of the subjects of poetry: let us now speak of the style; and when this has
been considered, both matter and manner will have been completely treated.

I do not understand what you mean, said Adeimantus.

Then I must make you understand; and perhaps I may be more
intelligible if I put the matter in this way.

You are aware, I suppose, that all mythology and poetry is a
narration of events, either past, present, or to come?

Certainly, he replied.

And narration may be either simple narration, or imitation,
or a union of the two?

That again, he said, I do not quite understand.

I fear that I must be a ridiculous teacher when I have so
much difficulty in making myself apprehended.

Like a bad speaker, therefore, I will not take the whole of
the subject, but will break a piece off in illustration of my meaning.

You know the first lines of the Iliad, in which the poet
says that Chryses prayed Agamemnon to release his daughter, and that Agamemnon
flew into a passion with him; whereupon Chryses, failing of his object, invoked
the anger of the God against the Achaeans.

Now as far as these lines, ’And he prayed all the Greeks,
but especially the two sons of Atreus, the chiefs of the people,’ the poet is
speaking in his own person; he never leads us to suppose that he is any one
else.

But in what follows he takes the person of Chryses, and then
he does all that he can to make us believe that the speaker is not Homer, but
the aged priest himself.

And in this double form he has cast the entire narrative of
the events which occurred at Troy and in Ithaca and throughout the Odyssey.

Yes.

And a narrative it remains both in the speeches which the
poet recites from time to time and in the intermediate passages?

Quite true.

But when the poet speaks in the person of another, may we
not say that he assimilates his style to that of the person who, as he informs
you, is going to speak?

Certainly.

And this assimilation of himself to another, either by the
use of voice or gesture, is the imitation of the person whose character he
assumes?

Of course.

Then in this case the narrative of the poet may be said to
proceed by way of imitation?

Very true.

Or, if the poet everywhere appears and never conceals
himself, then again the imitation is dropped, and his poetry becomes simple
narration.

However, in order that I may make my meaning quite clear,
and that you may no more say, ’I don’t understand,’ I will show how the change
might be effected.

If Homer had said, ’The priest came, having his daughter’s
ransom in his hands, supplicating the Achaeans, and above all the kings;’ and
then if, instead of speaking in the person of Chryses, he had continued in his
own person, the words would have been, not imitation, but simple narration.

The passage would have run as follows (I am no poet, and
therefore I drop the metre), ’The priest came and prayed the gods on behalf of
the Greeks that they might capture Troy and return safely home, but begged that
they would give him back his daughter, and take the ransom which he brought,
and respect the God.

Thus he spoke, and the other Greeks revered the priest and
assented.

But Agamemnon was wroth, and bade him depart and not come
again, lest the staff and chaplets of the God should be of no avail to him–the
daughter of Chryses should not be released, he said–she should grow old with
him in Argos.

And then he told him to go away and not to provoke him, if
he intended to get home unscathed.

And the old man went away in fear and silence, and, when he
had left the camp, he called upon Apollo by his many names, reminding him of
everything which he had done pleasing to him, whether in building his temples,
or in offering sacrifice, and praying that his good deeds might be returned to
him, and that the Achaeans might expiate his tears by the arrows of the
god,’–and so on.

In this way the whole becomes simple narrative.

I understand, he said.

Or you may suppose the opposite case–that the intermediate
passages are omitted, and the dialogue only left.

That also, he said, I understand; you mean, for example, as
in tragedy.

You have conceived my meaning perfectly; and if I mistake
not, what you failed to apprehend before is now made clear to you, that poetry
and mythology are, in some cases, wholly imitative–instances of this are
supplied by tragedy and comedy; there is likewise the opposite style, in which
the poet is the only speaker–of this the dithyramb affords the best example;
and the combination of both is found in epic, and in several other styles of
poetry.

Do I take you with me?

Yes, he said; I see now what you meant.

I will
ask you to remember also what I began by saying, that we had done with the
subject and might proceed to the style.

Yes, I remember.

In saying this, I intended to imply that we must come to an
understanding about the mimetic art,–whether the poets, in narrating their
stories, are to be allowed by us to imitate, and if so, whether in whole or in
part, and if the latter, in what parts; or should all imitation be prohibited?

You mean, I suspect, to ask whether tragedy and comedy shall
be admitted into our nation?

Yes, I said; but there may be more than this in question: I
really do not know as yet, but whither the argument may blow, thither we go.

And go we will, he said.

Then, Adeimantus, let me ask you whether our guardians ought
to be imitators; or rather, has not this question been decided by the rule
already laid down that one man can only do one thing well, and not many; and
that if he attempt many, he will altogether fail of gaining much reputation in
any?

Certainly.

And this is equally true of imitation; no one man can
imitate many things as well as he would imitate a single one?

He cannot.

Then the same person will hardly be able to play a serious
part in life, and at the same time to be an imitator and imitate many other
parts as well; for even when two species of imitation are nearly allied, the
same persons cannot succeed in both, as, for example, the writers of tragedy
and comedy–did you not just now call them imitations?

Yes, I did; and you are right in thinking that the same
persons cannot succeed in both.

Any more than they can be rhapsodists and actors at once?

True.

Neither are comic and tragic actors the same; yet all these
things are but imitations.

They are so.

And human nature, Adeimantus, appears to have been coined
into yet smaller pieces, and to be as incapable of imitating many things well,
as of performing well the actions of which the imitations are copies.

Quite true, he replied.

If then
we adhere to our original notion and bear in mind that our guardians, setting
aside every other business, are to dedicate themselves wholly to the
maintenance of freedom in the nation, making this their craft, and engaging in
no work which does not bear on this end, they ought not to practice or imitate
anything else; if they imitate at all, they should imitate from youth upward
only those characters which are suitable to their profession–the courageous,
temperate, holy, free, and the like; but they should not depict or be skilful
at imitating any kind of illiberality or baseness, lest from imitation they
should come to be what they imitate.

Did you never observe how imitations, beginning in early
youth and continuing far into life, at length grow into habits and become a
second nature, affecting body, voice, and mind?

Yes, certainly, he said.

Then, I said, we will not allow those for whom we profess a
care and of whom we say that they ought to be good men, to imitate a woman,
whether young or old, quarrelling with her husband, or striving and vaunting
against the gods in conceit of her happiness, or when she is in affliction, or
sorrow, or weeping; and certainly not one who is in sickness, love, or labor.

Very right, he said.

Neither must they represent slaves, male or female,
performing the offices of slaves?

They must not.

And surely not bad men, whether cowards or any others, who
do the reverse of what we have just been prescribing, who scold or mock or
revile one another in drink or out of drink, or who in any other manner sin
against themselves and their neighbors in word or deed, as the manner of such
is.

Neither should they be trained to imitate the action or
speech of men or women who are mad or bad; for madness, like vice, is to be
known but not to be practiced or imitated.

Very true, he replied.

Neither may they imitate smiths or other artificers, or
oarsmen, or boatswains, or the like?

How can they, he said, when they are not allowed to apply
their minds to the callings of any of these?

Nor may they imitate the neighing of horses, the bellowing
of bulls, the murmur of rivers and roll of the ocean, thunder, and all that
sort of thing?

Nay, he said, if madness be forbidden, neither may they copy
the behavior of madmen.

You mean, I said, if I understand you aright, that there is
one sort of narrative style which may be employed by a truly good man when he
has anything to say, and that another sort will be used by a man of an opposite
character and education.

And which are these two sorts?  he asked.

Suppose, I answered, that a just and good man in the course
of a narration comes on some saying or action of another good man,–I should
imagine that he will like to personate him, and will not be ashamed of this
sort of imitation: he will be most ready to play the part of the good man when
he is acting firmly and wisely; in a less degree when he is overtaken by
illness or love or drink, or has met with any other disaster.

But when he comes to a character which is unworthy of him,
he will not make a study of that; he will disdain such a person, and will
assume his likeness, if at all, for a moment only when he is performing some
good action; at other times he will be ashamed to play a part which he has
never practiced, nor will he like to fashion and frame himself after the baser
models; he feels the employment of such an art, unless in jest, to be beneath
him, and his mind revolts at it.

So I should expect, he replied.

Then he will adopt a mode of narration such as we have
illustrated out of Homer, that is to say, his style will be both imitative and
narrative; but there will be very little of the former, and a great deal of the
latter.

Do you agree?

Certainly, he said; that is the model which such a speaker
must necessarily take.

But there is another sort of character who will narrate
anything, and, the worse he is, the more unscrupulous he will be; nothing will
be too bad for him: and he will be ready to imitate anything, not as a joke,
but in right good earnest, and before a large company.

As I was just now saying, he will attempt to represent the
roll of thunder, the noise of wind and hail, or the creaking of wheels, and
pulleys, and the various sounds of flutes, pipes, trumpets, and all sorts of
instruments: he will bark like a dog, bleat like a sheep, or crow like a cock;
his entire art will consist in imitation of voice and gesture, and there will
be very little narration.

That, he said, will be his mode of speaking.

These, then, are the two kinds of style?

Yes.

And you would agree with me in saying that one of them is
simple and has but slight changes; and if the harmony and rhythm are also
chosen for their simplicity, the result is that the speaker, if he speaks
correctly, is always pretty much the same in style, and he will keep within the
limits of a single harmony (for the changes are not great), and in like manner
he will make use of nearly the same rhythm?

That is quite true, he said.

Whereas the other requires all sorts of harmonies and all
sorts of rhythms, if the music and the style are to correspond, because the
style has all sorts of changes.

That is also perfectly true, he replied.

And do not the two styles, or the mixture of the two,
comprehend all poetry, and every form of expression in words?  No one can say anything except in one or
other of them or in both together.

They include all, he said.

And
shall we receive into our nation all the three styles, or one only of the two
unmixed styles?  or would you include
the mixed?

I
should prefer only to admit the pure imitator of virtue.

Yes, I said, Adeimantus, but the mixed style is also very
charming: and indeed the pantomimic, which is the opposite of the one chosen by
you, is the most popular style with children and their attendants, and with the
world in general.

I do not deny it.

But I suppose you would argue that such a style is
unsuitable to our nation, in which human nature is not twofold or manifold, for
one man plays one part only?

Yes; quite unsuitable.

And this is the reason why in our nation, and in our nation
only, we shall find a shoemaker to be a shoemaker and not a pilot also, and a
husbandman to be a husbandman and not a dicast also, and a soldier a soldier
and not a trader also, and the same throughout?

True, he said.

And
therefore when any one of these pantomimic gentlemen, who are so clever that
they can imitate anything, comes to us, and makes a proposal to exhibit himself
and his poetry, we will fall down and worship him as a sweet and holy and
wonderful being; but we must also inform him that in our nation such as he are
not permitted to exist; the law will not allow them.

And so when we have anointed him with myrrh, and set a
garland of wool upon his head, we shall send him away to another country.

For we mean to employ for our souls’ health the rougher and
severer poet or story-teller, who will imitate the style of the virtuous only,
and will follow those models which we prescribed at first when we began the
education of our soldiers.

We certainly will, he said, if we have the power.

Then now, my friend, I said, that part of music or literary
education which relates to the story or myth may be considered to be finished;
for the matter and manner have both been discussed.

I think so too, he said.

 

Now he discusses how music needs to be constructed, to make the nation good
at war:

 

 

Next in
order will follow melody and song.

That is obvious.

Every
one can see already what we ought to say about them, if we are to be consistent
with ourselves.

I fear, said Glaucon, laughing, that the word ’every one’
hardly includes me, for I cannot at the moment say what they should be; though
I may guess.

At any rate you can tell that a song or ode has three
parts–the words, the melody, and the rhythm; that degree of knowledge I may
presuppose?

Yes, he said; so much as that you may.

And as
for the words, there will surely be no difference between words which are and
which are not set to music; both will conform to the same laws, and these have
been already determined by us?

Yes.

And the melody and rhythm will depend upon the words?

Certainly.

We were
saying, when we spoke of the subject-matter, that we had no need of lamentation
and strains of sorrow?

True.

And which are the harmonies expressive of sorrow?  You are musical, and can tell me.

The harmonies which you mean are the mixed or tenor Lydian,
and the fulltoned or bass Lydian, and such like.

These then, I said, must be banished; even to women who have
a character to maintain they are of no use, and much less to men.

Certainly.

In the next place, drunkenness and softness and indolence
are utterly unbecoming the character of our guardians.

Utterly unbecoming.

And which are the soft or drinking harmonies?

The Ionian, he replied, and the Lydian; they are termed
’relaxed.’ Well, and are
these of any military use?

Quite
the reverse, he replied; and if so the Dorian and the Phrygian are the only
ones which you have left.

I answered: Of the harmonies I know nothing, but I want to have one warlike, to
sound the note or accent which a brave man utters in the hour of danger and
stern resolve, or when his cause is failing, and he is going to wounds or death
or is overtaken by some other evil, and at every such crisis meets the blows of
fortune with firm step and a determination to endure; and another to be used by him in times of peace
and freedom of action, when there is no pressure of necessity, and he is
seeking to persuade God by prayer, or man by instruction and admonition, or on
the other hand, when he is expressing his willingness to yield to persuasion or
entreaty or admonition, and which represents him when by prudent conduct he has
attained his end, not carried away by his success, but acting moderately and
wisely under the circumstances, and acquiescing in the event.

These two harmonies I ask you to leave; the strain of
necessity and the strain of freedom, the strain of the unfortunate and the
strain of the fortunate, the strain of courage, and the strain of temperance;
these, I say, leave.

And these, he replied, are the Dorian and Phrygian harmonies
of which I was just now speaking.

Then, I
said, if these and these only are to be used in our songs and melodies, we
shall not want multiplicity of notes or a panharmonic scale?

I suppose not.

Then we shall not maintain the artificers of lyres with
three corners and complex scales, or the makers of any other many-stringed
curiously- harmonized instruments?

Certainly not.

But what do you say to flute-makers and flute-players?  Would you admit them into our nation when
you reflect that in this composite use of harmony the flute is worse than all
the stringed instruments put together; even the panharmonic music is only an imitation
of the flute?

Clearly not.

There remain then only the lyre and the harp for use in the
city, and the shepherds may have a pipe in the country.

That is surely the conclusion to be drawn from the argument.

The preferring of Apollo and his instruments to Marsyas and
his instruments is not at all strange, I said.

Not at all, he replied.

And so,
by the dog of Egypt, we have been unconsciously purging the nation, which not
long ago we termed luxurious.

And we have done wisely, he replied.

Then let us now finish the purgation, I said.

Next in order to harmonies, rhythms will naturally follow,
and they should be subject to the same rules, for we ought not to seek out
complex systems of metre, or metres of every kind, but rather to discover what
rhythms are the expressions of a courageous and harmonious life; and when we
have found them, we shall adapt the foot and the melody to words having a like
spirit, not the words to the foot and melody.

To say what these rhythms are will be your duty–you must
teach me them, as you have already taught me the harmonies.

But, indeed, he replied, I cannot tell you.

I only know that there are some three principles of rhythm
out of which metrical systems are framed, just as in sounds there are four
notes (i.e. the four notes of the chord.) out of which all the harmonies are
composed; that is an observation which I have made.

But of what sort of lives they are severally the imitations
I am unable to say.

Then, I said, we must take Damon into our counsels; and he
will tell us what rhythms are expressive of meanness, or insolence, or fury, or
other unworthiness, and what are to be reserved for the expression of opposite
feelings.

And I think that I have an indistinct recollection of his
mentioning a complex Cretic rhythm; also a dactylic or heroic, and he arranged
them in some manner which I do not quite understand, making the rhythms equal
in the rise and fall of the foot, long and short alternating; and, unless I am
mistaken, he spoke of an iambic as well as of a trochaic rhythm, and assigned
to them short and long quantities.

Also in some cases he appeared to praise or censure the
movement of the foot quite as much as the rhythm; or perhaps a combination of
the two; for I am not certain what he meant.

These matters, however, as I was saying, had better be
referred to Damon himself, for the analysis of the subject would be difficult,
you know?  (Socrates expresses himself
carelessly in accordance with his assumed ignorance of the details of the
subject.

In the first part of the sentence he appears to be speaking
of paeonic rhythms which are in the ratio of 3/2; in the second part, of
dactylic and anapaestic rhythms, which are in the ratio of 1/1; in the last
clause, of iambic and trochaic rhythms, which are in the ratio of 1/2 or 2/1.)
Rather so, I should say.

But there is no difficulty in seeing that grace or the
absence of grace is an effect of good or bad rhythm.

None at all.

And also that good and bad rhythm naturally assimilate to a
good and bad style; and that harmony and discord in like manner follow style;
for our principle is that rhythm and harmony are regulated by the words, and
not the words by them.

Just so, he said, they should follow the words.

And will not the words and the character of the style depend
on the temper of the soul?

Yes.

And everything else on the style?

Yes.

Then beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm
depend on simplicity,–I mean the true simplicity of a rightly and nobly ordered
mind and character, not that other simplicity which is only an euphemism for
folly?

Very true, he replied.

And if
our youth are to do their work in life, must they not make these graces and
harmonies their perpetual aim?

They must.

And surely the art of the painter and every other creative
and constructive art are full of them,–weaving, embroidery, architecture, and
every kind of manufacture; also nature, animal and vegetable,–in all of them
there is grace or the absence of grace.

And ugliness and discord and inharmonious motion are nearly
allied to ill words and ill nature, as grace and harmony are the twin sisters
of goodness and virtue and bear their likeness.

That is quite true, he said.

But shall our superintendence go no further, and are the
poets only to be required by us to express the image of the good in their
works, on pain, if they do anything else, of expulsion from our nation?  Or is the same control to be extended to
other artists, and are they also to be prohibited from exhibiting the opposite
forms of vice and intemperance and meanness and indecency in sculpture and
building and the other creative arts; and is he who cannot conform to this rule
of ours to be prevented from practising his art in our nation, lest the taste
of our citizens be corrupted by him?  We
would not have our guardians grow up amid images of moral deformity, as in some
noxious pasture, and there browse and feed upon many a baneful herb and flower
day by day, little by little, until they silently gather a festering mass of
corruption in their own soul.

Let our artists rather be those who are gifted to discern
the true nature of the beautiful and graceful; then will our youth dwell in a
land of health, amid fair sights and sounds, and receive the good in
everything; and beauty, the effluence of fair works, shall flow into the eye
and ear, like a health-giving breeze from a purer region, and insensibly draw
the soul from earliest years into likeness and sympathy with the beauty of
reason.

There can be no nobler training than that, he replied.

And
therefore, I said, Glaucon, musical training is a more potent instrument than
any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of
the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the
soul of him who is rightly educated graceful, or of him who is ill-educated
ungraceful; and also because he who has received this true education of the
inner being will most shrewdly perceive omissions or faults in art and nature,
and with a true taste, while he praises and rejoices over and receives into his
soul the good, and becomes noble and good, he will justly blame and hate the
bad, now in the days of his youth, even before he is able to know the reason
why; and when reason comes he will recognise and salute the friend with whom
his education has made him long familiar.

Yes, he
said, I quite agree with you in thinking that our youth should be trained in
music and on the grounds which you mention.

Just as in learning to read, I said, we were satisfied when
we knew the letters of the alphabet, which are very few, in all their recurring
sizes and combinations; not slighting them as unimportant whether they occupy a
space large or small, but everywhere eager to make them out; and not thinking
ourselves perfect in the art of reading until we recognise them wherever they are
found: True– Or, as we recognise the reflection of letters in the water, or in
a mirror, only when we know the letters themselves; the same art and study
giving us the knowledge of both: Exactly– Even so, as I maintain, neither we nor our guardians,
whom we have to educate, can ever become musical until we and they know the
essential forms of temperance, courage, liberality, magnificence, and
their kindred, as well as the contrary forms, in all their combinations, and
can recognise them and their images wherever they are found, not slighting them
either in small things or great, but believing them all to be within the sphere
of one art and study.

Most assuredly.

And when a beautiful soul harmonizes with a beautiful form,
and the two are cast in one mould, that will be the fairest of sights to him
who has an eye to see it?

The fairest indeed.

And the fairest is also the loveliest?

That may be assumed.

And the man who has the spirit of harmony will be most in
love with the loveliest; but he will not love him who is of an inharmonious
soul?

That is true, he replied, if the deficiency be in his soul;
but if there be any merely bodily defect in another he will be patient of it,
and will love all the same.

I perceive, I said, that you have or have had experiences of
this sort, and I agree.

But let me ask you another question: Has excess of pleasure
any affinity to temperance?

How can that be?  he
replied; pleasure deprives a man of the use of his faculties quite as much as
pain.

Or any affinity to virtue in general?

None whatever.

Any affinity to wantonness and intemperance?

Yes, the greatest.

And is there any greater or keener pleasure than that of
sensual love?

No, nor a madder.

Whereas true love is a love of beauty and order–temperate
and harmonious?

Quite true, he said.

Then no intemperance or madness should be allowed to
approach true love?

Certainly not.

Then mad or intemperate pleasure must never be allowed to
come near the lover and his beloved; neither of them can have any part in it if
their love is of the right sort?

No, indeed, Socrates, it must never come near them.

Then I suppose that in the country which we are founding you
would make a law to the effect that a friend should use no other familiarity to
his love than a father would use to his son, and then only for a noble purpose,
and he must first have the other’s consent; and this rule is to limit him in
all his intercourse, and he is never to be seen going further, or, if he
exceeds, he is to be deemed guilty of coarseness and bad taste.

I quite agree, he said.

Thus much of music, which makes a fair ending; for what
should be the end of music if not the love of beauty?

I agree, he said.

After music comes gymnastic, in which our youth are next to
be trained.

Certainly.

Gymnastic as well as music should begin in early years; the
training in it should be careful and should continue through life.

Now my belief is,–and this is a matter upon which I should
like to have your opinion in confirmation of my own, but my own belief is,–not
that the good body by any bodily excellence improves the soul, but, on the
contrary, that the good soul, by her own excellence, improves the body as far
as this may be possible.

What do you say?

Yes, I agree.

 

The mind has been trained, now to the body

 

 

Then,
to the mind when adequately trained, we shall be right in handing over the more
particular care of the body; and in order to avoid prolixity we will now only
give the general outlines of the subject.

Very good.

That they must abstain from intoxication has been already
remarked by us; for of all persons a guardian should be the last to get drunk
and not know where in the world he is.

Yes, he said; that a guardian should require another
guardian to take care of him is ridiculous indeed.

But
next, what shall we say of their food; for the men are in training for the
great contest of all–are they not?

Yes, he said.

And will the habit of body of our ordinary athletes be
suited to them?

Why not?

I am afraid, I said, that a habit of body such as they have
is but a sleepy sort of thing, and rather perilous to health.

Do you not observe that these athletes sleep away their
lives, and are liable to most dangerous illnesses if they depart, in ever so
slight a degree, from their customary regimen?

Yes, I do.

Then, I
said, a finer sort of training will be required for our warrior athletes, who
are to be like wakeful dogs, and to see and hear with the utmost
keenness; amid the many changes of water and also of food, of summer heat and
winter cold, which they will have to endure when on a campaign, they must not
be liable to break down in health.

That is my view.

The really excellent gymnastic is twin sister of that simple
music which we were just now describing.

How so?

Why, I
conceive that there is a gymnastic which, like our music, is simple and good;
and especially the military gymnastic.

What do you mean?

My meaning may be learned from Homer; he, you know, feeds
his heroes at their feasts, when they are campaigning, on soldiers’ fare; they
have no fish, although they are on the shores of the Hellespont, and they are
not allowed boiled meats but only roast, which is the food most convenient for
soldiers, requiring only that they should light a fire, and not involving the
trouble of carrying about pots and pans.

True.

And I can hardly be mistaken in saying that sweet sauces are
nowhere mentioned in Homer.

In proscribing them, however, he is not singular; all
professional athletes are well aware that a man who is to be in good condition
should take nothing of the kind.

Yes, he said; and knowing this, they are quite right in not
taking them.

Then you would not approve of Syracusan dinners, and the
refinements of Sicilian cookery?

I think not.

Nor, if
a man is to be in condition, would you allow him to have a Corinthian girl as
his fair friend?

Certainly not.

Neither would you approve of the delicacies, as they are
thought, of Athenian confectionary?

Certainly not.

All such feeding and living may be rightly compared by us to
melody and song composed in the panharmonic style, and in all the rhythms.

Exactly.

There complexity engendered licence, and here disease;
whereas simplicity in music was the parent of temperance in the soul; and
simplicity in gymnastic of health in the body.

Most true, he said.

But when intemperance and diseases multiply in a nation,
halls of justice and medicine are always being opened; and the arts of the
doctor and the lawyer give themselves airs, finding how keen is the interest
which not only the slaves but the freemen of a country take about them.

Of course.

And yet what greater proof can there be of a bad and
disgraceful nation of education than this, that not only artisans and the
meaner sort of people need the skill of first-rate physicians and judges, but
also those who would profess to have had a liberal education?  Is it not disgraceful, and a great sign of
want of good-breeding, that a man should have to go abroad for his law and
physic because he has none of his own at home, and must therefore surrender
himself into the hands of other men whom he makes lords and judges over him?

Of all things, he said, the most disgraceful.

Would you say ’most,’ I replied, when you consider that
there is a further stage of the evil in which a man is not only a life-long
litigant, passing all his days in the courts, either as plaintiff or defendant,
but is actually led by his bad taste to pride himself on his litigiousness; he
imagines that he is a master in dishonesty; able to take every crooked turn,
and wriggle into and out of every hole, bending like a withy and getting out of
the way of justice: and all for what?–in order to gain small points not worth
mentioning, he not knowing that so to order his life as to be able to do
without a napping judge is a far higher and nobler sort of thing.

Is not that still more disgraceful?

Yes, he said, that is still more disgraceful.

Well, I said, and to require the help of medicine, not when
a wound has to be cured, or on occasion of an epidemic, but just because, by
indolence and a habit of life such as we have been describing, men fill
themselves with waters and winds, as if their bodies were a marsh, compelling
the ingenious sons of Asclepius to find more names for diseases, such as
flatulence and catarrh; is not this, too, a disgrace?

Yes, he said, they do certainly give very strange and
newfangled names to diseases.

Yes, I said, and I do not believe that there were any such
diseases in the days of Asclepius; and this I infer from the circumstance that
the hero Eurypylus, after he has been wounded in Homer, drinks a posset of
Pramnian wine well besprinkled with barley-meal and grated cheese, which are
certainly inflammatory, and yet the sons of Asclepius who were at the Trojan
war do not blame the damsel who gives him the drink, or rebuke Patroclus, who
is treating his case.

Well, he said, that was surely an extraordinary drink to be
given to a person in his condition.

Not so extraordinary, I replied, if you bear in mind that in
former days, as is commonly said, before the time of Herodicus, the guild of
Asclepius did not practise our present system of medicine, which may be said to
educate diseases.

But Herodicus, being a trainer, and himself of a sickly
constitution, by a combination of training and doctoring found out a way of
torturing first and chiefly himself, and secondly the rest of the world.

How was that?  he
said.

By the invention of lingering death; for he had a mortal
disease which he perpetually tended, and as recovery was out of the question,
he passed his entire life as a valetudinarian; he could do nothing but attend
upon himself, and he was in constant torment whenever he departed in anything
from his usual regimen, and so dying hard, by the help of science he struggled
on to old age.

A rare reward of his skill! Yes, I said; a reward which a
man might fairly expect who never understood that, if Asclepius did not
instruct his descendants in valetudinarian arts, the omission arose, not from
ignorance or inexperience of such a branch of medicine, but because he knew
that in all well-ordered  nations every
individual has an occupation to which he must attend, and has therefore no
leisure to spend in continually being ill.

This we remark in the case of the artisan, but, ludicrously
enough, do not apply the same rule to people of the richer sort.

How do you mean?  he
said.

I mean this: When a carpenter is ill he asks the physician
for a rough and ready cure; an emetic or a purge or a cautery or the
knife,–these are his remedies.

And if some one prescribes for him a course of dietetics,
and tells him that he must swathe and swaddle his head, and all that sort of
thing, he replies at once that he has no time to be ill, and that he sees no
good in a life which is spent in nursing his disease to the neglect of his
customary employment; and therefore bidding good-bye to this sort of physician,
he resumes his ordinary habits, and either gets well and lives and does his
business, or, if his constitution fails, he dies and has no more trouble.

Yes, he said, and a man in his condition of life ought to
use the art of medicine thus far only.

Has he not, I said, an occupation; and what profit would there be in his life if he
were deprived of his occupation?

Quite true, he said.

But with the rich man this is otherwise; of him we do not
say that he has any specially appointed work which he must perform, if he would
live.

He is generally supposed to have nothing to do.

Then you never heard of the saying of Phocylides, that as
soon as a man has a livelihood he should practise virtue?

Nay, he said, I think that he had better begin somewhat
sooner.

Let us not have a dispute with him about this, I said; but
rather ask ourselves: Is the practice of virtue obligatory on the rich man, or
can he live without it?

And if obligatory on him, then let us raise a further
question, whether this dieting of disorders, which is an impediment to the
application of the mind in carpentering and the mechanical arts, does not
equally stand in the way of the sentiment of Phocylides?

Of that, he replied, there can be no doubt; such excessive
care of the body, when carried beyond the rules of gymnastic, is most inimical
to the practice of virtue.

Yes, indeed, I replied, and equally incompatible with the
management of a house, an army, or an office of nation; and, what is most
important of all, irreconcileable with any kind of study or thought or
self-reflection–there is a constant suspicion that headache and giddiness are
to be ascribed to philosophy, and hence all practising or making trial of
virtue in the higher sense is absolutely stopped; for a man is always fancying
that he is being made ill, and is in constant anxiety about the nation of his
body.

Yes, likely enough.

And therefore our politic Asclepius may be supposed to have
exhibited the power of his art only to persons who, being generally of healthy
constitution and habits of life, had a definite ailment; such as these he cured
by purges and operations, and bade them live as usual, herein consulting the
interests of the nation; but bodies which disease had penetrated through and
through he would not have attempted to cure by gradual processes of evacuation
and infusion: he did not want to lengthen out good-for-nothing lives, or to
have weak fathers begetting weaker sons; –if a man was not able to live in the ordinary way he had
no business to cure him; for such a cure would have been of no use either to
himself, or to the nation.

Then, he said, you regard Asclepius as a  nationsman.

Clearly; and his character is further illustrated by his
sons.

Note that they were heroes in the days of old and practised
the medicines of which I am speaking at the siege of Troy: You will remember
how, when Pandarus wounded Menelaus, they ’Sucked the blood out of the wound,
and sprinkled soothing remedies,’ but they never prescribed what the patient
was afterwards to eat or drink in the case of Menelaus, any more than in the
case of Eurypylus; the remedies, as they conceived, were enough to heal any man
who before he was wounded was healthy and regular in his habits; and even
though he did happen to drink a posset of Pramnian wine, he might get well all
the same.

But they would have nothing to do with unhealthy and
intemperate subjects, whose lives were of no use either to themselves or
others; the art of medicine was not designed for their good, and though they
were as rich as Midas, the sons of Asclepius would have declined to attend
them.

They were very acute persons, those sons of Asclepius.

Naturally so, I replied.

Nevertheless, the tragedians and Pindar disobeying our
behests, although they acknowledge that Asclepius was the son of Apollo, say
also that he was bribed into healing a rich man who was at the point of death,
and for this reason he was struck by lightning.

But we, in accordance with the principle already affirmed by
us, will not believe them when they tell us both;– if he was the son of a god,
we maintain that he was not avaricious; or, if he was avaricious, he was not
the son of a god.

All that, Socrates, is excellent; but I should like to put a
question to you: Ought there not to be good physicians in a nation, and are not
the best those who have treated the greatest number of constitutions good and
bad?  and are not the best judges in
like manner those who are acquainted with all sorts of moral natures?

Yes, I said, I too would have good judges and good
physicians.

But do you know whom I think good?

Will you tell me?

I will, if I can.

Let me however note that in the same question you join two
things which are not the same.

How so?  he asked.

Why, I said, you join physicians and judges.

Now the most skilful physicians are those who, from their
youth upwards, have combined with the knowledge of their art the greatest
experience of disease; they had better not be robust in health, and should have
had all manner of diseases in their own persons.

For the body, as I conceive, is not the instrument with
which they cure the body; in that case we could not allow them ever to be or to
have been sickly; but they cure the body with the mind, and the mind which has
become and is sick can cure nothing.

That is very true, he said.

But with the judge it is otherwise; since he governs mind by
mind; he ought not therefore to have been trained among vicious minds, and to
have associated with them from youth upwards, and to have gone through the
whole calendar of crime, only in order that he may quickly infer the crimes of
others as he might their bodily diseases from his own self-consciousness; the
honourable mind which is to form a healthy judgment should have had no
experience or contamination of evil habits when young.

And this is the reason why in youth good men often appear to
be simple, and are easily practised upon by the dishonest, because they have no
examples of what evil is in their own souls.

Yes, he said, they are far too apt to be deceived.

Therefore, I said, the judge should not be young; he should
have learned to know evil, not from his own soul, but from late and long
observation of the nature of evil in others: knowledge should be his guide, not
personal experience.

Yes, he said, that is the ideal of a judge.

Yes, I replied, and he will be a good man (which is my
answer to your question); for he is good who has a good soul.

But the cunning and suspicious nature of which we spoke,–he
who has committed many crimes, and fancies himself to be a master in
wickedness, when he is amongst his fellows, is wonderful in the precautions
which he takes, because he judges of them by himself: but when he gets into the
company of men of virtue, who have the experience of age, he appears to be a
fool again, owing to his unseasonable suspicions; he cannot recognise an honest
man, because he has no pattern of honesty in himself; at the same time, as the
bad are more numerous than the good, and he meets with them oftener, he thinks
himself, and is by others thought to be, rather wise than foolish.

Most true, he said.

Then the good and wise judge whom we are seeking is not this
man, but the other; for vice cannot know virtue too, but a virtuous nature,
educated by time, will acquire a knowledge both of virtue and vice: the
virtuous, and not the vicious, man has wisdom–in my opinion.

And in mine also.

This is the sort of medicine, and this is the sort of law,
which you will sanction in your nation.

They will minister to better natures, giving health both of
soul and of body; but those who are diseased in their bodies they will leave to
die, and the corrupt and incurable souls they will put an end to themselves.

That is clearly the best thing both for the patients and for
the nation.

And thus our youth, having been educated only in that simple
music which, as we said, inspires temperance, will be reluctant to go to law.

Clearly.

And the musician, who, keeping to the same track, is content
to practise the simple gymnastic, will have nothing to do with medicine unless
in some extreme case.

That I quite believe.

The very exercises and tolls which he undergoes are intended
to stimulate the spirited element of his nature, and not to increase his
strength; he will not, like common athletes, use exercise and regimen to
develope his muscles.

Very right, he said.

Neither are the two arts of music and gymnastic really
designed, as is often supposed, the one for the training of the soul, the other
for the training of the body.

What then is the real object of them?

I believe, I said, that the teachers of both have in view
chiefly the improvement of the soul.

How can that be?  he
asked.

Did you never observe, I said, the effect on the mind itself
of exclusive devotion to gymnastic, or the opposite effect of an exclusive
devotion to music?

In what way shown?
he said.

The one producing a temper of hardness and ferocity, the
other of softness and effeminacy, I replied.

Yes, he said, I am quite aware that the mere athlete becomes
too much of a savage, and that the mere musician is melted and softened beyond
what is good for him.

Yet surely, I said, this ferocity only comes from spirit,
which, if rightly educated, would give courage, but, if too much intensified,
is liable to become hard and brutal.

That I quite think.

On the other hand the philosopher will have the quality of
gentleness.

And this also, when too much indulged, will turn to
softness, but, if educated rightly, will be gentle and moderate.

True.

And in our opinion the guardians ought to have both these
qualities?

Assuredly.

And both should be in harmony?

Beyond question.

And the harmonious soul is both temperate and courageous?

Yes.

And the inharmonious is cowardly and boorish?

Very true.

And, when a man allows music to play upon him and to pour
into his soul through the funnel of his ears those sweet and soft and
melancholy airs of which we were just now speaking, and his whole life is
passed in warbling and the delights of song; in the first stage of the process
the passion or spirit which is in him is tempered like iron, and made useful,
instead of brittle and useless.

But, if he carries on the softening and soothing process, in
the next stage he begins to melt and waste, until he has wasted away his spirit
and cut out the sinews of his soul; and he becomes a feeble warrior.

Very true.

If the element of spirit is naturally weak in him the change
is speedily accomplished, but if he have a good deal, then the power of music
weakening the spirit renders him excitable;–on the least provocation he flames
up at once, and is speedily extinguished; instead of having spirit he grows
irritable and passionate and is quite impracticable.

Exactly.

And so in gymnastics, if a man takes violent exercise and is
a great feeder, and the reverse of a great student of music and philosophy, at
first the high condition of his body fills him with pride and spirit, and he
becomes twice the man that he was.

Certainly.

And what happens?  if
he do nothing else, and holds no converse with the Muses, does not even that
intelligence which there may be in him, having no taste of any sort of learning
or enquiry or thought or culture, grow feeble and dull and blind, his mind
never waking up or receiving nourishment, and his senses not being purged of
their mists?

True, he said.

And he ends by becoming a hater of philosophy, uncivilized,
never using the weapon of persuasion,–he is like a wild beast, all violence and
fierceness, and knows no other way of dealing; and he lives in all ignorance
and evil conditions, and has no sense of propriety and grace.

That is quite true, he said.

And as there are two principles of human nature, one the
spirited and the other the philosophical, some God, as I should say, has given
mankind two arts answering to them (and only indirectly to the soul and body),
in order that these two principles (like the strings of an instrument) may be
relaxed or drawn tighter until they are duly harmonized.

That appears to be the intention.

And he who mingles music with gymnastic in the fairest
proportions, and best attempers them to the soul, may be rightly called the
true musician and harmonist in a far higher sense than the tuner of the
strings.

You are quite right, Socrates.

And such a presiding genius will be always required in our
nation if the government is to last.

Yes, he will be absolutely necessary.

Such, then, are our principles of nurture and education:
Where would be the use of going into further details about the dances of our
citizens, or about their hunting and coursing, their gymnastic and equestrian
contests?  For these all follow the
general principle, and having found that, we shall have no difficulty in
discovering them.

I dare say that there will be no difficulty.

Very good, I said; then what is the next question?  Must we not ask who are to be rulers and who
subjects?

Certainly.

There can be no doubt that the elder must rule the younger.

Clearly.

And that the best of these must rule.

That is also clear.

Now, are not the best husbandmen those who are most devoted
to husbandry?

Yes.

And as we are to have the best of guardians for our city,
must they not be those who have most the character of guardians?

Yes.

And to this end they ought to be wise and efficient, and to
have a special care of the nation?

 

Loyalty

 

 

True.

And a
man will be most likely to care about that which he loves?

To be sure.

And he
will be most likely to love that which he regards as having the same interests
with himself, and that of which the good or evil fortune is supposed by him at
any time most to affect his own?

Very true, he replied.

Then there must be a selection.

Let us
note among the guardians those who in their whole life show the greatest
eagerness to do what is for the good of their country, and the greatest
repugnance to do what is against her interests.

Those
are the right men.

And they will have to be watched at every age, in order that
we may see whether they preserve their resolution, and never, under the
influence either of force or enchantment, forget or cast off their sense of
duty to the nation.

How cast off?  he
said.

I will explain to you, I replied.

A resolution may go out of a man’s mind either with his will
or against his will; with his will when he gets rid of a falsehood and learns
better, against his will whenever he is deprived of a truth.

I understand, he said, the willing loss of a resolution; the
meaning of the unwilling I have yet to learn.

Why, I said, do you not see that men are unwillingly
deprived of good, and willingly of evil?
Is not to have lost the truth an evil, and to possess the truth a
good?  and you would agree that to
conceive things as they are is to possess the truth?

Yes, he replied; I agree with you in thinking that mankind
are deprived of truth against their will.

And is not this involuntary deprivation caused either by
theft, or force, or enchantment?

Still, he replied, I do not understand you.

I fear that I must have been talking darkly, like the
tragedians.

I only mean that some men are changed by persuasion and that
others forget; argument steals away the hearts of one class, and time of the
other; and this I call theft.

Now you understand me?

Yes.

Those again who are forced, are those whom the violence of
some pain or grief compels to change their opinion.

I understand, he said, and you are quite right.

And you would also acknowledge that the enchanted are those
who change their minds either under the softer influence of pleasure, or the
sterner influence of fear?

Yes, he said; everything that deceives may be said to
enchant.

Therefore,
as I was just now saying, we must enquire who are the best guardians of their
own conviction that what they think the interest of the nation is to be the
rule of their lives.

We must
watch them from their youth upwards, and make them perform actions in which
they are most likely to forget or to be deceived, and he who remembers and is
not deceived is to be selected, and he who fails in the trial is to be
rejected.

That will be the way?

Yes.

And there should also be toils and pains and conflicts
prescribed for them, in which they will be made to give further proof of the
same qualities.

Very right, he replied.

And then, I said, we must try them with enchantments–that is
the third sort of test–and see what will be their behaviour: like those who
take colts amid noise and tumult to see if they are of a timid nature, so must
we take our youth amid terrors of some kind, and again pass them into pleasures,
and prove them more thoroughly than gold is proved in the furnace, that we may
discover whether they are armed against all enchantments, and of a noble
bearing always, good guardians of themselves and of the music which they have
learned, and retaining under all circumstances a rhythmical and harmonious
nature, such as will be most serviceable to the individual and to the nation.

 

How Rulers are to gain power

 

And he
who at every age, as boy and youth and in mature life, has come out of the
trial victorious and pure, shall be appointed a ruler and guardian of the
nation; he shall be honoured in life and death, and shall receive sepulture and
other memorials of honour, the greatest that we have to give.

But him who fails, we must reject.

I am
inclined to think that this is the sort of way in which our rulers and
guardians should be chosen and appointed.

I speak generally, and not with any pretension to exactness.

And, speaking generally, I agree with you, he said.

And
perhaps the word ’guardian’ in the fullest sense ought to be applied to this
higher class only who preserve us against foreign enemies and maintain peace
among our citizens at home, that the one may not have the will, or the others
the power, to harm us.

The
young men whom we before called guardians may be more properly designated
auxiliaries and supporters of the principles of the rulers.

I agree with you, he said.

How
then may we devise one of those needful falsehoods of which we lately
spoke–just one royal lie which may deceive the rulers, if that be possible, and
at any rate the rest of the country?

What
sort of lie?  he said.

Nothing new, I replied; only an old Phoenician tale (Laws)
of what has often occurred before now in other places, (as the poets say, and
have made the world believe,) though not in our time, and I do not know whether
such an event could ever happen again, or could now even be made probable, if
it did.

How your words seem to hesitate on your lips! You will not
wonder, I replied, at my hesitation when you have heard.

Speak, he said, and fear not.

Well
then, I will speak, although I really know not how to look you in the face, or
in what words to utter the audacious fiction, which I propose to communicate
gradually, first to the rulers, then to the soldiers, and lastly to the people.

They
are to be told that their youth was a dream, and the education and training
which they received from us, an appearance only; in reality during all that
time they were being formed and fed in the womb of the country, where they
themselves and their arms and appurtenances were manufactured; when they were
completed, the country, their mother, sent them up; and so, their country being
their mother and also their nurse, they are bound to advise for her good, and
to defend her against attacks, and her citizens they are to regard as their own
brothers.

You had good reason, he said, to be ashamed of the lie which
you were going to tell.

True, I replied, but there is more coming; I have only told
you half.

Citizens,
we shall say to them in our tale, you are brothers, yet God has framed you
differently.

Some of
you have the power of command, and in the composition of these he has mingled
gold, wherefore also they have the greatest honour; others he has made of
silver, to be auxiliaries; others again who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen
he has composed of brass and iron; and the species will generally be preserved
in the children.

But as
all are of the same original stock, a golden parent will sometimes have a
silver son, or a silver parent a golden son.

And God
proclaims as a first principle to the rulers, and above all else, that there is
nothing which they should so anxiously guard, or of which they are to be such
good guardians, as of
the purity of the race.

They should observe what elements mingle in their offspring;
for if the son of a golden or silver parent has an admixture of brass and iron,
then nature orders a transposition of ranks, and the eye of the ruler must not
be pitiful towards the child because he has to descend in the scale and become
a husbandman or artisan, just as there may be sons of artisans who having an
admixture of gold or silver in them are raised to honour, and become guardians
or auxiliaries.

For an oracle says that when a man of brass or iron guards
the nation, it will be destroyed.

Such is the tale; is there any possibility of making our
citizens believe in it?

Not in the present generation, he replied; there is no way
of accomplishing this; but their sons may be made to believe in the tale, and
their sons’ sons, and posterity after them.

I see the difficulty, I replied; yet the fostering of such a
belief will make them care more for the country and for one another.

Enough, however, of the fiction, which may now fly abroad
upon the wings of rumour, while we arm our earthborn heroes, and lead them
forth under the command of their rulers.

Let them look round and select a spot whence they can best
suppress insurrection, if any prove refractory within, and also defend
themselves against enemies, who like wolves may come down on the fold from
without; there let them encamp, and when they have encamped, let them sacrifice
to the proper Gods and prepare their dwellings.

Just so, he said.

And their dwellings must be such as will shield them against
the cold of winter and the heat of summer.

I suppose that you mean houses, he replied.

Yes, I said; but they must be the houses of soldiers, and
not of shop- keepers.

What is the difference?
he said.

That I will endeavour to explain, I replied.

To keep watch-dogs, who, from want of discipline or hunger,
or some evil habit or other, would turn upon the sheep and worry them, and
behave not like dogs but wolves, would be a foul and monstrous thing in a
shepherd?

Truly monstrous, he said.

And therefore every care must be taken that our auxiliaries,
being stronger than our citizens, may not grow to be too much for them and
become savage tyrants instead of friends and allies?

Yes, great care should be taken.

And would not a really good education furnish the best
safeguard?

But they are well-educated already, he replied.

I cannot be so confident, my dear Glaucon, I said; I am much
more certain that they ought to be, and that true education, whatever that may
be, will have the greatest tendency to civilize and humanize them in their
relations to one another, and to those who are under their protection.

Very true, he replied.

And not only their education, but their habitations, and all
that belongs to them, should be such as will neither impair their virtue as
guardians, nor tempt them to prey upon the other citizens.

Any man of sense must acknowledge that.

He must.

Then now let us consider what will be their way of life, if
they are to realize our idea of them.

In the first place, none of them should have any property of
his own beyond what is absolutely necessary; neither should they have a private
house or store closed against any one who has a mind to enter; their provisions
should be only such as are required by trained warriors, who are men of
temperance and courage; they should agree to receive from the citizens a fixed
rate of pay, enough to meet the expenses of the year and no more; and they will
go to mess and live together like soldiers in a camp.

Gold and silver we will tell them that they have from God;
the diviner metal is within them, and they have therefore no need of the dross
which is current among men, and ought not to pollute the divine by any such
earthly admixture; for that commoner metal has been the source of many unholy
deeds, but their own is undefiled.

And they alone of all the citizens may not touch or handle
silver or gold, or be under the same roof with them, or wear them, or drink
from them.

And this will be their salvation, and they will be the
saviours of the nation.

But should they ever acquire homes or lands or moneys of their
own, they will become housekeepers and husbandmen instead of guardians, enemies
and tyrants instead of allies of the other citizens; hating and being hated,
plotting and being plotted against, they will pass their whole life in much
greater terror of internal than of external enemies, and the hour of ruin, both
to themselves and to the rest of the nation, will be at hand.

For all
which reasons may we not say that thus shall our nation be ordered, and that
these shall be the regulations appointed by us for guardians concerning their
houses and all other matters?

Yes,
said Glaucon.

 

 

 

The Purpose of Justice

 

Parents and tutors are always telling their sons and their
wards that they are to be just; but why?
Not for the sake of justice, but for the sake of character and
reputation; in the hope of obtaining for him who is reputed just some of those
offices, marriages, and the like which Glaucon has enumerated among the
advantages accruing to the unjust from the reputation of justice.

More, however, is made of appearances by this class of
persons than by the others; for they throw in the good opinion of the gods, and
will tell you of a shower of benefits which the heavens, as they say, rain upon
the pious; and this accords with the testimony of the noble Hesiod and Homer,
the first of whom says, that the gods make the oaks of the just– ’To bear
acorns at their summit, and bees in the middle; And the sheep are bowed down
with the weight of their fleeces,’ and many other blessings of a like kind are
provided for them.

Some extend their rewards yet further; the posterity, as
they say, of the faithful and just shall survive to the third and fourth
generation.

This is the style in which they praise justice.

But about the wicked there is another strain; they bury them
in a slough in Hades, and make them carry water in a sieve; also while they are
yet living they bring them to infamy, and inflict upon them the punishments
which Glaucon described as the portion of the just who are reputed to be
unjust; nothing else does their invention supply.

Such is their manner of praising the one and censuring the
other.

Once more, Socrates, I will ask you to consider another way
of speaking about justice and injustice, which is not confined to the poets,
but is found in prose writers.

 

Nations

 

I will tell you, I replied; justice, which is the subject of
our enquiry, is, as you know, sometimes spoken of as the virtue of an
individual, and sometimes as the virtue of a nation.

True, he replied.

And is not a nation larger than an individual?

It is.

Then in the larger the quantity of justice is likely to be
larger and more easily discernible.

I propose therefore that we enquire into the nature of
justice and injustice, first as they appear in the nation, and secondly in the
individual, proceeding from the greater to the lesser and comparing them.

That, he said, is an excellent proposal.

And if we imagine the nation in process of creation, we
shall see the justice and injustice of the nation in process of creation also.

I dare say.

When the nation is completed there may be a hope that the
object of our search will be more easily discovered.

Yes, far more easily.

But ought we to attempt to construct one?  I said; for to do so, as I am inclined to
think, will be a very serious task.

Reflect therefore.

I have reflected, said Adeimantus, and am anxious that you
should proceed.

A
nation, I said, arises, as I conceive, out of the needs of mankind; no one is
self-sufficing, but all of us have many wants.

Can any other origin of a nation be imagined?

There can be no other.

Then, as we have many wants, and many persons are needed to
supply them, one takes a helper for one purpose and another for another; and
when these partners and helpers are gathered together in one habitation the
body of inhabitants is termed a nation.

True, he said.

And they exchange with one another, and one gives, and
another receives, under the idea that the exchange will be for their good.

Very true.

Then, I said, let us begin and create in idea a nation; and
yet the true creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention.

Of course, he replied.

Now the
first and greatest of necessities is food, which is the condition of life and
existence.

Certainly.

The
second is a dwelling, and the third clothing and the like.

True.

And now let us see how our country will be able to supply
this great demand: We may suppose that one man is a husbandman, another a
builder, some one else a weaver–shall we add to them a shoemaker, or perhaps
some other purveyor to our bodily wants?

Quite right.

The barest notion of a
nation must include four or five men.[ds1]

Clearly.

And how will they proceed?
Will each bring the result of his labours into a common stock?–the
individual husbandman, for example, producing for four, and labouring four
times as long and as much as he need in the provision of food with which he
supplies others as well as himself; or will he have nothing to do with others
and not be at the trouble of producing for them, but provide for himself alone
a fourth of the food in a fourth of the time, and in the remaining three
fourths of his time be employed in making a house or a coat or a pair of shoes,
having no partnership with others, but supplying himself all his own wants?

Adeimantus thought that he should aim at producing food only
and not at producing everything.

Probably, I replied, that would be the better way; and when
I hear you say this, I am myself reminded that we are not all alike; there are
diversities of natures among us which are adapted to different occupations.

Very true.

And will you have a
work better done when the workman has many occupations, or when he has only
one?[ds2]

When he has only one.

Further, there can be no doubt that a work is spoilt when
not done at the right time?

No doubt.

For business is not disposed to wait until the doer of the
business is at leisure; but the doer must follow up what he is doing, and make
the business his first object.

He must.

And if so, we must infer that all things are produced more
plentifully and easily and of a better quality when one man does one thing
which is natural to him and does it at the right time, and leaves other things.

Undoubtedly.

Then more than four citizens will be required; for the
husbandman will not make his own plough or mattock, or other implements of
agriculture, if they are to be good for anything.

Neither will the builder make his tools–and he too needs
many; and in like manner the weaver and shoemaker.

True.

Then carpenters, and smiths, and many other artisans, will
be sharers in our little nation, which is already beginning to grow?

True.

Yet even if we add neatherds, shepherds, and other herdsmen,
in order that our husbandmen may have oxen to plough with, and builders as well
as husbandmen may have draught cattle, and curriers and weavers fleeces and
hides,–still our nation will not be very large.

That is true; yet neither will it be a very small nation
which contains all these.

Then, again, there is the situation of the city–to find a
place where nothing need be imported is well nigh impossible.

Impossible.

Then there must be another class of citizens who will bring
the required supply from another country?

There must.

But if the trader goes empty-handed, having nothing which
they require who would supply his need, he will come back empty-handed.

That is certain.

And therefore what they produce at home must be not only
enough for themselves, but such both in quantity and quality as to accommodate
those from whom their wants are supplied.

Very true.

Then more husbandmen and more artisans will be required?

They will.

Not to mention the importers and exporters, who are called
merchants?

Yes.

Then we shall want merchants?

We shall.

And if merchandise is to be carried over the sea, skilful
sailors will also be needed, and in considerable numbers?

Yes, in considerable numbers.

Then, again, within the city, how will they exchange their
productions?  To secure such an exchange
was, as you will remember, one of our principal objects when we formed them
into a society and constituted a nation.

Clearly they will buy and sell.

Then
they will need a market-place, and a money-token for purposes of exchange.

Certainly.

Suppose now that a husbandman, or an artisan, brings some
production to market, and he comes at a time when there is no one to exchange
with him,– is he to leave his calling and sit idle in the market-place?

Not at all; he will find people there who, seeing the want,
undertake the office of salesmen.

In well-ordered
nations they are commonly those who are the weakest in bodily strength,
and therefore of little use for any other purpose; their duty is to be in the
market, and to give money in exchange for goods to those who desire to sell and
to take money from those who desire to buy.

This want, then, creates a class of retail-traders in our
nation.

Is not ’retailer’ the term which is applied to those who sit
in the market-place engaged in buying and selling, while those who wander from
one country to another are called merchants?

Yes, he said.

And there is another class of servants, who are
intellectually hardly on the level of companionship; still they have plenty of
bodily strength for labour, which accordingly they sell, and are called, if I
do not mistake, hirelings, hire being the name which is given to the price of
their labour.

True.

Then hirelings will help to make up our population?

Yes.

And now, Adeimantus, is our nation matured and perfected?

I think so.

Where, then, is justice, and where is injustice, and in what
part of the nation did they spring up?

Probably in the dealings of these citizens with one another.

I cannot imagine that they are more likely to be found any
where else.

I dare say that you are right in your suggestion, I said; we
had better think the matter out, and not shrink from the enquiry.

Let us then consider, first of all, what will be their way
of life, now that we have thus established them.

Will they not produce corn, and wine, and clothes, and
shoes, and build houses for themselves?
And when they are housed, they will work, in summer, commonly, stripped
and barefoot, but in winter substantially clothed and shod.

They will feed on barley-meal and flour of wheat, baking and
kneading them, making noble cakes and loaves; these they will serve up on a mat
of reeds or on clean leaves, themselves reclining the while upon beds strewn
with yew or myrtle.

And they and their children will feast, drinking of the wine
which they have made, wearing garlands on their heads, and hymning the praises
of the gods, in happy converse with one another.

And they will take care that their families do not exceed
their means; having an eye to poverty or war.

But, said Glaucon, interposing, you have not given them a
relish to their meal.

True, I replied, I had forgotten; of course they must have a
relish–salt, and olives, and cheese, and they will boil roots and herbs such as
country people pare; for a dessert we shall give them figs, and peas, and
beans; and they will roast myrtle-berries and acorns at the fire, drinking in
moderation.

And with such a diet they may be expected to live in peace
and health to a good old age, and bequeath a similar life to their children
after them.

Yes, Socrates, he said, and if you were providing for a
nation of pigs, how else would you feed the beasts?

But what would you have, Glaucon?  I replied.

Why, he said, you should give them the ordinary conveniences
of life.

People who are to be comfortable are accustomed to lie on
sofas, and dine off tables, and they should have sauces and sweets in the
modern style.

Yes, I said, now I understand: the question which you would
have me consider is, not only how a nation, but how a luxurious nation is
created; and possibly there is no harm in this, for in such a nation we shall
be more likely to see how justice and injustice originate.

In my opinion the true and healthy constitution of the nation
is the one which I have described.

But if you wish also to see a nation at fever-heat, I have
no objection.

For I suspect that many will not be satisfied with the
simpler way of life.

They will be for adding sofas, and tables, and other
furniture; also dainties, and perfumes, and incense, and courtesans, and cakes,
all these not of one sort only, but in every variety; we must go beyond the
necessaries of which I was at first speaking, such as houses, and clothes, and
shoes: the arts of the painter and the embroiderer will have to be set in
motion, and gold and ivory and all sorts of materials must be procured.

True, he said.

Then we must enlarge our borders; for the original healthy
nation is no longer sufficient.

Now will the country have to fill and swell with a multitude
of callings which are not required by any natural want; such as the whole tribe
of hunters and actors, of whom one large class have to do with forms and
colours; another will be the votaries of music–poets and their attendant train
of rhapsodists, players, dancers, contractors; also makers of divers kinds of
articles, including women’s dresses.

And we shall want more servants.

Will not tutors be also in request, and nurses wet and dry,
tirewomen and barbers, as well as confectioners and cooks; and swineherds, too,
who were not needed and therefore had no place in the former edition of our
nation, but are needed now?  They must
not be forgotten: and there will be animals of many other kinds, if people eat
them.

Certainly.

And living in this way we shall have much greater need of
physicians than before?

Much greater.

And the
country which was enough to support the original inhabitants will be too small
now, and not enough?

Quite true.

Then a
slice of our neighbours’ land will be wanted by us for pasture and tillage, and
they will want a slice of ours, if, like ourselves, they exceed the limit of
necessity, and give themselves up to the unlimited accumulation of wealth?

That, Socrates, will be inevitable.

And so
we shall go to war, Glaucon.

Shall
we not?

Most
certainly, he replied.

Then without determining as yet whether war does good or
harm, thus much we may affirm, that now we have discovered war to be derived
from causes which are also the causes of almost all the evils in nations,
private as well as public.

Undoubtedly.

And our
nation must once more enlarge; and this time the enlargement will be nothing
short of a whole army, which will have to go out and fight with the invaders
for all that we have, as well as for the things and persons whom we were
describing above.

Why?  he said; are
they not capable of defending themselves?

No, I said; not if we were right in the principle which was
acknowledged by all of us when we were framing the nation: the principle, as
you will remember, was that one man cannot practise many arts with success.

Very true, he said.

But is not war an art?

Certainly.

And an art requiring as much attention as shoemaking?

Quite true.

And the shoemaker was not allowed by us to be a husbandman,
or a weaver, or a builder–in order that we might have our shoes well made; but
to him and to every other worker was assigned one work for which he was by
nature fitted, and at that he was to continue working all his life long and at
no other; he was not to let opportunities slip, and then he would become a good
workman.

Now nothing can be more important than that the work of a
soldier should be well done.

But is war an art so easily acquired that a man may be a
warrior who is also a husbandman, or shoemaker, or other artisan; although no
one in the world would be a good dice or draught player who merely took up the
game as a recreation, and had not from his earliest years devoted himself to
this and nothing else?  No tools will
make a man a skilled workman, or master of defence, nor be of any use to him
who has not learned how to handle them, and has never bestowed any attention
upon them.

How then will he who takes up a shield or other implement of
war become a good fighter all in a day, whether with heavy-armed or any other
kind of troops?

Yes, he said, the tools which would teach men their own use
would be beyond price.

And the higher the duties of the guardian, I said, the more
time, and skill, and art, and application will be needed by him?

No doubt, he replied.

Will he not also require natural aptitude for his calling?

Certainly.

Then it
will be our duty to select, if we can, natures which are fitted for the task of
guarding the country?

It will.

And the selection will be no easy matter, I said; but we
must be brave and do our best.

We must.

Is not
the noble youth very like a well-bred dog in respect of guarding and watching?

What do
you mean?

I mean
that both of them ought to be quick to see, and swift to overtake the enemy
when they see him; and strong too if, when they have caught him, they have to
fight with him.

All
these qualities, he replied, will certainly be required by them.

Well,
and your guardian must be brave if he is to fight well?

Certainly.

And is
he likely to be brave who has no spirit, whether horse or dog or any other
animal?  Have you never observed how
invincible and unconquerable is spirit and how the presence of it makes the
soul of any creature to be absolutely fearless and indomitable?

I have.

Then now we have a clear notion of the bodily qualities
which are required in the guardian.

True.

And
also of the mental ones; his soul is to be full of spirit?

Yes.

But are
not these spirited natures apt to be savage with one another, and with
everybody else?

A
difficulty by no means easy to overcome, he replied.

Whereas,
I said, they ought to be dangerous to their enemies, and gentle to their
friends; if not, they will destroy themselves without waiting for their enemies
to destroy them.

True,
he said.

What is
to be done then?  I said; how shall we
find a gentle nature which has also a great spirit, for the one is the
contradiction of the other?

True.

He will not be a good guardian who is wanting in either of
these two qualities; and yet the combination of them appears to be impossible;
and hence we must infer that to be a good guardian is impossible.

I am afraid that what you say is true, he replied.

Here feeling perplexed I began to think over what had
preceded.–My friend, I said, no wonder that we are in a perplexity; for we have
lost sight of the image which we had before us.

What do you mean?  he
said.

I mean to say that there do exist natures gifted with those
opposite qualities.

And where do you find them?

Many
animals, I replied, furnish examples of them; our friend the dog is a very good
one: you know that well-bred dogs are perfectly gentle to their familiars and
acquaintances, and the reverse to strangers.

Yes, I know.

Then there is nothing impossible or out of the order of
nature in our finding a guardian who has a similar combination of qualities?

Certainly not.

Would not he who is fitted to be a guardian, besides the
spirited nature, need to have the qualities of a philosopher?

I do not apprehend your meaning.

The trait of which I am speaking, I replied, may be also
seen in the dog, and is remarkable in the animal.

What trait?

Why, a
dog, whenever he sees a stranger, is angry; when an acquaintance, he welcomes
him, although the one has never done him any harm, nor the other any good.

Did
this never strike you as curious?

The
matter never struck me before; but I quite recognise the truth of your remark.

And
surely this instinct of the dog is very charming;–your dog is a true
philosopher.

Why?

Why,
because he distinguishes the face of a friend and of an enemy only by the
criterion of knowing and not knowing.

And must not an animal be a lover of learning who determines
what he likes and dislikes by the test of knowledge and ignorance?

Most assuredly.

And is not the love of learning the love of wisdom, which is
philosophy?

They are the same, he replied.

And may we not say confidently of man also, that he who is
likely to be gentle to his friends and acquaintances, must by nature be a lover
of wisdom and knowledge?

That we may safely affirm.

Then he who is to be a really good and noble guardian of the
nation will require to unite in himself philosophy and spirit and swiftness and
strength?

Undoubtedly.

Then we
have found the desired natures; and now that we have found them, how are they
to be reared and educated?  Is
not this an enquiry which may be expected to throw light on the greater enquiry
which is our final end– How do justice and injustice grow up in  nations?
for we do not want either to omit what is to the point or to draw out
the argument to an inconvenient length.

Adeimantus thought that the enquiry would be of great
service to us.

Then, I said, my dear friend, the task must not be given up,
even if somewhat long.

Certainly not.

 [ds1] Barest notion of a nation

 [ds2]division of labor

 

How did we, the members of the human race get where we are now?

We are in a dangerous situation:

Our world is divided into entities we call ‘countries,’ that engage in activities called ‘wars’ as a matter of policy.  Wars are organized and planned mass murder and destruction events.  These ‘countries’ don’t simply fall into these ‘wars’ by accident, they appoint or elect leaders to plan them well in advance; they extract fantastic sums of money from their people to pay for them. (As of 2024, Governments are planning for the next generation of wars, which will use artificial intelligence and other technologies that don’t even yet exist, to kill and destroy more thoroughly and effectively than we can now.)  To provide resources that the ‘countries’ can use in these organized destruction events, the entities called ‘global corporations’ are raping the world, taking everything of value the best technology allows them to take, and spreading toxins that never existed before into areas where they can never be cleaned.

This can’t continue forever.

At some point, war will get out of hand.  As you read this, numerous countries are doing research to build weapons that they call ‘doomsday weapons.’  They aren’t doing this secretly:  they actually issue press releases and openly describe their research.  In some cases, this involves what we may call ‘second-tier military powers’ whose leaders are claiming they need these devices because it is the only way they can deter attacks by first-tier powers. They need to make absolutely sure that a conflict will result in mutually assured destruction (MAD) and the only way to do this involves building giant devices that will make the world uninhabitable if used.  First-tier powers, however, don’t want to be caught with a ‘doomsday weapons gap.’ They need to keep up, and are building doomsday weapons also.

If we are lucky and the struggles between the entities we call ‘countries’ don’t destroy us, we aren’t out of the woods.  Global corporations pose just as many threats as the entities we call ‘countries.’ These corporations have always been dangerous.  (We will see that corporations go back much farther than most people realize; they try to keep a relatively low profile in history so we don’t know about them, but these entities are responsible for a great deal more damage and threats than most people realize.)   But, without the high-tech tools they have now, corporations haven’t really been capable of wiping out the entire planet or human race. This has changed.  The destruction now far exceeds the ability of the natural world to respond and repair the damage.  This leads to an accelerating downward spiral with very predictable consequences.

War only poses risks of destruction.   There is a possibility that we may be very lucky and escape, perhaps for several more centuries.  But if environmental damage continues to grow at current rates, the end is not just possible, it is certain.

How did this situation come to exist?

What set of events set us on this path we are now on?

This is vital information.

In many ways, this is the most important question faced by the human race today.

If we want a better future—or any kind of future at all—we need to understand exactly where we are in our path through time and how we got here.  We need to understand our past.  We need to understand history.

The Failures of Conventional Histories

The silly political histories that we are taught in school will not help us understand these things. These histories are not objective and unbiased records of past events that the human race as a whole can use to understand what is behind us so we can work together to build a better future. The histories we were taught in school are biased and subjective.  The worst problem, however, is that they don’t provide any foundation for understanding how the realities of the world came to work as they do.

You need to know the basics before the details make any sense.

If you don’t understand the big picture, learning the details is a waste of time.  You have no idea how things fit together. Memorizing the names and dates of the wars between the countries of the world (as all of us were required to do in school) does no good if you don’t first understand what the term ‘countries’ means, how the entities called ‘countries’ came to exist on earth, and the reasons they came into conflict.

You can’t expect to understand why something is broken and doesn’t work right if you don’t even know what it is.  It would be like someone who has never heard of car engines and doesn’t know anything about cars at all except the them except the names of certain car makes and dates they were released trying to understand why his car no longer goes forward when he pushes down on the accelerator.  You need to start understanding the basic elements, then work from there.

The histories we are taught in school don’t start with the beginning and explain how the key institutions of the world around us came to exist.  You can’t understand the things you see around you if you accept everything important somehow magically appeared, operating at its inception the same way it operates now.  You need to know about the background.

Fact Based History is about the way the world came to work as it does now.  It explain show how the key structures and institutions of our world today came to exist and then evolved into their current form.  It is designed to be a useful history, one that we can use to understand why the problems of the world around us exist so that we can have the tools we need to solve them.

Possible Societies

Sometimes, when you are trying to understand a complex problem, it helps to change your perspective and the way you look at it.  Here on Earth in the 21^st century, we only have a very limited view of Earth events and, given this perspective, is hard to really understand the reason things work as they do.  I want to ask you to change your perspective and look at the world as would someone not embroiled in the struggles that are happening here and now:

The TV show ‘Star Trek’ is about a group of explorers from various worlds who live in the distant future. They are traveling among the stars to study new life and new civilizations.’

From time to time, they come across a planet that organizes itself in an incredibly dangerous way, one that seems almost incomprehensible to the explorers:  The people on this world divide their population into groups and its territory into divisions that are like the Earth entities we call ‘countries.’ These countries fight over things that don’t really make any sense to the explorers, like where the imaginary lines called ‘borders’ between the countries will be located and which of the ‘countries’ has the right to govern and provide services for a certain group of people.  The people on these worlds take these fights very seriously and use whatever weapons they have at their disposal to gain advantages in these fights.  As their technology advances, their weapons become more and more destructive.

These episodes generally start when the starship encounters one of these worlds.  The members of the crew, who are very intelligent people, seem to have a hard time accepting what they are seeing.  The people seem to be intelligent:  they have technology that makes it clear they can think on a conscious level. They can talk and make arguments that show that they are at least capable of reason.  But the system their people have built seems crazy and clearly does not benefit the world or its people.  The wars are fantastically expensive, both in terms of material wealth and human lives. This welth would be enough to allow everyone to live in great comfort, if it were used for this purpose.  But these people don’t use it for this. They use their wealth to kill each other and destroy the world around them.  This not only impoverishes the people, it places them at ever increasing risk of extinction.

It just isn’t logical.

What do they get out of it?

What is the advantage of setting up a system like this?

There doesn’t seem to be any.

These systems only bring hardship, misery, death, destruction, and eventual extinction. It hardly seems to be anything that intelligent beings would design and build.

There is a very simple reason that a system could exist on a world with intelligent beings that does not meet the needs of those intelligent beings:  It was NOT designed intentionally, either by these beings themselves or by any other beings with intelligence.  It came to exist through some process other than intelligent design. In this book we will see that that virtually infinite evidence points to the conclusion that there was no intelligent design process for humans or for human societies.  Both of these things came to exist through a process of evolution.  If you go back in our genealogy far enough, you get to animals that didn’t have the ability to reason, think, and plan on a conscious level. They were not stupid (apes are far more intelligent than most Earth animals) but they didn’t have our level of intelligence.  They did, however, have organized ways of living.  They had social structures (alphas, for example were leaders and had first priority over sexual partners, ‘homes’ or ‘nest sites,’ grooming rights, and food).  There were rules to these systems.  They had ‘ape societies.’ Over time, both the DNA and the societies changed and adapted to the growing intelligence of the beings and the changing realties of their lives.  Their DNA changed into our DNA and their societies changed into the societies that we have now.  This happened very, very slowly and there was no sudden or dramatic transition.   There was no point where the evolving beings suddenly realized that they were evolving beings and that the societies they inherited from their animal ancestors no longer met their needs.  (This point has not come yet. I am hopeful we will get there soon.) This may explain the reason that worlds with intelligent beings can have societies that are not able to meet the needs of those beings.  We know this can happen, even without being able to travel among the stars ourselves, because the one planet that we know of that has intelligent beings, the Earth, has societies that clearly can’t meet our needs.

The crew members on the starship discuss this among themselves.  They are looking for something about this particular system, or these particular people, that made them adopt this crazy, dangerous, and destructive system.  They never come up with anything reasonable, at least not in any of the episodes like this I have seen.   Sometimes, late in these shows (which are actually quite common:  the audience can clearly relate to this plot) some people say something like:  Well, it may seem strange, but a lot of worlds seem to have these strange societies.  The planet Vulcan, for example (home world of Spock’s father), and Klingon, had them; even the Earth had them.

In the show, someone often says something like:  ‘yes, but they got over it.’

They don’t say how the people of these other words got over it.  If we could go to their history, to see how the people of these other worlds got over it, we could understand how it was done and we could do it ourselves.  But, of course, the story is fiction and fiction writers are allowed to skip over steps in their narrative to create a story.

What if we wanted to figure this out?

What if we wanted to figure out how a group of intelligent beings that become aware at some point in their evolutoin, that they had a system like the one above (one that divides these beings into countries which then fight over territory) and that this system couldn’t meet their needs?  What if they wanted to ‘get over it?’  What steps would they take?

It seems logical to start with an analysis of the system that they have inherited:  How did it come into existence?   If they want to fully understand the system, they may start as early as possible, going back, perhaps, to before their world even existed. They may trace the steps that led to a world, then life, then advanced life, then proto-humans, then true humans.  They may follow the changes in the way the animals lived as they evolved, paying special attention to the past few million years, which include the final stages in evolution.  They will see that they have been on a path through time.  They can trace the steps along this path they have taken.  This will allow them to figure out where they are and understand what they have to work with.

Then, they can plan for the future.

The Importance of Understanding History

This book is about the way the world came to operate as it does now.  It starts with the very earliest events about which we have evidence: the beginning of the solar system. It proceeds to the era that you will recognize, because you are living in it now.

We have tools that can help us understand all of these things.  For example, space-based telescopes like the Web allow us to actually watch as planets are being formed:  we can see how it happens.   We can determine when the earth formed (scientists have a very good idea when this happened) and when the first solid ‘rocks’ were formed in the hot liquid that collected to form this planet.  We can locate fossils of the thing we call ‘life’ on earth and date them, to determine when they likely first came to exist on this world.  We can identify the early life forms, find currently living life forms that look the same and appear to have the same function, then sequence their DNA to get a good idea of the complexity level of these early beings. We can then go through the fossil record and date and sequence the series of animals that existed in the past to trace a pattern of evolution.

We can then trace changes life forms to the first mammals, which came about 74 million years ago. We can follow them through the great extinction event of 65 million years ago that wiped out the less adaptable animals and left mammals (our ancestors) as the most advanced beings. We can trace mammal evolution to the pan genus, our most recent evolutionary ancestors that still survive, taking us back about 6.7 million years.  Since the pans still exist, we can study the way their societies work. We will see very great similarities between the societies of the pans and the societies of humans.   (Many researchers have been accused of altering their observational data to make it appear that the societies of these apes, the pans, are more like the societies of modern humans than they could possibly actually be.  We will see that independent analysis has shown that these similarities are very real and nothing was exaggerated.)

We can then go through the many links between the descendants of the members of the pan genus that take us, eventually, to homo sapiens denisovan (denisovan man), homo sapiens neanderthalis (neanderthal man), and finally early people with the same species and subspecies names as modern humans (homo sapiens sapiens). We can determine when, where, and how these evolving beings reached important milestones in their development, including the ability to engineer and manufacture complex tools, the ability to use fire for lighting, cooking, and heating, and the ability make clothing, blankets, and tent coverings that would allow them to travel into areas with harsh climates.  We can go through charts of brain cavity measurements and comparative MRI scans to show what lobes developed over time and how they corresponded to the improving mental abilities of these beings.

We can figure out how early humans lived.  For most of history, people didn’t really have any idea how old artifacts they found really were.  Recent tools have shown that their guesses were often off by fantastic amounts: artifacts that were thought to be a few hundred years old have been shown to be millions of years old, and artifacts that were thought to be millions of years old have been shown to be fakes, created by pranksters a few weeks before they were ‘discovered.’

We have tools that allow us to reconstruct the past.  We can determine migration patterns by sequencing DNA, both in modern populations and in ancient artifacts.  We can analyze food residue found on ancient cooking implements to determine whether these were natural foods or had been created intentionally through cross breeding of domestic crops or domesticated animals.  This can allow us to determine the level of technology of people who have been gone for hundreds of thousands of years.

This book undertakes this kind of analysis, but it is not simply for random knowledge.  It focuses on the specific events in our past that can help us understand the reason that the societies we have in the world today exist, the way they came into existence, and the way they evolved into their current form.  This isn’t random curiosity.  It is about the path that we, living on this tiny blue speck of a world in this vast universe, came to be on; it is about the place in this path we are now on and the forces that have pushed us down this path to our current point in time. If we want to understand what may lie in front of us on this path, we have to understand where we are on this path and how we got here.

We need to be objective and be willing to accept whatever we find.  We can’t understand a way forward if we are so afraid we might find out something bad about ourselves that we are going to select only the bits of history that paint us (no matter how you define this term) in a good light, and pretend the rest of the evidence doesn’t even exist.

We need to look at history as a scientist would, concentrating on evidence and facts.

That is what this book is designed to do. 

Transitions under construction

Chapter 9:  Industry comes to the World

 

Bronze is a very useful military metal. 

But steel is much, much harder and stronger than bronze. 

A steel sword will slice right through bronze armor.  A steel arrowhead can cut through several plates of bronze kill the solder or the horse being protected by the armor.  As soon as some countries figured out how to make steel, bronze became an obsolete technology.  We don’t see bronze weapons on the battlefield today.  We haven’t really seen them for centuries.  But steel is everywhere.  All modern weapons are made of steel. 

Steel is very, very difficult to make.  You can easily make bronze in your back yard.  You can’t make steel that way.  Even the simplest steel-making systems require dozens of workers who have specialized skills.  You need many tons of raw material to make just a few pounds of steel.  This raw material is going to have to be located and transported to the place where steel will be made.  This requires enormous amounts of work and dedicated workforces who know how to remove the materials, process them, and transport them.  they then have to be moved to facilities that are extremely large and very expensive to build.  (Smelter, foundries, steel mills, and casting plants, and finishing plants, to name a few.)  The people who do these things are going to have to do them full time.  This means that they aren’t going to be able to grow their own food or build their own homes.  It means the country with steel will have to set up an economic structure that can support all of the people necessary to produce steel weapons. 

The more weapons they make the better, from the perspective of the military.  They want as much as they can have. 

I want to explain the process of making steel, because you really need to understand its incredible difficulty in order to understand the social changes that will have to happen in systems that produce steel.  Steel is an industrial product.  It is extremely hard to make (as you will see shortly), requires a great many workers, all of whom have to be very skilled.  The society must be organized in a very special way to make this possible.  It will have to be organized around the needs of industry.  It will have to be an industrial society. 

Industrial societies dominate the world today.  Industrial systems require a great many complex structures that are not necessary in non-industrial systems. 

They need money, for example.  The people who work to make steel have to be given something they can trade for food, lodging, and other services.  They need courts and rules to protect private property rights.  People will not make the fantastic investments needed for industry unless they know their rights to the properties they build will be secure and not depend on the whims of a particular ruler.  They need massive roads and other infrastructures.  They need investment systems that allows large amounts of ‘capital’ to be raised from numerous investors and dedicated to the project. 

Industrial societies are necessarily extremely complex.  I don’t think you can really appreciate the changes that will happen next, in the historical account, without understanding how difficult it is to make steel. 

 

How To Make Steel

 

If you want to make steel, you need to start with iron.  Iron is one of the most abundant elements on the earth.  But it is not found in metal form.  It is found mixed with oxygen, as ‘iron oxide,’ also known as ‘rust.’  To get metal, you need to remove the oxygen.  The process of removing the oxygen is called ‘smelting.’

 

The term smelting is a combination of  the word ‘smoke’ and ‘melting.’  It uses smoke to get metal to melt. 
          The smoke is needed because smoke contains carbon monoxide.  You generate the carbon monoxide by building a fire.  It needs to be very, very hot.  You put the ore into the fire (this is described below).  As the ore heats, the chemical bond between the oxygen and ore gets weaker and weaker.  At some point, the bond is so weak that the carbon monoxides attraction is stronger, and the oxygen flies out of the ore and into the smoke.  At this point, the  metal instantly melts.  It will drip through the fire to the ash below.  You can wait until the ash is cool and sift through it to find the bits of metal. 
     The smelting process is the same for al metals.  But different metals ‘smelt’ at different temperatures.  The softer metals smelt at relatively low temperatures.  You can smelt them with a wood fire.  This is not true for iron

 

To smelt iron, you need an extremely hot fire.  Wood doesn’t burn hot enough for this.  Natural gas doesn’t burn hot enough.  Coal doesn’t burn hot enough.  Oil doesn’t burn hot enough.  The only natural fuel that burns hot enough to smelt iron is pure carbon.  Until very recently, when people figured out how to make ‘coke’ out of coal, the only source for pure carbon was charcoal. 

If you want to smelt iron, you need charcoal.  You will need a lot of it, as you will see.  (One of the main justifications for the exploration to the new world in the 1400s was a search for wood.  The forests in Europe had all been cut down to make charcoal, mainly to use to make steel.  The mills had all shut down for a lack of fuel.  One of the first things that Columbus did when he began conquest of Haiti was begin cutting down the forests there to make charcoal.  This was the ‘black gold’ of his day.  What was the charcoal used for?  He smelted iron to make steel.) 

The text box below explains how to make charcoal:

 

Wood to charcoal: 
          Wood is made of hydrocarbons, which are molecules with both hydrogen and carbon.  To get pure carbon (charcoal) you need to get rid of the hydrogen.  You do this by heating the wood to a very high temperature under conditions that prevent it from catching on fire.  To prevent this, you need to make sure that no oxygen (from the air) is in contact with the wood
           If you want to do this, you need to build a kind of igloo out of clay blocks, large enough for you to sit inside.  It needs a chimney on the top at least 6 feet high and an opening at ground level big enough to crawl through with loads of wood for the fire inside.  You then pile the wood you will turn into charcoal over the igloo  to a depth of about 5 feet.  You then cover the entire thing with about a foot of dirt.  Then build a fire in the igloo.  (The air for the fire will come through the opening you walk through to carry the wood.)  Keep it very very hot for about 2 days.  You will have to work furiously this entire time to make sure there is enough wood in the igloo to keep the fire inside at the right temperature. 
          Then let it cool for a few days and remove the dirt.  You have charcoal. 
          It takes about three tons of wood to make a ton of charcoal this way.  You put a ton and a half of wood on the igloo to start.  You burn the other ton and a half.  It is very unpleasant work and requires a lot of skill.  You have to understand a lot of things to do it right, and you have to do them all well.  But all this is necessary to make steel. 

 

Once you have charcoal, you need to make the smelting furnace and the bellows.  You can make the smelter out of clay.  It needs to be a certain shape with a chimney and a hole in the bottom for the bellows.  People used to make the bellows out leather that is fastened to two large boards. 

Once you have this set up, you can start smelting iron.  You start by building  a fire in the furnace using charcoal.  It needs to be very, very hot, much hotter than it will burn by natural aspiration of oxygen.  You need a massive bellows.  You need several people who will rotate with each other to pump the bellows as rapidly as they can.  This bellows blows air (which contains oxygen that the charcoal needs to burn) through the pulverized fuel, causing it to burn more rapidly and making it hotter. 

If you watch this being done, you will see that even the strongest workers can’t last much longer than 10 minutes on the bellows at the required pace.  This means you will need to rotate people onto this task.  You will probably need at least 6 people for this; that gives them one 10 minute shift every hour. 

You also need a large number of people pouring of pulverized charcoal down the chimney and into the furnace.  As you do this, the fire gets hotter and hotter.  At a certain point, it is hot enough.  (You will need someone who has done this before to tell you when you are at this point.)  Now you can start mixing tiny bits of iron ore into charcoal.  Keep pouring the ore and fuel mixture into the chimney for about 18 hours.  You need massive amounts of fuel for this.  All this time, your helpers must be pumping the bellows furiously:  if they slow down for even a few seconds, the furnace will become too cool and all effort so far will be wasted:  you will have no iron. 

If you do this right, after 18 hours there will be iron metal in the furnace.  The metal turns into a liquid as soon as it loses its oxygen.  It then drips out of the mixture and flows to the bottom.  You will want to put a mold on the bottom to catch the iron.  The iron will harden to the shape of the mold. 

The standard mold looks like a mother pig nursing her piglets.  Because of this, the iron in this form is called ‘pig iron.’ 

If you are very skilled and good at cutting your costs, you can turn three tons of charcoal and three tons of iron ore into about 2 pounds of pig iron. 

 

Steel

 

Iron and steel are to different things.  Iron is the raw material you need to make steel.  You have to do a lot of hard work to turn iron into steel.  You can find many descriptions on the internet, but here is a quick one: 

Take the pig iron and hold it with tongs.  Put it into a very hot charcoal fire.  Leave it there until it glows white hot.  You will need a helper with a bellows blowing oxygen through the charcoal, and replenishing it constantly as it burns, to make this happen.  Once you get it white hot, take it out and hammer it into a thin sheet. 

Then put the sheet back into the fire to make it white hot again.  Then fold the sheet in half and hammer the halves into a new thin sheet, heating as necessary.  Keep doing this, over and over. 

The difference between iron and steel is carbon.  Steel has between 1% and 3% carbon.  The carbon comes from the smoke of the charcoal fire.  You need to literally beat it into the metal.  The more carbon the metal has, the harder the steel.  The 1% iron content steel is considered ‘soft’ steel.  It is still much harder than iron and has many uses, so a lot is made.  The 3% steel is very hard, suitable for tools and swords. 

There is a television show called ‘forged in fire’ where people compete to make steel knives using this method.  They have machines to do the hammering, so they can make good steel in a few days.  But if you did the hamming by hand, you would need several months to make a good knife or sword.  Back when the work was done by hand, steel swords were legacy items, handed down from generation to generation.  A good sword could cost more than a years of salary for a top officer. 

Steel is a fantastic product.  It now holds together skyscrapers that are thousands of feet high; it forms the hulls of submarines that travel thousands of feet below the ocean, it is provides the casings for bombs and rockets.  As of the 21^st century, nearly all military weapons are made of steel; for most military uses, nothing superior has been found in spite of 4,000 years of searching

In 2000, archeologists found the oldest steel weapon to be discovered to date at the Kaman-Kalehöyük archeological site in Turkey.  Here is an excerpt from the press release:

 

A piece of ironware excavated from a Turkish archaeological site is about 4,000 years old, making it the world’s oldest steel, Japanese archaeologists said on Thursday.  Archaeologists from the Middle Eastern Culture Center in Japan excavated the 5-centimetre piece at the Kaman-Kalehoyuk archaeological site in Turkey, about 100 kilometers southeast of Ankara, in 2000.  The ironware piece is believed to be a part of a knife from a stratum about 4,000 years old, or 2100-1950 BC, according to them
          An analysis at the Iwate Prefectural Museum in Morioka showed that the ironware piece was about 200 years older than one that was excavated from the same site in 1994 and was believed to be the oldest steel so far made in 20th-18th centuries BC.  The ironware is highly likely to have been produced near the Kaman-Kalehoyuk site as a 2-cm-diameter slag and two iron-containing stones have also been excavated, Kyodo news agency quoted the archaeologists as saying. 

 

Industrial Evolution   

 

Before the steel age began, states didn’t have to be very big or well organized.  Most of  early states were built around cities like Faiyum.  They were basically rich farmlands surrounded by a convoluted collection of paths that go around the mud huts where people live and operate little kiosks that sell the things they can’t make themselves. 

 

Qqq Faiyum valley 3

 

Enormous changes will be needed to build industry.  To support heavy industry, you absolutely need a centralized and highly organized economy.  This would not be a simple task for the people who lived 4,000 years ago.  They had never seen and industrial society.  They didn’t know how one worked.  They would have to figure it out themselves, basically with trial and error.  They would need a lot of things that we take for granted now and think we understand (because we use them every day) but aren’t really intuitive or easy to figure. 

Consider the thing we call ‘money.’  The early city states didn’t really need money.  In Faiyum, people produced mostly rice.  If you aren’t a rice farmer but keep chickens for their eggs, you can trade your eggs for rice, both to feed your chickens and meet your own needs.  Others may fish or make hats out of rice straw and trade these items for things that they need.  The government can collect taxes in rice, which can then be used to feed the troops.  Barter can meet the needs of the pre-industrial system.  But it is hard to imagine putting together the resources needed to build and operate an industrial system without money.  Even today, no one seems to have attempted it; I can’t imagine anyone trying and succeeding 4,000 years ago. 

This seems simple enough at first.  If you need money, create it.  Governments print it and then tell people ‘this is money’ and they start using it, right? 

But if you had never seen money and some people who had gained positions of leadership told you these little pieces of paper were able to buy anything in the country, you would probably laugh.  Even today, economists argue about what money is, how it works, and why people continue to accept it.  There must be some reason.  If you wanted to build a steel mill 4,000 years ago, you would have to figure out how to make money and how to get people to accept it. 

The industrial state will also need infrastructure.  You need a lot of charcoal to make steel.  You can’t have people strapping piles of twigs to their horses and then traveling from the forests (which get farther away as the closer trees are removed) to the charcoal plant, and expect to keep a large steel mill operating.  You need roads that are big enough for heavy wagons.  They have to be good roads:  if the wagons can’t make it through, the steel production stops. 

You will need a lot of workers.  These people will have to devote their lives to dangerous, extremely unpleasant, and very difficult work.  This work must be done right so they must be well educated and they must be able to remain motivated and keep working year after year, as many hours as you can get them to work.  They need to be motivated as children just to get them to take the time to go to school and learn the skills.  The schools must exist and have funding. 

At first, these states won’t be very good at these things.  Even today, 4,000 years into the industrial period, states seem to be struggling to figure out the next step.  But they have to try.  They were born into a system where people have fantastically strong genetic and cultural tendencies to identify them with a group of people, in this case a state, and to use the resources of that group to fight other groups to gain territory for their group. 

This may not make much sense but it is reality:  we can all see the fanatical people who operate current states doing everything they can to fan hatred and fear to make their people fight harder.  Once people understand how to make steel, they know their enemies can have it and may use it to destroy them.  They need more than the enemies. 

They may not know exactly how to organize an industrial economy to make it happen.  But they have to try to figure it out

 

It may seem that this particular discussion is being presented in the wrong time period.  You may be thinking:    ‘Aren’t industrial economies very recent things?  Didn’t all important industrial innovations take place in the last 200 years?  How could this be relevant to a discussion of events 4,000 years ago?’
         As we will see shortly, this isn’t true. 
         There are people that think we can never have sound societies if industry exists and want to ‘disappear’ it (to use George Orwell’s term for ‘make it appear it never existed’).  Many people have tried to wipe out industry, at various times, and then rewrite the history books to make it appear it never existed.  We will look at look at two of these events in the next few chapters.  The most notable was started by Emperor Constantine in the year 322 AD.  At the time, the European area was well into the industrial age with numerous large industrial facilities producing enormous amounts of both steel and cement.  (You can read about the steel in works of Homer written in circa 880 BC, in Herodotus "History" circa 446 BC and in Aristotle’s ‘Physics’ circa 350BC.  You can see the cement work with your own eyes in Europe where massive edifies built of concrete built 2000-3500 years ago are pretty much everywhere.)
          Although many such attempts have been made, the most successful was that of Emperor Constantine, which started in the year 322 AD.  All books were burned, all schools closed, all corporations shut down with their assets turned over to the church, a new book that Constantine ordered written, called ‘The Bible,’ was composed in Latin and only vetted priests were allowed to learn to read Latin.  The result was a ‘dark age’ that lasted more than a thousand years and resulted in a decline estimated to be 50% of the population.  (Without technology, only primitive techniques could be used and production collapsed.)   We will look at the events that led to this and the reason it happened in later chapters.  
         Yes, most of what we know now about running an industrial economy is new. 
          But we aren’t learning it the first time, we are relearning this information. 
          If you watch the news, you will see that many people want to try the same thing Constantine tried again.  They want to send us back to the dark age (again).  We have been here before and we are making the exact same mistakes we made before. 

 

 

The Principle of Group Augmentation

 

The purpose of this book is to reconstruct the past events that put the human race onto the path we are now on.  This path leads to ever increasing problems that will take us, if we stay on this path long enough, in our extinction.  If we want to find a way to get onto a path that leads somewhere else, we have to understand the forces that put us on this path.  We also have to understand the forces that are pushing us forward toward the end. 

One of these forces is the evolutionary force called ‘group augmentation.’  

Evolution works by competition.  Animals compete as individuals.  The fittest individuals survive these competitions and pass their genes on to future generations. 

Groups also compete.  The fittest groups (where ‘fittest’ means ‘best at getting the group what it needs’) survive.  Group augmentation works by dividing the animals into individual groups and pitting the groups against each other in battles for territory.  (‘states’ are different competing groups).  Group augmentation works wherever the ability of a large group of individuals to work together matters.  It works on bees, ants, and other eusocial species.  Our ability to act together as states, and the larger collections we call ‘nations’ matters:  the states that are best at conquering and holding territory get the highest quality territory.  They can eat when people from states that don’t work as well are defeated and lose the land that once fed them. 

Bees and ants and other eusocial animals without the ability to think and plan on a conscious level have no choice but to continue to compete.  If they competition gets to a point where it threatens to wipe out their entire species, they can’t stop competing:  they don’t have the ability to take this into consideration. 

We are different.  If we find ourselves under the influence of forces that threaten to wipe us out, we can organize a plan to get out from under that influence.  This is possible.  Other books in the Possible Societies series explain how to do this. 

But before we can take any plan to make changes seriously, we need to recognize that these forces really do exist.  We have to understand that we are on a path through time.  We have to understand how we lived in the past, going as far back as possible.  We need to understand that there is a process that causes animals to change and evolve according to certain rules.  We need to understand that this same process works for us.  We need to understand that this process is not necessarily benevolent.  It may not move us where we want to go.  If it is moving somewhere we don’t want to go, we need to understand what we must to do to break away from the path it has put us on and get us onto another path

Until about 570 BC, there is no historical evidence that anyone made any serious attempt to bring the idea of intelligent design into analysis of society.  This should not be surprising:  we don’t have much real evidence of the thoughts of anyone that goes back more than 2,600 years, because very few written documents remain of the earlier period.  The next chapter resumes the history in 570 BC. 

Bear in mind that when we get to this period, we are not starting with cave men who hit girls over the head with clubs and drag them into caves for sex.  We are starting at a time when people know how to make both steel and concrete (the most important outputs of heavy industry) and have been making these things for centuries.  It is very, very hard to find an efficient way to organize industrial states to make them good at war.  They don’t have it all figured out as of 570 BC.  (We don’t really have it figured out now, as you can tell by watching the news.)  But they have been trying various different things for a long time.  Evolution has been operating this entire time.  States better at organizing themselves for war have advantages in war.  States that are not good at this get conquered.  They are taken over by better states, who then move their organizational structures (the ones that were better at making them better at war) to the conquered areas.  Over long periods of time, society has been evolving in ways that gradually eliminate any features that may make the states weak, passive, concessionary, liberal, or non-confrontational.  Evolution reinforces any characteristics that make the states more cohesive (those that promote patriotism and nationalism), more aggressive, more willing to sacrifice. 

Many people could see that these things are not working to promote what we might call a ‘sound society’ (one that can advance the interests of the human race as whole over the long term).  By the year 570 BC, many people could clearly see that the competitive, territorial, aggressive societies that were in place at the time could not meet the long term needs of the human race as a whole.  We needed something else.  Many people tried to figure out what else was possible. 

7:  City States:  The Precursor of Modern Countries

 

The image below is a satellite image of the lower Nile from Space.  There is a bright green patch in the desert labeled ‘Faiyum.’  It sits along the Nile about 30 miles south of Cairo and 2,000 miles north of Unity.  This valley has endless water from the Nile.  The soil is exceptionally fertile, having been washed down from the tropical highlands over the course of millions of years.  The land, well into the desert, gets almost perpetual sun.  Plants love this place.  It is heaven to them. 

 

 

 

Before humans arrived, wild rice grew in all of the low-lying areas along the lower stretches of the Nile.  The Faiyum valley flooded yearly from the rains upriver.  This created the perfect conditions for rice.  The rice found this land millions of years ago and flourished.  Over the course of time, a bountiful and diverse ecosystem developed around the foundation of this amazing plant.  After floods, fish would swim in from both up and down river to eat.  They eat just about anything; this turns the materials that other animals had not eaten into fertilizer.  When the water receded and shoots came up, thousands of small animals came into feed on them.  When the plants started to grow heads, megafauna came in to feast. 

Enormous flocks of migratory birds stopped over to rest and eat.  Those coming from the south may have gone thousands of miles since they had any chance to rest.  They are hungry and tired and will spend time to recoup in this valley.   Some will lay eggs and the chicks will hatch.  To them, this place is imprinted on their memory.  For the rest of their lives, they think of it as home.  Then the river would flood again and wash the land clean, leaving more fertile soil washed down from the highlands.  The entire process would start again. 

The first people to see this valley were in the species Homo Egaster.  They moved through here about two million years ago.  The Nile corridor is the only practical way for these people to get from the tropics of Africa where they evolved to ‘the rest of the world.’   They were definitely in ‘the rest of the world’ in the year 1.85 million BP.  They had to have passed through this valley on their way.  They saw it sometime around 2 million years BP (before the present, or this many years ago.)   

The Homo Egaster, their descendants the Homo Erectus, and their descendents the denisovans, were migratory by disposition.  They descended from the non-territorial pans, the bonobos.  As youngsters grew up, they learned how to live off of the land.  It did not belong to them and they didn’t treat it as a possession.  To them, the land was a giver of gifts, a sort of mother to all living things. 

They learned that certain kinds of land were not good places for them to try to go.  There were other people around who lived very differently than they did.   These other people felt attached to land somehow, as if certain parcels of land had been created for them and belonged to them.  These others, members of the species Homo Habilis and their descendants the neanderthals, formed into tight-knit and loyal tribes.  Each tribe took control of a certain parcel of land, about 3-5 square miles in size.  The members built borders around it, and patrolled and defended the borders. 

 

We will look at the factors that determine sizes shortly.  We have plentiful artifacts to show us how large their early countries were.  Early humans can have larger countries than chimps, but, until they get some technology which won’t be available until about 6,000 BP, they can’t be much larger. 

 

If any of  the migratory people tried to even walk on the land controlled by these territorial people, the territorial people would organize to attack and kill them.  They didn’t see any reason to try to go to the areas these people controlled.  The world was big.  They were  at home wherever they went.  They liked to travel and explore.  They were raised by people who migrated and their ancestors lived this way, going back as far as anyone could remember.  They taught the children the things they would need to know to live this way. The Homo Egaster, their descendants the Homo Erectus, and their descendants the denisovans, were comfortable with this lifestyle. 

Although the Faiyum valley was rich and productive, with endless food, it had its drawbacks.  It was a dangerous place.  The rich lands attracted a large number of plant eaters.  They came in vast herds to feast on the bounty of the land.  The predators followed.  Life was good for the predators:  They always had weak animals to pick off and use to feed their children.  Humans gave up a lot to have greater resources.  We are fragile and very easy prey.  We can’t run fast.  We can’t fight well.  Our skin is thin.  Our eyesight, our hearing, and our sense of smell are all poor.  We have a hard time detecting danger.  Worst of all, we need to sleep for about a third of the day to replenish our hard-working brains.  During this time, we can’t even defend ourselves, let alone our children.  Early humans would have been easy meals for the predators.  Many would treat human camps like fast-food restaurants.  If they want something quick that they don’t have to work a lot to get, we were waiting to feed them.  The migratory people would get tired of this pretty quickly.  Areas that were not as rich didn’t attract as many herbivores and this meant fewer predators.  I don’t think they would have wanted to spend any more time in the valley than necessary.

The other people who came, the territorial Homo Habilis and their descendants the neanderthals, were different.  These people had been raised in cultures that depended on stability and security.  The people wanted their own homes, places where they could return to every night and sleep in comfortable surroundings.   They were not really fond of freedom and were willing to give it up for security.  They wanted to know that there were borders that were protected and monitored 24/7 by guards.  Their ancestors had lived this way and the ancestors of their ancestors (the territorial pans) had lived this way.  It was what they knew and what they wanted.  To live this way, they needed land that could produce enough to support them perpetually, without any need for them to ever leave.  (If they built homes and then left them, even for a short time, they couldn’t expect them to be unoccupied when they returned).  The land in Faiyum could produce immense quantities of rice.  They could collect this rice and put it into granaries.  It would keep as long as it was dry.  They could cook it when they didn’t have anything else.  As long as there was rice, they would never have to leave.  The land produced immense amounts of rice.  It was perfect for them. 

 They could build border defenses that could keep out other humans.  But they couldn’t build defenses that would keep out saber toothed tigers or other predators, or keep out mastodons or other megafauna.  Life was a struggle for them too.  Until about 70,000 BP, predators and competitors kept their populations in check.  They were part of the ecosystem in Faiyum, but were definitely not dominant there.  They were just another of the many animals with territorial sovereignty societies that lived in the valley. 

 

A Change in Conditions

 

Then, things changed.  The brain components that are responsible for complex communication developed enough that they could start to think the way we, do, with a series of the things we call ‘words’ representing the different concepts, people, places, things, actions, and modifiers. 

 

The three main brain components are :Broca’s area, the Arcuate fasciculus, and Wernicke’s area. 

 

They could turn these ‘words’ into sounds and send these sounds though the air by speaking.  Others of their species who had the necessary brain components would recognize these sounds as words and translate these words into thoughts.  People with these brain components could basically frame their thoughts and ideas in a way that allowed them to transfer these thoughts and ideas into the minds of others, using speech.  They could work together in ways that were impossible for ancestors who did not have these brain components.  They could make themselves the masters of their environment. 

Their first priority was to eliminate the threats to their lives that they faced every day.  Predators were killing their babies.  They could wipe out these predators and did wipe them out.

Megafauna were eating most of the food that the valley produced.  The plant eating animals bred rapidly and couldn’t be removed by taking a few a year.  To remove them, they would have to organize massive hunts where every single animal was killed.  They would have to do this over and over, year after year, until they were all gone.  This was a lot of work.  But we know they were able to get it done because they did it.  Humans they went from being a part of the ecosystem to the master of the ecosystem.  We were the dominant species in this valley, North Africa, and, after another 52,000 years (when the extinctions finally reached the tip of South America) the entire world. 

This change came to North Africa before it happened anywhere else.  It came to Faiyum first. 

After this change, the primary checks that nature uses to keep animal populations under control were gone.  Before, the human population was small.  We were just another animal competing with the rest of the world for survival.  After, there was no competition.  There were no predators to speak of.  Our population began to grow very rapidly. 

We measure population pressure by something called ‘fertility rate.’  This is the number of children that are born to each woman, on average, over her entire lifetime.  Before modern birth control methods were developed, fertility rates averaged more than 7 births per woman.  (I couldn’t find older data; this goes back to 1800.)  If 4 of these babies live to have children of their own, the population doubles every generation.  At this rate, the population grows by the following multiples over generations:  2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1048 times the starting population.  In 10 generations, it the population will have increased to more than a thousand times the starting population.  After another ten generations, it will be a thousand times that, or a million times the starting population.  In another 10 generations, it will be a billion times the starting population.   If a generation averages 30 years, in a millennium, the population will grow to a billion times the starting population, if there are no checks on population. 

Of course, the population isn’t going to be able to grow this much, because at some point there won’t be enough food to support more people.  The population will be able to grow to the limit of the food supply, an no higher. 

 

Faiyum in 18,000 BP

 

The people who were born inside of protected areas will want to keep monopoly rights over the land inside the borders.  They need to keep outsiders out.  Simple paths with patrols—the system chimps used—won’t be enough.  They need walls.  Small walls won’t be enough.  They need very high walls.  The walls can’t be made of wood because the attackers have fire: they can burn them down.  The walls have to be very high, very strong, and made of a very durable material. 

The picture below is an image of a border wall in the land near the valley of Faiyum.  You can see this wall is very impressive.  Note that the lowest parts of the wall are about 40 feet high.  This is too high people to climb without equipment that defenders are going to see from a long way away.  Note that there are towers at regular intervals that rise another 40 feet.  Guards in these towers can keep watch and locate any organized invaders that might be getting ready for an assault, even if they are very far away. 

 

 

The walls are very thick.  They are thick enough to support a road that is about 20 feet wide at the top.  The structures spaced at intervals along the walls are barracks for troops and armories to hold their weapons.  The troops can get to the road and move to any area they are needed very quickly.  The outside part of the road has a parapet wall that is high enough to protect the defending troops from arrows or projectiles that might come from below. Every 6 ft or so there is a slot in the parapet that allows the solders to fire arrows, burning tar balls, or other projectiles onto attackers, without any real risk to themselves. 

Note that there are windows in the walls underneath the top roadway.  These windows are small so defenders could easily block them in the event enemies started to climb the walls.  But they are large enough to use as weapons bays.  A bucket of burning oil-tar mixture that has been set on fire will discourage any who are trying to climb the wall from continuing.  Their cries of pain as they are burned alive will discourage their comrades from following them. 

The walls are faced with very hard rock.  This makes sense:  people can cut through mud walls with basic picks and shovels.  If the walls are faced with enormous rocks which are meticulously pieced together, attackers will not be able to cut through them without detection. 

Imagine you had a machine that allowed you to go back in time.  You set the ‘time’ dial to 18,000 BP and the location to Faiyum.  (Make sure you arrive inside the walls:  if you materialize outside, and try to get in, you won’t have a chance.)  

You would be arriving more than 30,000 years into the era where people were capable of using complex speech.  They currently speak a language called Nobiin. This language goes back antiquity and, there is a good chance that they spoke the same language 18,000 years ago.  If you took an online course in this language before you went back in time, and you made sure your clothes were appropriate, you could probably fit in.  You could talk to the people there.  You could find out what mattered to them.

The people who lived in Faiyum 18,000 years ago had walls like those in the picture above.  But they weren’t tourist attractions.  They were built to defend the area within and protect the monopoly rights of the people inside. 

If you talked to the people, you would soon find people who would explain to you why the walls were so high, so strong, so thick, and so well defended:  Their enemies are very smart and are always looking for weaknesses in border defenses.  There had been times in the past, when the walls weren’t so high.  The enemies were able to enter and defeat the defenders.  There had been times when the walls weren’t thick enough or strong enough. They learned from experience what they needed to do.  These walls are fantastically expensive. 

The people have to pay these expenses through taxes.  (Taxes don’t have to be in the form of money.  People can be required to do a certain number of hours of work or give up a certain amount of rice to feed workers each month.)  But people accept this great burden so they can be safe from their enemies and sleep soundly at night. 

 

The Precursors Of Modern States

 

The image below is a satellite picture of the Faiyum valley in the 21^st century.  Note the large circle that is labeled ‘the Ring Road.’ 

 

 

If you zoom in on the ring road, you will see it is a modern superhighway.  It has wide lanes, a wide median strip in the middle, wide shoulders on both sides, and enough land between the superhighway and the walls that mark the area outside of the right of way to allow for drainage if there is a storm, so the water won’t harm the road.  This road can be and is used in all weather conditions. 

Will see that the areas on both sides of the Ring Road (outside of the walls that protect the traffic) is a jumbled mess of mud and concrete huts, fields, and paths.  There doesn’t seem to be any real plan.  The superhighway appears to cut right through this mess in an organized way, with a roughly circular pattern around the richest part of the valley. 

The circle is about 5 miles in diameter and has a circumference of roughly 14 miles.  The Ring Road was built where the ancient walls used to sit.  There is a reason this road is here.  After explosive weapons were developed about a thousand years ago, these walls no longer served any purpose.  The people stopped maintaining them and they started to decay.  The governments in these areas originally built fairly small roads on top of the ruins, to make it easy for people to get around.  Recently, the governments have wanted to attract industry so they could create jobs for their people.  Industrial corporations have to compete in global markets and they need modern infrastructure to be in place, or they won’t move into an area.  The governments need to build roads so the corporations will come in.  But it is very hard for them to find real estate they can use to build roads. 

Every square inch of land is in use.  Any infringement on the rights of the people using this land will lead to riots and armed resistance.  But the land where the walls were built has been public land for thousands of years.  The government of Egypt built this road in the 1960s.  The ruins of the old wall were removed, and the new facility was built. 

You can actually find these ring roads all over Afro Eurasia.  They exist for the same reason that this one exists.  Governments wanted industry and industry needed good roads.  The old walls were no longer needed for walls and were the only contiguous areas where governments could build without displacing people whose families had lived in the same homes for centuries and would not be easy to remove.  The governments tore down the ruins of the walls and built ring roads. 

There are thousands of these roads around the world.  If you look at a few of them, you will see that there is a fairly standard size, about the size of the one in Faiyum.  It encloses about 5 square miles and is about 14 miles long. 

 

Qqq 74 ring road

 

Why This Size?

 

Look at the massive wall in the image above again.  Then consider that it was 14 miles long.  Construction was a truly a massive undertaking.  It took an immense work force many generations just to move the materials to use to make the walls to the area where they were needed.  The stones had to be cut and fit with great precision.  Then they had to be put into place, all by hand.  The stones at the top had to be lifted nearly 80 feet into the air, all without the kinds of machines we have today. 

There was a time when people were planning this wall.  How big should they make their country?  Of course, they wanted a larger country.  A larger country meant more people for soldiers and better defenses.  But there are practical limits to the size of these human countries for the same reason there were practical limits to the sizes of the chimp countries.  Longer walls are harder to defend.  If a wall is very long, an enemy can mass an attack at a certain point and overwhelm the defenses.  They can get across to the other side before the defenders can get reinforcements to the area. 

We saw that the chimp countries were about 2,000 acres, or about 3 square miles.  The human countries have larger sizes, but not much larger.  These countries are about the size of the modern entities we call ‘cities.’  Historians have name for these ‘city-sized countries.’  They call them ‘city states.’ 

If you could go back 18,000 years, you would find hundreds of these city states along the 4,000 mile length of the Nile river.  Some of the sites have been turned into tourist attractions.  (Aswan, Kom Ombo, El Kab, Cairo; you can find many if you are looking for some.)  But most of them just fell into decay after they were abandoned because they could no longer defend the people inside.  If you could go back to 18,000 BP, you would see them all along the river. 

 

The Other Societies

 

The land along the Nile is very rich.  It is monopolizable, in a practical sense.  The walls are very expensive and hard to build, but they were built and this tells us it was considered to be practical to build them.  The land inside the walls produced enough to support a population that was high enough to field and supply a military that was large enough to patrol the walls, 24/7, and backed by enough reinforcements to deal with the threats, with enough extra wealth and resources to cover the costs of keeping the walls in repair and keeping the military supplied. 

Most of  the land of the Earth is not as productive.  It isn’t monopolizable.  It can’t produce enough surplus food (above the amount needed to support the people who produce food) to cover the cost of building and maintaining the walls, the cost of the armies, and the costs of the needed supplies. 

People can live on land that is not fantastically productive.  They just can’t have societies built on territorial sovereignty.  They need to build their societies on other foundations.  If you could go back 18,000 years and just explore, you would find these enclosed city-sized states in some areas.  But most of the land you would see would not be in one of these city states.   People would live in these areas.  They would live much differently than the people lived in the city states.

 

Life in Different Societies

 

If you had been born 18,000 years ago, your life would depend a great deal on the conditions of your birth.  If you had been born in one of the city-states, you would have a certain way of life and be raised to believe and accept certain things.  If you had been born outside of the walled areas, you would have been raised with entirely different values and an entirely different point of view. 

The people born inside the city states are raised to believe that a part of the world is naturally theirs.  It is their ‘state.’  It provides wonderful things for them including freedom, justice, and liberty.  (They would be told the state gives them these things, but these terms are not really definable in any way that would allow people to tell if they actually have them.  But many believe anyway.)  The state is like a stern but loving parent. 

The state keeps order.  It has laws and rules.  You don’t have to figure out what is right or wrong to order your life, you only have to know what is legal and what is not legal.  As long as you don’t do any of the things that are illegal, you can do whatever you want.  You don’t have to worry about morality.  It is not your problem.  The state decides what is moral.  If the state says it is moral, it is; if not, it isn’t.

The state provides a foundation for an economy.  As long as you have money or trade goods, you can go to a market and get the things you need.  The state makes sure these trades are orderly and at least superficially honest. 

The state protects your property, and particularly your home.  There are people from outside the border of your state that don’t respect your rights to this land.  If they were in charge, they would not let you have your home.  Luckily, the state goes to incredible lengths to make sure they are not in charge and will never be in charge.  It builds and maintains the massive walls that keep and their  armies out.  It supports the weapons industries that your state’s troops use to protect you and your home.  It provides the troops that patrol the borders 24 hours a day to make sure you are safe from these enemies. 

The state also protects your property from internal threats.  People inside the borders must respect your property rights.  Property is very valuable so many people would like to take it.  But the state has laws and rules to protect you from them.  Even the authorities can’t take your property without following strict rules. 

Because your property is safe, you can wealth in the form of property.  Most property in the cities generates income for the owners.  If you accumulate property, you accumulate the rights to get these income streams.  If you accumulate enough property, you may end up with enough income from the property to live in a mansion with servants catering to your every whim, without doing another day’s work the rest of your life.  You can pass your property on to your children and they will inherit your wealth. 

The state provides these things.  You must provide several things in return.  First, you must pay taxes.  (Money doesn’t have to exist to have taxes:  before money, taxes were paid in kind.)   Second, you must agree to give anything you have to defend and protect your country:  if it is conquered, it has no power or ability to grant any rights to anyone.  The state can only provide the things it provides if the people in it are willing to protect it, even if they must give up their own lives to do so.  Third, you must accept its rules, even if you disagree with them.  If the rules allow people to harm the world around you, and you don’t want this to happen, you must accept you are helpless and let those who the government has given the rights to destroy do whatever the rules allow them to do.  If the government says that that a certain city-state that was once your ally is now your enemy, and all the effort of your city state must now be devoted to destroying it and killing everyone in it, you must accept that this is the way things are, even if  you have personal friends or relatives in the city-state to be destroyed. 

People who were born into this system would have a hard time imagining how anyone could ever live any other way.  Yes, there is land outside of the walls.  Yes, there are people there.  But they are not like the people in the state.  They have no rights.  They want to come in (there are always people queuing up at the border checkpoints).  But they must meet strict requirements to get in and most of them don’t meet the requirements.  It is reasonable therefore to think of them as inferior.  They want what you have.  But the people who run the border stations have determined that they are not worthy.  Why would you even consider living the way they live? 

If people are trying to harm them, they have no police to protect them.  If a state tries to conquer them and take their land, they don’t have walls to protect them or organized armies to man the walls. 

They can’t own property because there is no way for them to enforce their property rights.  They need an organized government for this and don’t have one.  They can’t accumulate property for their children for the same reason.  They have no government to take care of them, to build roads for them, to provide welfare when times are hard.  They will not likely ever have a lot of money or personal wealth of any kind because there isn’t any way to keep it safe.  If there is no way to get rich, what is the reason we are living?  To people born and raised inside the walled states, these outsiders would seem like dogs, wandering from place to place to get scraps and sleeping wherever they can find shelter. 

If you were born into one of the states, you would probably think something like this. 

You are one of the lucky ones. 

You pity the outsiders.

 

Life In Natural Law Societies

 

If you were born outside, you would have been raised an entirely different way.  You would have been taught the incredible value of good personal relationships.  You can’t depend on any outside agent (like a government) to make people be good and honest and kind.  You must make them want to be good and honest and kind, at least when dealing with you.  

You have no government to protect you.  But if you deal with others in good faith, if you have a good reputation and people trust and respect you, you don’t need a protector standing above you with a weapon to have good dealings with others.  You will learn who you can trust and who you can’t.  Your people will help you if you need help. 

There is no government.  But is this a bad thing?  Many people don’t think governments are good entities at all.  Governments ‘govern’ people.  This means they make rules for people.  Having no government doesn’t mean you can do anything you want.  You need people to respect you if you want them to deal with you in good faith.  You have to figure out the right way to behave to make this happen.  Your people will help you with this.  They will teach you.  But, in the end, you have to be responsible for your own behavior.  You can’t do things that harm others and then claim that you have the right to do this because there is no law against it.  You have to figure out what is right and you have to do it. 

If you were raised this way, the idea of having an organization governing you would be offensive.  It would imply that you aren’t capable of knowing right from wrong.  If you had a chance to actually meet people who lived under these laws and talk to them, you will see that the laws often allow people to do horrible things to others.  This is not illegal and the government protects their rights to do these things.  Why would anyone want to have a government like this?  We should all learn what is right and act the right way.  It is insane to require people to follow made-up rules that everyone can clearly see are wrong. 

It is true you can’t own property if you live outside of the state.  You can’t protect rights that you claim to have if everyone else around you disagrees and claims you don’t have the rights.    But do the people in the city-states who think they own property really own it?  Can we really own a part of the world?  The world takes care of us.  It provides our food and water, fuel for our fires and a place for us to live.  We depend on it for our lives. 

If nature or the natural world doesn’t meet our needs at some time, we can’t order it to do so as if its existence depended on us and expect it to change.  The land doesn’t follow the directions of humans.  We don’t and can’t truly be the owners of nature or parts of the natural world.   The people in the walled city-states who believe they own parts of this planet are deluded.  If you had been born and raised outside of the city walls, you would probably feel sorry for them.

People inside the walls have to pay taxes.  They have to pay for their food, for shelter, for a drink of water, for a bath, even to grab an apple from a tree as they pass.  They have to pay for everything.  This means that they are not their own masters.  They have to work or have some other source of income or they have nothing to pay for the necessities and die.  People who have to work to avoid death are not really free.  People inside the walls can never really be free.  They are always slaves to the system, to money, and to the owners.  Their lives are not their own. 

Not everyone lives this way.  If you had been raised outside of the states, some 18,000 years ago, you would almost certainly have an entirely different point of view.  You would probably think of the poor deluded people who live inside the crowded, filthy, and disgusting city states as fools who are so out of touch with reality they don’t even realize how miserable their lives really are.   They are slaves to a dangerous, destructive, and incredibly oppressive system that uses them up and throws them away.  You would almost certainly pity them.

 

Possible Societies

 

This book is about the way the human race came to be on the path we are now on, the path that leads to our extinction.  There are various different forces that put us here and various forces that are pushing us down it.  If we want to understand how we can avoid being forced along a path that we don’t want to be on at all until we are pushed over the cliff to death, we need to understand that there are other paths.  We need to understand that people are capable of living other ways. 

I know it is hard for people raised in the highly territorial and loyalty-inspiring societies we have now to understand that true humans can live differently.  But this is one important reason to understand history:  it tells us what is possible. 

We are on a path that leads to extinction.  But we are not stuck on this path.  There are other paths.  How many total paths are possible for thinking beings with physical needs?  (This is the category that includes humans.) 

Are there any take us a place where we can live in harmony with nature and other people, but still have technology and progress?  I claim there are.  The more we understand about our past—not the endless stories of good states and bad ones fighting in endless wars, but a real history that explains what was important to real people in the past—the easier it is to see that we have both the right and ability to take control of our destiny. 

5:  Out of Africa

 

Let’s look at Africa again. 

 

 

If you look closely at the picture, you will see that the green area in the center is essentially boxed in.  It is blocked on all sides and there is no way to get from there to the outside world.  At least

 

On the north is the hot and arid Sahara.  On the other three sides are oceans. 

If you look very close, however, you will see a tiny ribbon of green that moves up from the green area and cuts through the great desert.  It is tiny because you are looking at it from 2,500 miles up.  This will be the route our ancient ancestors took when they leave Africa.  It is the Nile river. 

This the only way out.  it is the way our ancestors went when they left Africa about 2 million years ago. 

There were different groups of homos that left Africa.  They are:

 

1.  Homo egaster (the worker man)

2.  Homo habilis (the capable man). 

 

We don’t have DNA from either of these groups.  This means that we can’t do genetic tests to determine if they are two separate species, members of the same species that have different ways of life for different reasons, like the chimps and bonobos.

I think you can see what is coming:

 

Two Different Societies Leave Africa

 

One of these two groups, the homo egaster, left artifacts that indicate that its members were clearly migratory.  We don’t find artifacts of homo egaster or their descendants the denisovans in fixed and well built homes, or in communities with roads and public facilities.  They are not found in desirable areas like fertile river valleys, which could be colonized and turned into ‘countries.’ They traveled in small groups and most of the evidence we have from then indicates they were clearly not ‘living’ in the places where they left artifacts, they were just traveling through. 

They lived in the wild open spaces.  They probably were hunter gatherers, and traveled very long distances following game they were hunting.  Homo egaster are the ancestors of the denisovans, who followed the same lifestyles and who left artifacts in many of the same places.  The denisovans are the ancestors of the modern nomads of Mongolia and Siberia, many of whom live the same general lifestyle, living in portable homes called ‘yurts’ and traveling by dogsled or, if they can afford them, snowmobiles. 

In the places where homo egaster lived, it wouldn’t have been possible to form and defend a specific part of the world as a ‘country.’ For this to happen, they would need a piece of land that is monopolizable.  It must be practical for the people living on the land to build borders and defend them, and the land must produce enough to support them without them having to leave it undefended.  The places where homo egaster lived clearly do not qualify. 

They were like the bonobos, both in terms of disposition and culture.  Of course, they probably would have liked to live in the best areas, where food and everything else they need is plentiful.  But, for some reason, they shunned these areas and stayed in remote areas. 

Homo habilis lived entirely differently.  They formed colonies as they went and built permanent facilities, including very large and durable walls to surround the areas where they lived.  We can study their former habitations because many were built along the banks of the Nile where it flows through the dry Sahara.  It doesn’t rain in many of these areas for centuries, so the dwellings don’t degrade very rapidly.  Their artifacts show they clearly ‘settled’ the areas where they lived.  They stayed there.  They had homes where they slept every night.  They clearly had military forces patrolling the walls: we can find evidence of defensive fortifications that allowed them to rain down fire on their enemies while remaining safe themselves.  They clearly had societies like the chimps, built in the same principle: territorial sovereignty.  The homo habilis divided into groups, each of which took possession of a territory, then treated it as if they had sovereignty over it.  They acted much like the people of the world’s countries do today. 

The homo habilis were the ancestors of the people called the neanderthals.  Neanderthal remains are found in great quantities in Europe.  The neanderthals built the many thousands of city states of ancient Europe.  When later technology made it impossible to defend a small state, larger entities closer to modern countries evolved and many of the smaller ‘city states’ (a state the size of a modern city) were abandoned.  You can find the ruins of their old city walls today, all over Europe.  There are so many of them, that most even aren’t marked and used as tourist attractions today.  They are just left to be destroyed by the weather. 

Both of these early groups of the homo genus left Africa starting about 2 million years ago.  The homo egaster went first.  They were migratory people descended from migratory people.  They were clearly very comfortable with traveling over vast distances and, within a very short time, they were all over Asia.  The homo habilis had different backgrounds.  They were clearly not comfortable with travel and their remains are not scattered all over.  They tended to stay in communities and settlements. 

Both groups were capable of using fire.  Both had kits that allowed them to make fire anywhere they went (discussed in the text box below) and appear to have always had one of these kits available to them wherever they went.  Fire was an important part of their lives.  They used it for light, heat, cooking, and heating water to keep themselves clean. 

 

How to make fire: This is easy if you have something that is flammable (a light oil like what you would skim from the top of a pool works well, but anything that burns well works; you could soak some cotton in some rendered fat from an animal or use coconut or other oil containing plants), a piece of flint (a common type of rock) and a rock with a high iron content or, better yet, a piece of iron itself.   

If you can make a spark you can ignite the flammable item.  Early homos would have used some kind of oil (perhaps rendered fat from an animal, oil squeezed from an oil-rich plant like flax, or skimmed from the top of a natural oil pool) mixed with a piece of cotton, flax, or other fiber.  They could carry this in a leather pouch and, when they want fire, open it, rub the flint on the iron to create a spark and ignite the oil soaked fabric. They could use this to ignite wood and then put out the oil-soaked fabric to use it again.  The basic idea here is identical to the working principle of a Zippo lighter.  If you remember the television ads, you can light a Zippo in a hurricane and, using the same principle, early homos would have been able to make fires under any conditions. 

Early explorers who visited a great many different places with natural law societies (like Captain Cook) discuss the use of fire by natives in their logs.   Fire making kits were essential equipment and even natives who had no other tools to speak of carried their kits with them everywhere they went. 

You may wonder how people without metal pans might heat water.  In his book Travels and Adventures, Alexander Henry explains some trips he made to spend time with tribes in the far north of Canada in the middle of the winter and discusses how they lived.  They had a ‘shower room,’ actually a teepee, with buffalo hides hung from the top so that they held water.  They filled the hides with water and put rocks heated in a fire into the water to heat it.  The hides were set up so that water could be diverted into a smaller hide that had holes in it for a shower.  Even when the weather was incredibly cold, they could have (and, according to Henry, did have) showers every day.

 

How Territorial Sovereignty Societies Spread

 

Homo habilis, and their descendants the neanderthals, had societies built on the idea of dividing themselves into different teams to fight over exclusivity (sovereignty) over pieces of territory.  These are the same kinds of societies chimps have and the same kinds of societies that dominate the world now. 

These societies spread in a very specific way.  If we want to understand how they developed into the societies we have now, it helps to understand how these systems expand. 

These societies spread by the process of ‘colonization.’  They can start with a few people (or animals; territorial sovereignty societies are suitable for both) in a fixed and defined area.  If food is plentiful and conditions are otherwise healthy, their population will grow.  As long as there are no massive wars to cull their populations, eventually the population will be so high that there wasn’t enough food for all.  At this point, they start to fight among themselves for food.  They generally don’t’ do this as individuals however.  They break into different gangs under different leaders.  The groups then fight each other in a kind of ‘civil war.’  The two sides fight each other for the home territory.  The winners take all.  The losers are sometimes all killed.  (These are ‘to the very last man fights.)  But sometimes some of the losing group flees.  I need a term to refer to these ‘landless refugees from territorial sovereignty societies.’  I will use the Japanese term ‘Ronin’ for this, as this is the closest term in common use I could find to represent the concept. 

 

In Japanese feudal systems, the soldiers were called ‘samurai.’  The samurai were vassals of feudal lords.  The lords had their feuds (the territory they controlled) and had to fight to retain control of their territory.  If the lords were killed or defeated and driven from their lands, their samurai had no master and no income.  (Lords would normally not survive the fights.  It was so dishonorable to let down the people under the masters by losing he land that they preferred death and committed sepuku, a ritual suicide.)  The samurai and others who had fairly high rank that fled after their masters were displaced became something called ‘Ronin.’ 

 

These Ronin were used to a certain lifestyle.  They would look for a piece of land that they could control so they could live as they lived before.  At first, when people with territorial sovereignty societies are moving into an vast territory, they would find vacant land that met their requirements.  They would identify land, make borders, and adopt it as their home territory.  They would make a kind of clone of the system they left behind in the new area.  The method of growth is called ‘colonization.’  The human society spreads in much the same way that bacterial colonies spread.  They move into an area that is rich in food.  Their population grows and grows until the food can’t support more.  Then, some members of the colony will head to areas outside the colony and start a new colony.  (This happens both for bacteria and humans).  The colony will grow until the population is too large for the food supply and the process will repeat.  This can keep going as long as suitable land is available.  When they run out of land, the Ronin have no way to get their old lifestyles back unless they can organize with others into armies and use these armies to take over existing colonized areas.  

DNA doesn’t last forever and we haven’t yet found enough intact DNA to sequence from truly ancient members of the homo genus.  (We get our samples of Pan DNA from modern pans, not ancient ones.)  The oldest DNA from members of the homo genus come from individuals that have been classified as either ‘neanderthal’ or ‘denisovan’ depending on the genetic profile. 

Since we don’t have any DNA from either Homo Egaster or Homo Habilis, we can’t really tell if they were separate species, or perhaps the same species but different subspecies, as denisovans or neanderthals.  I think that, until we have information that they were not the same, it makes sense to leave this question open and focus on the members of the homo genus that we can positively identify, the later subspecies, neanderthals and denisovans.  We know both of these human-like beings existed.  We know their genetic profiles and their ways of life.  These two subspecies appear to be the ancestral species of modern humans.  (We have their genes in our DNA.)  Let’s consider where and when they live in large numbers and go over come evidence about the way they lived. 

 

Neanderthals

 

In 1856 in the Feldhofer Cave of the Neander Valley, near Düsseldorf, Germany, some quarry workers found some unusual bones.  They contacted the local university who analyzed the bones and determined they were from a male being that was not an ape and not a human, but something in between.  There are certain anatomical features that modern humans all share.  Beings with these features are called ‘AMH’s, which stands for ‘anatomically modern humans.’   The remains found in the Feldhofer Cave did not have the modern anatomical features.  But they were very similar to modern humans in almost every other way.  Scientists eventually decided that these were the bones of an ancient precursor to humans.  They named this man after the valley where the remains were found, the Neander valley.  They called him ‘neanderthal man.’  

Over the course of the next century and a half, large quantities of neanderthal remains and artifacts were found all over Europe.  Some additional remains were found in the area now called the ‘Middle East.’  The map below shows their known range, as inferred by bones and other remains of neanderthals that have been found. 

 

 

Neanderthals clearly lived in settlements.  Large numbers of individuals lived together.  They had homes that were well built and durable.   They made complex tools including weapons.  Their artifacts show that they were very violent and war was a frequent activity.  Their wars were like the wars of the chimps, in that they appeared to be brutal and savage fights to the death with no empathy or compassion shown. 

 

Denisovans

 

In 1970, some people who were no a sport hunting trip in a remote part of Siberia were exploring a cave that the locals called  Denisova Cave. They found some bones that looked like they might be human bones.  They reported the remains to the authorities to determine if they might be evidence of a crime. 

The authorities determined they were not human bones, at least not from modern humans, because they didn’t have the anatomical features we associate with AMH’s.  They did look very similar, however.   They asked researchers from Germany to come to the site to see if they might be neanderthal remains.  Later, neanderthal remains would be found in lower levels of the same cave, but the remains in question, the first found at the site, were clearly not neanderthal remains.  They decided to name the being that that these bones were once part of ‘Denisovan man.’  

The Denisova Cave has since yielded a treasure trove of archeological evidence.  It has been visited by human-like beings, off and on, for at least 285,000 years.  Some of these beings stayed in the cave for months at a time and used it as their home.  They hunted and fished in the local forests and river, gathered roots, mushrooms, berries, and other foods, and brought all these different foods to the cave to cook into meals.  So far, archeologists have excavated more than 22 layers with artifacts, each from a different era.   This has led to one of the richest archeological sites found so far anywhere.  There is a reason this particular cave preserved artifacts so well.  It is in an area that is very, very cold and very dry. 

 

Neanderthals, Denisovans, And ‘Modern Humans’

 

Neanderthal remains and artifacts show they were brutal and violent, organizing and participating in horrific mass murder events.  They killed and killed and killed; it was what they were known for.  Their bodies looked something like those of modern humans.  But, until genetic analysis showed otherwise, people wanted to draw a line between them and us. 

The research reports all stressed that neanderthals are extinct.  (Even modern reports say this, but it isn’t true.  Modern humans all seem to have some neanderthal DNA.  Since their species is the same as our species (we are both homo sapiens), it can’t be true that their species is extinct.  Before this evidence came out, however, people tried hard to find a way to draw a line between them and us.  So far, we can’t find a line.

Denisovan remains were found far more recently.  They were not savage fighters.  But they didn’t seem to be quite up to the standards of modern humans.  They appeared to lack ingenuity and normal curiosity.  They were hunter gatherers, not even intelligent enough to build permanent cities or form governments.  The articles I read also claimed, without evidence of any kind, that beings had been extinct for long periods of time.  The implication was clear:  these simple beings simply couldn’t compete with the wise, noble, and cultured beings that WE are. 

DNA evidence has shown that this is wrong.  All modern humans tested so far show some neanderthal DNA, some denisovan DNA, or both.  No one tested doesn’t have any DNA from either.  These beings are not extinct.  They are still here.  We are them. 

You can have your DNA tested.  The testers will tell you your ancestry.  All evidence I have read so far has indicated  that all of us have at least some neanderthal DNA.  (It may be a tiny amount, but we all have some.)   Most people also have denisovan DNA. 

Our mental abilities appear to be associated with the use of complex tools and the benefits we gain from using these tools.  Fire is the most complex tool in the human tool kit.  It is a very complicated thing.  We are still not fully in control of it.  It has uses that we still haven’t found, after three million years living with it.  But it is so powerful and so useful that nature was able to push aside other adaptations to give animals that have the ability to use fire and other complex tools priority over those that adapted other ways and were not as capable at using this particular tool.  A doubling of the brain size was necessary to create beings with the capability to control fire.  But nature was patient.   Over the course of a million years, this happened. 

Evolution didn’t stop after this.  Each newborn was genetically unique, with its own DNA profile. Some had genes that made them more able to make additional connections and use tools (including the tool of complex language) even better than others.  The generations get smarter and smarter.  In the next two million years, the brain sizes increased by the same amount, reaching its current size about 200,000 to 300,000 years ago.  As the saying goes, ‘size isn’t everything.’  Our brains also got more complex.  We got smarter. 

Anthropologists that find remains must classify them.  By creating classifications, they create the illusion that evolution goes by steps.  The being starts as a pan paniscus, for example and becomes a homo egaster.  At some point, she becomes a homo erectus, then a homo neanderthalis, then a homo sapiens neanderthalis.  Eventually, she crosses a certain line and is an ‘anatomically modern human.’  But these steps aren’t real.  Changes are slow and take millions of years. 

Here is the point: there is no hard line.  We are them and they are us. 

 

Colonization

 

Territorial sovereignty societies spread by colonization.  The people with these societies are both genetically and culturally predisposed to find a home territory, separate their territory from the rest of the world with borders, and then patrol the borders to keep these two parts world separate and to make sure that the people inside the borders are in total charge of everything that happens there. 

They want to be in such a state that they are ‘independent and sovereign.’  They want to be in an ‘independent and sovereign state.’  

 

The Colonization of Europe

 

The image below is an image of the area where the first territorial members of the homo genus would have found themselves after they had made it down the Nile Corridor.  The Nile empties into the Mediterranean sea at Alexandria, in Egypt.  Note the deep green color of the Nile Delta:  this is some of the richest rice land on Earth.  (Constant sunshine doesn’t often coincide with endless water and enormous amounts of very fertile land in very many places.) 

But once they hit the sea, they would be stock.  There is no adjacent land that is productive enough to colonize.  To the east, the Sahara runs all the way to the sea.  The only river from the mountains that makes it all the way to the sea is the Nile:  The rest all dry up in the desert.  To the north is the Mediterranean, impassable without fairly complex boats.  To the east is the Sinai Peninsula, blistering hot and bone dry desert.  Eventually, some people would find that if they went past the Sinai, they would eventually get to the Jordan River valley, where there was fresh water and some land that was able to support crops.  But if you look at the image, you will see only scattered patches of green surrounded by brown and tan desert.  Most of the land couldn’t support settlements and much of it still isn’t settled today. 

They could form a few colonies, but then they would run out of land for new ones.  Those with land good enough to support them would soon finding themselves in fights with others to try to take land from the others.  This kind of geography would lead to some very serious conflicts.  Those with good land lived, those without good land died, and there was plenty of bad land around all the good land where people could organize for conquest.  We might expect these battles to be incredibly fierce and they may continue without pause for thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years.  If you look at today’s news, you will see that this area still has some of the bitterest and most furious wars on Earth and they never seem to stop. 

The ‘partly’ colonizable lands continue along the coastal areas of the Mediterranean through what is now Lebanon, Syria, and far eastern Turkey.  The settlers would have fought bitterly over these lands and, even today, the fights continue.  They wouldn’t reach any really large parcels of highly productive land, where the colonies could be right one against the other, until they reached southern Europe.  Then, as you can see, it is green green green, as far as the eye can see. 

Europe has a unique climate.  It has a fairly high latitude going into an area that would normally be too cold to grow a lot of crops.  But a massive flow of warm water called the Gulf Stream’ rises up from the tropics.  The Gulf stream both warms the area, giving it a far longer growing season than any other area with this latitude, and it brings constant rains.  The territorial members of the homo genus (the homo habilis and then neanderthals) wanted rich land.  When they found it, they colonized it.  They built borders around land and defended it.  To them, Europe was paradise. 

 

The Sizes of the First European States

 

The chimps had strict limits on the sizes of their ‘countries’ because they had to feed their members on whatever the land grew naturally.  They didn’t have the mental ability to put together farming operations, plant seeds, tend them, harvest the crop, and convert the crop into food. 

The humans had brains that were two to three times larger and presumably at least two times more powerful than the chimps.  They could use fire, which meant they could take advantage of foods that the chimps couldn’t. One important example is rice.  Neither pans nor humans can digest raw rice.  But if it is cooked, it can be a staple crop that supports us almost indefinitely.  Other grains can be cooked the same way.   They can also be ground into flour which is them mixed with water and a little yeast, then baked into bread.  Grains can be stored for long periods.  A group of people with some land that can produce grain can become sedentary farmers, staying in the same place all year long.  They can harvest grain and then use it, throughout the year, both for bread for themselves and for food for chickens, pigs, sheep, and other animals that they domesticate.  They can live in the same place and eat well-balanced meals every day. 

They basically have to monopolize the land to do this.  they need to protect it from outsiders.  If they don’t, the outsiders can attack during the harvest and take everything, killing everyone in the unprotected grain producing area.  They need borders and need to defend them all the time to make sure that the grains and other foods they have stored are safe from bandits, Ronin, and other countries.  They have to live the same basic way that the chimps lived, building and defending borders. 

They would still have limits on the sizes of their countries, for the same reason as the chimps had limits.  If the country was too large, they would have to have enormous numbers of border guards to monitor the border.  When trouble came, they would still have to travel a long way to get to and bring soldiers to deal with the problem.   Too large of a country and they wouldn’t be able to defend it. 

They could have larger countries than the chimps, however, because their greater technology would allow them to produce a lot more food in a given area.  This means they could support a great many more soldiers and support personnel.  However, they wouldn’t be able to support enough to have countries of the size of modern countries. 

We will see shortly that we have artifacts that can tell us how large their countries were.  They built walls that were massive around their states and many of these walls still exist.  Even in places where the walls were torn down, we can easily tell where the walls used to be because other structures were built in their place.  Recently, governments have wanted to build roads for densely populated areas.  But this is difficult because all of the land is in use and it is very hard to get enough land that is in a line to make a road that is useful.  This is where the walls come in.  The old walls that were still standing when the machine age began were obvious places to build walls.  They were circles surrounding cities.  You can look at maps of Europe and easily see where the walls used to be by looking at the road systems. 

The countries that the humans built were larger than the countries the chimps built.  They were closer to the sizes of the political units we call ‘cities’ than the ‘states’ of the world today.  Historians generally call these early states ‘city states.’ 

 

Keywords    Human evolution, Homo genus, Early hominids, Fire use in human evolution, Out of Africa theory, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Neanderthals, Denisovans, DNA evidence in evolution, Brain size evolution, Territorial behavior in early humans, Human migration patterns, Prehistoric tool use, Ancient human societies, Human ancestors, Evolutionary biology, Paleogenetics, Human origins, Prehistoric fire control

4:  The Homos

 

Our genus, the genus of the currently living members of the human race, is ‘homo.’  The term ‘genus’ means a ‘generic name’ and is a general name that is used to refer to a category of beings that all seem similar.  It really has no scientific meaning and is used only for general classification to help people understand the general category of beings referred to.  The term ‘homo’ is often used synonymously with ‘man' or ‘human’ but it is a generic term that basically means ‘man like’ (or ‘human like’) beings.

The earliest members of the homo genus that have been classified are the Homo egasters.  This term is often translated as 'the working man.'  (egaster is Latin for ‘working.’)  This name was coined because these were found around large numbers of assorted tools, making researchers think they were dealing with people who liked to work and make things. 

Homo erectus is often translated as ‘the upright man.’  This came from its posture, dramatically different and more upright than its pan ancestor.  Some researchers think homo erectus and homo egasters are different subspecies of the same species, while others think they are in different species.  Some think that they may not even be different subspecies, but merely different members of the same species and subspecies that happen to look different.  (We don’t all look the same.)  We don’t have any DNA from these beings, so we can’t verify the claims.  They aren’t really important for the points here:  All that matters is that there were early human-like beings that had this classification.  Large numbers of fossils have been found both in Africa and in Asia.  

These people traveled a lot.  (I will take the liberty of using the terms ‘people’ to refer all members of the genus homo.  The main reason for this is that I need something to call them in discussions and this seems more appropriate than any other name I could find.) 

Homo habilis is ‘the tool using hominid’ or ‘the tool using man.’  Homo neanderthalis and homo denisova are named after the sites where their remains were first identified.

Homo sapiens means ‘the intelligent hominid’ or ‘the intelligent man.’

Until very recently, this term was used to refer to ‘our’ species, where ‘our’ refers to ‘the people who are now classified as humans and the people with similar levels of intellect who lived in the past six thousand years.  Those who believed that history went back more than six thousand years thought that the beings who lived before this period were in some other category, at least in a different species but possibly in a different genus. 

 

A family of religions called the ‘Abrahamic religions’ is built on a set of books called variously by names like the ‘Books of Moses’ and ‘the Pentateuch and the Torah have been and still are important religions in the world, claiming more than 57% of the world’s people as followers, and include Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.  All Abrahamic religions teach that nothing existed before a certain date (October 23, 4004. B.C., according to James Ussher, who claims to have worked it out in detail). 
          For many centuries, the Abrahamic religions controlled state apparatus in large parts of the world and required all followers to accept this story on pain of death.  People couldn’t do research into events that they thought occurred before this date, because that would subject to them to arrest, execution, and confiscation of all their property by the state. 
          We will go over this period in history later in the book.  The ban on analysis faded away fairly slowly (or so it appears to us who lived through time) as more and more evidence showed it had to be wrong and religious authority faded.  But as recently as a century ago, teachers in the United States could be arrested for implying the chronology was wrong under the Butler Act, which prohibited certain teachings that were inconsistent and many countries today still have laws prohibiting providing children with inconsistent information and, while it isn’t strictly illegal, many jurisdictions go to great lengths to discourage this teaching.     

 

Not everyone accepts the scientific evidence, even today. 

But most educated people accept at least the premise that he universe is a lot older than 6,030 years old.  There still seems to be a lot of resistance to the idea that humans (meaning true humans, including homo sapiens) go back more than 6,030 years.  DNA evidence is showing us, however, that the species homo sapiens definitely goes back a very, very long time, because human-like beings that were once thought to be different species, like neanderthal and denisovans, clearly had babies with beings that were anatomically and genetically indistinguishable from modern humans.  This means that all three of these groups, thought to be different species, are actually the same species. 

Let’s look at the evidence we have that can help us understand the background of the genus homo (human-like beings). 

 

The Genus Homo

 

The earliest specimen of the genus Homo found to date (as of 2024) was found in the Ledi-Geraru site in the Afar Region of Ethiopia, in the northern part of Africa, in January of 2013.  It has not yet been assigned to a species as of this writing.  It has been given the designation LD-350.   It has been dated back to somewhere between 2.75 and 2.8 million years BP (before the present).  Several other finds have been made that have been dated to between 1.85 million and 2.75 million years ago.  All finds older than 1.85 million years ago were found in Africa.  We have no evidence of any ‘human like’ beings living anywhere outside of Africa before 1.85 million BP (before the present). 

This seems to indicate that the genus homo originated in Africa.  It also indicates that the members of this genus who left Africa did so some time before 1.85 million years ago, but probably not much before this, or we would have probably found signs of this.  That means that we can date the exit of humans from Africa to about 1.85 million years ago. 

 

What Are Homos?

 

The main difference noticeable between the Pan genus and the Homo genus is brain size.  We don’t actually have brains of early homos for comparison, because brain tissue decomposes quickly.  But we can tell the brains of the members of the homo genus were much larger than the brains of the members of the Pan genus by measuring the brain cavities in remains. 

The brain cavities of the earliest adult homos are about twice the size as the brain cavities of adult pans.  The brain cavities of adult modern humans are about three times the size of those of adult pans. 

I think it is important to try to get some idea how this particular change happened, because large and complex brains are basically the defining features of humans. 

We got these large brains somehow. 

In other words, they evolved for some reason.  

After we got this higher ‘processing capability’ we could use it for many different things.  We now use it to study things, solve problems, and build fantastic machines and equipment.  But if we want to understand why we are what we are now and how we got here, we should at least try to get some idea of the reason that these large and powerful brains were needed. 

 

Fire

 

There seems to be a very obvious explanation for the massive increase in mental processing ability:  The pans who lived in a certain very specific area got a new toy. 

Actually, it was a tool. 

But it is really fun to play with and most of us play with it, in one way or another, nearly every day.  (If you drive a fossil fuel powered car, you are playing with it:  the fire is in the cylinders.)  It has so many uses that, even after having had it for at least three million years, we still haven’t figured them all out yet. 

Fire is such a complicated tool/toy that the pans who had access to it couldn’t understand it and use it effectively with the smaller brains they had when they first found it.  Over the course of millions years, different individuals had different genetic profiles (every one is unique) and different mental capabilities. 

Some had just a little bit better capability to understand and use fire than others. 

They could do things the others couldn’t.  They could meet the needs of their babies when others couldn’t.  They passed their mental advantages down to the next generation and showed them tricks they could do with this new toy that others didn’t know how to do.  Those that succeeded had greater chances of survival than those that didn’t.  Over long periods of time, the percentage with genes that encouraged larger brains to grow increased and the percentage without these genes declined. 

This led to what we may think of a ‘supercharging’ in the evolutionary process.  In the area where this new toy/tool was available, progress was incredibly fast, at least relative to places where fire was not available.  The growth in intellectual capability was so profound that, within a million or so years, the beings that had the use of this new toy/tool had changed almost everything about the way they interacted with the world around them. 

They weren’t as smart as we are now.  But they were far, far smarter than the pans that were their evolutionary ancestors, and so different that reasonable analysts would not consider them to be the same genus.  They were a different genus, the ‘homos.’ 

 

Fire

 

Fire is mesmerizing.  I have sat and watched wood fires for hours, staring into the flames.  It has many uses.  I cook with it, heat my house with it and, when the electricity goes out I have candles I can light to see my way around.  Gasoline engines use controlled fire, setting gas air mixture ablaze in conditions that lead to a rapid burn called an ‘explosion,’ which is then repeated over and over to make the wheels turn.  Jet engines use fire, as do rocket engines.  Guns ignite a highly flammable powder to create an explosion that drives a bullet.  Armor piercing uranium bullets explode and burn on impact in a way that melts steel and turns it into a liquid.  The bullet then cuts through what had been several inches of solid steel as if it were butter, into the center of the tank, where it hits oxygen that causes the liquid metal debris to explode again to kill everyone inside the vehicle. 

Fire is very complicated.  It takes different skills and different mental connections to figure out these uses than it takes to find bananas and other food in forests.  The animals still needed the brain components they used to find food and meet their other needs. But those that could expand their brain and direct its activities so that it could do these other things had fantastic advantages over those who couldn’t. 

To use fire effectively and safely, you need to be pretty intelligent.  If you are stupid and you take risks with fire, you will not live very long.  If you are smart and use fire well, you have incredible advantages over beings that are otherwise the same as you, but don’t use fire.  They are primitive beings compared to you.  

The transitions from ‘primates that don’t use fire’ to ‘primates that do use fire’ is a critical one in the human experience.  I really couldn’t find any scientific analysis, even speculative analysis, that showed how this key event took place in the literature.  But you understand a little bit about the geography of Africa, the domains of the pans, and the way that oil pools above fields with great pressure and then catches fire from natural events, you can get a pretty good idea where and how it is likely to have happened. 

The descriptions below are speculative.  But they are only designed to fill in some important holes in the way we look at ourselves and our past.  These exact events may not have happened, but something similar did happen.  We can understand a process a lot better if we can put a picture of it together in our minds.  I want to describe the picture for you:

 

Unity

 

First let’s set the scene:

Let’s consider again the picture of Africa taken from space. 

 

 

The central area, right around the equator, is where the Nile river begins.  The clouds that circle the globe at the equator are trapped by something called an ‘Intertropical Convergence Zone.’   They can’t go north or south, they can only circle until they have so much water in them they just can’t hold it anymore. 

When they hit the high mountains in Tropical Africa, the Rwenzoris, they have to go up.  The air is cooler up there and as the clouds cool, they release moisture as rain.  The rain falls and falls, constantly, often in torrents.  The rain flows across the land and comes together as rivers that fill massive valleys, which become lakes.  The lakes overflow to form new rivers that flow into other lakes.  The water fills all of the valleys and every nook and cranny that can hold water.  Then, it has nowhere to go but down.  It starts to flow down the rugged mountains into the foothills below.  It collects, at the base of the mountains, into one of the two main tributaries of the Nile, the ‘White Nile.’

As the land levels out in the northern part of the green zone of the picture, the White Nile becomes a lazy river.  The low land doesn’t drive the clouds up to cause rain in these areas, so the land becomes drier and drier.  At a certain point, the land turns bone dry and there is no plant growth at all.  (The moisture is trapped in the Intertropical Convergence Zone.) 

The river now enters the Sahara desert, where it provides a ribbon of life that extends more than 2,000 miles all the way to the Mediterranean Sea. 

If you follow the White Nile river down to just before the green disappears and you enter the desert, you would be in a state called ‘Unity.’  It isn’t really possible to tell what country the state of Unity is in, because it is disputed and several countries claim it today.  But they all call it ‘Unity.’   This is the site of the unity oil field. 

It is truly massive field.  It has underground reserves of 3.5 billion barrels of oil.  (This may help you understand why so many people are fighting over it.  The war over Unity doesn’t make the news very much, possibly because news shows don’t cover wars that involve black people fighting other black people.  But it is one of the largest and most deadly conflicts on the planet as I write this.)  

The underground oil deposits are under fantastic pressure from the weight of the land above them.  this pushes the oil up from the underground deposits to the surface.  It flows up and forms pools at the surface. 

These pools have been there for a very long time.  Ancient Egyptian texts discuss the transport of this oil down the river to Giza, the site of the pyramids, so that the builders could use it for light, for lubrication (oil a flat surface and you can easily slide something weighting several tons across it), for cooking, heating, and making medicines.   This oil was there when the pan genus evolved 6.7 million years ago. 

Once oil gets forms pools, they oil starts to stratify.  Heavy oils like tar and asphalt sink to the bottom.  Lighter oils like methane, ethane, propane and butane, rise to the top.  The first two are lighter than air and float up into the sky.  They mix with oxygen on the way, creating a very explosive mixture.  A tiny spark anywhere will set the entire thing on fire.  The other light oil products float partly as gasses and partly as liquids on the top of the pools.  These burn easily and keep burning as long as there is fuel to feed them.  With 3.5 billion barrels under the ground, they will never run out. 

Before humans, these surface pools were scattered all around the area near the current Unity Field.  Unity state is on the border between two climate systems.  The rains come in thick during certain times of the year.  Plants grow very rapidly.  Then there is no rain at all for months.  The plants all dry and become tinder dry.  Electrical storms are common in all climactic convergence zones:  rapidly rising water vapor strips electrons from the air, creating electrical charges.  Lightening equalizes these charges.  Lighting ignites the wild dry grass which burns like, well, wildfire.  The fires hit the pools, large and small, and ignite them all. 

The larger fires wouldn’t have been attractive to the pans.  Large fires create their own climate systems with howling winds that result from the intense temperatures.  The fires are hot enough to partially burn the very heavy hydrocarbons like asphalt and tar, which produce a thick black smoke.  They would have stayed away from these fires.

But the small pools of gasses and oil would be much different.  You can go to restaurants today, in areas with cold climates, that have outdoor patios. 

 

 

 

They run propane through rocks in a little fireplace and set it on fire.  It is very comfortable to be around these fires and I enjoy coming to these places to get a drink or something to eat.   

 

The Pans Arrive in Unity

 

For millions of years, pans were the smartest beings on Africa.  They were able to dominate other animals and take what they wanted.  If an area had food that could support pans, and they wanted it, they could take it.  The green area in Africa is very large and can support enormous populations.  But, given enough time, even these enormous areas would get crowded. 

The territorial pans, the chimps, would move out and colonize new territories when their lands got crowded.  The White Nile goes through very productive land all the way to Unity.  It probably took hundreds of thousands or even millions of years, but eventually, communities of chimps would have lived on land that was close to the fires. 

The non-territorial pans probably got there first.  They were comfortable with traveling and felt at home wherever they went.  They didn’t need rich land and were accustomed to working for whatever they got.  Then the territorial pans arrived, and made it clear they were willing to kill, if necessary, to monopolize the best lands, the non-territorial pans moved on.  But both lived in this area as of 3 million BP (before the present).   

They saw the fires from the burning oil pools. 

The members of the pan species are very intelligent.  Other than humans, no other animal can use tools better or make better use of the things they see around them.  There are uses for fire, even if you don’t know how to make it or move it from place to place.  Fire provides light. 

Pans, like humans, have poor night vision. 

Their predators (lions, saber toothed tigers, wolves, to name a few) have excellent night vision.  Pans that are in total darkness will be helpless against these predators.  They will be a lot safer if they can find a place where there is a natural fire (a relatively small burning oil pool) and make their camp close enough to use its light to see predators coming.  To the territorial pans who had carved out the best land for themselves, it provided great benefits.  If they could camp close to fire, they could see their enemies coming and organize to fight them.  They couldn’t be attacked by surprise, at least not as easily, if they had even a tiny bit of light. 

As the pans spent more time around fire, they became more and more comfortable around it.  Fire is mesmerizing.  I like to watch it and think about how it moves and dances around the fuel.  I start to see patterns.  I don’t try to apply any logic or reason to it, I simply watch.  Eventually, I can start to see where the flames will dance off to next. 

Primatologist Jill Pruetz at Iowa State University in Ames studies the way that pans interact with fire.  When dry seasons come to parts of Africa, wildfires burn everywhere.  Preuetz notes that the chimps appear to be far more comfortable around the fires than humans.  They have to live with them several months out of the year.  They know that if they take certain precautions, they will be safe so they don’t panic like other animals, including humans.  Here she describes it in an interview with LiveScience.com: 

 

"It was the end of the dry season, so the fires burn so hot and burn up trees really fast, and they were so calm about it," Pruetz said of the chimps.  "They were a lot better than I was, that's for sure."

For the most part, wild animals consider fire very distressing, but the chimpanzees showed no sign of stress or fear with the wildfires, other than calmly avoiding the fire as it approached them.

"I was surprised at how expert they were at handling the fire," Pruetz told LiveScience.  "The fire was burning really hot, and the flames were at least 10 feet high, up to 20 feet at times."

The apes were experts at predicting where the fire would go, Pruetz noted.  "I could predict it, sort of, but if it were just me, I would have left," she said.  "At one time, I actually had to push through them because I could feel the heat from the fire that was on the side of me and I just wasn't that comfortable with it."

 

These animals clearly lived around fire for a long time.  As she notes, most animals are afraid of fire, mainly because they don’t know enough about how it moves to keep themselves safe.  (Even humans are in this category).  But the chimps appeared to be smarter than humans in this regard.  They understood fire. 

 

The Intentional Use of Fire

 

Most likely, one of the first intentional acts of fire control involved moving fire from one place to another.  Large pools of oil burn very hot and produce massive amounts of smoke.  They stay lit for decades or even centuries:  There is plenty of fuel and no winds or rain are strong enough to put them out.  The small pools burn at a good temperature and are useful, but they go out with a strong wind or heavy rain.  The early pans may have seen a fire that was too big to be useful and many smaller pools that would be great for them if they could find a way to set them on fire. 

They had seen the smaller pools burning before, but they are not on fire at that time.  But they see that a stick gets into a pool of fire and catches fire itself.  Then the stick may fall out of the fire pool of oil, but keep burning.  They would have seen wood burning many times. 

They would have stared at fire as humans do and watched it. 

They would have seen embers falling to small pools and igniting the small pools.  They would know, from their experience dealing with wild fires in the forests (as described in the text box above) that they can safely move a burning branch out of the way if they stay far enough from the flames.  It may take a long time but, eventually, one of them will take the burning stick and move it to the smaller pool, to create a fire the right size. 

Others will see this.  Pans are copycats.  They copy the things others do.  They don’t have to have schools where they are taught how to safely move fire to copy another pan that has done it. 

But every pan has unique DNA.  Some are smarter than others.  Eventually, one will be born that has mental connections that allow her to safely carry a burning stick from one burning pool to another.  She will have invented one of the simplest fire-using tools, a torch.  Mothers are driven by instinct to protect their children.  Nothing drives them harder.  A torch can allow a mother to protect her children from predators.  If she masters the tool of the torch, her children will live while the children of mot hers who didn’t have the new mental connections will become food for the predators.  She will pass on her intellect, along with the skills themselves, to her children. 

The new brain connection will have come into existence because of a chance change in the DNA of the pan that had it.  The new DNA makes the animal more capable.  Those without it won’t be able to compete and their genes will go away.  Eventually, all of the pans in an area will have the beneficial DNA connection.  They will all be able to move fire from one pool to another, if they have to do this. 

Then, another connection will develop that makes the one with it even more capable.  This process will supercharge evolution.  It is hard to explain the doubling of brain size in a mere 1 million years without incredible pressure and great advantages for the animals that had greater intellect.  But the use of fire seems to be something in this category.  It has so many uses that, even now, some 3 million years into the fire age, we haven’t figured them all out yet.  Each new use for fire requires new mental connections. 

 

Nuclear reactions are a kind of controlled fire.  Do you have the mental connections needed to understand how to build a nuclear bomb? A tiny percentage of the people on Earth even have minds capable of understanding the mathematics needed for this. 

 

The power that comes from higher intelligence, in this situation, is fantastic.  A little bit more intellect means you are a little better at using this tool.  Those with this greater intellect survive while those that aren’t good at using this tool perish.

 

Fire and territorial Societies

 

Fire is useful in war.  Armies that have it can fight at night.  If their enemies don’t have it, their enemies are not going to last long.   Armies with fire can throw balls of burning tar using slings, burning their enemies to death.  (This is still done, in a slightly more sophisticated way; the devices we call ‘napalm bombs’ are essentially balls of burning gelatinized oil which are ‘thrown’ from airplanes onto the bodies of enemies and any who happen to be under the planes.) 

The use of fire changed them in many ways.  It expanded their mental capabilities a great deal.  It takes a lot of intelligence to use fire effectively and safely.  We know that in very young children, the parts of the brain that process this information are not yet fully developed.  Young human children will try to touch burning objects and, if not stopped, can be badly hurt.  The parts of their brains that have a cognitive understanding of the dangers of fire are not fully developed. 

The pans living close to the oil fields developed these brain components over time.  Those with them had advantages over those without them.  They were more likely to survive long enough to have young and then raise them to be adults.  Over time, the better-adapted chimps would be more likely to pass on their genes.  The adaptations would build on one another.  Eventually, the chimps would be so different than any of the original chimps that an objective observer would probably not want to use the same name to refer to them. 

They would no longer be pans.  They would be a new genus, our genus, the homo genus. 

 

Out of Africa

 

Let’s look at Africa again. 

 

 

If you look closely at the picture, you will see that the green area in the center is essentially boxed in.  It is blocked on all sides and there is no real way to get from there to the outside world.  On the north is the hot and arid Sahara.  On the other three sides are oceans. 

If you look very close, however, you will see a tiny ribbon of green that moves up from the green area and cuts through the great desert.  It is tiny because you are looking at it from 2,500 miles up.  This will be the route our ancient ancestors took when they leave Africa.  It is the Nile river. 

This the only way out.  it is the way our ancestors went when they left Africa about 2 million years ago. 

There were different groups of homos that left Africa.  They are:

 

1.  Homo egaster (the worker man)

2.  Homo habilis (the capable man). 

 

We don’t have DNA from either of these groups.  This means that we can’t do genetic tests to determine if they are two separate species, members of the same species that have different ways of life for different reasons, like the chimps and bonobos.

I think you can see what is coming:

 

Two Different Societies Leave Africa

 

One of these two groups, the homo egaster, left artifacts that indicate that its members were clearly migratory.  We don’t find artifacts of homo egaster or their descendants the denisovans in fixed and well built homes, or in communities with roads and public facilities.  They are not found in desirable areas like fertile river valleys, which could be colonized and turned into ‘countries.’ They traveled in small groups and most of the evidence we have from then indicates they were clearly not ‘living’ in the places where they left artifacts, they were just traveling through. 

They lived in the wild open spaces.  They probably were hunter gatherers, and traveled very long distances following game they were hunting.  Homo egaster are the ancestors of the denisovans, who followed the same lifestyles and who left artifacts in many of the same places.  The denisovans are the ancestors of the modern nomads of Mongolia and Siberia, many of whom live the same general lifestyle, living in portable homes called ‘yurts’ and traveling by dogsled or, if they can afford them, snowmobiles. 

In the places where homo egaster lived, it wouldn’t have been possible to form and defend a specific part of the world as a ‘country.’ For this to happen, they would need a piece of land that is monopolizable.  It must be practical for the people living on the land to build borders and defend them, and the land must produce enough to support them without them having to leave it undefended.  The places where homo egaster lived clearly do not qualify. 

They were like the bonobos, both in terms of disposition and culture.  Of course, they probably would have liked to live in the best areas, where food and everything else they need is plentiful.  But, for some reason, they shunned these areas and stayed in remote areas. 

Homo habilis lived entirely differently.  They formed colonies as they went and built permanent facilities, including very large and durable walls to surround the areas where they lived.  We can study their former habitations because many were built along the banks of the Nile where it flows through the dry Sahara.  It doesn’t rain in many of these areas for centuries, so the dwellings don’t degrade very rapidly.  Their artifacts show they clearly ‘settled’ the areas where they lived.  They stayed there.  They had homes where they slept every night.  They clearly had military forces patrolling the walls: we can find evidence of defensive fortifications that allowed them to rain down fire on their enemies while remaining safe themselves.  They clearly had societies like the chimps, built in the same principle: territorial sovereignty.  The homo habilis divided into groups, each of which took possession of a territory, then treated it as if they had sovereignty over it.  They acted much like the people of the world’s countries do today. 

The homo habilis were the ancestors of the people called the neanderthals.  Neanderthal remains are found in great quantities in Europe.  The neanderthals built the many thousands of city states of ancient Europe.  When later technology made it impossible to defend a small state, larger entities closer to modern countries evolved and many of the smaller ‘city states’ (a state the size of a modern city) were abandoned.  You can find the ruins of their old city walls today, all over Europe.  There are so many of them, that most even aren’t marked and used as tourist attractions today.  They are just left to be destroyed by the weather. 

Both of these early groups of the homo genus left Africa starting about 2 million years ago.  The homo egaster (sometimes called ‘homo erectus,’ although there is no agreement on whether they are the same species) went first.  They were migratory people descended from migratory people.  The homo habilis, with their fixed homes and city states then followed. 

These people had large brains.  They were more than twice as large as those of the pans who were their ancestors.  They used fire for light, heating, cooking, and to help them in the manufacture of their tools.  Since the areas where they went didn’t have naturally burning oil fields, they clearly had figured out how to make fire.  They brought the items needed to make fire with them, wherever they went. 

 

How to make fire: This is easy if you have some light oil, a flint, and a piece of metal that contains iron.  This is how a ‘Zippo’ lighter works: the reservoir has very light oil (‘lighter fluid’ is a very light oil).  This oil is soaked up by a wick.  The wick is placed right next to a tiny piece of flint which is pushed up into a metal wheel by a tiny spring.  The metal wheel is made of steel, which has a high iron content.  Spin the wheel and it scrapes the flint creating a spark which lights the oil-soaked wick.  (The wick itself doesn’t burn and can last for decades; it only holds the oil.) If you don’t have fossil-fuel oil, you can use natural oil from animal fat or extracted from oil-rich plants.
       Early homos could have figured out that the oil was the key part.  Oil and a wick (which can be made of anything) and a spark.  The hard part is actually the iron containing metal, needed to generate a large spark from a flint.  If you know the trick, however, you can find them: there is a certain color of red mixed with orange that indicates a high iron content in a rock.  Look for it and keep trying, striking the rocks together until you get a tiny spark.  (This will happen when you find one with an iron content of about 60% or higher).  Then, once you have the iron rock as a striker, you test it against other rocks.  Each one will give a different level of spark.  Striking flint against the iron rock will give you the best spark.
       The American ‘Indians’ used this method to make fire.  For this reason, they placed great value on iron and one of the most valuable trade goods available to early explorers was simple nails.  (The explored Captain Cook descries the elaborate lengths to which the natives he met would go to get even a single nail.  He didn’t seem to understand why a nail was worth more than a pile of silver or gold.  The higher the iron content, the greater the spark.  His nails were almost 100% iron.)
       Cook traveled extensively and was the first person from Europe to have contact with the people of several hundred islands.  They were all different in many ways, but they all shared one trait: they all used fire.  Cooke noted that the poorest of the people he met had no clothes, blankets, or other comforts, but they would never go anywhere without their fire making kits: 

 

How Territorial Sovereignty Societies Spread

 

Homo habilis, and their descendants the neanderthals, had societies built on the idea of dividing themselves into different teams to fight over exclusivity (sovereignty) over pieces of territory.  These are the same kinds of societies chimps have and the same kinds of societies that dominate the world now. 

These societies spread in a very specific way.  If we want to understand how they developed into the societies we have now, it helps to understand how these systems expand. 

They can start with a few people (or animals; territorial sovereignty societies are suitable for both) in a small area, but spread until they cover immense areas.  These societies spread by the process of ‘colonization.’ When the individuals in a group that has taken control of a territory can no longer support their population on that territory, they find some other territory that will allow them to basically transport a new version of their system to that territory. 

They have a system that requires defendable borders.  Homos are a lot better at fortifying borders than chimps.  They build durable barriers that are very high (many of the border walls in the world are more than 100 feet high, and incredibly well fortified).  These borders can’t be moved so the territory of each of these units is more or less fixed.  If the population grows, the territory can’t grow.  The territory gets more and more crowded expand with ever increasing stress on resources.  Eventually, if additional territory exists, they will send out ‘colonists’ to find it and basically create a new version of their system into that colony. 

If no unoccupied territory that is suitable is available, they will have to try to take over occupied territory.  If the others in the territory are passive and pacifistic, unwilling to fight (as the bonobos were in the chimp/bonobo conflicts), the more aggressive colonists can often drive them away.  If there is no place to move them to, they can simply wipe them, out. 

 

In the book ‘A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies,’ Las Casas tells how Columbus colonized the formerly densely populated island of Haiti.  The ‘Indian’ population when Las Casas he arrived in 1509 was over 3 million.  Twenty years later it was down to 100 and, by the time he wrote the book in 1542 it was zero.

 

If the all land that is unoccupied and all land occupied by people with pacifist societies has been colonized, the only way to get more territory will be to make war against another occupied area (‘country’) and take it from them.  but this time is not going to come for the homo habilis and their descendants for another 3 million years.  When they first left Africa, there was plenty of land everywhere. 

 

Where They Spread

 

The map below indicates the paths of migration of the more aggressive early members of the homo genus, including homo erectus and neanderthals. 

They came from central Africa.  They went up the Nile.  From there, they spread along the Mediterranean shore.  Some went east to the area now called the ‘Middle east.’ They found the fertile and productive valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates.  They built colonies in these areas.  They continued west along the northern part of the Mediterranean, to modern Greece.  (The inland areas along the Mediterranean east of Greece were not really suitable for colonization without modern technology, because it doesn’t rain enough in these areas to support crops.) From Greece, they spread into what is now western Europe.  The land they found is rich and productive and the homo erectus and neanderthals flourished there. 

The great bulk of the land of western Europe is productive enough to support permanent hominid settlers.  They can plant grains and grow them in the summer.  They can store the grains and grind them into flour, to have bread in the winter.  They can domesticate and feed chickens, ducks, geese, pigs, goats, sheep, oxen, and other animals.  They can have eggs, milk, cheese and butter.  They can live very well. 

Since they live well, their population will grow.  At some point, they will need more land.  The people with the other culture, the homo egaster and denisovans (discussed below) will already be there.  These are migratory people however and have neither the desire nor the ability to fight in a way that might allow them to win against the ones who need the land for their colonies.  At first, the occupied territories will have space between them.  But this space will fill in.  Eventually, the occupied territories, which we may now call ‘states’ or ‘countries,’ will be against each other, with the borders of one the same as the borders of the next.  (This is the way these ‘countries’ are today.) As long as food is plentiful, however, and they have no effective birth control, the population will grow.  Stress will build.  The people who have important positions in each country will look for weaknesses in the defenses of their neighbors.  When they find them, they will attack. 

Their system will work the same basic way as the system of the chimpanzees, with one exception: They will have far better weapons.  The carnage will be far greater than takes place in chimp societies. 

 

Neanderthals, denisovans, and ‘Modern Humans’

 

As noted earlier, sciences are advancing at lighting pace.  They are providing new information that shows that old ideas about fundamental realities of existence were wrong.  Neanderthal remains and artifacts show they were brutal and violent, organizing and participating in horrific mass murder events.  They killed and killed and killed; it was what they were known for.  Their bodies looked something like us, but that was a coincidence.  They were not like us.  We are civilized and reasonable.  They were thought to be the primitive beings that lived in Europe before true humans arrived. 

However, we were told, we don’t have to worry about these horrible monsters bothering us.  They are now extinct and have been for tens of thousands of years.  Or so says every reference I could find to them that was written before about 2020.  Modern humans arrived at some point, only a few thousand years ago.  (Religious people are stuck on the figure of about 4,000 BC, the time given for creation in the Bible.) The neanderthals couldn’t compete with the logical, reasonable, empathetic and entirely civilized beings that we are. 

Denisovan remains were found far more recently.  They were not savage fighters, but they appeared to lack ingenuity and the normal curiosity of modern humans.  They were hunter gatherers, not even intelligent enough to build permanent cities or form governments.  They are also extinct.  These simple beings simply couldn’t compete with the wise, noble, and cultured beings that WE are. 

DNA evidence has shown that this is wrong.  All modern humans tested so far show some neanderthal DNA, some denisovan DNA, or both.  They are not extinct.  We are them.  DNA also shows that many babies were produced with one parent that was neanderthal or denisovan, and another parent that had a DNA profile and anatomical features indicative of a modern human.  This meant that we are all the same species.  They are not extinct.  They are still here.  We are them. 

You can have your DNA tested.  The testers will tell you your ancestry.  If you have any European ancestry, you will have neanderthal DNA.  If you have Indonesian, or American native ancestry, you will have denisovan DNA.

It is important for us to realize there is no hard line between us and our evolutionary ancestors.  Not between us and neanderthals/denisovans (which were, remember, the same species), not between us and the homo egaster/homo habilis (which may have been the same species) and not between us and the pans (two species, two different subspecies).  Evolution is a slow process.  Each change is tiny.  But the changes accumulate, one on top of the other.  We go from pans who live around fire to members of the homo genus that have brains that are large enough and powerful enough to actually understand how to use fire.  This didn’t happen overnight.  It took more than a million years of mental growth to get to that point. 

Fire is a very complicated thing.  We are still not fully in control of it.  It has uses that we still haven’t found, after three million years living with it.  But it is so powerful and so useful that nature was able to push through aside other adaptations to give animals that have the ability to use it priority over others.  A doubling of the brain size was necessary to make this work.  But nature was patient and, over the course of a million years, this happened. 

New brain connections were needed for this.  Each newborn was genetically unique, with its own DNA profile. Some had genes that made them more able to make these connections and form additional brain material to hold them.  These children grew up to be a tiny bit smarter than their parents and the generations that came before them.  The smarter ones had a better ability to deal with key tools and otherwise meet their needs.  They had a greater chance of survival than others and were more likely to survive long enough to pass on their genes to their young.  There are more than 3 billion connections in our DNA.  A single link of difference, which could be the result of a mutation or a chance inheritance that had simply never happened before, could make a difference in this area.  The generations get smarter and smarter.  Not in any way would notice in just a few hundred years.  But if you could come back and visit the beings living alongside of the fires near Unity once every thousand years, you would see a difference. 

Eventually, they were so different that people who are now studying their remains would want to put them into a different category.  They have to have something to call them.  So they come up with names, like homo egaster, homo habilis, neanderthals, and denisovans.  Until we had the ability to do large scale DNA analysis, we couldn’t do anything more than guess about the relationships.  Now we are finding that we can test relationships in detail.  This is showing that the differences aren’t really that great. 

We don’t have DNA from homo egaster or homo habilis (the presumed first steps in evolution from pans to humans), so we can’t test them.  We only know that beings with much larger brains than pans evolved in northern parts of Africa and eventually spread to the rest of the world.  We do have DNA from both neanderthals and denisovans and we know that they are the same species as we are.  We don’t look the same as they look.  You probably wouldn’t have a very satisfactory conversation with these beings and, if you considered them to be human at all, you would probably consider them to be very stupid humans.  But if you were in the right situation and mood and had sex with one of the opposite sex, the female could get pregnant and eventually give birth to a child that was healthy and fertile. 

Here is the point: there is no hard line.  We are them and they are us. 

 

Keywords    Human evolution, Homo genus, Early hominids, Fire use in human evolution, Out of Africa theory, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Neanderthals, Denisovans, DNA evidence in evolution, Brain size evolution, Territorial behavior in early humans, Human migration patterns, Prehistoric tool use, Ancient human societies, Human ancestors, Evolutionary biology, Paleogenetics, Human origins, Prehistoric fire control