10:  A Transition between Eras

 

 

From the very beginning of humankind, the human race was split into two divisions.  The people who lived in these divisions were entirely different culturally, economically, socially, and spiritually.  They had societies built on entirely different foundational principles. 

One of these types of societies evolved in response to evolutionary forces that forced them to adapt a certain way.  All beings must adapt to the realities of their environment or they will perish.  For lower animals (all animals without the ability to think and plan on a conscious level), a clear rule applies:  If a parcel of land is rich and productive enough that it can be monopolized, it must be monopolized.  Beings that live on that land that can be monopolized who don’t take active steps to monopolize it will be driven from that land by others who do take these steps.  The animals that enforce monopoly rights to land are enforcing sovereignty over a piece of territory. 

These societies are built on the principle of territorial sovereignty. 

Both humans and lower animals can have societies built on this principle.  Some of the members of our closest group of relatives, the pans, developed under conditions that pushed them to divide the land into individuals parcels which they would then form into groups (troops) to fight over.  They didn’t work this out logically, go over the different kinds of societies they could have, and decide on this one.  They were not capable of the kinds of analysis needed for this.  This system was forced on them by nature. 

The other type of society developed in other areas.  Some areas can't be monopolized.  To monopolize an area, the beings in them must be able to defend their homeland all the time.  They can't do this if they have to leave, because the land they want to claim can’t support them perpetually, without them ever having to leave for any reason.  If they have to leave, they can't expect the land to be ‘theirs’ when they return.  They will have to fight for it as if they had never had possession of it at all. 

In the areas where the inhabitants couldn’t monopolize land, they couldn't form territorial sovereignty societies.  They had to form other types of societies.  Practical realities forced them to be tolerant and try to get along with others.  They couldn’t spend all their time fighting because they needed to work hard to meet their needs.  They had to be able to form trusting relationships with others who aren’t part of their immediate social groups.  They had to be able to do this quickly.  Non-territorial pans, the bonobos, established these relationships by having intimate relations with the others they encountered.  We don't have a lot of information about the way the early humans in these societies acted, but we know a lot about others who had these same kinds of societies very recently, the native people who lived in the Americas before and during the early phase of the conquest.  (Before they were affected by the conquest so dramatically that they could no longer practice their way of life.)  We will see that many of the groups of humans in these societies did the same things as the non-territorial pans (the bonobos).  They wanted to get along.  Nothing was more important to them and used intimacy to demonstrate and establish trust.  This and other behaviors that we will examine when we get to the point where we have detailed information about the way these societies operated allowed them to live in the areas where they lived. 

The people in the non-territorial societies didn’t have the intense need to organize massive industries to build weapons to fight their enemies.  They didn’t have the need to treat the Earth around them as a storehouse full of resources to be plundered.   We all have affection for the beautiful world.  Unless we are compelled to rape it to accomplish some higher goal (in territorial sovereignty societies, protection of the sovereignty is higher than everything else), we want to show our affection and protect this world.  As these people evolved and gained intellectual capabilities, they found ways to put their feelings about the land and other people on the planet into words.  Here is a sample:

 

We know the sap which courses through the trees as we know the blood that courses through our veins. We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters. The bear, the deer, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the dew in the meadow, the body heat of the pony, and man all belong to the same family.

We know that the white man does not understand our ways.  One portion of land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The Earth is not his brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on. He leaves his father's grave behind, and he does not care.  He kidnaps the earth from his children, and he does not care. His father's grave, and his children's birthright are forgotten. He treats his mother, the Earth, and his brother, the sky, as things to be bought, plundered, sold like sheep or bright beads. His appetite will devour the earth and leave behind only a desert. 

This we know; the Earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the Earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.

 

The ways of life of people who lived in these two different kinds of societies were as different as night is from day.  We will see that even when people with these two societies life right next to each other they don’t seem able to grasp the basic idea that there are other ways to live.  But there clearly are.  We can live other ways. 

Let’s take a look at the way these two kinds of societies operated in the early part of human history, the period between roughly 70,000 BP and 6,000 BP.  Then, we will look at changes that happened around 6,000 BP that altered the realities of existence on one of the landmasses of Earth (Afro Eurasia), and would eventually lead to expansion for territorial sovereignty societies that allowed this kind of society to take over the entire continent and either subjugate, assimilate, or exterminate all members of the other kind of society.  

 

Territorial Sovereignty Societies

 

Let’s start our analysis of territorial sovereignty societies before humans evolved, back in the ancient times in Africa when the pans were the most intelligent beings on the continent.  

Some of the pans lived in areas close to oil deposits.  The oil was under great pressure and, in places, it would seep to the surface and form pools and tar pits.  These oil pools and tar pits would catch fire and burn for very long periods of time.  The pans that lived around these perpetual fires were smart. 

They figured out uses for fire. 

Fire is incredibly useful.  Those that had more capable minds (because of random chance:  we all have different genes) were more likely to figure it out.  They had great advantages over others with less capable minds.  They were more likely to survive long enough to reproduce.  The smarter pans produced more offspring than the less-smart pans.  The average intelligence of the pans that lived under these conditions (those near fire) increased over time.  Our minds are able to adapt to greater complexity.  The new neurons needed space and the brain sizes increased.  The impact was so great that, after several millions of years, the brains of those that had adapted to fire were double the size of the brains of those who had not done so. 

These large-brained beings were so different that they were no longer in the same category as their ape ancestors.  Later when scientists examined the remains and artifacts and classified them, they classified the new beings in a different genus, the ‘homos.’  They were in the genus that includes you and me. 

Some of these members of this new genus lived in territorial societies.  Territorial sovereignty societies are built around conflict.  The species divides itself into teams, each of which takes control of a territory and defends it by force.  The new members of the homo genus who evolved from the territorial apes (the chimpanzees) didn’t invent territorial sovereignty societies.  They were born into them.  They had gained mental skills slowly over a period of millions of years.  They descended from a long line of ancestors who had lived in these societies going back fantastic amounts of time.  It was all they knew.   Over the generations, those who weren’t mentally suited for this way of life were not able to meet their needs as well as those who were mentally suited.  Those who were aggressive, violent, loyal, and easy to anger found a place in the system and those with very strong features became leaders.  Those that were passive, tolerant, considerate, and had empathy to all members of their species, even those their teams were trying to kill, did not fit in.  They were less likely to have offspring and these genes weakened.  (They didn’t disappear entirely.   Even the most aggressive people in the world today have some members who refuse to participate in the organized mass murder events.)   But the basic realities of territorial sovereignty societies encouraged certain ways of thinking and ways of acting. 

These instincts pushed them form into tight and loyal clans, the type of clans that we now call ‘countries.’  Their instincts told them it was correct to be loyal to their clans and show respect and deference to those in positions of authority, even if they had intense personal dislike for the individuals in authority.  If their leaders decided war was necessary to protect the territory of the clans, the others followed and helped the war effort, regardless of their personal feelings for the leaders.  They may not have loved their leaders, but they have instincts they interpreted as ‘love for their country.’  It was a part of their cultural and genetic heritage. 

Their instincts (again, interpreted as feelings) told them there were people they were supposed to hate and fear.  Those members of their species who were not members of their clans lived outside the borders.  They were dangerous, unpredictable, and capable of using great trickery.  At any time, they could attack them and, if their guard was down, wipe them out.  Their logic may have told them that the people outside were no different than the people inside.  But their instincts told them to not trust their logic in this matter. The stakes were too high. 

Their instincts/feelings told them there was only one way to deal with the outsiders:  destroy them.  As they gained greater control of fire and other complex tools, the brains grew larger and their intellectual capability grew.  They used their new intellectual power to help them create new and better ways to do the things their feelings/instincts told them to do. 

They gained control over the environment around them.  Predators were killing their children.  At some point, starting about 70,000 BP, they had the intellectual capability to deal with this problem.  They organized in some way that allowed them to wipe these predators from the face of the Earth.  (We may not know the details of the way they did this, but we know it happened.)  

Other animals were taking the food that humans wanted.  Sometimes, humans experienced great hunger and famine because of these other animals.  They were capable of dealing with this too.  Again, we don’t know exactly how they did it, we just know they did. 

They eliminated the two most important checks that nature uses to control animal population.  These checks on population were now gone.  The human population could grow. 

The people inside the walls had very limited food supplies.  They walls were enormous and they couldn’t move them to increase their land.  When the population grew above the number the food could support, there was hunger.  Since they couldn’t move the walls out, the only real solution was to create a new colony.  They sent ‘colonists’ out into the world to find new land that could produce enough to support clones of their system.  They built new walls and the colonies began to sprout wherever the land produced enough to support them. 

At some point, there was no more colonizable land in many areas.  The people couldn’t build new colonies.  They needed more land so they could grow more food.  But there was no more land (at least none that met the requirements for colonization) around.  So, they had only one choice:  they had to take land away from some other country.  Of course, the people in the other country weren’t going to let this happen if they could help it.  They would fight too.  They had great pressure to be smart:  the better weapons and tactics they had, the greater the chance of survival.  They used their great intellectual capabilities to find better ways to kill.  They got very, very good at organizing mass murder events.  It was, in many ways, their greatest skill. 

This is still true today. 

 

The Other Society

 

The great bulk of Afro Eurasia isn't productive enough to support a dense network states.  Some places, mainly valleys along river, could support a few of the states.  But most of the land didn’t produce enough to be monopolizable.  People could live in these other areas.  But they couldn’t monopolize them.  They had to share them.  They had to be tolerant and accommodating.  They couldn't organize themselves around violent conflict.  They couldn’t simply force the world to comply with their absolute and totally unyielding requirements.  (Sovereignty is an absolute concept.)  They had to be flexible and comprising. 

You may compare these two societies to the societies of the chimps and the soc of the bonobos.  The chimps had territorial sovereignty societies with hard borders that were defended by organized troops and murderous violence.  The people with territorial sovereignty societies lived like this.  The most aggressive of these societies were in Europe.  The people in these societies had both cultural and genetic forces pressing them to be territorial and violent.  Their genes came mainly from Neanderthals, the human ancestors who had descended from the territorial chimps.  Over thousands of generations, individuals who had refused to comply with the standards of these societies had been outcasts. 

 

If you are born into a system where war is constant and loyalty is highly valued, and have genes that make you question the idea of patriotism and give you feelings that organized mass murder is not a good idea, you won’t be very popular.  You will have a harder time finding a mate and finding a way to fit into the economy so you can make a living.  You be less likely to breed than a hard-line patriot who screams for war at every opportunity. 

The difference may be tiny and many pacifist people and non-nationalists may still have children and raise them.  But in territorial sovereignty societies these genes will give a disadvantage to the people that have them.  In natural law societies, which are more inclined to tolerance and peace anyway, these same genes will be beneficial.

Over a long period of time, the genes of these two groups of people will diverge.  The divergence probably won't be enough to prevent them from breeding with each other, but they will be enough to create two entirely different personality types.  The people in territorial sovereignty societies will tend to be fiercely loyal to the entity they call their ‘country,’ and easy to incite to violence.  The people in natural law societies will be more like the hippie apes, the bonobos:  tolerant, empathetic, and open to discussion.

 

The Old Way of Life (Pre 6,000 BP)

 

By 50,000 BP, humans gained enough intellectual capability to become the dominant species, at last in Afro Eurasia.   If you could go back to sometime before 6,000 BP (when another change, discussed in this chapter, altered them forever), you would find people that could think about and discuss complex concepts, in much the way they can.  I picked the year 18,000 BP for the previous chapter, but this was an arbitrary choice.  I only wanted something long enough after the Pleistocene Extinction Period for the changed conditions to have become universal that was before 6,000 BP, the period discussed here. 

If you went back to 18,000 BP, you would have found city-states that were a lot like Faiyum in many places.  In Europe, these city-states would be fairly close together with little or no space between them.  In other parts of the world, like along the Nile, they would be laid out in a line, wherever the rich land is located.  In places where rich lands were scattered, the city states would be scattered, with great distances between them. 

Since most of the land on Earth wouldn’t have been suitable for territorial sovereignty societies at that time, we would expect most of the land to contain people who live in the non-territorial natural law societies.  At this time, the humans had wiped out all their major predators and all major competitors for food.  The two main natural checks on population growth would be gone.  Without these natural checks, populations would have to grow until they reached some other barrier.  The only reasonable barrier I could think of is the food supply.   The population would grow to the carrying capacity of the land, given the production methods in use at the time.

The people in the city states would use fairly sophisticated technology.  They would feel totally safe inside their protected territory.  They could plant grain without fear that bandits will arrive and steal their crop just before the harvest.  They could invest in technologies to drive up their yields, like fertilizing the crops, leveling the land, and irrigation.  Their city states would protect the property rights of individuals, so individuals could justify investing their time and skills into machine shops and other facilities to build equipment.  The land in the city states would produce extremely high yields.

The people outside wouldn’t be able to take these same steps.  They wouldn’t invest the time and effort into leveling land, fertilizing crops, or irrigation systems.  Their land was not protected.  They couldn’t be sure that others would not simply force them off of any land they had improved.  They wouldn’t have incentives to invest in improvements.  They could raise some crops, but agriculture wouldn’t have been nearly as important to them as it would to the people in the city states.  They would be more likely to live by following animals, hunting, or herding. 

Prior to the innovations and changes that happened about 6,000 years ago in Afro Eurasia (discussed below), these societies didn’t come into any real conflict for the same reason that the societies of the chimps and bonobos didn’t come into any real conflict for millions of years:  they existed in different ‘habitats.’  The territorial sovereignty societies existed only in areas that had rich patches of land that were ‘colonizable’ (or ‘monopolizable.’)  The people in these areas needed land that was productive enough to fight over. 

The people in the territorial sovereignty societies had weapons and advanced military tactics.  There was a lot of land around them that was not particularly productive and had people with natural law societies living on it.  They could have ‘conquered’ this land if they wanted.  They didn’t do this though, because they couldn’t have their particular type of society on this land. 

They ‘let’ the people who lived outside the walls have the great bulk of the planet’s land.  Not because they are generous, but because this land didn’t produce the surpluses that were needed to support their preferred ways of life. 

The people who lived outside the walls were used to freedom.  They could travel wherever they wanted, as long as they didn’t try to go into the city states without getting the proper permissions.  The city states required everyone to pay for the right to simply be alive in some way.  (At the very least, everyone had to make contributions to the defense of their ‘country.’  In territorial sovereignty societies that had money, this meant paying taxes.  In societies without money, it meant turning over a share of whatever they made to use for common defense and agreeing to be part of the military themselves for some period of time.)  

The people with the natural law societies didn’t have to pay anyone just to stay alive.  They could sleep in their tents along the rivers.  They could eat the fish, eggs, birds, venison, berries, roots, nuts, seeds, and other things nature provided.   If they didn’t like the weather where they were they didn’t have to put up with it:  they could pack up and head somewhere nicer.  (Many people in our 21^st century world want this, but they can’t afford all the things they have to bring with them to bring their way of life in their travels; a fully-equipped recreational vehicle can cost more than many people in the 21^st century make in ten years.)  

The people with the natural law societies wouldn’t have any real conflict with the people with the territorial sovereignty societies.  The main reason is that they didn’t want to live the way these people lived.  They were free.  The people in the cities were not.  They could smell clean air and flowers.  The people in the cities smelled the stench of human offal.  They could listen to the birds singing and water flowing down the stream.  The people in the city heard only mindless din.  As we will see in later chapters, when the conquest of the Americas started, a very large percentage of the people with natural law societies committed suicide when they realized they couldn’t maintain their ways of life anymore.  The conquerors wanted to ‘assimilate’ them into their societies.  The people raised the other way didn’t consider life in the other societies to be living.  As Seattle writes: 

 

The white man does not seem to notice the air he breathes. Like a man dying for many days he is numb to the stench.  When the buffalo are all slaughtered, the wild horses are tamed, the secret corners of the forest are heavy with the scent of many men and the view of the ripe hills blotted by talking wires, that is the end of living and the beginning of survival.

 

Two entirely different cultures existed on earth during the early era of modern humans (which started with the developments discussed in the previous chapter, the new brain components that turned humans into the dominant species on Earth).  But these two cultures weren’t in any real conflict for most of this time because their ways of life were so different that neither actually wanted anything the other had. 

Then something changed. 

As long as people had to fight and transport goods on foot, the practical realities of warfare limited the size of the states to a relatively small size.  You can find the old footprints of these states all over Afro Eurasia.  They tended to be about five square miles in size with borders of about 15 miles.  (I have lived in places like this where the walls are still there.  It takes me about an hour to walk from the wall on one side to the wall on the other side.)   About 6,000 BP (6,000 years ago) this changed and the conditions of life for the human race underwent a dramatic transition. 

 

An Amazing New Technology (In 6,000 BP):  Horses That Could Be Ridden And Could Be Trained To Pull Wagons And Other Equipment

 

All horse-like animals are in the zoological taxonomy of Perissodactyla and the zoological family of Equidae.  This family has thousands of different individual members, all of which are unique genetically.  

America had a great many members of the family  Equidae until the pleistocene extinction events.  This landmass had ‘horse like animals.’  But all members of this genus that existed when humans first arrived disappeared in the extinction events. 

Most members of this animal family also perished in Afro Eurasia when modern humans arrived.  But a few of them continued to exist.  We don’t know the exact reason that these animals were spared, but it probably has something to do with milk.  All mammals produce milk to feed their young (this is how the species is defined).  Milk is an extremely important food for migratory people.  There are still migratory people in Tibet, Mongolia, Siberia, and Northern Canada that rely on dairy products for a large part of their nutritional needs.  In many of these areas, horses or horse-like animals provide the milk.  (You can buy horse diary products in stores in these areas.) 

Migratory people can bring milk, cream, and butter with them, in endless quantities, by bringing horses or horse-like animals.  If you have horses that you can milk, you don’t need a refrigerator:  you can go directly from the horse into your mouth and have food that is germ-free and totally healthy. 

We know the early humans in parts of Afro Eurasia spared some horse-like animals, even though the humans in the Americas wiped them all out.  We don’t know the exact reason, but it seems logical that they kept them because they gave milk.  Whatever the reason, however, we know they did spare these animals in Afro Eurasia. 

In the early days (going back 7,000 to 70,000 years ago) the horse-like animals were not suitable for the things we use horses for now.  However, over long periods of time, the people who kept the horse-like animals would have bred them to create new varieties that were suitable for different uses.  This was not an easy task and took a very long time:   Scientists have identified 273 different precursor horse-like animals in the genetic mix of modern horses.  Breeders worked with different animals to create animals capable of doing the things they wanted done.  Early hose-like animals were generally quite small.  But herders of these animals would selectively breed them to make them bigger and stronger. 

About 6,000 years ago, they succeeded in creating breeds that were capable of carrying adults on their backs and capable of pulling heavy wagons and other equipment. 

Ridable horses must have seemed like marvels to the first people who saw them. 

 

Where did these innovations take place? 

There is a lot of controversy about this. 

The people of three areas (Spain, the Ukraine, and Arabia) all claim these changes took place in their area and their people are the ones who figured out how to make this happen.  This is a dangerous topic to bring up in areas where people have great affection to horses, because many people who tend to drink a lot of alcohol have very strong opinions about it and get violent when people dispute their claims. 

 

As soon as people saw them, they wanted them.  They could change the life of the person who got it.  they are fantastically useful in war, so military leaders wanted them very badly.  They could carry troops at 10 times the former speed and they could haul wagons with hundreds of times more cargo than humans could carry on their backs.  Migratory people wanted them too:  they didn’t want to have to carry their things when they traveled. 

A healthy mare (female horse) can produce a foal (a baby horse) every year.  She can therefore produce two new horses, enough to replace herself and her stud (the male) every two years, and produce four new horses (enough to replace herself and her stud two times over) each four years.  If human breeders want to produce horses as rapidly as possible, they can double the population in 4 years.  If you started with 10 horses and went through 10 doublings (this would take about 40 years), you would have 10,240 horses.  In another 40 years it will double 10 more times and you would have more than 10 million animals. 

Once people had bred useable animals in enough numbers to create a viable gene pool, horse populations explodes.  Within a few centuries, horses would be common everywhere in the Afro-Eurasian continent. 

We don’t know the details about the spread of early horses in Afro Eurasia.  We do know what happened, however, in the Americas.  The first horses were brought to the Americas by Spaniards about the year 1500.  (Horses went extinct in the Americas Pleistocene extinction events and there were none before the Europeans brought them.)   Horses are very hard to transport so they didn’t bring a great many.  But they breed very rapidly and by 1900, a mere 4 centuries after the first horses arrived, there were more than 20 million domestic horses in the part of America now called the ‘United States’ alone. 

 

 

The Advantages Of The Horse

 

          This quote is from Britannica: 

 

When Cortés sailed for the coast of Yucatán on February 18, 1519, he had 11 ships, 508 soldiers, about 100 sailors, and—most important—16 horses

 

The writers on Britannica think the most important cargo on the ships were the horses.  If you read books about the conquest you will understand the importance.  (I recommend the wonderful and extremely well researched book ‘The Conquest of Mexico’ by William Prescott, which is available in the references section of the PossibleSocieties.com website.)   The horses were the key to Cortez and his small contingent of solders conquering what many scholars today think was the most populous valley in the world, the great valley of Mexico, with more than 30 million people with a dozen different cultures, all in a period of less than two years. 

This is from another Britannica article:

 

In 1531 Francisco Pizarro’s expedition of 180 men and 37 horses sailed to the Inca empire in Peru.  A Spanish priest met with the Inca emperor Atahuallpa, exhorting him to accept Christianity and Charles V.  After Atahuallpa refused, Pizarro’s forces attacked, captured, and later executed Atahuallpa, enabling Pizarro to occupy Cuzco, effectively conquering the empire. 

 

Again, if you read accounts of the conquest by people who were there, you will see that this conquest (this time of about 12 million people, also according to Britannica) would not have been possible without horses. 

Horse made enormous difference in war. 

The horse changed the dynamics of Afro-Eurasia in many ways.  Of course, it made it possible for a well-organized military to conquer and hold vast amounts of territory.  But it also made it possible for the sedentary and stationary lifestyle that was common in the city-states to expand into large new areas. 

With a few horses and some equipment, a family could plant and harvest hundreds of acres of land.  They could go out to work in the morning (after having eaten a hearty breakfast of eggs from their henhouses and pancakes made of flour from stored grains, and bacon from their pigs) and come home and sleep in the same bed each night.  They could live just like they lived in the city

A lot of people lived in cramped quarters in city-states. 

They would have liked to have had more space.  But they couldn’t move outside the walls because they couldn’t live the same way there.  They couldn’t be defended.  They couldn’t keep homes and sleep in the same beds.  They couldn’t go to stores.  Horses changed all this.  Mounted soldiers could protect farmers living outside the gates, at least most of the time.  (Watch TV westerns and you will be able to get at least some idea how this happened.  The farmers are threatened by either ‘Indians’ or bad whites.  The sheriff can usually find a solution.  If not, they call in the cavalry.)   

With horses to haul in supplies, they could have their luxuries:  Glass for their windows, pot-belly stoves to keep them warm, jars and pots to put up fruits in the summer; clothes made in mills that may be hundreds of miles away

If a town with stores is 10 miles away, people without horses can’t go there more than once every few months.  With horses, they can ride to town every day if they want.  They can enjoy almost all of the benefits of living in town, but still have plenty of space to move. 

 

The Conquest of Afro-Eurasia by States

 

We know a lot about the conquest of the Americas by European states.  This happened between 1492 and about the year 1890. 

 

The conquest actually began November of 1493, when Columbus returned to what he thought were islands in the Indian Ocean (actually islands in the Caribbean sea) with armies to conquer them.  It proceeded very rapidly, with Mexico conquered in 1521 and South America brought under the control of conquistadors by the end of the 1530s.  Plagues were spread that wiped out most of the native people in North America, but the area was not brought under control of European powers right away, allowing their populations to increase.  The second phase of the conquest involved taking the remainder of the lands.  The final event of the conquest is often considered to be the Wounded Knee Massacre.  It happened on December 30, 1890.

 

We know a lot about this because it happened recently, a large number of records were kept, many writers wrote accounts of the period from various different perspectives.  We will go over this information when we get to that point in history.  We don’t know much about the period that started about 6,000 years ago when the entities called ‘states’ expanded from their walled enclosures to take over the land outside.  But we do know that the states expanded very quickly outside of their walls once the people in the states had horses.  By the time that we have written historical records, states with governments were dominant in all areas that the records cover.  

 

The oldest written records we have found so far go back to 4200 BP.  Again, this means 4,200 years before the present, or 4,200 years ago; this would make the date about 3200 BC, if you prefer the Christian dating method.  

 

We don’t know much about the details of the conquest of this part of the world by territorial sovereignty societies.  We do know that there are still nomadic and traveling people in many parts of Afro Eurasia.  Until recently, it was thought that these people, originally called ‘Gypsies’ and now called ‘Romani,’ all came from the same place, somewhere in India, in ancient times, and them spread throughout Afro Eurasia by about the sixth century.  The stories of their history since the sixth century are similar to the stories of the history of the ‘Indians’ in America during the late stages of the conquest, with numerous attempts to wipe them out. 

New tools are making it possible to go deeper into their Backgrounds.  The following illustration is from a 2005 study: A newly discovered founder population: the Roma/Gypsies.  It shows that the genetic heritage is literally all over the map.   They didn’t originate from India, specifically, they originated from everywhere, with genes from all over Afro Eurasia.  This is what we would expect if they had natural law societies with no fixed homes.  They traveled.  In their travels, they met other bands.  There is a taboo in natural law societies in general against having relations with members of your own band.  (This is considered to be incest.  It was the highest taboo in pre-conquest American societies, as discussed by Ancient Society by Lewis Morgan.)  The genes naturally mix. 

 

 

Before the military use of the horse, most of the land of Afro-Eurasian was not in any country (city state) at all.  It was free land, unowned and no one had any more rights to it than anyone else.  But the states grew fairly quickly.  Within a thousand years, the states had conquered much of this land.  In some places, all of the unowned land was conquered and, after the conquests, the states were touching each other, with the border of one the border of its neighbor. 

The people who ran the militaries of the states now had a lot more to fear than they had before, when there was space between them and their enemies.  Their enemies were right there, on the other side of their borders.  In most cases, the borders were not the very high and well fortified walls that had been the borders of the city states.  It was not practical to build these massive structures over distances of hundreds or even thousands of miles. 

 

Some people tried.  You can find some ruins of these walls in various places.  But once a thousand mile long wall is breached, the entire wall becomes less than useless.  The enemy can simply move down the wall and remove the defenders.  The wall actually helps the attackers because they control both sides of it and they have significantly more freedom of movement than the former defenders. 

These great walls were built but they became useless quickly and the borders were no longer located along the walls.  Eventually, most people (those who were reasonable and logical) stopped trying.  A few continue to this day. 

 

The borders between countries were now very long and very hard to defend.  In the old days, when the countries were separated by large distances, the people really didn’t have much to fear from other countries.  Both countries had about the same kinds of weapons.  Both had massive walls that were well fortified.  Attackers would have had to breach the walls, all in plain sight of the defenders, who could pour down arrows, spears, and burning tar on the attackers from safe places behind parapet walls. 

But times changed.  The countries grew larger and their borders much longer.  The new long borders were much harder to defend and there was less and less open space (that didn’t belong to any country at all) between them.  Eventually, the countries were one against the other.  The old defenses would not work anymore.  They needed new ways to protect their monopoly rights to the land that they claimed. 

Until this time, weapons were quite primitive.  They used the same basic weapons as Neanderthals had used hundreds of thousands of years earlier:  bows and arrows, javelins, and slings.  All the states had the same weapons.  To gain advantages, they would need something new. 

 

The Bronze Age

 

People had had some metals for a long time.  Lead, copper, zinc, and tin can all be ‘smelted’ (removed from ore using a combination of smoke and melting) in an ordinary wood fire.  But none of these metals was remotely as hard as the rocks they used for their knives and arrowheads.  They were all very soft and weak metals, not really useful in war. 

But it is possible to make very hard, strong, and useful metals by mixing some of these soft metals and heating to melt them together.  These mixtures are called alloys

Modern bronze is a mixture of 88% copper, 7% tin, and 5% lead.  You can make bronze yourself if you want, in a fire pit in your yard.  You can watch internet videos that show you how to do it.  The first to make bronze didn’t hit on this ratio right away.  They found mixing two metals made the result stronger and harder.  They experimented.  Eventually they hit on the ratio above, which is the ratio we still use today. 

Bronze is extremely hard.  You can find bronze items in many museums.  Most of the bronze items I have seen are weapons.  Bronze can be cast into any shape desired.  If it cast into a sword, the edge can then be sharpened by rubbing it on a stone.  You can make it as sharp as a razor.  It will cut off enemy’s hand or head with a single stroke. 

Armies with bronze daggers, battleaxes, swords, halyards, pikes, and with arrows and spears with bronze tips can easily defeat armies that only had tools made of rocks and sticks.  If you run a state and have bronze weapons, while your enemies only have weapons made of rocks and sticks, you are going to be able to defeat them. 

Bronze items have been found and dated to as far back as 2775 BCE. 

 

 BCE means ‘before current era.’  It is the replacement term for BC, which meant ‘before Christ.’  It means the same thing, so 2775 BCE is the same year as 2775 BC.  To get the date BP, which means before the present, add the year number by the Christian calendar.  If it is the year 2025, the year BP is 4800 BP.  I am sorry for having to use these confusing terms, but they reflect the standards of the time and reflect dates you will find from other sources. 

 

However, bronze tarnishes over time, in the same way that steel rusts an most analysts I found seem to think that bronze was being made up to 825 years before that, or starting about 3,500 BCE (or about 5,525 BP, see text box above). 

Bronze weapons provided great military advantages to those who had them.  Other states had to figure out how to make bronze themselves or they would almost certainly be defeated.  If they were defeated, the victors would bring the new technology to the area.  Either way, the technology spread quickly. 

 

Iron and Steel

Bronze is a very useful military metal.  But steel is much, much better.  A steel sword will slice right through bronze armor.  A steel arrowhead can cut through the thickest leather to kill the solder underneath. 

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 take place 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 next transition will take us to an industrial society, the type that dominates the world now.  Industry requires a great many complex structures that are not necessary in non-industrial systems.  It needs money, for example; it needs courts and rules to protect private property rights, it needs massive roads and other infrastructures, and it needs an investment system that allows large amounts of ‘capital’ to be raised and dedicated to the project.  All 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. 

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.  This gas has a very strong affinity to oxygen:  each molecule of carbon monoxide wants to grab another oxygen atom from somewhere to form carbon dioxide, with is a very stable material with extremely strong bonds.  You generate the carbon monoxide by building a fire.  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 process is the same for al metals.  But the temperature needed for smelting is different for each metal.  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.  The only common source for pure carbon is 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.)  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.  After the process is over, the charcoal will be 2/3 as heavy as the wood originally used to create it.  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.  Then 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.  It 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 will be able to smelt about 2 pounds of pig iron with the three tons of wood you started with

 

Steel

For weapons, nothing beats steel.  Because steel is so strong, a thin and light steel sword will be much stronger than a heavy and awkward bronze sword.  The person with the lighter and stronger sword will have a great advantage over someone with a heavier but weaker weapon. 

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.  Then take it out and hammer it into a thin sheet.  Then fold the sheet in half and hammer the halves into a new thin sheet, heating as necessary.  Keep doing this.  You will have more and more sheets, each of which will get thinner and thinner. 

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% 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 and, you would take several months to make a good knife or sword.  Back when the work was done by hand, officers would often pay more than a full year’s salary to get a high quality sword. 

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 the shell for bombs and rockets, and almost all useful tools are made at least partly of steel. 

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  the city states probably looked a lot like Faiyum looks today, as seen in the image above:  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. 

This isn’t going to work for a city with heavy industry.  To support heavy industry, you absolutely need a highly organized economy.  This would not be a simple task for the people who lived in 5,500 BP (before present).  They didn’t have any idea how an industrial system 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 5,500 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 a government told you these little pieces of paper were able to buy anything in the sate, 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 5,500 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, 5,500 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 5,500 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’).  We will look at two of these events in the next few chapters.  The most notable was started by Emperor Constantine in the year 322 AD.  (Note: AD is the same as the politically more correct term CE, for current era.  It is the date under the Christian Calendar.)    At the time, the European area was well into the industrial age with numerous large plants 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 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.