Global History E-Book

Noel Cowen

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 285

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

This short book offers a clear and engaging introduction to the history of humankind, from the earliest movements of people to the contemporary epoch of globalization. Cowen traces this complex history in a manner which offers both a compelling narrative and an analytical and comparative treatment. Drawing on a new perspective on global history, he traces the intersection of change in economics, politics and human beliefs, examining the formation, enlargement and limits of human societies. Global History shows how much of human history encompasses three intersecting forces - trading networks, expanding political empires and crusading creeds.

Abandoning the limits of a Eurocentric view of the world, the book offers a number of fresh insights. Its periodization embraces movement across continents and across the millennia. The indigenous American civilizations are included, for instance. The book also ranges over the early civilizations of China and Europe as well as the Russian and Islamic worlds. Modern American and Japanese civilizations are, in addition, a focus for attention. The author examines national and regional histories in relation to wider themes, sequences and global tendencies. In conclusion, he seeks to address the question of the extent to which a global society is beginning to crystallize.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Civilizations

World systems

Global history

An overview

The narrative

THE CLASSICAL ERA

PART I: The Primary Concern

1 Global Odyssey

2 Civilized Centres

3 Rulers and Myths

The primary concern

PART II: The Political Prospect

4 Hostile Encounters

5 Communication Network

6 Global Response

The political prospect

PART III: The Religious Factor

7 Creeds of Empire

8 Crossing Frontiers

9 Division and Decline

The religious factor

From Classical to Modern

THE MODERN ERA

PART IV: New Beginnings

10 Movement of Peoples

11 Economic Breakthrough

12 Church and State

New beginnings

PART V: Wider Identities

13 Centuries of Empire

14 Tools of Empire

15 Creeds of Empire

Wider identities

PART VI: Global Tendencies

16 The World Economy

17 Hostile Encounters

18 Communication Network

Global tendencies

Conclusion

Civilization and globalization

Economic pressures

Political problems

The belief factor

Phases and factors

Bibliography

Index

Copyright © Noel Cowen 2001

The right of Noel Cowen to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2001 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd

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Acknowledgements

My first and heartfelt acknowledgement is to my son Robin whose belief in this project has been constant for twenty-five years. From the international sixth-form Atlantic College in Wales he won a Fairbridge scholarship to the University of Western Australia to study philosophy, politics and history. Searching through the current literature on the philosophy of history, Robin felt bound to report: ‘The central goal to afford a total explanatory account of the past is now very unsympathetically regarded.’ But he added his opinion that my theory was ‘eminently plausible’. His subsequent commitment was to the foundation of sound education in primary schools in Australia and England. But his interest in my plausible enterprise never wavered, and in correspondence and recorded discussion he injected something of the intellectual rigour of his M.A. thesis in philosophy into the narrative I was piecing together.

Born in the naval and military town of Chatham during one of the worst episodes of the Great War, as I grew to manhood I learned with mounting horror of the sheer wickedness of the Battle of the Somme. In my last years at school and as a young newspaper reporter I was increasingly aware of the new chapters of wickedness that threatened a return to global conflict. I registered as a conscientious objector at the onset of the Second World War, and in its aftermath I was recruited to a small team at the Ministry of Economic Affairs to help explain our economic plight. When the Ministry was merged into the Treasury I worked on problems of reconstruction in an emerging global context. I learnt about the stern economics of recurrent crisis and our dependence for survival on international political cooperation and the definition of common goals for war-ravaged nations. Stimulated by Toynbee’s A Study of History, but unconvinced by its core arguments, I sent him some criticisms and some thoughts of my own. In his reply he said ‘the more of us have a go at it the better.’

With this encouragement I began an extensive programme of reading which has never really ended. My plan was to eschew theory for the time being and search the works of specialist historians for detailed factual accounts of particular civilizations. My debt to them is enormous, not only for the knowledge and insight they have given me but also for the pleasures of wandering in their enchanted garden. The City of Westminster library responded with zeal to my growing lists of books, which they bought or borrowed when they were not available on their shelves. I welcomed the opportunity to move to the Ministry of Education and to profit, thereby, from the scholarly wisdom of H.M. Inspectors, one of whom in particular was seeking to arouse an interest in world history in the secondary schools. Teddy (E.E.Y.) Hales had published a number of historical works and was currently working on curricular ideas based on discussions with international educationists. We discussed the relevance of this background to my studies.

In an article I published around that time I first spelt out the global dimensions of my work, referring to ‘the global view’ which was discernible in ‘the unfolding of the regional sequences’. After discussing ‘the ends pursued in turn by man the wanderer, man the settler, man the conqueror and man the worshipper’, I turned to ‘the global situation’ taking shape and asked if there were any signs of a common direction emerging. In discussions with Robin I undertook several reworkings of my material and in the 1980s I concluded a comparative treatment of classical and modern civilizations with a summary of increasing global trends against the background of technological and financial innovation. Drawing the strands together, I wrote that ‘the essential conditions for a sustainable civilisation of global dimensions in the future would be, on the analogy of the past, the material means to sustain its population, a system of government to give security and stability, and a supportive ethos widely enough recognised and upheld.’

I had by then retired from government service and could spend more time on research, notably in Exeter University library and in the university library in Perth, Western Australia. Shortly afterwards I became aware of an explosion of interest in world history in the United States. I joined the ten-year-old World History Association, studied the Journal of World History, and visited the States to talk about my work. I was well received and in 1996 I was invited to address the final plenary session of the annual international WHA conference. Although illness prevented me from attending the conference, this American connection had several further consequences. The first was that I wrote an account of modern American civilization compared with modern Japanese civilization, showing correspondences between both and with the early modern and classical civilizations. The second consequence was an interest in what was becoming known as ‘global history’, which appeared to be the history of the concept of globalization. Applying this notion to my account of civilization I wrote a new shorter study entitled ‘Civilisation and Globalisation’. The third consequence was that I attended the 1997 Anglo-American Conference of Historians on European Peoples and the Non-European World. Encouraged by the conference document, which called for guidelines and big pictures of world history, I sent a copy of the synopsis of my book to the organizer, Professor Patrick K. O’Brien, the retiring director of the London Institute of Historical Research. In his reply he thought I had ‘lighted on two organising or ordering concepts’.

In 1999 I realized the relevance of my studies to what Professor David Held and his colleagues were describing as ‘the globalization debate’ and I sent a copy of my book to Polity Press. The prompt and positive response I received from David Held and the suggestions subsequently forthcoming from Polity readers resulted in substantial revisions and additions. The book now published is the product of half a century of study, welcomed by Toynbee in its early stages, supported by my son Robin throughout, and given recognition at the end by David Held and Polity. My wife Helen has been a sympathetic and long-suffering participant in this obsessive enterprise and to her this final outcome is gratefully dedicated.

The author and publishers would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce copyright material:

Cambridge University Press for the map on p. 128 from I.M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies (1988), p. 243;

Gerald Duckworth and Co. Ltd for the map on p. 62 from N.G.L. Hammond, The Genius of Alexander the Great (1997), p. 126;

Octopus Publishing Group Ltd for the maps on pp. 98, 140 and 146 from Philip’s Atlas of World History, pp. 44, 112, 115. Copyright © George Philip Ltd, 1999;

Oxford University Press, Inc. for the map on p. 84 from Jerry H. Bentley, Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times (1993), p. 34. Copyright © 1993 Oxford University Press;

Random House Group Ltd for the map on p. 20 from C. Stringer and R. McKie, African Exodus, Pimlico (1996), p. 169;

Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity.

Introduction

The time frame in which to locate the global history of mankind was effectively shown by two academic events which occurred in the late 1980s. In 1987 an international conference in Cambridge of specialists in human evolution, archaeology and molecular genetics found evidence that there were anatomically modern human beings 100,000 years ago. There was wide support for the view that, following an exodus from east Africa, their descendants went on to occupy all the continents of the Earth.1 At about the same time a research project on the global forces now shaping our lives was being formulated in an application to the Economic and Social Research Council. The results have now been published in a book on global transformations in politics, economics and culture, which reaches the conclusion that globalization ‘is an idea whose time has come’.2 Between these two parameters, where are meaningful guidelines to be drawn?

The answer I believe lies in a significant shift in world history studies in the last quarter-century. Three strands in particular have come together, one from the study of civilizations, another from the concept of world-systems, and the third from the idea of global history. Together they map out a course across the millennia.

The leading exponent of the first strand is William H. McNeill, an early associate of Arnold J. Toynbee who in a famous study treated civilizations as separate but related entities.3 After the appearance of the last of Toynbee’s twelve volumes in 1961 McNeill set out to improve on him ‘by showing how the separated civilisations of Eurasia interacted’.4 Finally he concluded that ‘a proper world history ought to focus primarily upon changes in the ecumenical world system, and then proceed to fit developments within separate civilisations … into the pattern of that fluctuating whole.’5 From McNeill, therefore, we have the idea that civilizations in themselves are a valid field of study, as well as the interactions between them.

This fitted well with a study of the modern world-system by Immanuel Wallerstein, the first volume of which had been published in 1974, arguing that world-economies were ‘divided into core-states and peripheral areas’.6 His particular concern was that in the sixteenth century ‘there came into existence what we may call a world-economy.’7 This proposition has led to a vigorous debate on whether such a system had a history of 5,000 years or was the latest in a series of world-systems, each with a changing structure. Implicit in this debate is the idea that regional interactions have gradually developed to the point where we can meaningfully talk about a global world system.

The third strand became visible in the late 1980s with discussions across a wide range of disciplines on what were being called ‘global issues’. Among these forums was an international conference at Bellagio in Italy in 1991 and the publication in 1993 of a collection of essays linked by the idea of ‘conceptualizing global history’.8 In 1999 the concept was given detailed and authoritative treatment in the book mentioned above on global transformations in the contemporary era. Emphasizing the need to look beyond the modern era, to offer an explanation of a process ‘which has a long history’, this study called for an ‘analytical framework offering a platform for contrasting and comparing different phases or historical forms’.9

Civilizations

The study of civilizations became very popular after the First World War in response to publications by Oswald Spengler in Germany, Arnold Toynbee in Britain and Pitirin Sorokin and others in America. Continuing up to the years of the Second World War, such works were a reaction against national histories, a reaction which had begun to appear in the second half of the nineteenth century. During that century the idea had been entertained that a science of history and society might be possible that was akin to the natural sciences. An international effort emerged to give status to the study of sociology, in which the parts of a society could be seen as cohering into a unity, an integrated system with a life character of its own.

Among those who explored this idea was the French scholar Émile Durkheim, who was deeply distressed by the war of 1870 with Germany and the consequences of defeat and social breakdown. He argued that society existed independently of particular individuals, maintaining itself like an organism. In Germany after the 1914 war Oswald Spengler applied this concept to large complexes of political, social, economic and cultural elements passing through cycles of birth, development and decay. He believed that western society was in irreversible decline. Sorokin, for his part, was expelled from Russia for opposing Bolshevism and founded the department of sociology at Harvard, where he wrote at length about the crisis of western society and about civilizations and cultures that in their balances of values and conditions had distinguishable life cycles of growth and decline. His four volumes of Social and Cultural Dynamics appeared between 1939 and 1941. Between 1934 and 1961 Toynbee published the twelve volumes of A Study of History in which he identified twenty-three civilizations, described their life cycles and looked for principles that governed their lives. While much of this elaborate edifice has ceased to command support, the study of civilizations has received a new lease of life in the contacts between them, including economic exchanges and technological and cultural borrowings.

World systems

By the 1970s, however, a new perspective on world history studies was emerging, with roots in the intense battles of the American student rebellion of the previous decade and a background in the revolutionary ideologies of what was being called the Third World. The projection of world social history offered by Immanuel Wallerstein in the first volume of The Modern World-System in 1974 appeared to respond to these influences with a comprehensive theory that made sense of actual world events. His strategy was to identify the social system in which capitalism had grown as a world economy, thus differing from political empires which were dominated by strong centres. This, he hoped, might end debates about the comparability of societies and the degree to which generalizations could be formed about them. He found it necessary to trace the history of the capitalist world economy from the sixteenth century, because that was when it began, believing that if societies went through stages so did the world system. Changes in sovereign states could then be explained as consequences of the evolution and interaction of the ‘world-system’.

In 1989, when his third volume appeared, covering the second era of great expansion between 1730 and the 1840s, Janet Abu-Lughod published a book called Before European Hegemony. This argued that between 1250 and 1350 many parts of the Old World began to become integrated into a single system of exchange, and that an even earlier world system (excluding northern Europe) had existed some two thousand years ago. McNeill, however, writing a foreword to papers on the world system in 1993, gave the opinion that a market that embraced the whole world could only arise after 1500 with the arrival of global shipping.10 The argument was already shifting towards a global history, with antecedents that included Wallerstein’s system. It was perhaps no accident that in looking for an intellectual base Wallerstein had turned to Fernand Braudel, who had coined the phrase ‘histoire globale’.

Global history

Braudel, who had shifted from civilizations to world systems, wrote of ‘histoire globale’ in the sense of there being no boundaries to the subject, and in 1972 he called for a history whose scope would extend to all the sciences of man, to the ‘globality of the human sciences’. In his account of the Mediterranean world in the sixteenth century, and in his three-volume account of civilization and capitalism from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, he combined a broad vision with a meticulous attention to detail. These immense works appeared between 1949 and 1979. They were limited to the premodern world, and primarily to economic history, but they had established the concept of thinking globally, which for him was ‘the only form of history capable of satisfying us now’.

What this might mean remained uncertain, not least in the context of what were seen as Three Worlds (capitalist, communist and uncommitted), the subject of a would-be definitive account in 1984.11 Five years later the Berlin Wall was pulled down, and in November 1990 the end of the Cold War was formally proclaimed. By the end of the century a different world was ten years old, as a new international system of global integration began to give substance to Braudel’s vision. During that decade significant attempts were made ‘to develop a more comprehensive explanation of globalization which highlights the complex intersection between a multiplicity of driving forces’.12 In 1995 Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, writing about world history in a global era, argued that the central challenge at the end of the twentieth century was ‘to narrate the world’s past in an age of globality’. This would not ‘refuse or jettison the findings of world-systems theories or of a contemporary history of civilizations … But the practice of world history in a global age does reconfigure the field in which these paradigms are deployed.’13

An overview

This book is a contribution to the process of understanding world history. Benefiting from an analysis developed in the study of civilizations and world systems, it offers an overview of global history in terms of the three groups of problems that have the greatest impact on historical change. These are the economic problems of subsistence and surplus, the political problems of stability and security, and finally the religious or ideological problems to do with our understanding of self, society and salvation. It is the argument of this book that this core group of problems provides not just a perspective on world history, but an insight into some important parallels between civilizations.

In comparing civilizations it has become clear that there have been parallels in terms both of stages of growth and the key problems that have been faced at each stage. These parallels suggest a framework for the study of civilizations that consists of three phases (formation, expansion, limitation) and the interplay of three factors (economics, politics, belief). The underlying theme is that, while all the factors are important in all the phases, their relative importance changes from one phase to the next. Thus, in the formative period the economic factors of subsistence and surplus are paramount; in the period of enlargement the political factors of power and control are paramount; and in the period of limitation the ideological factors of belief and commitment are paramount. Given this changing pattern of emphasis, the other factors are generally seen to provide more of a supportive role.

This relationship between phases and factors provides a framework for studying civilizations separately, for tracing similarities between them, and for comparing which of the factors of economics, politics and belief had the most significance at each stage. Throughout the experience of the civilizations, economic, political and ideological factors have of course always been present, but what is significant is that first one and then another became more important in relation to the main problems of the time. When a movement of peoples leads to settlement and surplus there are some common consequences. With better living the population increases, with more consumption there is need for more material resources; to secure them and defend them the frame is enlarged. In time the enlargement of the frame creates new problems: the relationship of the expanding periphery to the centre, and of expanding societies with each other and with more mobile or nomadic groups. New political structures are attempted and some succeed, providing for a time a common rule over diverse peoples. When the imperial structures become overextended there is political breakdown; cohesion is achieved less by means of politics and increasingly by means of ideology or religion. This common experience, which is found in the classical civilizations as much as in early modern and contemporary civilizations, may be represented in a simple grid (see overleaf).

A further theme of this study is that technology has a key relationship to all the factors, although it is first and most obviously seen in relation to economics and the tools and techniques necessary to sustain settlements and cities. The term is used throughout in its broadest sense to include any means, processes or skills of a technical nature to achieve particular ends. As such it includes the making of pots as well as the technical aspects of controlling behaviour or spreading knowledge.

PhasesFactorsKey problemsFormationEconomicPoliticalIdeologicalProblems of subsistence, surplus and specialization, including the tools and techniques needed for production, distribution and exchange within and between settled regionsExpansionPoliticalEconomicIdeologicalProblems of authority and security and the relationship between the core and periphery areas as well as frontier issues which require a military and most typically imperial solutionLimitationIdeologicalEconomicPoliticalProblems of identity and cohesion as political and military structures begin to break up, leading to attempts at spiritual/ideological allegiance within and beyond imperial boundaries

The themes and the framework just outlined allow for the key developments in the history of a civilization to be outlined in the space of a paragraph. In the case of American civilization, for example, the first colonists faced an immediate need for adequate and continuing subsistence. With the creation of a surplus above that level, more permanent settlements became possible. This required not just a productive economy but also a durable political structure and an ideological commitment. Precisely because these became part of the American experience, the enterprise succeeded. But in its very success lay further problems: the political problems of relations between the centre and the parts, and between the new nation and other nations. These problems dominated the history of America from the Declaration of Independence to the outcome of the Civil War. They were resolved by political means, but with the help of industrial technology and an ideology which overruled divisive tendencies. In the twentieth century, however, separatist tendencies again engaged the American people as they tested the limits of their growth in ideological causes.

In common with all the earlier civilizations, America’s has encountered a recurrent tension between movement and settlement, becoming in the process a frontier society dotted with townships. At all times in all the regions there has been both the ongoing search for subsistence in varying habitats and the desire to make permanent the particular relationships between peoples and their homesteads. The settlers in the first civilizations, and centuries later in the early modern civilizations, no matter how committed they were to their permanent centres, were nevertheless impelled to go beyond them: at first prospecting for raw materials, then in a need for security behind extending frontiers, and finally in the missionary motivation of the would-be universal churches. This recurrent pattern has been an integral part of global history: through the sequences of the regional civilizations, and in the interactions between them and with peoples still following a nomadic path. In all the phases and in all the factors there have been encounters with other societies. There have been patterns of exchange and exploitation, patterns of conquest and military rule, and patterns of missionary conviction and endeavour. Exchange, conquest and belief have been the recurrent modes through which human societies have influenced each other and their common global habitat.

It is within the sequences of the civilizations, and in the manifestations of the factors which govern their corporate existence, that the tension between movement and settlement has repeatedly thrown up global tendencies. These have all in essence been attempts to resolve the tension on an ever- widening scale, achieving patterns of coexistence between the societies while each sought to preserve the harmony and drive of its own heritage and aspiration. When these attempts lost momentum and foundered there were periods of lost direction and fading vision until the sequences could be re-enacted and the balance of the factors restored.

The narrative

The structure of the book reflects the argument. In part I, the focus is on the resources, on the economic needs which impelled our distant ancestors on their global odyssey and, many millennia later, laid the groundwork for permanent centres. I show how rulers and myth-makers provided support for the primary concern of an economic surplus. In part II, the political structures become all-important in resolving the problems of hostile encounters, and key improvements in the networks of communication (highways, alphabets, coinages) provided the means to harness the global impulses of the empires. In their success however lay the seeds of their decline, and they paid the price of overextension. It was then, as related in part III, that the spiritual imperative took over, in a renewed search for common purposes which overran the political frontiers.

In part IV, the story is resumed in the further massive movement of peoples which occurred between the end of the ancient world and the beginnings of the modern world. Between the two lay several centuries of economic arrest or decline and the loss of stable political structures. In the process continuity suffered, as in the break between classical Mediterranean civilization and a new civilization to the north in western Europe. In a similar way there was a break between classical civilization based on the north China plain and a new civilization based on the river system and coastal area in the south. These two new civilizations, which I have called early modern, began around the same time as civilizations based on the fertilization of the eastern Slavlands by the Vikings and the Arabic fertilization of the Middle East. In these four regions economic advance, supported by alliances between political and religious leaderships, led to new civilized centres which drew on the experience of the past, but more significantly on their own technological innovation. In part V, the global impulse is resumed in the empires of the Chinese, the Russians, the Muslims, and the western Europeans. Advances in the tools of empire, particularly in shipbuilding and weaponry, prepared the way for industrial revolution; and revolutionary ideas, of nationalism and of progress, moved out disturbingly along the seaways. Finally, in part VI, we look at the global systems of the modern era, the evolution of a world economy, the hostile encounters of the last two centuries, and the communication networks we are still busily creating.

The global history of the last millennium is based on a comparison of the early modern civilizations of China, Russia, Islam and western Europe, all of which in the twentieth century reached phases of limitation. Their empires failed to command the commitment of their diverse peoples, and despite the improvements in communications, intensive propaganda and military power, they all experienced crises of growth. This was a global phenomenon in which two more modern civilizations have increasingly played a part as America and Japan have moved towards expanding hegemonies. Entering into a world economic system already taking shape, they have become leading promoters of multinational enterprise and global communication. In this context, a brief overview of global history must take into account the interrelated roles of the six modern civilizations in a global model rather than a Eurocentric one.

While using for convenience the familiar terms we know as civilizations and empires, I have tried to avoid giving them a reality they do not possess. It was groups of people around the globe who found ways of resolving problems that enabled some core areas to achieve permanence as the basis for high achievement in the arts of living. From the core areas, knowledge of the achievement spread widely and there was contact between groups. There were hostile encounters and means found to deal with them. But the solving of problems, the achievement of better living, the spread of knowledge, and the hostile encounters, were all the work of people, of people working together in groups for common ends. If from time to time we label all this in terms of civilizations and empires and world systems, it does not mean that these were in some sense entities, capable of solving problems, conferring better living, having encounters. It was human beings who did these things, following impulses to become civilized, to become globalized. They, and their impulses, are the subject of the story told in these pages.

This is not a book in which to look things up, but a book that offers a perspective on global history, or rather the several perspectives of economics, politics and ideology in global history. The main interest has been in the making of broad comparisons, not with any intention of arguing for a kind of historical determinism, but certainly with the intention of offering some reasoned generalizations. If globalization is an idea whose time has come, it is because the trends of the past have come together. But if the idea is ever to become a reality in a truly global society, all the factors would have to be satisfied. As well as an economic foundation there would have to be a workable political structure and a recognition of common purpose.

NOTES

1 P. Mellars and C. Stringer, eds, The Human Revolution, Edinburgh University Press, 1989, p. 26.

2 D. Held, A. McGrew, D. Goldblatt and J. Perraton, Global Transformations, Polity, 1999, p. 1.

3 A.J. Toynbee, A Study of History, 12 vols, Oxford University Press, 1934–1961.

4 W.H. McNeill, The Rise of the West, Chicago University Press, 1963.

5 W.H. McNeill, ‘The changing shape of world history’, in World History, ed. P. Pomper, R.H. Elphick and R.T. Vann, Blackwell, 1998, pp. 28, 29.

6 I. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, vol. 1, Academic Press, 1974, p. 349.

7 Ibid., p. 15.

8 B. Mazlish and B. Buultjens, eds, Conceptualizing Global History, Westview, 1993.

9 Held et al., Global Transformations, p. 13.

10 A.G. Frank and B.K. Gills, eds, The World System, Routledge, 1993.

11 Peter Worsley, The Three Worlds, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984.

12 Held et al., Global Transformations, p. 12.

13 M. Geyer and C. Bright, ‘World history in a global age’, American Historical Review 100 (Oct. 1995).

THE CLASSICAL ERA

PART IThe Primary Concern

Between 100 millennia and 10 millennia ago our ancestors penetrated all the continents of the earth. The search was for suitable habitats yielding an adequate subsistence. About two-thirds of the way through that period, radical changes occurred in parts of Europe in the making and use of stone tools. They were accompanied by changes in social organization and mental concepts, as illustrated for example in cave paintings. By the end of the period, in parts of the Middle East the hunting economy had passed into a farming economy and the preconditions had been met for creating the permanent civilized centres of the classical era. These appeared over a period from five millennia ago in several sites across the Old World and in Mesoamerica and Peru. The need for subsistence was still the primary concern, and provision for it was supported by the way community life was organized and by the beliefs that grew around it.

1

Global Odyssey

Searching for Subsistence

The available evidence of fossils, stone age tools and, more recently, molecular genetics suggests that an archaic African population of some 200,000 years ago provided the source from which anatomically modern human beings (our ancestors) developed by 100,000 years ago. Dispersal would seem to be the mechanism for their appearance in the rest of the world. Separate evolution in different regions has been considered, but is thought to be implausible and difficult to reconcile with the molecular data. A new species entering a new habitat would have had an advantage over locally conditioned stock by reason of its more generalized exploitation of the environment. It is possible that some limited interbreeding provided for an element of regional continuity. But the African evidence taken as a whole does indicate the presence there of essentially modern human beings extending back to 100,000 years before the present, and this is the most useful and reliable place to begin an account of the human odyssey.