Mankind traces roots to common African stock

By Gwynne Dyer

This is the second of three articles on the history of human race.

LONDON (JP): About 10,000 years ago, "history" proper got started, in the sense that we know some specific facts about particular groups. By 7,000 years ago, we even know a few names. But it is a terrible history, full of conquest and slavery -- and it ended up 50 years ago with Europeans and their descendants running the whole world except for a few parts of Asia.

As a result, we still tend to believe that human beings are naturally inclined to conquest and oppression. We are also haunted by the racist dogmas of the recent past, which explained European success by inventing a racial pecking order that put Europeans at the top. But new facts and concepts have emerged in the past decade that offer a different explanation.

Conquest and amalgamation are the historical reality. From the 20 or maybe even 50,000 very small groups that filled the world 10 millennia ago, we have now arrived at a world where 95 percent of the world's people speak a mere 50 languages.

Indeed, only 10 languages (Chinese, English, Hindi, Arabic, Spanish, Russian, Indonesian, Portuguese, French, and Japanese) account for half of the world's population.

The "linguistic steamrollers" that imposed this amalgamation on the world, it is becoming clear, were often driven by a single technological advance. For example, the domestication of the horse by "barbarians" in what is now southern Ukraine enabled them to overrun almost all the early agricultural civilizations of the Fertile Crescent, Europe, and northern India. As a result, languages derived from their original Indo-European tongue are now spoken by over two billion of the world's six billion people.

But the harder question is why so many of the key advances, from the domestication of the best food crops to the invention of guns and ocean-going ships, occurred in Eurasia. Why did other continents (the Americas, Africa, and Australia) lag so far behind that they were eventually invaded and overrun?

The answer is that the dice were loaded -- by geography. As Jared Diamond, a professor of physiology at University of California, Los Angeles who has become one of the most articulate exponents of the "new metahistory", puts it: "History unfolded differently on different continents because of differences among continental environments, not because of biological differences among peoples."

Europe and Asia are really just one huge continent, and if you ignore regions covered by icecaps (Antarctica, Greenland, etc.) then Eurasia accounts for over 40 percent of the world's habitable land area. Not all that many wild plants and wild animals are suitable for domestication, and Eurasia started out with at least half of them (particularly in the Fertile Crescent and the Chinese river valleys).

This initial advantage was compounded by Eurasia's east-west geography. There are local climate variations, but essentially it is a unified climatic zone, with no major physical barriers, stretching 10,000 kilometers. (6,000 miles) from the North Sea to the Sea of Japan. Any newly domesticated plant or animal -- and any new technology -- spread along the whole of this east-west corridor (what much later became the Silk Route) in only a few centuries.

All Europeans and Asians had access to any advance made anywhere in Eurasia, whereas the early agriculturalists in other continents had to make do with the paltry few plants and animals they could domesticate locally. Eurasia had a far more productive agriculture, hence bigger populations and more people freed from growing food to work on technological innovation -- and so bigger armies, better weapons, bigger empires.

And there was one other great Eurasian advantage (though it often felt like a curse): their diseases. In the crowded cities of Eurasia, where people and animals often lived under the same roof and passed their diseases back and forth, virulent new sicknesses evolved that were really only viable in such dense populations.

Tens of millions of Eurasians died of these diseases, from smallpox to the black plague, but the survivors developed a good deal of immunity over the centuries. The other continents, with less dense populations, had no comparable diseases -- and no immunities. So if those diseases ever traveled across the oceans, the people at the far end were facing near-extinction. And eventually they did travel.

"Wherever the European had trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal," wrote Charles Darwin in 1839. Both the Chinese and the Europeans had the technology to cross the oceans by the 15th century, and the outcome would have been the same for the rest of the world whether it had been invaded by the western or the eastern Eurasians. But the Ming emperor of China banned further ocean voyages in 1433, which left the field clear for the Europeans.

Alfred Crosby of the University of Texas, who did the key work on the impact of disease in the "new Europes" overseas, estimates that 90 percent of the deaths that reduced the aboriginal peoples of the Americas and Australia to tiny minorities in their own lands in only a few centuries were caused by European diseases.

Guns did the rest of the work, but where military superiority was the only European advantage -- as in Asia and even in Africa (whose inhabitants had long been exposed to Eurasian diseases, and had some of their own to pass on in return) -- the conquest lasted only a century or two, and the original population remained the overwhelming majority.

Neither the germs nor the guns were any kind of proof of European "superiority". What made the difference was geography.