This is not quite a transcript, but it is more of a summary of the audio. Substack provides transcripts of the audios that are not too bad. Also, you can turn on closed captions while listening to it by using Google’s Chrome browser and turning on Live Captioning (under “Settings” and “Accessibility”). You can also select any part of the transcript and Substack will play that sound clip. I am continually amazed at how these kinds of technologies are progressing. This is decidedly a less formal way of presenting my work, and we will see if people find it helpful.
As I finished a prior post, in this interglacial interval, in which Earth became warmer and wetter (it has been called “The Long Summer”), with higher carbon-dioxide levels, with Earth’s easy meat driven to extinction and the human population a thousand times greater than when the Second Epoch began, about 12,000 years ago, the time was right for the Domestication Revolution. Nobody ever saw the next Epoch coming until now. The next Epochs were simply unimaginable to the beings who lived just before each new Epoch arrived. When people began domesticating plants, nobody had any idea what it would lead to. The hunter-gatherers who experimented with plant domestication could not imagine the cities that would arise several thousand years later.
Keith Otterbein hypothesized that agriculture could not have developed where megafauna hunting was prominent, as early farmers would have been raided by hungry hunters for their crops. Otterbein argued that only once the megafauna had been hunted to extinction or nearly so would farming have been feasible.
Plant domestication happened in several places on Earth, independently, in favorable mid-latitudes, mainly of seed crops. Women likely performed those experiments, as an adjunct to their gathering duties, although it is hypothesized that for some of it, it was just a natural outcome of planting and harvesting crops, without really trying to domesticate those plants. In many early horticultural societies, because women provided the subsistence base, those societies became matrilocal, broke up the gangs of related males, and those legendary peaceful horticultural villages really existed, for a time. There was an early “honeymoon” of domestication, of intact forests, fertile soils, and a lack of “pests.” But that early golden age of domestication came to an end, as forests were razed, soils were degraded, “pests” arrived, and life became drudgery. Humans shrank in stature, but there were far more mouths to feed, and going back to hunting and gathering became infeasible.
In four places on Earth, about 5,000 years after farming began in those regions, civilizations arose, independently of each other. They had remarkable similarities. All pristine civilizations seem to have initially arisen relatively peacefully, in more golden ages that ended all too quickly, which soon degenerated into warfare, as each polity tried to conquer its neighbors, and wars became much larger affairs than in hunter-gatherer times. As Azar Gat wrote, it was still the biological compulsion to survive and reproduce in a world of scarcity, but on a much larger scale.
In mobile hunter-gather cultures, those societies ensured that no man exercised his alpha-male proclivities to become a potentate. There was not an energy surplus to support something like that. Christopher Boehm hypothesized that psychopathic genes were largely culled from humanity’s gene pool in those days. But once there was an agricultural surplus, men then indulged their chimp proclivities once again and vied for status. Beginning about 7,000 years ago, there was a genetic bottleneck of men, in which up to 95% of men never fathered any children, as early male elites played studs to their harems (1, 2, 3). Similar violent coercion was typical of the first urban elites. This was part of the downside of the Domestication Revolution: the ascendance of psychopathic men once again.
But on the positive side, the rise of civilization meant the appearance of professions, and those big human brains and dexterity were repurposed like never before, once they were freed from subsistence duties. A multitude of innovations accompanied the first civilizations of the Fertile Crescent, such as metallurgy, writing, math, the first stirrings of science, plow agriculture, the wheel, and so on. On the downside was a great expansion of slavery, warfare on unprecedented scales, and civilizations have never been sustainable, as one energy source after another was plundered to exhaustion, even to this day, as humanity mines hydrocarbon deposits a million times as fast as they were formed, and the end of them is near.
Agrarian civilizations quickly leveled nearby forests, wrecked the soils, turned forests into deserts, and epidemic diseases, which largely came from domestic animals, tore through civilizations early and often. All early civilizations collapsed, and urban life expectancy did not exceed rural life expectancy until the 20th century.
Agrarian empires were always brutal affairs of violent conquest (and all empires, really). Gat did not explicitly state it, but he influenced Ian Morris’s idea of productive and unproductive warfare, which is an accountant’s view of warfare. Productive warfare is when an empire’s subjects get a “peace dividend” through being conquered. They no longer fight their neighbors, and imperial taxation is less onerous than the warfare “tax” on those societies would be. Unproductive war is when more is destroyed by warfare than would be saved by the peace dividend, and it is hard to put a price on lives, so the worst peace is arguably better than the best war, in the end.
In agrarian Eurasia, especially in the Fertile Crescent and vicinity, it was an unending series of rising and falling empires. Sons slaughtered fathers and brothers to sit on those coveted thrones and enjoy their attendant harems. The same soils were repeatedly slaked with blood over centuries and even millennia. In what became known as the West, the apex of ancient imperial activity was the Roman Empire. Everything about it was on an unprecedented scale and the Mediterranean’s periphery was devastated by Roman rule. Rome’s bath fleet is the only instance that I ever heard of in which firewood was seagoing freight.
The Han dynasty was contemporary with imperial Rome, and together they ruled over more than half of humanity. Northern Europe was a Eurasian backwater for millennia, but after Rome fell, northwestern Europe began its ascent to dominance. Europe had three population replacements since humans became behaviorally modern. Hunter-gatherers displaced Neanderthals, farmers from the Fertile Crescent displaced hunter-gathers, and invading herders from the steppes displaced farmers. After Rome fell, Vikings invaded much of Europe and some became Russians. Some settled in northern France (Normandy, which has its roots in “Norse”). The British Isles were regularly invaded by Vikings, and the Norman invasion from Normandy in 1066 was a key event in British history. By that time, watermills, invented by Greek engineers and used by Rome, became a central aspect of what has been called the “Medieval Industrial Revolution,” as watermills proliferated across northwestern Europe, with its abundant rivers and streams from North Atlantic precipitation. It was the first time that non-muscle power had been generated on land to any appreciable degree, and it marked the rise of Europe.
Scholars have long debated why Europe conquered the world and was the first region on Earth to industrialize, but what can’t be denied is that without Epochal energy innovations, those events could not have happened. While waterpower was critical, two other energy events had greater importance: harnessing the winds that blew across Earth’s ocean, and exploiting fossil fuels on an unprecedented scale. The Portuguese were the first European power to begin turning the world’s ocean into a low-energy transportation lane, which European powers soon used to conquer the world. The English rode the power of coal to industrialization, and became the world’s first global empire because of it. That was how the Fourth Epoch began.
Some trends over the Epochs merit discussion. One was that with each Epoch, as a new energy source was exploited, the process quickened. While the First Epoch lasted three million years, the second only lasted about 50,000 years, the third only 12,000 years, the fourth is only three centuries old (and most of humanity still does not really live in it, but in agrarian economies), and we are on the cusp of the next Epoch. The other noteworthy trend was that each Epoch consumed far more energy than the previous one, by orders of magnitude in total.
Until the Industrial Revolution, each energy breakthrough generally meant more mouths to feed. It took over three million years from the first crafted stone tools to produce the few thousand behaviorally modern humans that conquered Earth. Over the Second Epoch, humans consumed a thousand times more energy at the end as at the beginning (as there were a thousand times more people). At the end of the Third Epoch, humans consumed hundreds of times as much energy as was consumed when the Epoch began (as there were hundreds of times as many humans). Industrial societies, however, rode on energy-powered machines, and a calorie of energy spent feeding a machine instead of a human produces ten times as much work, and machines perform feats far beyond human ability (such as flying to the moon and manipulating electrons in semiconductors).
The biggest event in the human journey so far happened as a side effect of industrialization: the end of childhood death. Half of all offspring died in the human line, in a trend that went back to gorillas. Industrialization led to the improvements in sanitation, nutrition, and hygiene that ended childhood death. Medical interventions had virtually nothing to do with it. Infectious diseases were conquered before there were medical interventions for them, such as vaccines and antibiotics. My favorite statistic on that reality is that when the measles vaccine was introduced in England in the 1960s, the measles death rate had already declined by 99.96%.
Also, what happened over the Epochs is that human societies became increasingly more humane and less violent, which was because human standards of living rose. People no longer lived on the brink of survival. Until industrialization, anybody, from oldest to youngest, richest to poorest, was at constant risk of an untimely death, often violently. Not only did hunter-gatherers kill a large fraction of their infants, they also killed their elderly, especially when food was scarce. While infanticide waned, it did not disappear until industrialization, and the elderly have not been systematically killed since hunter-gatherer times. Up to half of male chimps died violently, “only” about 25% of hunter-gatherer men did, a far smaller proportion of agrarian men did, and in my community, almost nobody ever dies violently. We still have a long way to go, but we also have come so far.
Another trend that I believe began when Europe began conquering the world was the rise of global elites. Global elites play an evil game, by and large, of dominating humanity, largely from behind the scenes. Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and American presidents are members of what I call the retail elite, who are nowhere near the top of the world’s power structure. The public has never heard the names of the people who really run the world, and the public will never encounter them unless they engage in activities that threaten the wealth and power of the global elite, such as bringing disruptive technology to market, which I learned the hard way.
But the global elite rely on a sleeping and egocentric public, whose horizons of awareness rarely extend past their immediate self-interest. That is primarily why the global elites can play their games of power and domination. I think that there is a grim symbiosis happening between the global elite and the public, and there are likely mystical reasons for this. The world economy is dominated by rackets, and the masses play right along with it, even filing to their deaths. I had to witness that a number of times before I began to accept it, and I see that behavior to this day.
Another trend, since the first crafted stone tools, has been killing off all other lifeforms in the name of human self-interest, other than those that we successfully bred in captivity. Today, humans and domestic animals comprise 96% of mammalian biomass. Earth has also lost 50% of its plant biomass since farming began. Human activities are quickly warming Earth’s surface, and we have our toes over the edge of the abyss in many ways. Deficits in human integrity and sentience are the primary reasons for why we are in this situation. All Epochs had their dominant ideologies, which were understandably based on scarcity, fear, and justifying the ill-treatment of members of the out-group. This has been a human universal until now.
While I acknowledge our immense human problems, several which are existential, we are also on the brink of the biggest event in the human journey, by far. I call it the arrival of the Fifth Epoch, which comes next in this series of posts.
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