Humanity's Second Epoch

Conquering Earth

Modern anthropology has Victorian roots, colonialism and racism marred it, and it is still recovering from that.  In the 20^th century, particularly after the trauma of the World Wars, anthropology took a different ideological turn.  Instead of seeing preliterate humans as brute savages in need of the West’s civilizing tutelage, anthropologists adopted the Rousseauian idea that prehistoric humans lived peacefully and in harmony with their environments.  It became a dogma that dominated anthropology until just the past generation, the Rousseauian camp is still influential, and even Chomsky has blurbed their work. 

With my radicalized perspective that I began my days of study with, I eventually became extremely skeptical of that Rousseauian view of prehistoric humanity.  In the past generation, those ideas have been completely overturned by the evidence.  Hobbes’s view prevailed, that prehistoric life was “nasty, brutish, and short.”  The primary upshots of the past generation of changing views of prehistoric humanity were the realizations that humans did not live in harmony with their environments, drove most of Earth’s large animals to extinction, and their lives were extremely violent. 

After Homo sapiens achieved behavioral modernity, they left Africa around 60,000 years ago and conquered Earth, in what I call the Second Epoch.   All other human species, of which several have been discovered so far, disappeared from Earth during that conquest, and it was likely not a peaceful process.  Australia became a perfect window into humanity’s early days, as the entire continent was populated by hunter-gatherers when the British invaded in the late 1700s.  The first-contact accounts record highly violent peoples, but those accounts were ignored during the Rousseauian heyday. 

Anthropologist Keith Otterbein argued that humans could have only domesticated plants where the megafauna had been hunted to extinction or nearly so, so that megafauna hunting was no longer the dominant mode of subsistence.  Megafauna-hunting tools also worked fine for warfare, so life was never peaceful among megafauna hunters, and incipient farmers would have been vulnerable to raids from hungry hunters.  In Australia, fleet-footed kangaroos, which could take their vulnerable infants with them, were not hunted to extinction.  So, in Australia, megafauna hunting never ended and farming never began, although many plants were candidates for domestication. 

In Eurasia were several human species, and all were quickly driven to extinction after behaviorally modern humans arrived.  The most spectacular megafauna extinctions were of the members of the elephant family.  Not only were Eurasian wooly mammoths driven to extinction, but when humans invaded the Americas, elephant-family members had lived throughout the Americas for millions of years, with several species, and they went 100% extinct soon after human arrival.  The elephant family was far from alone in its quick disappearance from the Americas.  Some scientists still try to invoke non-human reasons for that, as they defend humanity beyond all reason.  Similarly, there are scientists who absolve the original Australians of Australia’s megafauna extinctions.  Not only is that idea without merit, but there is evidence in Australia and nearby Southeast Asia that humans set fire to forests, likely to drive prey animals and make the environment human-friendlier.  Thus began the destruction of Earth’s forests by humans.   

During that conquest of Earth, the population of behaviorally modern humans increased by a factor of a thousand, which was the most dramatic population explosion in the history of life on Earth, at least until the subsequent human explosions. 

In my opinion, those Rousseauian scientists, in their attempts to pacify and idealize the human past, have helped obscure how far we have come.  Humanity is not nearly as violent as it used to be, and environmental concerns are something relatively new in the human journey.  Azar Gat’s statement, that the compulsion to survive and reproduce in a world of scarcity is the root of all violence, is the most succinct summary that I have seen.  We do not live in scarcity nearly to the level that prehistoric humans did, and that explains why we are more peaceful and humane.  Richard Wrangham’s idea that human-line warfare goes back to chimps is the correct one, I believe. 

There was one trend that helped the Rousseauian idea, which was when societies became matrilocal or multilocal and broke up the gangs of related males.  Those became the most peaceful prehistoric societies.  It happened only rarely during the Second Epoch, if at all, but it began appearing in early horticultural societies, as women became the dominant providers of food.  That is a subject for the agrarian Epoch of the human journey, which I call the Third, and that comes next.