All Connected Now

Life In The First Global Civilization

Walter Truett Anderson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367007263
• eBook ISBN: 9780429721588
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Going beyond the narrow economic focus common to most books about globalization, All Together Now describes four kinds of global change-economic, political, cultural, biological-all of which are now accelerating, driven by the increasing mobility of symbols, goods, people, and non-human life forms. Anderson describes how we are entering an age of o

Part 1
Globalizations

1
The Global Animal

It is a familiar item of schoolbook history that when Christopher Columbus and his men set forth in their little ships to cross the Atlantic in 1492, they were far from certain about what they might find at the end of their journey. Columbus hoped to find a new trade route to Asia, but others thought he might find places inhabited by strange nonhuman monsters or that he might find the edges of the earth.

What he and later explorers found, of course, was the New World. And they found far more than that: They found the whole world—the great watery spheroid globe, with its two hemispheres and its vast territories, a world that had not existed in the human imagination before the fifteenth century. They also, in a sense, found the human species. Because the creatures who greeted Columbus when he stepped ashore proved to be, on closer examination, people. And what subsequent expeditions discovered was—more people. People on all the islands of the Caribbean, in the vast deserts of Mexico, in the jungles of Central America, in the breathtakingly high valleys of the Andes Mountains; people hunting seals in the Arctic and fishing in the waters of Patagonia.¹

' They were there because the age of exploration had not just begun but merely entered a new phase.'Countless other explorers, radiating outward from Africa over the millennia of human existence, had discovered new worlds, populated them, created their own societies, developed their languages, forgotten their origins, and invented fantasies of where they had come from.

Yet although exploration was riot new—although it was and is inseparable from human evolution itself—the discovery of the Americas by Columbus on his voyage from the east marks a great evolutionary transition: For some 50,000 to 100,000 years since the appearance of the first Homo sapiens, the species had been expanding far beyond its place of origin in Africa; now, as descendants of people who had migrated into Europe met descendants of people who had migrated to the Americas, the human species was discovering one world; one phase of globalization was ending and another had begun.²

The Great Expansion

We are finding out more all the time about the origins of the human species, yet much remains shrouded in mystery and controversy. The experts are still arguing about when and where and how Homo sapiens separated from other species, wondering what really happened to the Neanderthals. They are still far from complete agreement on the exact nature of the evolutionary transition that set the first Homo sapiens apart from their near relatives. This much, at least, is clear and undisputed: Our ancient ancestors got around. They migrated in successive waves out of Africa into Asia and Europe and Australi a, expanded eventually into North America, boated from island to island across the Pacific. And some of this remarkable mobility preceded the appearance of Homo sapiens. Groups of the African hominid Homo erectus apparently were venturing through the Middle East and into Asia well over 2 million years ago, and it's possible that some of them even traveled back to Africa. Commenting on recent finds of their stone tools in present-day Israel and Pakistan, biologist Christopher Wills writes:

In both cases the tools have been dated quite firmly at about 2.5 million years ago—a remarkable finding which makes them as old as any that have been found in Africa. As soon as [Homo erectus] invented such tools, it seems, they used them to conquer new worlds. It has generally been assumed that stone tools were first used in Africa, but these new finds raise the possibility that they were invented somewhere else and taken back to Africa by H. erectus as they moved back and forth over a wide swath of territory.³

There were doubtless many reasons for this enormous human (and prehuman) restlessness, and we will never know all the reasons why a particular individual or family group or tribe went from one place to another. Obviously, hunting and gathering—everybody's way of making a living until agriculture was invented—were wandering activities. Hunters must often have followed their prey into unfamiliar territories, as bands of gatherers likewise explored new lands in search of new supplies of nuts, berries, fruits, and vegetables. Undoubtedly conflicts and competition were also wrapped up in these movements, such as when one group might leave an area to get away from its neighbors or when a new group might move in on a territory previously occupied by another one.

In the century and a half since Charles Darwin shocked the world with his carefully documented theories of how species—including our own—originated, evolutionary scientists have become much more adept at piecing together the prehistory of globalization. Until recently, most such speculation was based on the evidence of fossils and artifacts; now much more attention is being paid to the work of such genetic detectives as Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, who study the genetic differences among people from different parts of the world to, in effect, work backward along the "tree" of evolution to reconstruct an account of how peoples migrated and evolved. Although the paleogeneticists are careful to remind us that there are vast areas of uncertainty and ignorance, it appears now that the common ancestors of all of us lived in Africa some 70,000 to 100,000 years ago, that small groups of Africans colonized Asia (traveling across both land and water) and moved on to Australia some 50,000 years ago. Some 40,000 years ago migrations from Asia and Africa populated Europe—probably hastening the extinction of the Neanderthals who had gotten there first—and, in the final major move, people crossed into North America around 30,000 years ago. Paleogenetics gives a credible account of the whole vast saga and also offers some rather startling de tails, such as the hypothesis (based on such evidence as the near 100 percent frequency of type O blood among American Indians) that the number of the first group of immigrants who crossed from Asia was twelve or fewer.⁴ Some scholars maintain that humanity may have evolved in other places and that there was interbreeding among various early humans, but even if this is so, the evidence is strong that we are all descended from African ancestors and that we are all related—genetically, rather closely so.

Tools of Globalization

The accelerating evolution of the human species—and of globalization—was helped along by the hominids' increasing capacity to make and use tools and by their growing ability to communicate with one another through mimesis and sound. These were the beginnings of culture, a new kind of evolution by which adaptive strategies could not only be passed down from parent to child through the genes but could spread rapidly from person to person, place to place. It was somewhere back there in the lost, prehistoric past that the first steps were taken toward the global information society.

Some 5,000 years ago, people in the kingdom of Sumeria, in the southern region of present-day Iraq, created one of the most important evolutionary innovations:writing. Its appearance marks the transition from prehistory into recorded history, the beginning of a new stage in the evolution of humanity and the earth. According to Sumerian legend, writing was invented by a great king named Uruk after one of his couriers arrived at the court of another king so exhausted that he could not get breath to deliver the oral message. The next time he had to send a message, King Uruk formed some clay into a tablet and wrote it down so he would no longer be dependent on the wind power of his couriers. A Sumerian epic poem proclaims:

Before that time writing on clay had not yet existed,
But now, as the sun rose, so it was!
The king ofKullaba had set words on a tablet, so it was!⁵

So, in fact, it probably wasn't. Writing, like agriculture, may have been invented at many times and places, and most scholars believe it evolved out of various kinds of pictograms and records that did not necessarily correspond to written speech. It may have taken a long time before any civilization developed written language that actually corresponded to its spoken language, and the overwhelming majority of spoken languages never evolved into writing.'But the development of writing, enabling information to be recorded and transported in increasingly effective ways, was essential to the growth of complex human civilizations.

Many technological and social innovations played a part in this development. The clay tablet was one of the earliest of these; later came papyrus, the bound book, eventually movable type and printing—the last a change so momentous that there is now an enormous body of literature documenting and celebrating the transformative impacts of the "Gutenberg revolution." The word "revolution" is used frequently and usually accurately in connection with such innovations. And as time goes on, the revolutions become more frequent: Over 2 million years elapsed from the invention of the first tools used in food gathering to the invention of agriculture. Some 5,000 years passed from the invention of agriculture in the Middle East to the invention of writing by an agricultural civilization not far away. And early writing was often used for the purpose of keeping records of food stored—and not only stored but received and exchanged in trade.

In a region that is now southern Russia, archaeologists have discovered and dated to around 3000 B.C. the earliest known wheels, relics of a globalizing invention that was to have innumerable uses, serve as a major force in advancing human mobility, and so capture the human imagination that it often served as a symbol of all mobility. Wheels, coupled with draft animals, led to the invention of carts for agriculture and trade, chariots for war, carriages for human transportation. They were the central mechanism in mills for grinding grain, in pulleys for drawing water and supplying irrigation systems. With gears they later made possible two more revolutionary inventions, the clock and the first computer, as well as all the machines of the industrial revolution. In the human imagination wheels formed the visual image of the movement of planets through the heavens, the turning of time, the phases of life.

Another innovation with far-reaching consequences was the domestication of the horse. Dogs were the first domesticated animals, then the food animals such as goats and sheep, then draft animals such as the ox and the ass. Horses were initially bred as draft animals and then, perhaps some 4,000 years ago, people began to ride them. "The idea," observed Jacob Bronowski in The Ascent of Man, "must have been as startling in its day as the invention of the flying machine."⁶ That innovation enabled the horse-breeding tribes of Central Asia to turn into fierce, all-conquering warriors, thundering across Europe, striking terror into the hearts of Greeks who believed horse and rider to be one and so invented the myth of the centaur. Centuries later bands of horsemen conquered the New World, building globe-encircling empires—huge systems of economic, political, cultural, and biological interaction.

Many other innovations, of the sort that we now call technological, contributed to the growing ability of human beings to travel, communicate, create extended systems of trade and culture, and transform themselves and their environments.

The Changing World

And while early humans were in the process of inhabiting the planet, the planet itself kept changing. People had to adapt not only to the conditions of new regions into which they migrated but also to cycles of climatic variation that occasionally transformed those regions. Several times since Homo sapiens first appeared, the global climate has changed spectacularly.

Current research indicates that major glaciation recurs approximately every 100,000 years and is probably influenced by a number of factors including the eccentric solar orbit and cyclical variations in the tilt of the earth's axis: For about 90,000 years of one of these cycles, much of the planet is covered in ice. In the last great ice age, gigantic sheets of ice more than a mile deep covered North America as far south as the present U.S.-Canadian border, and northern Europe and Asia to the same degree; the Antarctic ice extended northward to South America, Australia, and New Zealand. Sea levels were some 300 feet lower than they are at present, and vast pieces of now submerged land along the continental shelves stood exposed.⁷ Then, after each such age, the warming process would set in, the glaciers would recede, an enormous springtime would creep across the planet, and some 20,000 to 40,000 years would pass before the cooling began again. There also appear to be smaller cycles, notably the Little Ice Age that lasted from around 1500 until the eighteenth century. These cycles undoubtedly influenced human migratory patterns and also forced people to invent new tools and social arrangements in order to survive under conditions dramatically different from those they had encountered when they first wandered into a new territory.

And we now know (although it has taken us an inordinately long time to discover the extent of it) that human societies don't merely adapt to large-scale environmental changes: They also cause them. This was what ecologist Marston Bates was getting at some decades ago when he described humankind as "a new sort of geological force, reshaping the landscape, favoring some kinds of organisms and destroying others, changing the very composition of the atmosphere."⁸

The invention of agriculture was one of the great transitions in human evolution and indeed in the evolution of the planet, because it altered the Darwinian rules of selection as human beings bred and propagated and protected the plants most suitable for food production. Bronowski refers to agriculture's appearance as both a "biological revolution" and a "social revolution"—biological because it changed the relationship between people and the other living things on which they depended for food, social because "now it became possible—more than that, it became necessary—for man to settle."⁹

Recent paleogenetic research calls for some revision of the conventional view, such as the one expressed by Bronowski, that agriculture encouraged a less mobile lifestyle, led people to stay put in the relatively closed systems of walled cities. It may have done that for some of the early farmers, but it also led to population growth, which in turn sent other people to roaming the country in search of new arable land. Those human diasporas were accompanied by diasporas of domesticated crop plants, which were introduced into whatever ecosystem was converted to farmland. Agriculture was a great factor in biological globalization.

Agriculture was probably invented on several occasions, at different places and times. The best-documented case of its invention was the transition made by the Natufian people some 10,000 years ago, in the region near what became the city of Jericho. Already accomplished in harvesting and processing the local native grains, they had developed advanced tools such as flint sickles and stone mortars and pestles. The climate in the region was probably changing, becoming hotter and drier, forcing populations to concentrate, reducing the habitats of wild game, and shortening the growing seasons of the grains. That crisis presented an opportunity. The warmer climate favored the annual species of wild grains and legumes—those that completed their life cycles in the late spring—over the perennials. The annuals had large seeds, protected inside husks, that were able to survive the powerful summer droughts and then germinate in the cool and rainy winters. Some clever Natufians presumably observed this process and began to help it along a little bit each year by saving seeds when they harvested grains and then planting them in the next wet season. Eventually the cultivated fields in the Jordanian region were taken over completely by the seed-retaining, fat-grained mutants. As agriculture developed there it spread northward, and soon wheat, barley, peas, and beans were being grown in Turkey and Mesopotamia, with corresponding impacts on ecosystems and societies.

Jared Diamond makes a persuasive case that the relative climate uniformity of the huge Eurasian land mass—the fact that it spread east-west more than north-south—contributed greatly to the development of its agriculture (and in the process contributed also to the sequence of events that led to European colonization of the Americas instead of vice versa):

That's part of the reason why Fertile Crescent domesticates spread west and east so rapidly: they were already well adapted to the climates of the regions to which they were spreading. For instance, once farming crossed from the plains of Hungary into central Europe around 5400 B.C., it spread so quickly that the sites of the first farmers in the vast area from Poland west to Holland ... were nearly contemporaneous. By the time of Christ, cereals of Fertile Crescent origin were growing over the 8,000-mile expanse from the Atlantic coast of Ireland to the Pacific coast of Japan. That west-east expanse of Eurasia is the largest land distance on Earth.¹⁰

The early domestication of animals was probably also a gradual transition, perhaps scarcely visible when it was taking place. Bands of hunters that had followed certain kinds of animals such as reindeer, goats, and sheep evolved into pastoral tribes as they began to guide the movements of the herds, protecti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Globalization Is Evolution Is Globalization
• PART 1 GLOBALIZATIONS
• PART 2 CONNECTIONS
• PART 3 INFORMATIZATIONS
• PART 4 POSSIBILITIES
• Chapter Notes
• Bibliography
• Index