Lineages of Modernity

A History of Humanity from the Stone Age to Homo Americanus

Emmanuel Todd

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781509570119, 9781509534470
• eBook ISBN: 9781509534494
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Marriage & Family Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In most developed countries there is a palpable sense of confusion about the contemporary state of the world. Much that was taken for granted a decade or two ago is being questioned, and there is a widespread urge to try and understand how we reached our present situation, and where we are heading.

In this major new book, the leading sociologist, historical anthropologist and demographer Emmanuel Todd sheds fresh light on our current predicament by reconstructing the historical dynamics of human societies from the Stone Age to the present. Eschewing the tendency to attribute special causal significance to the economy, Todd develops an anthropological account of history, focusing on the long-term dynamics of family systems and their links to religion and ideology – what he sees as the slow-moving, unconscious level of society, in contrast to the conscious level of the economy and politics. He also analyses the dramatic changes brought about by the spread of education. This enables him to explain the different historical trajectories of the advanced nations and the growing divergence between them, a divergence that can be observed in such phenomena as the rise of the Anglosphere in the modern period, the paradox of a Homo americanus who is both innovative and archaic, the startling electoral success of Donald Trump, the lack of realism in the will to power shown by Germany and China, the emergence of stable authoritarian democracy in Russia, the new introversion of Japan and the recent turbulent developments in Europe, including Brexit.

This magisterial account of human history brings into sharp focus the massive transformations taking place in the world today and shows that these transformations have less to do with the supposedly homogenizing effects of globalization and the various reactions to it than with an ethnic diversity that is deeply rooted in the long history of human evolution.

1
THE DIFFERENTIATION OF FAMILY SYSTEMS: EURASIA

About 200,000 years ago, the so-called Homo sapiens type emerged in Africa, with its essential physical characteristics (its two-legged posture and its brain size). Its predecessor, Homo erectus, which appeared on the scene 1.8 million years ago, had already mastered fire (around 400,000 years ago, plus or minus 100,000 years). A step up the ladder of evolution, Homo habilis, identifiable 2.4 million years ago, knew how to use cut stones as tools.

The history of Homo sapiens continued with the species spreading out across the whole planet. These hunter-gatherers left their home continent some 100,000 years ago and moved into the southern fringes of the Middle East. They reached southern India around 60,000 BCE, then Australia, southern China and Southern Europe around 40,000 BCE. Home sapiens moved into Western Europe some 25,000 years ago. At the same time, the Bering Strait was crossed. South America was entered 15,000 years ago; Scandinavia, northern Siberia and Canada 10,000 years ago. Finally, just 6,000 years ago, Austronesian-speaking peoples moved from Taiwan to colonize the Philippines, Borneo, Malaysia and Indonesia, eventually reaching Madagascar around year 0 and New Zealand around 1250–1300 CE. These Austronesians were agriculturalists. All these dates are controversial and tentative, especially those concerning the settling of China and America.¹

The great migration of hunter-gatherers did not establish a definitive map of human settlement. The invention of agriculture triggered new movements because it is a naturally expansive activity. The masters of the new techniques quickly realized that newly cleared land was particularly productive, and the first peasants set out in turn to conquer the earth, dominating, assimilating or eliminating the hunter-gatherers they found on their way. So human beings were restless – especially as the invention of nomadic breeding, which followed that of agriculture, triggered even more movements, several times over, using donkeys, horses, camels and dromedaries.

There are few questions that inspire one to dream as much as the original migrations of hunter-gatherers. The fossil remains of humans and their productions are no longer the only data at our disposal for reconstructing their history. Modern genetics can reconstruct their ancient movements. The analysis of the human genome may one day lead to a definitive map and chronology of the mechanism of dispersal. For the time being, archaeologists and geneticists often disagree, and the geneticists themselves have not really come to any agreement. This new science is prone to indulge in an element of poetic licence. Analyses point to genetic bottlenecks occurring when human beings first moved into the Middle East, and when they crossed the Bering Strait and the Isthmus of Panama: each time, the small size of the migrant group led to what is known as a ‘founder effect’ caused by ‘depletion’ of the genome. Africa, it seems, retained a maximum genetic diversity, resulting from the long and chaotic emergence of the human species on this continent.²

Nowadays, again, we are increasingly aware of the hypnotic effect of a genetics that claims to have identified immutable biological characters at the deepest levels of the human being. The male Y chromosome and the female mitochondrial DNA have succeeded the blood groups A, B, AB and O as ways of essentializing group membership, delineating these groups ever more finely and allowing us to study lineages according to sex. The fascination that these stable and transmissible characters exert over us is quite legitimate. Differential sex-based genetics has, for example, led to the discovery that Judaism was transmitted to Europe by male individuals from the Mediterranean.³ This new patrilineal element will lead us, once we have tackled the rabbinical debates on the role of fathers in the education of children and on the conversion of women, to a reasonable interpretation of why a belated Jewish ‘matrilineality’ appeared on the scene (I return to this question below).

The historian of social forms must, however, be cautious and often sceptical when noting advances in population genetics. In most cases, the analysis of genes invisible to the naked eye does not go much further than the examination of trivial phenotypic differences such as skin colour or facial features. Recent genetic maps show that Africa, southern India and Australia were populated in ancient times and closely related in terms of genome. But we have known for a long time that these are also the regions where the skin of individuals is darkest – the effect of a genetic proximity that has not been affected by a long stay at higher, less sunny latitudes. Anthropology at its most traditional also revealed the similarity between the Dravidian faces of southern India and those of the Australian Aborigines, which without any shadow of a doubt establishes the close relationship between the two populations.⁴ Recent genetics confirms here what everyone already knew, and adds nothing to the accuracy of dating.

The analysis of secondary genetic differences between human subgroups, however, is of real interest in several areas, first and foremost when biological variations have medical implications. Note the vulnerability of African children to measles and the tendency of Australians of British origin to suffer from skin cancer.⁵ Specifically heterosexual transmission of the HIV virus in populations of African origin is an essential piece of data when it comes to prevention. But we have to admit that, for anyone interested in the social elements of human history over the last 10,000 or 12,000 years – including sedentarization, the invention of agriculture, the diversification of family structures, and the emergence of the city and the state – this genetic research is most often quite useless. The separation of the groups is too recent for genetic differences to have become big enough to cause a divergence in instincts, aptitudes and tastes.

What history shows us, on the contrary, is an astonishing ability on the part of the scattered human populations to invent similar techniques and social forms and pass them on to one another. Agriculture was born in the Middle East, China, New Guinea, Africa, and Central and South America. Each of these agricultural emergences led, in each of the populations concerned, to an invention of the patrilineal principle. The highly typical custom of transmission involving inheritance by the eldest son is found in every shape and size: we find it, at different dates, in Africa, the Middle East, China, Japan, Polynesia, Europe and among the Indians of the American Northwest. The history of human family systems can, for the most part, be written without any reference to biology.

The Neolithic revolution

The dispersal of hunter-gatherers, then, was followed by sedentarization and the invention of agriculture by several separate human groups. The Middle East made the first big leap, with sedentarization and the emergence of agriculture first occurring in the Fertile Crescent around 9000 BCE. It was followed by China, in the Yangtze and Yellow River valleys, around 8000 BCE. Neo-Guinean horticulture also developed from 7000 BCE onwards. It is now accepted that there was an autonomous sub-Saharan zone of emergence in West Africa between 3000 and 2000 BCE. In central Mexico and northern Andean America, two zones emerged between 3000 and 1000 BCE. Some researchers identify a pole of innovation in the eastern United States around 2000–1000 BCE. The invention of agriculture also came in many different shapes.

Six thousand years after the invention of agriculture, the differentiation of family types began, first with the emergence of primogeniture in Sumer, southern Mesopotamia, during the third millennium BCE. According to the model I am going to present, most of the differentiation in human family systems has occurred over the past five thousand years. Here, I will merely be describing this history of anthropological types in broad outline; for the details and the demonstration, the reader is referred to Volume I of my L’Origine des systèmes familiaux, where I analyse and methodically map the family structures of 215 populations of Eurasia; its general introduction includes the groups from America and Africa that are indispensable to the general demonstration.⁶ L’Origine des systèmes familiaux (henceforth OSF) is the main database on which the following description of family diversification is based.

However, in Chapter 2 of the present book I will add some results from Volume II (forthcoming) of L’Origine des systèmes familiaux, which will be devoted to Africa, the Americas and Oceania, but only for the human groups that, densified by agriculture, have survived European colonization: in the Central and Andean Americas, in New Guinea, and especially in Africa. These populations today comprise millions of people; they have been caught up in economic globalization and it would be unjustifiable to exclude them. Moreover, the significant populations of African origin in the United States, the United Kingdom and France, and those of Mexican origin in the United States, are, along with many others, being drawn into the most advanced modernity and a knowledge of their original family structures cannot fail to be of interest.

From the nuclear family to the Eurasian communitarian family

Our reconstitution of the history of family systems starts out from the geographical localization of types on the eve of urbanization. It uses an interpretative logic that was quite commonplace for linguistics and anthropology prior to the Second World War: the principle of conservatism in peripheral areas (PCPA). This powerful explanatory hypothesis makes it possible to read history in space: the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Foreword
• Preface to the English Edition
• Introduction: The Differentiation of Family Structures and the Inverse Model of History
• 1 The Differentiation of Family Systems: Eurasia
• 2 The Differentiation of Family Systems: Indian America and Africa
• 3 Homo Sapiens
• 4 Judaism and Early Christianity: Family and Literacy
• 5 Germany, Protestantism and Universal Literacy
• 6 The Great European Mental Transformation
• 7 Educational Take-off and Economic Development
• 8 Secularization and the Crisis of Transition
• 9 The English Matrix of Globalization
• 10 Homo Americanus
• 11 Democracy Is Always Primitive
• 12 Democracy Undermined by Higher Education
• 13 A Crisis in Black and White
• 14 Donald Trump as Will and Representation
• 15 The Memory of Places
• 16 Stem-Family Societies: Germany and Japan
• 17 The Metamorphosis of Europe
• 18 Communitarian Societies: Russia and China
• Envoi
• Postscript: The Future of Liberal Democracy
• Index
• End User License Agreement