Origin Story Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2018 by David Christian

  Cover design by Neil Alexander Heacox

  Cover image by Image Source / Getty Images

  Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  ISBN 978-0-316-39202-0

  E3-20180412-JV-PC

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Preface

  Introduction

  Timeline

  PART I: COSMOS

  Chapter 1 In the Beginning: Threshold 1

  Chapter 2 Stars and Galaxies: Thresholds 2 and 3

  Chapter 3 Molecules and Moons: Threshold 4

  PART II: BIOSPHERE

  Chapter 4 Life: Threshold 5

  Chapter 5 Little Life and the Biosphere

  Chapter 6 Big Life and the Biosphere

  PART III: US

  Chapter 7 Humans: Threshold 6

  Chapter 8 Farming: Threshold 7

  Chapter 9 Agrarian Civilizations

  Chapter 10 On the Verge of Today’s World

  Chapter 11 The Anthropocene: Threshold 8

  PART IV: THE FUTURE

  Chapter 12 Where Is It All Going?

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Appendix: Statistics on Human History

  Glossary

  Further Reading

  Notes

  Newsletters

  Preface

  We tell stories to make sense of things. It’s in our blood.

  —LIA HILLS, “RETURN TO THE HEART”

  The idea of a modern origin story is in the air. For me, it began with a course on the history of everything that I first taught at Macquarie University in Sydney in 1989. I saw that course as a way of getting at the history of humanity. At the time, I taught and researched Russian and Soviet history. But I worried that teaching a national or imperial history (Russia was both nation and empire) conveyed the subliminal message that humans are divided, at the most fundamental level, into competing tribes. Was that a helpful message to teach in a world with nuclear weapons? As a schoolboy during the Cuban missile crisis, I vividly remember thinking we were on the verge of an apocalypse. Everything was about to be destroyed. And I remember wondering if there were kids “over there” in the Soviet Union who were equally scared. After all, they, too, were humans. As a child, I had lived in Nigeria. That gave me a strong sense of a single, extraordinarily diverse human community, a feeling that was confirmed when, as a teenager, I went to Atlantic College, an international school in South Wales.

  Several decades later, as a professional historian, I began to think about how to teach a unified history of humanity. Could I teach about the heritage shared by all humans and tell that story with some of the grandeur and awe of the great national histories? I became convinced that we needed a story in which our Paleolithic ancestors and Neolithic farmers could play as important a role as the rulers, conquerors, and emperors who have dominated so much historical scholarship.

  Eventually, I understood that these were not original ideas. In 1986, the great world historian William McNeill argued that writing histories of “the triumphs and tribulations of humanity as a whole” was “the moral duty of the historical profession in our time.”1 Even earlier, but in the same spirit, H. G. Wells wrote a history of humanity as a response to the carnage of World War I.

  There can be no peace now, we realize, but a common peace in all the world; no prosperity but a general prosperity. But there can be no common peace and prosperity without common historical ideas.… With nothing but narrow, selfish, and conflicting nationalist traditions, races and peoples are bound to drift towards conflict and destruction.2

  Wells understood something else, too: If you want to teach the history of humanity, you probably need to teach the history of everything. That’s why his Outline of History turned into a history of the universe. To understand the history of humanity, you have to understand how such a strange species evolved, which means learning about the evolution of life on planet Earth, which means learning about the evolution of planet Earth, which means learning about the evolution of stars and planets, which means knowing about the evolution of the universe. Today, we can tell that story with a precision and scientific rigor that was unthinkable when Wells wrote.

  Wells was looking for unifying knowledge—knowledge that links disciplines as well as peoples. All origin stories unify knowledge, even the origin stories of nationalist historiography. And the most capacious of them can lead you across many time scales and through many concentric circles of understanding and identity, from the self to the family and clan, to a nation, language group, or religious affiliation, to the huge circles of humanity and life, and eventually to the idea that you are part of an entire universe or cosmos.

  But in recent centuries, increasing cross-cultural contacts have shown how embedded all origin stories and religions are in local customs and environments. That is why globalization and the spread of new ideas corroded faith in traditional knowledge. Even true believers began to see that there were multiple origin stories that said very different things. Some people responded with aggressive, even violent, defenses of their own religious, tribal, or national traditions. But many simply lost faith and conviction, and along with them, they lost their bearings, their sense of their place in the universe. That loss of faith helps explain the pervasive anomie, the feeling of aimlessness, meaninglessness, and sometimes even despair that shaped so much literature, art, philosophy, and scholarship in the twentieth century. For many, nationalism offered some sense of belonging, but in today’s globally connected world, it is apparent that nationalism divides humanity even as it connects citizens within a particular country.

  I have written this book in the optimistic belief that we moderns are not doomed to a chronic state of fragmentation and meaninglessness. Within the creative hurricane of modernity, there is emerging a new, global origin story that is as full of meaning, awe, and mystery as any traditional origin story but is based on modern scientific scholarship across many disciplines.3 That story is far from complete, and it may need to incorporate the insights of older origin stories about how to live well and how to live sustainably. But it is worth knowing, because it draws on a global heritage of carefully tested information and knowledge and it is the first origin story to embrace human societies and cultures from around the world. It is a collective global project, a story that should work as well in Buenos Aires as in Beijing, as well in Lagos as in London. Today, many scholars are engaged in
the exciting task of building and telling this modern origin story, looking for the guidance and sense of shared purpose that it may provide, like all origin stories, but for today’s globalized world.

  My own attempts to teach a history of the universe began in 1989. In 1991, as a way to describe what I was doing, I started using the term big history.4 Only as the story slowly came into focus did I realize that I was trying to tease out the main lines of an emerging global origin story. Today, big history is being taught in universities in many different parts of the world, and through the Big History Project, it is also being taught in thousands of high schools.

  We will need this new understanding of the past as we grapple with the profound global challenges and opportunities of the twenty-first century. This book is my attempt to tell an up-to-date version of this huge, elaborate, beautiful, and inspiring story.

  Introduction

  The forms that come and go—and of which your body is but one—are the flashes of my dancing limbs. Know Me in all, and of what shall you be afraid?

  —IMAGINED WORDS OF THE HINDU GOD SHIVA, FROM JOSEPH CAMPBELL, THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES

  Utterly impossible as are all these events they are probably as like those which may have taken place as any others which never took person at all are ever likely to be.

  —JAMES JOYCE, FINNEGANS WAKE

  We arrive in this universe through no choice of our own, at a time and place not of our choosing. For a few moments, like cosmic fireflies, we will travel with other humans, with our parents, with our sisters and brothers, with our children, with friends and enemies. We will travel, too, with other life-forms, from bacteria to baboons, with rocks and oceans and auroras, with moons and meteors, planets and stars, with quarks and photons and supernovas and black holes, with slugs and cell phones, and with lots and lots of empty space. The cavalcade is rich, colorful, cacophonous, and mysterious, and though we humans will eventually leave it, the cavalcade will move on. In the remote future, other travelers will join and leave the cavalcade. Eventually, though, the cavalcade will thin out. Gazillions of years from today, it will fade away like a ghost at dawn, dissolving into the ocean of energy from which it first appeared.

  What is this strange crowd we travel with? What is our place in the cavalcade? Where did it set out from, where is it heading, and how will it finally fade away?

  Today, we humans can tell the story of the cavalcade better than ever before. We can determine with remarkable accuracy what lurks out there, billions of light-years from Earth, as well as what was going on billions of years ago. We can do this because we have so many more pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of knowledge, which makes it easier to figure out what the whole picture may look like. This is an astonishing, and very recent, achievement. Many of the pieces of our origin story fell into place during my own lifetime.

  We can build these vast maps of our universe and its past partly because we have large brains, and, like all brainy organisms, we use our brains to create internal maps of the world. These maps provide a sort of virtual reality that helps us find our way. We can never see the world directly in all its detail; that would require a brain as big as the universe. But we can create simple maps of a fantastically complicated reality, and we know that those maps correspond to important aspects of the real world. The conventional diagram of the London Underground ignores most of the twists and turns, but it still helps millions of travelers get around the city. This book offers a sort of London Underground map of the universe.

  What makes humans different from all other brainy species is language, a communication tool that is extraordinarily powerful because it allows us to share our individual world maps and, in so doing, form maps much larger and more detailed than those created by an individual brain. Sharing also allows us to test the details of our maps against millions of other maps. In this way, each group of humans builds up an understanding of the world that combines the insights, ideas, and thoughts of many people over thousands of years and many generations. Pixel by pixel, through this process of collective learning, humans have built increasingly rich maps of the universe during the two hundred thousand years of our existence as a species. What this means is that one small part of the universe is beginning to look at itself. It’s as if the universe were slowly opening an eye after a long sleep. Today, that eye is seeing more and more, with the help of global exchanges of ideas and information; the precision and rigor of modern science; new research instruments, from atom-smashing particle colliders to space-based telescopes; and networks of computers with colossal number-crunching powers.

  The story these maps tell us is the grandest story you can imagine.

  As a child, I could not make sense of anything unless I could place it on some sort of map. Like many people, I struggled to link the isolated fields I studied. Literature had nothing to do with physics; I could see no connection between philosophy and biology, or religion and mathematics, or economics and ethics. I kept looking for a framework, a sort of world map of the different continents and islands of human knowledge; I wanted to be able to see how they all fitted together. Traditional religious stories never quite worked for me because, having lived in Nigeria as a child, I’d learned very early that different religions offer different, and often contradictory, frameworks for understanding how the world came to be as it is.

  Today, a new framework for understanding is emerging in our globalized world. It is being built, developed, and propagated collectively by thousands of people from multiple scholarly fields and in numerous countries. Linking these insights can help us see things that we cannot see from within the boundaries of a particular discipline; it lets us view the world from a mountaintop instead of from the ground. We can see the links connecting the various scholarly landscapes, so we can think more deeply about broad themes such as the nature of complexity, the nature of life, even the nature of our own species! After all, at present we study humans through many different disciplinary lenses (anthropology, biology, physiology, primatology, psychology, linguistics, history, sociology), but specialization makes it difficult for any individual to stand back far enough to see humanity as a whole.

  The search for origin stories that can link different types of knowledge is as old as humanity. I like to imagine a group of people sitting around a fire as the sun was setting forty thousand years ago. I picture them on the southern shore of Lake Mungo, in the Willandra Lakes Region of New South Wales, where the oldest human remains in Australia have been found. Today, it is the home of the Paakantji, Ngyiampaa, and Mutthi Mutthi people, but we know that their ancestors lived in this region for at least forty-five thousand years.

  In 1992, the remains of an ancestor (referred to as Mungo 1) discovered by archaeologists in 1968 were finally returned to the local Aboriginal community. This person was a young woman who had been partially cremated.1 Half a kilometer away, remains were found of another person (Mungo 3), probably a man, who died at about age fifty. He had suffered from arthritis and severe dental erosion, probably caused by drawing fibers through his teeth to make nets or cords. His body had been buried with care and reverence and sprinkled with powdered red ocher brought from two hundred kilometers away. Mungo Man was returned to Lake Mungo in November 2017.

  Both people died about forty thousand years ago, when the Willandra lakes, which are now dry, were full of water, fish, and shellfish and attracted multitudes of birds and animals that could be hunted or trapped.2 Life was pretty good around Lake Mungo when they were alive.

  In my imagined twilight conversations around the fire, there are girls and boys, older men and women, and parents and grandparents, some wrapped in animal furs and cradling babies. Children are chasing one another at the edge of the lake while adults are finishing a meal of mussels, freshly caught fish and yabbies, and wallaby steak. Slowly, the conversation becomes serious and is taken over by one of the older people. As on many long summer days and cold winter nights, the older people are retelling what they have learne
d from their ancestors and teachers. They are asking the sort of questions that have always fascinated me: How did the landscape, with its hills and lakes, its valleys and ravines, take shape? Where do the stars come from? When did the first humans live, and where did they come from? Or have we always been here? Are we related to goannas and wallabies and emus? (The answer of both the Lake Mungo people and modern science to that last question is a decisive “Yes!”) The storytellers are teaching history. They are telling stories about how our world was created by powerful forces and beings in the distant past.

  Told over many nights and days, their stories describe the big paradigm ideas of the Lake Mungo people. These are the ideas with long legs, the ideas that can stay the course. They fit together to form a vast mosaic of information about the world. Some of the children may find parts of the stories too complex and subtle to take in at first hearing. But they hear the stories many times in different tellings, and they get used to them and to the deep ideas inside the stories. As the children get older, the stories get under their skin. They come to know them intimately and better appreciate their beauty and their subtler details and meanings.

  As they talk about the stars, the landscape, the wombats and the wallabies, and the world of their ancestors, the teachers build a shared map of understanding that shows members of the community their place in a rich, beautiful, and sometimes terrifying universe: This is what you are; this is where you came from; this is who existed before you were born; this is the whole thing of which you are a small part; these are the responsibilities and challenges of living in a community of others like yourself. The stories have great power because they are trusted. They feel true because they are based on the best knowledge passed down by ancestors over many generations. They have been checked and rechecked for accuracy, plausibility, and coherence using the rich knowledge of people, of stars, of landscapes, of plants and animals available to the Mungo community and to their ancestors and neighbors.