Why the West Rules--For Now (14 page)

The answer, perhaps surprisingly, lies in the frozen wastes of Antarctica. Every year snow falls there, burying previous snows, and compressing them into thin layers of ice. These layers are like a chronicle of ancient weather. By separating them, climatologists can measure their thickness, telling us how much snow fell; establish the balance between isotopes of oxygen, revealing temperatures; and compare the amounts of carbon dioxide and methane, illuminating greenhouse effects. But drilling cores through the ice sheets is one of the toughest assignments in science. In 2004 a European team finished extracting an Antarctic core almost two miles deep, going back an astonishing 740,000 years, to the days when Neanderthals were still a twinkle in some ape-man’s eye. The scientists did this despite temperatures that plunged to—58°F in winter and never got above —13°, being forced to start over when the drill jammed in 1999, and having to use a plastic bag filled with ethanol as a makeshift drill bit for the final hundred yards.

The results these supermen and -women of science extracted from the ice make one thing very clear: the world the Altamira artists lived in was cold. Temperatures had started tumbling again after modern humans left Africa, and around twenty thousand years ago—when more artists were daubing ocher and charcoal on cave walls than ever before or since—the last ice age reached its chilling climax. Average temperatures stood 14°F below those of recent times. That made a staggering difference. Mile-thick glaciers covered northern Asia, Europe, and America, locking up so much water that the sea level was more than three hundred feet lower than today. You could have walked from Africa to England, Australia, or America without ever laying eyes on the sea. Not that you would have wanted to visit many of these places;
at the edges of the glaciers winds howled and dust storms raged across vast arid steppes, frigid in winter and barren in summer. Even in the least forbidding regions, within 40 degrees of the equator, short summers, meager rainfall, and reduced levels of carbon dioxide in the air limited plant growth and kept animal (including human) populations low. Things were as bad as in the worst days before modern humans left Africa.

Life was easier in what are now the tropics than it was in Siberia, but wherever archaeologists look, they find that people adapted to the Ice Age in rather similar ways. They lived in tiny bands. In colder environments, a dozen people was a big group; in the milder regions, twice that many might stick together. They learned when different plants ripened and where to find them; when animals migrated ahead of the seasons and where they could intercept them; and they followed both around the landscape. Those who did not learn these things starved.

Such tiny bands would have struggled to reproduce themselves. Like modern hunter-gatherers in marginal environments, they must have come together from time to time to exchange marriage partners, trade goods, tell stories, and perhaps speak to their gods, spirits, and ancestors. These gatherings would have been the most exciting social events on the calendar. We are guessing, of course, but many archaeologists think these festival days lie behind western Europe’s spectacular cave paintings: everyone put on their best skins and beads, painted their faces, and did what they could to decorate their holy meeting places, making them truly special.

The obvious question, though, is why—if these hard facts of life applied all across Africa, Asia, and Europe—we find such spectacular cave paintings only in western Europe. The traditional answer, that Europeans were more culturally creative than anyone else, seems to make a lot of sense, but we might do better to turn the question around. The history of European art is not a continuous catalogue of masterpieces running from Chauvet to Chagall; the cave paintings died out after 11,500
BCE
and many millennia passed before we know of anything to equal them.

Looking for the roots of Western rule in a thirty-thousand-year tradition of European creativity is obviously mistaken if this tradition in fact dried up for thousands of years. Perhaps we should ask instead why the cave paintings ended, because once we do so it starts to look
like the astonishing finds from prehistoric Europe have as much to do with geography and climate as with any special Western culture.

Through most of the Ice Age, northern Spain and southern France were excellent hunting grounds, where herds of reindeer migrated from summer to winter pastures and back again. But when temperatures started rising about fifteen thousand years ago (more on this in
Chapter 2
) the reindeer stopped migrating this far south in winter, and the hunters followed them northward.

It cannot be a coincidence that western European cave painting declined at just the same time. Fewer and fewer artists crawled under the ground with their animal-fat lamps and sticks of ocher. Sometime around 13,500 years ago the very last artist walked away. He or she probably did not realize it, but on that day the ancient tradition died. Darkness fell in the caves, and for millennia only bats and dripping water disturbed their tomblike silence.

Why did beautiful cave paintings not move steadily northward across Europe after 11,500
BCE
as hunters followed the retreating reindeer? Probably for the very good reason that northern European hunters did not have such convenient caves to paint. Northern Spain and southern France have a tremendous number of deep limestone caves; northern Europe has far fewer. The efforts prehistoric peoples made to decorate their meeting places rarely survived for us to find unless hunting grounds coincided with deep caves. Whenever this happy coincidence failed to arise, people must have gathered nearer to or even above the surface. Exposed to wind, sun, and rain for twenty thousand years, few traces of their artwork survive.

“Few traces” is not the same as “no traces,” though, and sometimes we get lucky. At the wonderfully named Apollo 11 Cave in Namibia, slabs of stone with drawings of rhinos and zebras peeled off the wall, fell to the floor, and were preserved under deposits that formed between 19,000 and 26,000 years ago, and some Australian examples are even older. At Sandy Creek, mineral deposits that built up over part of a carving on a cave wall can be dated to about 25,000 years ago and fragments of pigment are 26,000 to 32,000 years old, while at Carpenter’s Gap part of a painted cave wall fell into 40,000-year-old occupation debris, making it even earlier than Chauvet.

None of the African or Australian examples compares aesthetically with the best French and Spanish work, and there are quite a few deep
caves outside western Europe that do not have paintings (like Zhoukoudian, reoccupied twenty thousand years ago). It would be silly to claim that all humans put equal effort into cave art, let alone that all artistic traditions are equally successful. But given the preservation issues and the fact that archaeologists have been looking longer and harder in Europe than anywhere else, the survival of anything at all on other continents suggests that all modern humans, everywhere, shared the urge to create art. Where the conditions for cave painting were not so good as in western Europe, people may have put their energy into other media.

Figure 1.5. The beginnings of Western culture? The open circles show cave paintings 12,000 or more years old, and the solid circles show finds of portable art of the same age.

Figure 1.5
shows nicely that while cave art clusters in western Europe, stone, clay, and bone models of humans and animals are more common farther east. If the economics of publishing allowed it, I could show pictures of dozens of quite extraordinary figurines, found everywhere from Germany to Siberia. Since it does not, I will limit myself
to the most recent discovery, found in 2008 at Hohle Fels in Germany (
Figure 1.6
)—a two-inch-tall statuette of a woman with no head but with gigantic breasts, carved 35,000 years ago from mammoth ivory. Around the same date hunters at Malaya Síya near Lake Baikal in Siberia—surely one of the most inhospitable spots on earth—took time to engrave pictures of animals on bones; and by 25,000
BCE
groups up to 120 strong were gathering in huts of mammoth bone and skin at Dolní Vestonice in the Czech Republic, where they made thousands of clay figurines of animals and, again, large-breasted women. In East Asia the artistic record remains thin, but the earliest find—a tiny model bird carved perhaps fifteen thousand years ago from a deer antler, discovered at Xuchang in 2009—seems so sophisticated that we can be confident that future excavations will reveal a flourishing Ice Age artistic tradition in China, too.

Figure 1.6. The urge to create: a two-inch-tall, 35,000-year-old headless statuette of a huge-breasted “Venus,” carved from mammoth ivory, found in 2008 at Hohle Fels in Germany

Ice Age humans outside western Europe, lacking the conditions that made Chauvet and Altamira what they were, apparently found
other outlets for their creativity. There is precious little evidence that earlier ape-men felt any creative urges at all, but imagination seems to be hardwired into
Homo sapiens
. By fifty thousand years ago humans had the mental faculties to seek meaning in the world and the skills to represent these meanings in art and (probably, though we cannot observe it) poetry, music, and dance. Once again, people (in large groups) all seem to be much the same, wherever we find them. For all its splendor, Altamira did not make the West different from the rest.

Technological, intellectual, and biological differences accumulated for more than a million and a half years after the first ape-men left Africa, dividing the Old World into a Neanderthal/
Homo sapiens
West and a
Homo erectus
East. Around a hundred thousand years ago the West was characterized by relatively advanced technology and even hints of humanity, while the East looked increasingly backward; but when fully modern humans moved out of Africa sixty thousand years ago they swept all this away. By the time the last ice age reached its climax twenty thousand years ago, “east” and “west” were just directions in which the sun rose and set. Far more united the little bands of humans scattered from Britain to Siberia—and (relatively) soon to cross over into America—than divided them. Each band foraged and hunted, roaming over huge areas as plants ripened and animals came and went. Each must have known its territory intimately and have told stories about every rock and tree; each had its own art and traditions, tools and weapons, spirits and demons. And each surely knew that their gods loved them, because they were, in spite of everything, still alive.

Humans had come as far as they were likely to in such a cold, dry world; and there, we must suspect, things would have stayed, had the earth not wobbled under their feet.

2

THE WEST TAKES THE LEAD

GLOBAL WARMING

Though the cavemen shivering around their campfires twenty thousand years ago could not know it, their world had begun moving back toward warmth. Over the next ten thousand years the combination of climate change and their own superfast brains would transform geography, generating distinct regional ways of life that have continued to this very day. East and West began to mean something.