A Brief History of the Human Race

  • Michael Cook
W. W. Norton: 2003. 384 pp. $26.95 Granta: 2004. £20 0393052311 | ISBN: 0-393-05231-1

Ask the average historian whether a science of history is possible and you are likely to get a condescending smile. History, they assure us, belongs to the humanities; it is not even a social, much less a natural, science. Historiography is an intensely empirical exercise, but it deals with the facts of one time and place, or at most the record of how events have unfolded on a larger scale. It is not for nothing that the field's name contains the word ‘story’; the story must be as true as it can be, but do not expect it to yield any patterns.

Attempts at pattern-finding during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — by Karl Marx, Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee, for example — are seen as cautionary failures. There are world-systems theorists today, but they are few and marginalized. There are cliometricians, who present the particulars in quantitative form, but they are unlikely to generalize. Most historians don't want to measure Clio, the muse of history — they want her to inspire them to tell the best and truest story.

Anthropologists are different. Some at least have always sought patterns, and in surveying the great array of cultural variation that archaeology has unearthed and ethnography revealed, they have found them. Patterns have cropped up in some basic textbooks for decades. For example, in Culture, People, Nature (Longman, 1993), Marvin Harris calls the New World “the Second Earth”, and presents facts about the independent rise of agriculture, cities and empires as the results of a natural experiment: what happens if we start with hunter-gatherers and run the tape again? The results are remarkable. Do the Aztecs exactly replicate Sumer or Shang China? Of course not. But no one can come away from the comparison without the sense that, at the broadest level, there are laws of history.

In the modern period, not all historians have shied away from cause-and-effect relations. William McNeill, for example, in his respected Plagues and Peoples (Penguin, 1979), showed history to be shaped by epidemics, and his history of the West takes seriously the effects of demographic, environmental and technological forces.

Michael Cook takes this process further. A Brief History of the Human Race begins geologically, using data from the Greenland ice core to show that the past 12,000 years have seen a climate both warmer and more stable than in the preceding 100,000 years at least. This, he argues, made history — the change from a hunter-gatherer world to ours — possible. He proceeds biologically, showing that those 100,000 years correspond roughly to the spread of modern humans out of Africa. His summary of the DNA findings on this process leads to a conclusion widely accepted in anthropology: the human species as we know it is quite new and therefore remarkably unified.

One consequence is that humans respond similarly to the challenges and chances that geology and geography afford them. All human groups have wanted to do well, and many have had the ambition to build, grow and change. But the way they did it depended on where they were. Cook devotes considerable attention to Earth history, using descriptions of the collision of tectonic plates, the smoothing over of mountains, and the rise and fall of oceans, to set the scene for each continent's historical drama. Next, he reviews the peopling of the regions, using the best available genetic and archaeological evidence. He goes on to explain many aspects of regional history by reference to each region's geology, ecology and climate.

Technological innovation, predictably, has a central role thereafter. Stone was replaced by copper, copper by bronze, and bronze by iron in many parts of the world because humans want to do things better, and if the environment or trade networks afford them the opportunity, they will discover and apply new technological knowledge. Anomalies in this regard — some New Guinea groups who never left stone behind, or the absence of large domesticated animals in North American civilization — are attributed to limited ecological opportunities or geographical barriers to communication with other groups.

The book is anthropological in another sense: Cook presents vivid accounts of an important aspect of culture for each region in a way that is unusual in history books. Thus we find considerable detail on the Incan quipu, a record-keeping device in knotted rope; on the intricate clan and marriage rules of the Aranda hunter-gatherers of Australia; and on the sexually charged religious writings of India. These illustrate such general human tendencies as the need to keep account of things, the desire to order the social world, and the impulse to both express and control sexual drive.

By contrast, remarkably little attention is given to the past few centuries, which are covered in fewer than 30 pages. Perhaps this is appropriate. In a short history of the human species, many hard choices must be made, and Cook has focused on changes between the hunter-gatherer phase and the Industrial Revolution. Perhaps by that time the patterns were so well established that they could not be expected to change radically. But is hard to justify skipping the invention of democracy, our new power to destroy life on Earth, and the recent revolution in communication, while writing in detail about the quipu — however much it may warm an anthropologist's heart.

Another omission from the book — as from most history books — is any account of the human players in this great historical drama as individual members of a species, with shared tendencies and behaviours. The book is full of large-scale violence in the service of competition and ambition, but it makes no explicit reference to the possibility that part of the explanation lies in human nature. There are many entertaining references to sex, but none to the reproductive imperative that makes sex so exceptionally interesting.

Still, this is a particularly good history for a scientist to read, devoting as it does much more time and effort to underlying material causes than has been traditional. It is an elegant, quick and engaging way to review what has happened in history, to learn much that is new, and to appreciate the past of the whole world, not just the West. It meets scientists almost halfway, trying to ground the events of history literally in the material facts of the planet. As Cook understands, the best and truest story of our experience on Earth is in part a scientific one. Clio, I think, is smiling.