The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal Read online

  Domesticating wheat and barley wasn’t a conscious act. A group of hunter-gatherers didn’t sit down one day, mourn the extinction of big-game animals, and decide to become wheat farmers. Instead, plant domestication was an unplanned result of people’s preferring some wild plants over others and accidentally spreading seeds of the plants they preferred. In the case of cereals, people preferred plants with big seeds that were easy to remove from the seed coverings, and with firm stalks that held the seeds and kept them from scattering.

  It took only a few mutations, which people then favored, to turn wild grasses into domestic cereals. Archaeological digs at Middle Eastern sites show that these changes began to appear in wheat and barley around 8000 BC. Two thousand years later, crop cultivation had been combined with animal herding to create a complete food production system in the Middle East. For better or worse, people were no longer hunter-gatherers. They were farmers and herders, on the way to becoming civilized.

  Contrast this with what happened in the New World. The parts of the Americas where farming began did not have large-seeded wild grasses that were already productive in the wild. The ancestor of corn was a wild grass that did have big seeds, but in other ways hardly seemed like a promising food plant. it is called teosinte. No other crop underwent such drastic changes on the way to being domesticated. Teosinte has only six to twelve kernels per ear, and they are enclosed in stone-hard cases. No one uses these seeds today, and there is no sign that anyone did in prehistoric times, either.

  The key to making teosinte useful was a sex change! in teosinte the side branches end in tassels made of male flowers. in corn, these branches end in female structures, the ears. This sounds like a drastic difference, but it’s really a simple hormonal change that could have been started by a fungus, virus, or a change in climate. Once some flowers on the tassel had changed to female, they would have produced edible, exposed grains likely to catch the eye of hungry hunter-gatherers. The central branch of the tassel would then have been the beginning of a corncob. early Mexican archaeological sites have yielded remains of cobs barely an inch and a half long.

  Thousands of years of development still lay ahead before corn yielded enough grain to support cities or even villages. The final product was still much more work for farmers than the Old World grains. Corn ears had to be harvested individually by hand, rather than in bunches with a sickle. The kernels didn’t simply fall off like grain but had to be scraped or bitten off the cob. Sowing the seeds involved planting them individually rather than scattering handfuls. And the result was poorer nutritionally than Old World grains—corn had less protein and was deficient in niacin and important amino acids.

  Compared with Old World cereals, the main food crop of the New World was much harder to recognize as useful in the wild, harder to domesticate, and harder to use even after it was domesticated. Much of the lag between New World and Old World civilizations may be due to the peculiar features of a single plant.

  North-South versus East-West

  Biogeography—the way different plant and animal species are distributed over the world— determined which wild species were available for people to domesticate in a given area. Geography also played another major role in human history.

  Each civilization has depended not only on the food plants it domesticated, but also on other food plants that arrived after first having been domesticated somewhere else. The spread of food plants was affected by the different shapes of the Old and New Worlds. The mainly north-south axis, or central line, of the New World made it hard for food plants to spread over large areas. The mainly east-west axis of the Old World made it easy. Here’s why:

  Plants and animals spread quickly and easily within a climate zone they’re already adapted to. In order to spread out of that zone and into other climates, they have to develop new varieties that tolerate different conditions. A glance at the map shows that Old World plants and animals could shift long distances without encountering a change in climate. Species moved between China, India, the Middle East, and Europe without ever leaving the temperate part of the Northern Hemisphere.

  Related grains came to stretch for seven thousand miles, from the English Channel to the China Sea. The ancient Romans grew wheat and barley from the Middle East, peaches and citrus fruits from China, cucumbers and sesame from India, and hemp and onions from central Asia, along with local oats and poppies. Horses that spread from the Middle East to West Africa revolutionized military tactics there. African sorghum and cotton reached india by 2000 BC, while bananas and yams from tropical Southeast Asia crossed the indian Ocean to enrich agriculture in tropical Africa.

  But in the New World, the temperate zone of North America is isolated from the temperate zone of South America by thousands of miles of tropics, where temperate-zone species can’t survive. The domesticated llama, alpaca, and guinea pig of the South American Andes never spread to Mexico or North America. Potatoes also failed to spread from the Andes to North America, while sunflowers never spread from North America to the Andes. even crops that were grown in both North and South America in prehistoric times—including cotton, beans, chili peppers, and tomatoes—existed in different varieties or even species on the two continents, which suggests that they were domesticated independently in both areas.

  Corn did spread from Mexico to North and South America, but it evidently wasn’t easy, perhaps because it took time to develop varieties for different climates. Not until 900 AD, thousands of years after corn emerged in Mexico, did it become a staple food in the Mississippi Valley. The arrival of corn triggered the rise of the mysterious mound-building civilization of the American Midwest.

  Imagine reversing the shapes of the two hemispheres. If the Old World had had a north-south axis, and the New World had had an east-west axis, the spread of domestic crops and animals would have been slower in the Old World and faster in the New World. Who knows whether that difference would have been enough to let the Aztecs or the Incas invade Europe?

  Geography Sets the Ground Rules

  The fact that civilizations rose faster on some continents than on others was not an accident caused by a few geniuses. And it wasn’t due to differences in intelligence or in inventiveness from one human population to the next—there is no evidence of such differences, anyway. Biogeography led to the differences in cultural development. If Europe and Australia had exchanged their entire human populations twelve thousand years ago, it would have been the former Australians, transplanted to Europe, who would eventually have invaded the Americas and Australia.

  Geography sets ground rules for the biological and cultural evolution of all species, including our own. Geography has also played a role in shaping our modern political history. disasters have been caused by politicians ignorant of geography. in the nineteenth century, the european powers that colonized Africa divided up the continent into territories. Later, when the territories became independent nations, they inherited those borders—which often had no relation to the geography, ethnic relationships, or economies of the African people.

  In the same way, when the Treaty of versailles ended World War i in 1919, politicians drew new borders for eastern europe. Unfortunately, the politicians knew little of the region. The national borders they forced on it helped fuel World War II a generation later. A few weeks spent studying geography in seventh grade is not enough to teach our future politicians the effects that maps have on us. in the long run, and on a broad scale, where we live contributes heavily to making us who we are.

  CHAPTER 13

  IN BLACK AND WHITE

  IN 1988 AUSTRALIA CELEBRATED ITS two-hundredth anniversary. The modern nation of Australia had begun as a colony fifteen thousand miles from the home country of England. Many of the colonists were convicts sent on the eight-month voyage to Australia as punishment. They had no idea what to expect or how to survive in their new home. Two and a half years of near starvation would pass before a supply fleet arrived. Despite these grim beginnings, the settlers
survived, prospered, and built a democracy. It’s no wonder Australians felt pride as they celebrated their nation’s founding.

  Yet protests marred the celebrations. The white settlers were not the first Australians. Fifty thousand years earlier, the continent had been settled by the ancestors of the dark-skinned people usually called Aborigines, also known in Australia as blacks. In the course of English settlement, most of these original inhabitants were killed or died of disease. For this reason some of their modern descendants staged protests, not celebrations, to mark the two-hundredth year since the white settlers arrived. Why did Australia stop being black, and how did the courageous English settlers come to commit the crime we call genocide, a deliberate attempt to exterminate a whole people?

  Genocide: A Human Invention?

  The white settlers in Australia were not the only ones to commit the horrendous offense of genocide. Instead, it has happened more frequently than most people realize. When they hear the term genocide, many think of Nazi Germany in the mid-twentieth century, when mass killings of Jews and other minorities took place in concentration camps during World War II. But those killings were not even the largest genocide of that century.

  Hundreds of groups have been targets of successful extermination campaigns. Numerous groups scattered throughout the world are potential targets for the near future. Yet genocide is such a painful subject that we’d rather not think about it at all, or else we’d like to believe that nice people don’t commit genocide—only Nazis do. But our refusal to think about genocide has serious consequences. We’ve done little to halt the many genocides since World War II, and we’re not alert to where one might happen next.

  Basic questions about genocide remain in dispute. Do any animals routinely kill large numbers of their own species, or is that a human invention? Has genocide been rare throughout human history, or has it been common enough to rank as a human hallmark, along with art and language? is genocide becoming more common, because modern weapons allow push-button slaughter at a distance, reducing our instinctive reluctance to kill? Finally, are genocidal killers abnormal individuals, or are they normal people placed in unusual situations?

  Before we search for answers to these questions, it is useful to look at a case study: the extermination of the Tasmanians.

  Extermination Down Under

  Tasmania is a mountainous island about the size of Ireland. It lies a hundred and fifty miles off Australia’s southeast coast. When Europeans discovered Tasmania in 1642, the island was home to about five thousand hunter-gatherers.

  These Tasmanians were related to the Aborigines of Australia. Their technology might have been the simplest of that of any modern people. They made only a few simple stone and wooden tools. Unlike the Aborigines, Tasmanians did not have boomerangs, dogs, nets, sewing, or the ability to start a fire. Unable to make long sea journeys, they had had no contact with other people since rising sea levels separated Tasmania and Australia ten thousand years ago. When the white colonists of Australia finally ended that isolation, no two peoples on earth were less equipped to understand each other than Tasmanians and whites.

  The tragic collision of these two peoples led to conflict almost as soon as British seal hunters and settlers arrived around 1800. Whites kidnapped Tasmanian women and children, killed men, trespassed on hunting grounds, and tried to clear Tasmanians off their land. By 1830 the native population of northeast Tasmania was reduced to seventy-two men, three women, and no children. In one example of violence, four white shepherds ambushed a group of natives, killed thirty people, and threw their bodies over a cliff that some Australians today call Victory Hill.

  Naturally, Tasmanians fought back, and whites fought even harder in turn. The white governor tried to end the violence by ordering all Tasmanians to leave the parts of their island where whites had settled. Soldiers were authorized to kill any natives in the settled areas. A missionary rounded up the surviving Tasmanians and moved them to a small nearby island. Many Tasmanians died, but about two hundred of them, the last survivors of the former population of five thousand, reached Flinders Island. The settlement there was run like a jail, and its occupants suffered from malnutrition and illness. By 1869 only three remained alive. The last full Tasmanian, a woman named Truganini, died in 1876, although a few children of Tasmanian women by white fathers survived.

  The Tasmanians were few in number, but their extermination was important in Australian history. Tasmania was the first Australian colony to solve its “native problem.” Many whites on the Australian mainland wanted to imitate the Tasmanian solution, but they also learned a lesson from it. Because the Tasmanian genocide was carried out in full view of the urban press, it drew negative comments. The extermination of the much more numerous mainland Aborigines would occur on the frontier, far from urban centers.

  The shooting and poisoning of Australian Aborigines continued long into the twentieth century. in 1928, for example, police massacred thirty-one Aborigines at Alice Springs. The mainland Aborigines were too numerous to exterminate completely, as had been done with the Tasmanians. But from the arrival of British colonists in 1788 to the census of 1921, the Aboriginal population fell from about three hundred thousand to sixty thousand.

  Today, white Australians’ attitudes toward their murderous past vary widely. Government policy and many people’s private views have become more sympathetic to the Aborigines. Other whites, however, deny responsibility for the genocide.

  A LETTER WRITER DENIES GENOCIDE

  IN 1982 THE BULLETIN, ONE OF AUSTRALIA’S leading newspapers, printed a letter that shows how some Australian whites could energetically deny that genocide ever took place in their country. Patricia Cobern, the woman who wrote the letter, claimed that the peace-loving, moral settlers ofTasmania had not exterminated the treacherous, murderous, warlike, filthy native people. The Tasmanians had died out because of their bad health practices, such as never bathing, and also because they had a death wish and lacked religious beliefs. It was just a coincidence, Cobern implied, that after thousands of years of existence, they happened to die out during a conflict with the white settlers. The only massacres were of settlers by Tasmanians, never the other way around. Besides, according to Cobern, the settlers armed themselves only in self-defense, were unfamiliar with guns, and never shot more than forty-one Tasmanians at one time.

  Group Killing

  Mass killings that can be considered genocides have occurred in many time periods and parts of the world. How exactly do we define genocide? it means “group killing.” victims are selected because they belong to a particular group, whether or not an individual victim has done something that might cause him or her to be killed. Groups have become targets of genocide because of:

  * Race: One example is the killing of darkskinned Tasmanians by white Australians.

  * Nationality: In 1940, during World War II, Russians massacred Polish officers in the Katyn Forest.

  * Ethnic differences: The Tutsi and Hutu, two black African peoples, slaughtered each other in the nations of Burundi and Rwanda in the 1970s and 1990s.

  * Religion: Christians and Muslims, for example, have killed each other in the Middle Eastern nation of Lebanon and elsewhere.

  * Politics: During the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge Party of Cambodia killed thousands of Cambodians.

  Must killings be carried out by governments to be considered genocide, or do private acts also count? There is no clear answer. Some genocides have been well planned and entirely official, such as the killing of Jews, Gypsies, and other groups by the Nazi Party in Germany. Others have been private killings, as when land developers in Brazil hire professional hunters to exterminate native people. Many genocides involve both official and private killings. American indians, for example, were killed by private citizens and the U.S. Army alike.

  Another question concerns the cause of death. If people die in large numbers because ofheartless actions that were not specifically designed to kill them, does that count as g
enocide? In another example from American history, President Andrew Jackson forced the Choctaw, Cherokee, and Creek indians of the southeastern United States to move west of the Mississippi in the 1830s. Jackson did not deliberately plan for many indians to die on the way because of lack of supplies and bitter winter weather, but he did not take the steps needed to keep them alive.

  What reasons or motives lie behind genocidal killings? There are four types of motives, although some killings may be driven by more than one motive.

  The most common motive may arise when a militarily stronger people tries to occupy the land of a weaker people, who resist. Examples include the extermination of the Tasmanians and Australian Aborigines, the American Indians, and the Araucanian people of Argentina.

  Another common motive involves a long power struggle within a society that includes different groups. One group seeks a final end to the struggle by eliminating the other group. This was the case with history’s largest known genocide: the killing of political opponents by the government of the Soviet Union, a former nation made up of Russia and a number of neighboring countries. The Soviet government killed sixty-six million of its own citizens between 1917 and 1959. An estimated twenty million died in a single ten-year period starting in 1929.

  Those first two motives for genocide involve land and power. The third motive is scapegoating, in which members of a helpless minority are killed because they are blamed for the frustrations and fears of their killers. Jews were killed by fourteenth-century Christians as scapegoats for the bubonic plague. They were targeted again by Nazis during World War II as scapegoats for Germany’s defeat in World War I.