History of the World Chapter 1: The Framework of Civilization (Patreon)

This is the first chapter of my history of the world. I decided to make this free for all my patrons but for future chapters I'm lowering the price to the 10 dollar tier. If you pledged 15 just to read this, feel welcome to lower your contribution. I'm currently feeling a bit under the weather, but I'll try to release a chapter every week during lockdown and every 2 for the rest of time. I've written up to the Fall of Rome by now, so I've got a fair amount of material. Bibliography is at the end. I'm happy to hear your comments. 

Mankind’s Long Untold Story

History is only an exceptionally brief part of humanity’s story. The last seven thousand or so years of civilization are a mere drop in the ocean of the millions of years that mankind has existed. More than ninety percent of mankind’s story have been as hunter gatherers. Countless adventures and conquests likely took place in those unaccounted-for years before writing. So many stories worthy of telling that sadly never will be, because they vanished into the sea of time. If this were to be a history of humanity instead of a history of civilization and we wished to give prehistory justice, it would take up the vast majority of the narrative. Nations like England, Persia and America would appear like bubbles in the sea-foam of time and, to prevent this book from becoming endless and unreadable, the time between the splitting of the atom and the present would be a mere two sentences. Therefore, this book will not attempt that. It will focus only on the final 10,000 years, and put real focus only the final 3,000 years of the 7 million year story of humanity. However, to understand how history came to finally exist and why humanity so dominates the world in our age, we must dip our toes into the vastness of prehistory to reflect upon our quite finite civilized history. 

Mankind is descended from and related to the great apes of Africa. When the climate of Africa and the world warmed around 7 million years ago, the tropical jungles retreated, to be replaced by open grassland. Our ancestors, who dwelled in the trees, were forced to adapt to the new conditions or die. The forest ape was completely under-equipped for survival in this new environment; they had not the speed of the cheetah, the jaws of the crocodile, or the hide of the rhinoceros. The open country left them completely at the mercy of those predators and the equally dangerous large herbivores like elephants or hippopotamuses. This was the age of the megafauna, where all the daunting predators of our era’s Africa like the lion and hyena were somehow even larger and deadlier. The original evolution of mankind had less in common with the traditional triumphant view of conquest and progress than a horror movie, in which mankind was forced to adapt at breakneck speed to survive the horrors lurking behind every bush. The only advantages these apes had were their abnormally large brains and their dextrous front paws. The mainly vegetarian diet of the apes did not work on the grassland, where the fruits that the forest apes depended on simply were not prevalent enough to survive In fact, one variety of human did evolve the multi-layered stomach of the cow to digest the grass that made-up the African plains. Instead, our ancestors initially became scavengers, eating the leftovers of the real predators and only later became the hunters themselves. 

Practically everything that separates humans from the apes is an adaption for the grasslands. Our lack of fur was an adaption for sweat to help with temperature regulation to move more quickly either in hunting or running away. We stand upright to see above the grass and run more effectively. Mankind formed very complex social networks to counter the biological superiority of animals like lions by using coordination ands superior numbers. Humans have abnormally long childhoods to study these complex social arrangements. Thus, with these longer childhoods came more brainpower, which in turn allowed the development of even more complex social structures. The hunting, in turn, provided more protein in the form of meat to supply the energy needed for the brain growth. Another vital event was the discovery of fire, which allowed cooking, which made food softer. The softer food required less chewing to become digestible, which allowed jaw size to shrink and thus freed up space for brain size. Language likely was developed to effectively vocalize the hugely complex social interactions that followed. These came together to make likely the most intelligent creature on earth. 

In chimpanzee societies, a single alpha male is the only one that is allowed access to females for breeding. Lesser males are scared away and live alone until they are capable of gaining dominance of their own group of females and themselves become the alpha. This social organization did not work well for early man in that many males were needed to cooperate in the hunt to take down large animals or to protect the community from larger more biologically powerful creatures like lions. Thus, humans became fairly monogamous, to give as many males as possible a stake in society so they could fight effectively. This change has never been fully implemented, as in 85 percent of societies throughout history, polygamy is tolerated on some level, with it often being suggested for males of higher social class. Even in societies that technically forbid it, such as modern Christian ones, the high class males often commit affairs or have many marriages that maximize the number of women they can breed with. Although appealing for the dominant males that have ruled almost all historical societies, polygamy results in a higher violence rate as every extra female that goes to a dominant male results in a mate-less lower ranking male. Having biologically failed is the greatest impetus for male violence and thus results in great instability. 

With the evolution of opposable thumbs, likely one of the most important evolutionary developments, humans improved the basic usage of tools known in apes to form stone tools that greatly improved their skill at all activities, especially the hunt. Through a long and complex process, mankind rose to the top of the food chain. Through many iterations, mankind evolved into his present form, Homo Sapiens, around 400,000 years ago. A person of that era would physically be exactly the same as a black reader of this book today.

Although mankind may have physically been practically the same as today, it mentally was not. Until 60,000 years ago, the lights seemed to have not yet been fully turned on inside. Almost all archaeological evidence demonstrates a general stagnation or incredibly slow progress in technology before this point, alongside a nearly complete lack of art. However, around 60,000 BC, there was a revolution in every field imaginable, tool making, religion, art and geographic expansion. We call this the Cognitive Revolution, in which an earth shattering change in the way people thought likely took place. We have very little idea what caused it, genetics or not. However, the switch was probably that to abstract thought. Mankind came to imagine concepts that have no signs of direct existence, like religion, countries, fantasy worlds or companies. After this point, we see the fetishes, artwork and ceremonial objects that demonstrate abstract belief. This may seem useless from a directly biological point of view, with the actual issues such as “where is the water?”, much more important to survival than, “what is love?”, but asking deep questions like this produced enormous social power. This imagination allowed constant innovation, both socially and technologically, that kickstarted mankind as we understand it today. People could imagine distant hypotheses, which could allow them to invent consciously. More importantly, however, was the invention of culture. Massive groups of people, could be held and work together for broad concepts like “American”, “Christian” or “Trekkie”, on a scale that had never existed before. Before, the upper limit for organization was a single hunting band, numbering almost never over 100. Now, billions of people could organize themselves under a single ideal.  Before, the slow and haphazard physical process of evolution was the only means by which progress could be attained. However, merely think of how much changes in culture have changed the functioning of our society in the last two centuries. Humans are not the most intelligent species on the planet. It seems likely that whales and elephants have the same mental caliber as us. However, these species have never worked in groups large enough to allow their intelligence to reach their full potential. 

We have no real idea when humanity first left its cradle somewhere in Eastern Africa. The Flores man found in Indonesia is incredibly similar to the earliest men and suggests that certain very primitive men may have left Africa millions of years ago. Fossils have been found in California from 130,000 years ago and in Europe from 2.5 million years ago. Continental barriers are not as strong as we like to think and men wander where they please. Given the millions of years involved, we should expect early man to have gone wherever they could have. The harsh Sahara desert has repeatedly gone through dry phases, such as the one we are currently in, and wet ones in which it resembled the savannahs of modern day Eastern Africa. In those days an enormous grassland stretched from South Africa to Mongolia and some paleontologists believe early man evolved in this vague region dubbed “Savannah-stan”. Many biologists now believe that large sections of humanity’s evolution took place in Asia and that Asia and Africa alternated as cradles of man. Earlier humans had spread across the world millions of years earlier, but modern man evolved in Africa and spread out in a concentrated movement after around 100,000 BC. They first spread across the Equatorial regions like India and Arabia all the way to Australia in the east. The sea levels were much lower in that era due to so much water being trapped in the ice caps, thus making the voyage easier. Abetting this process was the super-volcano Toba in Indonesia, hundreds of times the strength of Mt. St. Helens, which erupted around 70,000 BC. This radically lowered the global temperature and scythed human numbers outside of Africa. Outside of Africa, human numbers were cut down to their lowest level ever, around 6,000 total. Africa escaped this and this is partially why Africa has more genetic diversity than the rest of the world combined. Afterwards, the invention of clothes allowed humans to penetrate the frozen northern continents of Europe and most of Asia around 50,000 BC. The Cognitive Revolution also likely accelerated this process, as it did everything else that humanity did. The Americas were likely settled by a combination of migrations from Asia, both by land and sea. 

Homo Sapiens is the only species left of twenty-one that used to exist in its genus. As mentioned before, in the very beginning there were types of humans that evolved to eat grass like cows. For almost all of human history, we shared this planet with other varieties of humanity. Until 40,000 years ago the Neanderthals dominated Europe and Western Asia, the Denisovian people in Siberia and the descendants of Homo Erectus in East Asia. Until 10,000 years ago, the “hobbit” Flores people lived on the small isle of Flores in Indonesia. Genetics suggests at least 3 more unknown human races that we have no archaeological evidence of but must have existed due to evidence in the human genome. The reason these species went extinct is unknown, but theories abound. Some say it was a purposeful genocide, some out-competition, others say human diseases cutting down their numbers with tropical diseases. The Cognitive Revolution made the humans much more innovative, thus resulting in possible out-competition of other species. However, the Neanderthals definitely show signs of having a well developed religion, technological development and advanced tool-making. Perhaps it was peaceful and humans bred with the native populations, assimilating them. Most non-Africans are between 3 and 5 percent Neanderthal and Australian Aboriginals have some Denisovian ancestry. We are unsure of when the last non-Sapiens humans went extinct. The legends of Indonesia speak of humans almost exactly the same as the Flores man named the Orange Pendik on the island of Flores that they say they drove to extinction in the 15th century. The truth is that we do not know, that it could be all of these combined or none of them. 

The Rise of Agriculture

Until 12,000 BC the world was in the grips of the last ice age. Glaciers stretched southward to cover modern day cities like Boston, Copenhagen, and St Petersburg under ice. The entire North Atlantic was an enormous iceberg stretching from New England to France. So much ice were in these glaciers that the sea level was far lower, with the North Sea, Baltic and English Channel being land and Japan being part of Mainland Asia. Around 11,000 BC the process of warming was going well. Humanity was thriving and then an apocalyptic misfortune occurred. In the span of fifty years, the world had plunged back to the worst years of the ice age, creating a global drought due to the loss of water. Multiple theories exist for why this happened, but the most popular today are either that it was a comet that hit Canada, or caused by the flooding of icy water into the oceanic system from a now extinct glacial lake covering much of the Dakotas and prairies Canada called Lake Agassiz. 

By the time this calamity occurred, the hunter gatherers of the Middle East were already fairly developed. During that time the Middle East was wetter than the present and what is now desert was once lush grassland. They had the highest population density on earth at the time and lived for long periods in one location, living off the nutritious nut trees and seeds, which supplemented their hunter gatherer lifestyle. The inhabitants of this region were definitely the most developed people on earth at that time. This region was hit brutally by the cooling climate with the warm grasslands immediately changing into harsh deserts and the dense populations needed to find a new way to survive. As the animal and wild food supply diminished, humans had to rely on something else. At some unknown date likely early women (since they were the ones who gathered and dealt with plants the most in hunter-gatherer societies) in the hills where modern Iraq, Syria and Turkey meet, likely discovered agriculture. Cereal crops like wheat and barley could be stored for years on end in the dry climate and so the crop of the good years could insure for the bad ones. The food supply could be controlled by good planning rather than the random nature of nature. With agriculture came the need the stay in one place for extended periods of time to tend the crops and thus came the first villages. Thankfully, after a thousand years the great drought left and after it the ice retreated, but it left with it an enduring legacy: agriculture, the primary building block of civilization.

The end of the ice age was not a universally positive movement for human societies. The advanced ice age societies like the Cro-Magnon of Europe and Clovis of North America depended on the complex ice age ecosystems that disappeared. The extinction of the megafauna (likely caused by humans), like the mammoths and wooly rhinoceros also seems to have disturbed the developed ice age societies. Many areas of the world regressed technologically and in population density as the newer environments, mostly forest, could not support as many people as the older ones did. In Europe, we actually see whole regions, such as the Netherlands or Britain, become depopulated for hundreds of years as the land had become overused by humans and the remaining humans wandered further North into Scandinavia to find new lands before those lands became used up too and they reverted back to their old, now resupplied hunting grounds in the South.

The discovery of plant cultivation came together with the discovery of animal pastoralism. The domestication of the dog took place 20,000 years before agriculture around 30,000 BC, likely simultaneously in Asia and Europe. The dogs aided humans greatly in hunting, using their wolflike qualities to supplement the human’s apelike deficiencies. In Cro-Magnon society dogs received equally elaborate burials as humans, suggesting they enjoyed respected status in the rest of their lives. The sheep, pig and goat were likely domesticated in the same Syrian foothills as agriculture a few thousand years after the discovery of agriculture. Similar processes took place with the yak, Asian elephant, chicken and camel in Orient. The llama, turkey and alpaca were domesticated in the Americas. This created enormous imbalances in which Eurasia achieved almost all the domesticated species, while Australasia, Africa and the Americas got very few. This disparity was less pronounced for crops. China developed rice and millet at roughly the same time and later we saw the domestication of yams in Africa; maize, corn, and squash in the New World; and bananas and sugar in New Guinea. We will study the effect of these agricultural revolutions in later chapters. 

Agriculture’s Effect on Society

We would like to believe that all innovation is positive and good for those involved, leading in a chain of progress that results in our enlightened existences. However, farming for the individual was not very appealing. Making sure the fields were well maintained and looking after the well being of livestock was a endless task, one that was often backbreaking. For comparison, most Hunter Gatherer societies only work around 20 hours per week (there is enormous variation, however), since gathering too much would degrade the environment for future years. In farming communities, cases of arthritis, bone deformities, especially with women in the feet, due to grinding cereals, were significantly higher than those seen among hunter-gatherers. Only by the 20th century did the average person match the average hunter gatherer in height, since the forager’s diet was so much more varied than farmers. Examples of various nutritional deficiencies, especially anaemia, especially again in woman, due to blood loss during menstruation, were distressingly common.

All of these variables meant that farming took a very long time to become the only lifestyle of humanity. For the first 5,000 years, or from 10,000 to 5,000 BC, humans supplemented farming with, pastoralism, fishing and foraging. The climate was getting warmer and thus the natural bounty of the world was increasing, even though the extinction of the megafauna had made a certain dent. Human world population was stagnant throughout this era, rising from 4 million total to 5 million. A enormous part of this was likely disease. Crowded human habitation alongside close habitation with animals made agricultural societies enormous breeding grounds for disease. Briefly consider the 90 percent death rates native peoples without contact to domesticated animal originated diseases faced during the Age of Discovery to consider the enormity of the disease gradient involved. Once humans had finally gained immunity to these diseases, they were able to intensify agriculture and increase their population density. This was likely done less by choice than by necessity. In hunter gatherer communities, families aim to only have one child every four years. This is because carrying and weaning two children at once is very exhaustive for a migratory people. However, in sedentary farming communities, the average woman has 7 children. This enormous birth rate is what made farming demographically worthwhile even though it initially faced horrifying death rates due to disease. Once that disease gradient had been climbed, it meant that agricultural population grew enormously and had to intensify to support the higher population density. People gave up the easier foraging lifestyle as the only way to support themselves was to work harder at farming. 

The Spread of Farming

Farming had enormous demographic implications. Using genetics, we’ve found that before the Younger Dryas the Near East had at least three different racial groups, as genetically distinct as modern Europeans and Asians. One of these was based out of Iran, another Turkey, and another Egypt. The invention of agriculture somehow forced these groups to merge, forming modern West Eurasians. The enormous birth rate of farming peoples and the desire for land resulted in large outward migrations of farmers from the Near East. 

From its origins in the hilly borderlands between Iraq, Syria and Turkey, wheat and barley agriculture spread horizontally across the whole of Eurasia from Atlantic to Pacific. The tropical climates in Africa and the far arctic were not suitable to wheat and barley agriculture and so gained their own forms of agriculture much later and in very different methods. This spread was not done peacefully and was done as equally by herders and pastoralists and if I err by saying farmer, remember that I equally mean herding peoples as well. Genetics suggest that in most places, including much of North Africa, practically all of Europe, and large sections of India, farmers committed genocide against the native populations. The native peoples were unwilling to adapt to the farming lifestyle and likely fought the farmers bitterly. We’ve seen this process take place in recorded history in regions like Africa, South America and Oceania and the hunters, due to their skill at hunting, for lack of a better term, win nearly as many battles as the farmers. However, the enormous demographic advantage of the farmers meant that their victory was assured everywhere. Another decisive tool was disease, as the farmers spread the diseases that had taken them thousands of years to gain immunity from to hunter gatherers with no immunity, the effects were likely similar to those with the Conquistadors in the New World. 

Agriculture spread early to the Black Sea, more than half of which was dry land before 5,600 BC. Archaeology shows us that there were once thriving agricultural communities beneath the waves of that sea. However, the Dardanelles land bridge that held back the waters of the Mediterranean broke, thus doubling the size of the Black Sea in a matter of days. This created a massive refugee crisis and stands to reason is the origin of the Flood myths of the various surrounding cultures including the Jewish Bible and Greek mythology. The refugees from this crisis pushed up the Danube, settling and pushing agriculture into Europe horizontally into Southern Germany and France, alongside Southern Europe. Another migration moved along the coasts, along the Mediterranean to Italy and Spain. In fact, by spreading agriculture into Europe and thus the cutting down of many trees to make way for the farmland, they actually warmed up the climate quite a bit, resulting in the final ending of the ice age, warming the world to even warmer than today. A similar migration that we know much less about was occurring simultaneously to the East, bringing wheat agriculture into Northern India. 

Meanwhile, the domestication of cattle along the banks of the Dardanelles came with the genetic ability to digest milk. These people were also part of the vanguard of the spread of agriculture into Europe, traveling a more northerly route, spreading pastoralism into Northern Europe and the British Isles far before conventional agriculture. Genetic and archaeological records suggest the hunter gatherers were able to launch a powerful counterattack from Scandinavia and the Baltic, where they were able to maintain a large population density due to fishing in the Baltic. This too was eventually defeated. The pastoralists were often the vanguard of the spread of the new agricultural lifestyle, for example herders, from the Middle East pushed across North Africa to the Atlantic, mixing with the native population to become ancestors of the Berbers. Either herders or farmers migrated into Central Asia from modern day Iran mixing with the native forager population. 

Farming’s Great Advantage

We’ve been quite cruel to farming so far here, but none of us would be here without it. It allowed the world’s population to increase from 4 million to 7.8 billion, which almost certainly includes you. Farming, for all the cruelty it caused to the average farmer was an enormous boon for the totality of human progress. It allowed hundreds of millions of more people to exist and allowed the creation of sedentary societies that were capable of incredible things. 

The ability to remain sedentary allowed materialism. Hunter Gatherers do not consider the world in materials, but in different ways. In hunter gatherer societies a rich man is he with many children, many wives, a full stomach and the few things he had were beautiful. However, the ability to accumulate possessions meant that of course humans had to accumulate them. In early farming societies wealth was often counted first by cattle. We see this in the word for capital sharing a root with cattle, or buck originally being a buckskin, or deer skin, which was used a currency. In Latin the word for money originated with the word for cow. Cattle rustling was practically a sport in many cultures around the world, be it South Africa, Mongolia, or Ireland. As farming grew in importance land grew more important and was measured on that account. A wealthy man was one who could own many lands that could produce much food. The wealthy gained security in their wealth meaning they had more resources to expand and could deal with calamities better than their poorer neighbors. Also in times of hardship, the wealthy were the ones that could afford protection, thus keeping their lands safe from attack. Over time, the poor put themselves under the protection of the wealthy so their lands would not be destroyed either. So government and aristocracy came to exist. By this principle the rich grew richer and inequality came to exist hand in hand with civilization. The poor, unable to compete with the rich became tenants on the wealthy’s land. Almost all farming societies existed with a tiny aristocracy and an enormous, horribly poor peasantry. Practically every society before the Industrial Revolution had either serfdom or slavery in some form to support it. Farming societies universally existed with complex hierarchies and patriarchal structures that kept women in an inferior position. The sheer ubiquity of all of these injustices to all the societies we know of suggests their necessity to the functioning of pre-Industrial farming societies. We hope that these demons can be consigned to the past and will not continue to haunt our Industrial societies in one form or another. 

However, the new complexity of society allowed a new ability to coordinate and intensify. With more people, specialists were allowed to focus on only one craft while peasants toiled to provide their food and goods. Universally, the first of these specialists were priests. As society changed, so did religion. Like the societies around them, hunter gatherer religions tended to be male dominated, based more around dealing with hunting than gathering. Humans can read emotions from mammals and so feel a certain form of guilt for killing them in the hunt (this is why one sees pescatarians, since few care how the fish feel!), even though mammals make up the majority of the possible game. Thus hunter gatherer religion was based around compensating for this guilt, with shamans communing with the spirits of the animals and proper rituals involved in the killing of the animals to compensate. The Quest motif in storytelling comes from the mythology of the hunt in which the male would leave the home and return to the community with the goods of the hunt. Most hunter gatherer societies tend to worship a single powerful, but distant and aloof sky god alongside “a lord of the beasts”, a universal motif lasting tens of thousands of years of a half animal god that would release the animals of the forest to man once he needed them. The sky God motif survived with later mythological figures such as Zeus, Thor, Indra and Shamash. The earthly world meanwhile was filled with a plethora of nature spirits, be they of trees, animals or the rivers. Remnants of these in later religions are the elves of the Norse, the Dryads of the Greek, the Faeries of the Irish and the demons of the Chinese and Babylonian. This eclectic mix of beliefs in the natural world is called animism. This is actually where the mascot concept originates, every tribe would have a special animal that would represent them. There was often a taboo for eating said animals except on special occasions. These taboos have expanded and resulted in results like the taboo of horse consumption in Germanic countries, pigs in Semitic cultures and cows in Hindu culture. Those who could commune with the spirit world were the shamans and the religious figures of these societies. These shamans would often consume hallucinogenic drugs to supposedly make voyages to the otherworld to bring its message back to society. 

In farming societies, the most important issue was the maintenance of the crops, thus the great impersonal forces that dominate farming, like the rain or the sun. The fertility of the fields was paramount and so fertility based religions tended to predominate. To control these great impersonal forces a class of priests grew to allay the populations fears of the lack of control over their lives. The priests spoke to the gods and asked them to help their fields. Over time the priests took dominance over the societies, since nothing was more important than the fields. Significant amounts of the produce of the fields was therefore plowed back into the temples to satisfy the “gods”, as the priest class grew fat. In Ancient Egypt, the temples controlled a third of all the land and that was in no way unusual of those ages. In our materialistic age, we look down upon these priests as parasites, but keep in mind they were the engines of their societies. They were the leadership, the historians, the artists, scientists, magicians, teachers, bankers and often times merchants of their societies. To keep the gods happy and giving, sacrifices had to be made and this came in the form of food, animals, and in almost all societies, human sacrifices. Religion became about pleasing the distant uncaring (or malevolent) gods so they deigned to care about humanity. People drew the connection between human fertility and natural fertility and so sexual fertility became important to these new religions. Orgies, sexual talismans, sexual rituals and religious prostitution were all staples. Nubile or fat female goddesses became a staple across the world, with remnants of these in Aphrodite, Ishtar, Freya, Isis and even the Virgin Mary of later mythologies. 

War is a sad continuing thread in history. In hunter gatherer societies ceaseless, but low level war exists. Almost every hunter gatherer society engages in war, with 20 percent male death rates in war not uncommon, a number far above any historical example beyond a few bizarre outliers. It’s hard to tell how war developed with agriculture, but we can assume that it continued its pattern in civilization of becoming scarcer and at the same time more awful when it did occur (compare the constant low level warfare of medieval Europe with today’s decades long gaps of peace followed by unimaginable orgies of violence). With higher populations, battles were undoubtably larger. Treaties were likely arranged between the larger tribes, but the armies were likely larger and better organized. 

Copper was the first metal to be discovered and was used for a variety of purposes. However, copper was a brittle metal and was actually not better on almost any scale to the older stone tools and so copper was used sparingly while stone continued to serve most people’s purposes. Later, bronze, a combination of tin and copper, thus resulting a far stronger metal, was far more successful. However, even bronze was not as widespread as iron would later be simply due to the issues of getting all the materials involved in one place. Copper was fairly widespread in the Middle East, but tin had to come from as far way as Afghanistan or Britain. Bronze remained, in general, the tool of the aristocracy while the peasants mainly subsisted with the stone tools or clay. In China, bronze was almost rarely used for useful tools like scythes or spear points, but mostly for sacrificial urns due to its rare nature. 

The permanent nature of agriculture naturally meant that people could easily congregate in one place, since food supply was stable. This meant that eventually large villages would become towns and towns eventually became cities. However with cities came a whole new range of issues, how to feed the masses, disease, how to organize men one had never met and how to keep nature based religions strong for men who had barely even seen a field. These issues had to be dealt with, but something new would have to exist to do so, civilization.

Selected Bibliography

1.The Long Summer, Brian Fagan

2.Last Ape Standing, Chip Walter

3.The Naked Ape, Desmond Morris

4. Who We Are and How we Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past David Reich

5.Ancestral Journeys: The Peopling of Europe, Jean Manco

6.Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari

7.Our Oriental Heritage, Will Durant

8.A Brief History of Myth, Karen Armstrong

9.Against the Grain, James C. Scott

10.Foragers, Farmers and Fossil Fuels, Ian Morris

11.War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, Lawrence H. Keeley

12.Lone Survivors, Chris Stringer

13.God: A Human History, Reza Aslan

14.Plagues and Peoples, William H. McNeil