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Human Accomplishment
The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950

Before human accomplishment could begin, we had first of all to become human. It took a long time. Bipedality came first, somewhere in the vicinity of five million years ago. After bipedality, about two and a half million years passed before the animal that walked on two legs learned to make crude tools. The taming of fire required another one and a half million years.

Even then, after these unimaginably long spans of time, the creature was still Homo erectus, of formidable talents compared to every other animal but not yet recognizably human. With his beetled visage and lumbering gait, Homo erectus did not look human. More to the point, he did not think like a human. Homo erectus had a cranial capacity averaging only two-thirds of ours, and his mind was inhumanly slow.

The animal that the paleo-anthropologists call Homo sapiens and that we identify as human appeared about 200,000 years ago. It is sometime after that point that human accomplishment begins. But when? Shall we mark the beginning at the moment when a human first spoke a word? Drew an image? Sang a song? Choosing a precise moment is, of course, as subjective as trying to specify exactly when human beings stopped being Homo erectus and started being Homo sapiens. But if one were forced to mark the dawn of human accomplishment, the year -8000 has much to recommend it.

As It Was In the Beginning

In its topography and climate, the world in -8000 was much the world we know today. The last major glaciation of the Pleistocene had been receding for centuries, and Europe was no snowier than it would be in modern times. The Rhine, Seine, and Danube already rolled past countryside that we would recognize today, and the Alps, though 10,000 years newer and a few meters less eroded, would have looked the same to our eyes. In the Americas, the southern tip of the remaining great glacier was already north of Lake Superior, and the geology of what would become the United States had been determined. Rockies and Appalachians, Mohave Desert and Mississippi valley and Manhattan Island -- all would have looked familiar. A few landmarks were different then. The Sahara was verdant, and the white cliffs of Dover overlooked a river valley linking England with the European mainland. But a time traveler from 21C would have had to fly over the surface of the Earth for many days to discover these occasional surprises.

Nor would a visitor from the future have been surprised by the flora and fauna. The forest on Manhattan was oak and elm and chestnut, inhabited by chipmunks and robins and crows. The world still contained a few lonely mastodons and saber-tooth tigers, but almost all of the animals you would have found were familiar, even if some were found in unaccustomed placesbison in Ohio, wolves in Germany, lions in Greece.

The most striking difference to a modern observer visiting -8000 would have been the scarcity of humans. People lived just about everywhere, from the farthest southern reaches of today's Chile to the Norse tundra, but they would have been hard to find, living in small and isolated bands. They had to be scattered, because the human animal is a carnivore by preference, and large carnivores surviving off the land require a large range -- about 5,000 acres per person, in the case of carnivore Homo sapiens. Depending on local conditions, a band of just 25 hunter-gatherers could require more than a thousand square miles. The world of -8000 probably supported fewer than 4 million human beings, roughly the population of contemporary Kentucky.

What kind of people were they? In the important ways, just like us. That doesn't mean that people of -8000 perceived the world as we do, but the differences were caused by cultural and educational gulfs, not smaller brain size. All of us had our counterparts in the world of -8000 -- people as clever, handsome, aesthetically alert, and industrious as any of us, with senses of humor as witty or ribald. Humans of -8000 were so like us that one of their infants raised in 21C would be indistinguishable from his playmates.

The humans of -8000 had already accomplished much. Fire had been not just tamed, but manipulated, adapted for uses ranging from lamps to the oxidation of pigments. Stone tools were sophisticated, including finely crafted hammers and axes, and spears and arrows with razor edges. The technology for acquiring and working the materials for such objects had evolved remarkably by -8000. There is evidence of underground mining of chert, a quartz used for spearheads and arrowheads, as early as -35,000.

By -8000, humans already had fully developed languages, the most advanced of which expressed ideas and emotions with precision. A few of them apparently had begun to work fibers into textiles. They knew how to grind seeds to make flour. The first tentative efforts to work copper had already occurred. And the human spirit was manifesting itself. Burial of the dead, drawings, sculptures, the conscious use of color, concepts of gods and cosmic mysteries were all part of human cultures scattered around the earth in -8000.

These were large accomplishments, and already set Homo sapiens apart from other living creatures. And yet most of the world's population in -8000 lived a daily life that in its physical dimensions was only marginally different from that of the animals they hunted. Humans had learned to find shelter from the cold and wet, but nothing we would find much more comfortable than the dens used by other animals. They had tools for hunting and gathering, but food nonetheless had to be obtained continually, by tracking and killing game or by finding wild vegetables and fruits. It was not always an exhausting life. When food was plentiful, Paleolithic man actually had a considerable amount of leisure time. But the tiny surpluses humans accumulated by smoking or salting their meat were stopgaps for emergencies ...