Chapter 3

      Putting History into Perspective

      IN THIS CHAPTER

      In several places in this book, I refer to the year 1492, when the explorer Christopher Columbus, sailing under a Spanish flag, landed for the first time on an island in the Bahamas, east of Florida. That year is a big dividing point in history, in that it marks the beginning of European colonialism in the Americas. The Western Hemisphere changed in ways that were devastatingly tragic for the people who had been living there. Diseases from Europe killed them by the millions. The rest of the world, meanwhile, saw changes that ranged from new crops (corn, potatoes, tobacco, peppers, coffee) to population migrations, to new, lucrative markets for slave trading (the most pernicious kind of population migration). A global economy took root once European navigators realized they could sail to new worlds, and soon around the world, in their little wooden ships.

Yet according to The New York Times, a survey conducted back in 2008 showed that fewer than half of teenagers in the United States could correctly pick the date of Columbus’s discovery from a multiple-choice list. If today’s teenagers, or adults, were given the same test, how many would choose the right answer? Many people have trouble putting history and its events into perspective. The history of the world is such a huge topic, covering so many eras, cultures, events, conflicts, ideas, and beliefs, that it’s easy to get mixed up. Three common problems that you may have are:

      In all three cases, I suggest that you relax. The terminology is less important than you may think.

      In this chapter, you get a chance to ponder what it means to be human before you plunge into the cavalcade of civilizations that follows in Part 2. If you can work up a healthy sense of awe about our remarkable species and its beginnings, you’ll be better able to appreciate the broad sweep of time that people have been around. And you can see that historical language — including relative terms such as ancient and labels for eras such as Classical Greece — is somewhat flexible and may be used differently by different historians. As with any subject matter, there are different ways of looking at history and even different ways of evaluating people in history. Sometimes perspectives conflict, but they can also complement one another.

Being Human Beings

      Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago, or so the astrophysicists say. My mind balks at the thought of such an expanse of time.

I do better starting with recent times, here meaning the many thousands of years that people have lived on Earth. Recent is a relative term. The modern human species — meaning people who are anatomically the same as you — may not be much more than 100,000 years old, although scientific estimates vary. And paleoanthropologists (human-fossil nerds) say that human beings didn’t start acting fully “human” until more recently. Humanity turned a corner roughly 60,000 years ago, when stone tools got more sophisticated, and people began carving patterns into rocks and bones, using charcoal to make exquisite cave paintings, and inventing rafts to cross water. These artistic expressions and engineering tasks mark them as being more like you and less like earlier models of the hominid (humanlike) family. Many scholars refer to members of our species who lived 30,000 years ago as being fully modern. In that usage, modern, like recent, is a relative term. Obviously, it doesn’t mean people who share TikTok videos. We can take it to mean people who behaved a bit more like us and less like earlier prehistoric humans had.

      You’ve probably seen the familiar illustration showing successive ancestor species marching single file, ever more upright and less hairy, toward modern humanity. Evolution didn’t happen that way, however. Evolution is rarely neat. Different kinds of more-or-less humanlike animals lived at the same time. Many were genetic dead ends and died out, although the genetic record reveals that other, related types of humans — including Neanderthals and Denisovans — interbred with our own ancestors, so in that way, they are us. All earlier hominids are extinct … unless you buy the idea that Sasquatch (Bigfoot) and Yeti (the Abominable Snowman) are your reclusive country cousins.

      If you think of the entire time since the emergence of hominids, perhaps 4 million years ago, to the present day as a single 24-hour day, Homo erectus lasted more than 8 hours. On that scale, modern humans have been here for about 15 minutes.

      Nearing the Neanderthal

      Neanderthals lived over a wide area stretching from today’s Belgium