I'm Jonathan Mackley.
When I was trained as an historian we were taught to
think of history as just the story of humankind.
But if you think about it, there's much more to
the story.
We should trace our history into Deep Time,
to the formation of our planet, our Solar system,
even the Universe itself.
In this series we're taking a new look at important
eras in human history by flashing back at key moments
to show how events deep in time, exploding stars,
the clash of continents secretly shaped the stories
we thought we knew.
By revealing the surprising links between human
history and the deep past we'll show how our
civilization and innovations, our voyages,
and battles are driven not only by the decisions
we make but by physics, geology, biology,
chemistry, by forces that can be too small to see
or so far back in time that the only way to understand
their influence is to think in a whole new way.
Civilization. It's the hallmark of humanity.
The thing that makes us unique among all species
on the Earth.
But why did it first arise?
What pushed our ancestors to abandon
their nomadic lives
and build the fantastic civilizations of the ancient world?
Most historians begin the story of civilization
about five thousand years ago but to truly understand it
we're going to be begin at the beginning of everything.
The Big Bang.
When all matter, all energy that will ever exist
bursts into being in a trillionth of a second.
13.8 billion years ago there was the mother of all
explosions, The Big Bang.
A tiny little singularity of space and time
blew up to create the galaxies, the planets,
the stars, you and me.
After The Big Bang, matter and energy
spread out across the Universe where the force of
gravity pulls it together into dense clumps.
Intense pressure ignites fusion reactions
that transform those clumps into shining stars.
Then 4.5 billion years ago our Sun and
the planets around it take form.
This is early Earth.
It's a place you would hardly recognize.
You couldn't survive a moment on it's
1800 degree Centigrade surface.
As things cool down and oceans condense
the first bacteria, the first life appears.
From the early stages of life, certain organisms
learn to access energy from the Sun through the
process of photosynthesis.
These bacteria begin to pump something
into the atmosphere that will make human history
possible on this planet.
Oxygen.
Then, after almost four billion years of life
on Earth, in a sudden fluffy of evolutionary change
called the Cambrian Explosion life as we know it
bursts into bloom.
By the Cambrian Explosion of 600 million years ago
the record in the rocks of the Earth reveals
a huge array of multi-cellular organisms.
And there after, evolution picks up more and more quickly.
500 million years ago plants such
as ferns and mosses begin to colonize the land.
It's the first wave of vegetation that will grow
to include all the crops and trees that we'll use
to build our civilization.
Then come animals like amphibians.
Life explodes in diversity laying the groundwork
for everything we know today.
As all this is happening, the land itself
is always on the move.
Continents drift across the planet's surface,
eventually they take the familiar shapes
on which human history will play out.
Africa and India start crashing into Eurasia
and as part of this great collision, the mountains
of Northern's Africa and Spain.
And the Alps, and the Himalayas rise.
Two great rivers, the Tigris
and the Euphrates being to flow.
The Persian Gulf and the Red Sea thrust far into the land.
And a region we call Mesopotamia comes into being.
A region that will play an outsized role
in the great drama of civilization that is to come.
And so the stage is set for the rise of civilization.
It begins in Mesopotamia 10,000 years ago
when people there figure out a new way to
harvest Deep Time's greatest gift.
The ancient energy from The Big Bang
which called into matter that was gathered up by gravity
into our Sun.
There, extreme temperatures and pressures
initiate nuclear reactions that release energy
and radiate it to Earth
as life giving light and heat.
Plants store this energy as glucose,
then herbivores access that glucose by eating plants,
and the carnivores access that energy two steps on
by eating the herbivores.
The story of the Universe, the story of life,
in fact, is a story of energy.
Believe it or not, all the energy that we consume
on the Earth today our cereals and our bacon and eggs
originally came from The Big Bang.
As humans evolved over 100,000s of years
we harvested this energy by simply hunting and gathering.
For 99% of human history we basically lived as nomads,
chasing the deer and the buffalo, getting energy
from wherever we could.
When the deer and the buffalo left, we had to leave too.
But about 8000 BC,
in a few select places
some people begin to experiment with a new way
of harvesting energy.
They growing their own crops.
An act so seemingly simple it's hard to believe
it will kickstart a revolution.
But it will.
These are the first seeds in the rise of civilization.
And, at first, it is only happening in one region
on Earth, here in Mesopotamia.
Why?
A major reason is that the hills above Mesopotamia
provide the motherload of native plants
that can be cultivated.
Including several species of a plant that's
going to become mankind's most vital resource
for all of recorded history.
A plant whose roots go far back into Deep Time.
Which plant is it?
It's grass.
It's not an exaggeration to say no grass, no civilization.
Around the world, every major civilization has been
a collaboration between humans and a particular grass.
Millet in North China, rice in South China,
in Meso-America, corn, in the Middle East, wheat and barley.
You don't get civilization without grass.
For most of Deep Time grass didn't exist.
It first arises about 100 million years ago
when certain plants evolve to spread their pollen
in a new way.
Not through bees and other insects,
but through the wind.
But once it appeared, grass carpeted the planet.
Grass has the ability of being able to spread
relatively quickly into ecologies and environments
and populate them quite fully.
And here's the forces of Deep Time help
determine where civilization began.
For one thing, the hills around Mesopotamia happen to
have two kinds of wild grass that are easily cultivated
and highly nutritious, wheat and barley.
So early farmers here have a major advantage
over people elsewhere on the planet.
But they still had work to do.
So over the centuries they took an early version
of local wheat and they carefully selected it
for the traits they wanted.
One of those traits is larger seeds.
Another is what's called non-shattering seeds.
So that when the wheat is harvested,
the seeds don't fall off and get scattered and lost.
So slowly, over time, by careful selection
humans coaxed this to evolve into this.
And it wasn't just local grasses that could be tamed.
Wandering the hills of Mesopotamia,
our lucky farmers would've seen the ancestors of
modern cattle, goats, sheep, and pigs.
A collection of creatures that happened to have
the right stuff to be tamed.
Instead of hunting them for their meat,
farmers could learn to raise them.
Ensuring easy, reliable access to animal protein
for the first time in history.
But why were these animals all found in Mesopotamia?
Part of it was sheer luck.
But another part was that Deep Time placed Mesopotamia
at one of the vital crossroads of the world.
As plate tectonics assembled the old world,
Mesopotamia found itself in the sweet spot
where Asia, Europe, and Africa came together.
Any wild animal migrating in any direction
was likely to come through here.
And if it liked these conditions
it stuck around.
But what exactly is it about this collection of animals
in ancient Mesopotamia that meant they could be domesticated
and help humanity launch our first civilizations?
Have you ever thought about why some animals became farm
animals and others didn't?
The first part of the answer is that all of our farm
animals are plant eaters.
And this is key.
It's way too expensive to keep and feed animals
that eat other animals.
Much less one that might view you as lunch.
So, if you're looking for animal to domesticate,
pick a herbivore.
But just because an animal eats grass
doesn't mean it can be domesticated.
When was the last time you saw someone plow
a field with a zebra?
Some animals are simply untamable,
they're too aggressive.
What else do cows, goats, and sheep
have in common that make them tamable?
They're all herd animals.
That will sometimes even stampede in their
eagerness to follow a leader.
Take that instinct, substitute yourself for the
natural herd leader
and you're on your way to turning a wild beast
into a very useful animal indeed.
But of the hundreds of large mammal species
on Earth, only 16 will submit to a human being
leading the herd.
And so it's truly remarkable that among the select
group, four of the most important animals that can
be domesticated happened to exist in one small
region of the ancient world.
So thanks to favorable wild crops and animals,
it is here in Mesopotamia that humankind begins
the journey to farming.
Which is the key to civilizations and empires to come.
But this still leaves the question: why now?
If fully modern humans had been around for
100,000 years and farming just started 10,000 years ago,
what on Earth were we waiting for?
It turns out we were waiting for warmth.
2.6 million years ago an era of ice ages begins.
Producing distinct cold eras
punctuated by periods of warm interglacials.
Modern humans evolved during the last glacial period.
And when did it end?
You guessed it, 10,000 years ago.
The fact is, plants like warm weather.
And it was only 10,000 years ago,
when the most recent Ice Age ended,
that conditions in Mesopotamia finally
came together in just the right way.
If you want to produce grain
you need a growing season that's at least 90 days long.
You need summertime temperatures in the mid-20 Celsius.
You need it slightly cooler at night.
And you need abundant, but not excessive, rainfall.
It's at the point when we see the glaciers start
to retreat last time, about 10,000 years ago,
that we start seeing the beginnings of agriculture.
So climate change helps answer the question
of why farming started when it did.
Now, flash forward from 8,000 BC
to 3800 BC.
People in hills above Mesopotamia have been farming
for over 6,000 years.
And things have been going pretty well.
But a disastrous change is coming.
There was a general drying out.
You didn't have as much the annual rains and floods,
there were hotter temperatures overall.
A climate crisis that starts around 3,800 BC
threatens to wipe out Mesopotamia's ideal conditions
and bring the farming experiment to an end.
The Sahara desert advanced into former grasslands
and what we essentially see are the early agriculturalists
needing to innovate, they need to adapt.
And it turns out that ancient geology
would be a key to their survival.
100 million years ago,
as part of the endless process of continental drift,
Africa and India begin drifting north
crashing into Europe and Asia.
The collision of Africa and India with Eurasia
pushed up a series of mountains known as the Alpine Belt.
This includes the mountains of Northern Africa and Spain,
and the Alps and the Himalayas,
and the mountains of Indonesia.
And we think of these as different mountain ranges,
but they're all connected physically because
they were caused by the crashing of
Africa and India into Eurasia.
And these mountains are crucial
to the rise of agriculture
because moist air passing over them is forced to rise
where it cools, condenses, and falls as snow.
Then, during the hot, dry Summer months,
the snow slowly melts.
This feeds major river systems
just when farmers need the water.
So without these tectonic collisions,
without the creation of these mountain ranges,
we wouldn't have these tremendous river systems
that have been so vital for subsequent human history.
Here in Mesopotamia,
two of these Alpine Belt rivers,
the Tigris and the Euphrates,
flow down right into this region of early farming.
Now, in 3,800 BC as this region dries out,
these rivers allow people to create
one of humanity's most important inventions.
A key stepping stone to civilization.
They begin to channel the rivers
into a maze of canals and ditches
that soak their fields throughout the summertime.
Now they don't need rain,
which has become erratic and unreliable.
Now all they need is the river.
We can just imagine these early experiments
and sort of ditch digging that must've gone on.
Early on this is done on a very small scale.
These villages are maybe 10, 20, 30 families,
something like that.
People here have stumbled onto a solution
that not only saves farming but causes yields to explode.
Now thanks to irrigation there's a major food surplus.
So for the first time in history some people
do not have to spend their entire lives obtaining food.
They can devote themselves to making things
like sunbaked bricks and clay pots.
In other words, now some people can specialize.
Very quickly these initial professions explode.
Arguably pottery is the first sort of profession
that appears because everybody needs to store their stuff.
You need stuff to eat out of and drink out of, and so on.
All the things that these early towns need
now start to appear,
and suddenly you've got builders,
you've got toolmakers,
irrigation diggers and bricklayers also,
early priestly, sort of classes begin to appear.
People with specialized leadership
functions start to appear.
As this happens,
another new thing appears for the first time.
Here in Sumer, the village of Uruk mushrooms
into a hub of thousands of people.
The first city.
And the more people gather together,
marshaling the energy of the surrounding countryside,
the more complex human society becomes.
It's a phenomenon seen across all scales in the Universe.
The more matter and energy gather together in one place,
the more chances there are for new interactions.
For new acts of creation.
Whether it's dust and gas pulled together by gravity
into stars and solar systems,
or elements gathered together into molecules,
these hubs of complexity are
what drive the Universe forward
and make it an interesting place to live.
The idea of hubs being regions of complexity
where interesting things can happen
permeates even life.
Animals and plants could not have developed
had it not been for a lot of stuff coming together
and being present in about the same place.
In the emerging cities of Mesopotamia
complexity brings new challenges.
People must find a way to prevent crime,
resolve disputes,
and pass laws.
So in 3,500 BC
the first large governments appear on Earth.
A collection of city-states called Sumer
right here on the banks of the Tigris.
Each city is ruled by a king
and an elite of priests, scribes, and soldiers.
These men establish laws, punish criminals,
and provide order.
This stability and structure helps civilization to grow.
But these elite also tend to prey on their subjects,
so now you get hierarchy.
Using the same principle by which farmers herd cattle,
people begin dominating other people.
We clearly see a leadership elite on the top,
below that there will be what appears
to be a military class, sort of a second tier.
Then we'll see the great mass of peasant farmers
and eventually as conflict increases
we'll see slaves.
This whole process of civilization
farming, irritation, cities, hierarchies,
begins in Sumer around 3,500 BC.
But it doesn't stay isolated here for long.
We know just a few centuries later,
along the great Nile Valley in North Africa,
the second great civilization will appear,
that of ancient Egypt.
Further to the east in the Indus Valley,
essentially modern Pakistan today,
the third great civilization appears.
Much further away on the eastern end of Eurasia,
there's another civilization.
Initially along the northern river of China,
the great Yellow River, the Huáng Hé,
another hub is appearing.
So far, all four ancient civilizations
cluster in river valleys.
The reason is simple,
early agriculture is just too primitive
to create a food surplus on rain watered land.
Irrigation is still the only way to go.
But humanity is about to break its dependence on rivers.
Because around this time
people discover that some of the animals
they first domesticated for food
have another gift to give.
The gift of power.
Human beings are relatively weak.
Over periods of sustained exertion
we can generate about 75 watts of power.
And for thousands of years we had to rely
on our own muscles to get things done.
Imagine today if every time you needed to switch on
a light and keep it glowing,
you had to turn a crank like this.
It does the job, but it takes a lot of time and energy.
Well it turns out that human muscle
is enough to farm rich river valleys
that become naturally fertilized every year.
If I stay on a river bank which floods every year
and brings new soil fertility every year
I, even as a weak, puny little human being
will be able to product a high level of crops.
A high yield on a river bank.
But rain watered land needs something else
to keep it fertile year after year.
You need to dig down and turn the soil over,
to dredge up rich nutrients.
In other words, you need to plow.
And people, with their 75 watts of power,
are just too weak to do that on a large scale.
But around 3,500 BC,
people discover that they can train
some of the animals they've been raising as food
to pull plows and dredge up the soil's deep fertility.
You could go down 6, 8, maybe even 10 inches
in some cases,
and access a huge amount of soil nutrition
which allowed us then to produce much great crops
and much higher yields.
And we could move into areas that simply could not
support agriculture when we were simply using
human labor as the basis of it, the cultivation.
It an energy revolution.
By yoking a horse or an ox to a plow,
mankind multiplies his power four to eight times.
Civilization is liberated
from the trap ancient river valleys
and begins to spread.
Now, for a 1,000 years,
the area around Sumer will produce
a stream of new city-states.
Each with their own governments and elites.
Then in 2,350 BC,
a powerful new leader appears.
He sparks a revolution that will reorganize civilization,
giving it the form it will take in most places
right up to the 20th century.
A form we call the empire.
His name is Sargon of Akkad.
The great Sargon of Akkad comes along,
conquers each of these cities one by one
to create a much larger socio-political military structure.
The world's first true empire.
And this just becomes the standard model then
for the next two, three millennia.
Sargon's forced unification
of Mesopotamia into the world's first empire is violent.
But once the violence subsides
the benefits become obvious.
This region was physically blessed
by the forces of Deep Time,
but the hubs of energy were scattered
across the landscape.
Uniting these individual cities into empires
is like networking a bunch of individual computers together.
It multiples their power and
increases the exchange of goods,
services, information, and ideas.
Huge amounts of labor can be mustered
to irrigate more land.
Trade can move safely across vast areas.
And since petty, local wars come to an end,
empires bring arguably their greatest gift:
peace.
Not far away, on the Nile,
a similar process has been taking place.
As god-kings called pharaohs,
extend their rule across Egypt.
Egypt's system is such a success,
it becomes the most stable civilization in history.
Lasting almost unchanged for 2,500 years.
But can Deep Time help explain
why Egypt will be so stable and unchanging?
Rise up above the Great Pyramid and look around.
Two thousand miles to the south,
the Nile begins in the mountains of central Africa.
Three hundred miles to the north,
it empties into the Mediterranean Sea.
On either side stretch harsh deserts.
All of this is a function of how Africa
crashed into Europe,
a process that began 100 million years ago.
And a byproduct of this Deep Time Geology
will help Egypt's rulers keep their land
united for millennia.
One major reason for this has to do with
travel and communication.
In the ancient world,
early boats can easily float down most rivers.
But they're too primitive to sail back up,
making most rivers a one-way street.
But not so in Egypt.
To the north, over the Mediterranean,
cool winds blow south to replace hot air
rising over the desert,
creating a powerful breeze that never stops.
So here, boats that float down the Nile
can sail back up,
pushed by the continuous breeze.
It's very easy to make the return journey
and just come back down again.
So trade and exchange, connections if you like,
between Upper and Lower Egypt
are facilitated through geology.
Meanwhile,
deserts on either side act as great walls
to protect Egypt from invasion.
Here's this Nile civilization
sealed off through it's quirks of geology and geography,
enjoyed millennia of relatively uninterrupted
peaceful, successful civilization.
Quite extraordinary.
In northern India,
another new culture called the Harappan civilization,
begins to spread along the Indus River valley.
Laying the foundations for the great civilizations of India.
And finally, along the Yellow River in China,
a fourth great civilization is taking shape.
The same basic pattern repeats itself
in China at roughly the same time.
It starts building cities,
it develops agriculture along a
similar pathway in terms of having
large scale irrigation networks.
But thanks to a quirk of Deep Time,
China will forever develop as a world apart.
Egypt, Mesopotamia, and North India
are relatively close together.
So these three civilizations
are linked together in a huge culture matrix.
But Deep Time has separated China
by 3,000 miles of Alpine Belt mountains and deserts.
Think about the journey you'd have to make
to get from China through various deserts,
the enormous mountain ranges,
all products of the tectonic collision
of India with Eurasia.
You'd have to get through the highest
mountains on Earth to be able to then
send your caravans eventually down into
the Indus Valley,
let alone to Mesopotamia and Egypt.
China's isolation is illustrated
by a major different between East Asians
and everyone else on Earth
and it has to do with how people write.
In both the Middle East and in China,
writing begins as pictographs and hieroglyphs
in which things and ideas are represented
by thousands of individual characters.
But Middle Eastern scribes eventually reduce writing
to a mere 30 phonetic symbols, or even less,
making it very simple.
Phonetic alphabets are quickly copied
across the Middle East and India.
But thanks to their Alpine Belt isolation,
the Chinese are unaware of this.
So even today, throughout the Far East,
people still have to memorize thousands
of different characters in order to read and write.
Geographical isolation leads to the emergence
of two profoundly different ideas about what
writing should look like.
Both equally rich, both capable of incredible expression,
but both profoundly different,
it appears, in purpose and in actual structure.
Despite being unaware of the
other three ancient civilizations,
China still exists on the same land mass as they do,
so some things inevitably get through.
Take a crop that is actually Chinese, the orange.
The wild ancestor of all orange trees
comes from South China,
but it didn't stay isolated there for long.
Oranges, which start in China,
end up all over Eurasia
and by the Roman times in the Mediterranean.
So, presumably, there were trading routes.
One little bit at a time,
farmers that tended to walk
and hand seed over to their friends
that walked and handed seed over to their friends,
and over very long periods of time
there were some exchanges between these two broad areas.
Across Eurasia, this happens again and again,
with food, technologies, even ideas.
Each great civilization reaps the benefits
of everyone else's innovation.
So for the next 3,000 years,
all four great, old world civilizations
will march forward at roughly the same level of development.
But things will play out very differently
for the civilizations arising across
the Atlantic Ocean in Central and South America.
American civilizations that culminate
with the Maya, the Aztecs, and the Incas,
independently invent agriculture,
then build impressive cities and empires.
They create stunning art and architecture
and invent novel forms of writing
and amazingly accurate calendars.
But even still, they're cut off
from major advances that sweep the old world.
They don't have things like wheeled vehicles,
or steel weapons, or gun powder,
and so they will lag thousands of years behind
the people in Afro-Eurasia.
Can the break up of the ancient super-continent Pangaea,
help explain why the old world
got jump start on the Americas?
Pangaea begins to break into smaller pieces
175 million years ago,
but they're all different sizes.
Big chunks break off, much smaller chunks break off,
they go in different directions,
eventually we end up with what we call the
Eurasian land mass, if you like,
which is a very big chunk of continent. Enormous.
Once India and Africa also drive into that land mass,
you've got this vast, world zone
that we'll call Afro-Eurasia.
At almost 33 million square miles,
Afro-Eurasia dwarfs any other land mass.
And humans will discover that for life in general,
and civilization in particular,
size has its advantages.
Because it's so big,
Afro-Eurasia has the most plants and animals.
The most river valleys.
And the largest temperate zone.
Civilizations here have a lot to work with.
There was a lot of different resources
potentially available within Afro-Eurasia
that could then gradually spread.
Even today 85% of the human race
lives in Afro-Eurasia.
This double continent also has another
advantage inherited from Deep Time.
Most of Afro-Eurasia is spread
in the East-West direction
and so crops that developed at one latitude
could spread along a band that would get
about the same amount of sunshine,
about the same climate.
The same is true for
technologies and even ideas.
So every civilization in Afro-Eurasia
advances at roughly the same pace.
But compared to Afro-Eurasia's 33 million square miles,
the second largest chunk of Pangaea, the Americas,
is only about 16.4 million square miles
and lacks the diversity of the old world.
As far as the grasses were concerned
the early Americans had no wheat,
no barley, no rice, no millet.
The only major grain in most of the Americas was corn.
And they had a similar problem with major animals.
There was no draft animal,
nothing you could use for a plow,
nothing you could use to pull a wagon.
Even more challenging, the Americas
are aligned North-South, not East-West.
This creates radically different climate zones.
Crops, and even people, they grow used to the climate
of North Dakota probably won't do will in Panama.
Even today if you were to take a road trip
from say, Alaska, to Chile,
think of the range of environments
different geologies and so on
you would have to pass through as you do that.
Still, as civilizations
first arise in both the old and new worlds,
the amazing is not how different they are
but how alike.
By 500 BC the old world civilizations
have begun to spread from their original hubs
of the Middle East, India, and China.
They'll eventually link together
into a vast worldwide system.
That system was rooted in history's
greatest revolution, the invention of farming,
which still underlies our civilization
and our success today.
In one sense, the rise of civilization began
10,000 years ago
when Mesopotamia's people began farming.
But, in another sense,
agriculture and civilization have roots
going back much further
to the evolution of plants like grass
and animals like sheep, goats, and cattle.
To the tumultuous sweep of climate change,
the birth of rivers,
the rise of mountains,
the collision of continents,
the formation of the solar system,
the energy of the Big Bang itself.
In short, the whole immense saga known as Deep Time.