The Genesis Plague (2010)

Neanderthals had long since vanished’ - she pointed up to the skull still showing on the big screen - ‘whether due to a turf war with early humans, or, as some scientists have suggested, genetic dilution through inbreeding with Homo sapiens . By 6000 BC, modern humans are thriving. They domesticate livestock for food, milk and clothing. They plant seeds along the fertile river banks to grow their own food. They are the world’s first farmers. Around 5500 BC they begin to irrigate the land with canals and ditches, allowing them to spread from the fertile north, to the arid south. For the first time in history, our great ancestors rely less on migratory hunting and become sedentary. This agricultural revolution spawns large organized settlements throughout the Middle East in modern Egypt, Israel, Syria and Iraq - a region referred to as the Fertile Crescent, or the Cradle of Civilization.’
    She pointed the clicker and the projector brought up a detailed map centred on the Middle East.
    ‘Surplus foods allow extensive trading over wide areas, while specialization of labour fosters hyper-speed technology. To manage this new way of life, industrious humans develop a systematic means of communication that doesn’t rely on memory or oral transference. They are to become the world’s first bureaucrats. Enter the first written language. Which leads us to the epicentre of it all - right here …’
    Brooke used the clicker’s laser pointer to place a bright red dot at the map’s centre, just north of the modern Persian Gulf.
    ‘Here is where archaeologists have unearthed the ruins of the world’s earliest hierarchical societies. This once lush and peaceful paradise was known as the “land between two rivers”, or “Mesopotamia”. Hard to imagine since today it is a war-torn nation known as Iraq.’
    Some quiet chatter rippled through the crowd.
    ‘Now I’d like to focus on how written language enabled these early civilizations to develop first into agricultural cities with tens of thousands of citizens, then city states hundreds of thousands strong, and eventually … empires stretching across Eurasia.’
    Scanning the sea of faces that filled the auditorium, Brooke focused on the intent smiles and nodding heads, blocked out the few sceptical scowls. The recent articles she’d published in the American Journal of Archaeology on the emergence of written language, which not-so-subtly challenged the archaeological establishment, had lured a number of detractors here today. Best to know your enemies, she thought.
    ‘The earliest known written communication dates to around 3500 BC.’
    Brooke hated snubbing the real truth about the ancient writings she’d uncovered in Iraq only a few years ago - the truth that would upend every established theory about the emergence of Mesopotamian culture; the discovery of an ancient language that would push back the timeline by at least five centuries. But she’d signed an airtight confidentiality agreement with that project’s benefactor.
    Taking a five-second break to sip some water helped her to fight the compulsion to scream out a pronouncement that would amount to career suicide. Any one of the faces staring back at her from the audience might be linked to that benefactor, she reminded herself. Someone out there is hanging on my every word.
    If only she could tell the world how irrefutable evidence showed that around 4000 BC a cataclysm took place in northern Mesopotamia - an event so profound that progress and humankind itself were thrown back in time, forced to start anew. The first Dark Ages.
    But instead, she forged on with the story that her esteemed colleagues expected.
    ‘Around 3500 BC, the Mesopotamian elite began using stamped seals to identify their property. A mark of ownership. Here you have a typical cylinder seal,’ she said, pointing the clicker to advance to the next image - a small stone tube covered in geometric depressions. ‘Cylinders like this would be rolled on to a wet clay slab to leave artful impressions and picture stories. Fast-forward to 3000 BC and we find that scribes then begin pressing into these damp clay tablets with reeds, or stones chips, or other instruments, to create pictographs and hashes representing numbers. Our first accountants and tax collectors.’
    The next slide showed an oblong clay tablet delineated into rows of boxes, which were filled with simple representations of animals. The pictographs were beset by vertical