The Great Divide

them (because of course they had no domestic mammals of their own).
    This account continues the theme of The Great Divide , that the domestic mammals of the Old World have had an important effect on the course of history, but it is not by any means the whole picture. There were many other factors which came into play: the plague, which shifted the centre of gravity of Europe to the west and north; the development of the north, due to the wool industry in the Netherlands and Britain, the routes between the Mediterranean and the English Channel being one of the elements in opening up the Atlantic; navigational and shipping innovations, introduced partly a result of the Crusades; the Crusades themselves, which sent men abroad to convert the unbelievers; the rediscovery of Ptolemy and his underestimation of the size of the earth; inaccurate and outdated travel literature which reinforced that view; the discovery that sailing in the tropics was easier than had been anticipated; deep-sea fishing exploits that had also helped familiarise and accustom sailors to the Atlantic; the discovery of islands in the ocean, which promised yet more land available to the brave.
    All of these psychological and technical matters came together to produce what we might call the Iberian Moment, why it was that the Spaniards and Portuguese were the first to cross the Atlantic going from east to west, to discover the Americas, rather than the other way round, with Moctezuma’s admirals travelling to Africa or Europe (or Japan, for that matter).
    P ATTERNS IN L A L ONGUE D URÉE
    The narrative of this book is not a straight line, not by any means; also, we must be careful not make it read like a ‘Just So’ story. We began, in the Introduction, by saying that we were to conduct a natural experiment, but one in which it would be impossible to verify all the details. Even so, as should now be clear, we are able to offer, in broad terms, a hypothesis as to why the two hemispheres diverged from each other. No less important, our theme also suggests a view on what, ultimately, it means to be human – it is, in a sense, a new version of what influences affect the broad sweep of human history.
    Human societies developed in very similar ways, according to certain criteria. As several surveys confirm, they include the fact that most societies are egalitarian – and villages undefended – until they reach somewhere between 150 and 300 inhabitants; nowhere have foragers developed ceremonial architecture; above the level of the village, hereditary leadership, ceremonialism and warfare emerge, with approximately 25 per cent of males being killed violently; with warfare male ‘superiority’ emerges; elites everywhere cultivate a distinctive lifestyle. And so on. The fact that such similarities exist across the world is remarkable testimony to the underlying unity of human behaviour. 3
    It has not been my aim in this book to deny either the existence or the importance of the many similarities that exist across the range of human societies scattered over the Earth. Not at all. But it has been my aim, unlike earlier authors, to focus on the di ff erences , and to show how fruitful contrasts can be, alongside the parallels. The work of Joyce Marcus is instructive here. It will be recalled from chapter twenty-one that she looked at hieroglyphic scripts in four Mesoamerican cultures and concluded that they were not literate in the accepted use of that term. Literacy, she decided, was not the aim of the Mixtecs, Zapotecs, Mayans and Aztecs, and that may have been true of all cultures with hieroglyphic script: its use was chiefly as propaganda, to boost a society’s self-esteem, confirming the genealogy of the ruling regime and reinforcing social stratification. So all societies with writing are not necessarily literate. This is a useful gloss, and an advance.
    We can now see that some profound differences have grown up between the peoples of the two hemispheres and we are at last in a position to put those differences into context.
     
    We may say that, at its most basic, people ‘become human’ – become the rounded, integrated, reflective observers that they are – by means of a three-stage process.
    The first element in this three-stage process is that people are placed, unavoidably, in a landscape, an environment. They live – or settle – on mountainsides, or in valleys, in the jungle, by rivers or next to the sea. They inhabit arid deserts,