The Great Divide

feature of their own rituals.
    We need to address the question as to why sacrifice was so strong in both Mesoamerica and the Andes. After all, we saw earlier that many ideas and practices did not travel easily (or at all) between the two regions (writing and the llama are two examples). This would seem to support the argument that sacrifice has its origins in catastrophe. Both Mesoamerica and the Andes, as is all too clear by now, were and are volcanically active, situated along the same tectonic rim, and both at the eastern end of the El Niño configuration. The practice of sacrifice grew up independently in the two regions, as it did in the Old World.
    The fact that (animal) sacrifice effectively ended in the Old World in AD 70, while human sacrifice (and many other forms of painful violence) continued to grow in frequency in the Americas, is a salutary reminder of how environment and ideology can interact to produce marked differences in human behaviour, in the very meaning of humanity.
     
    We shouldn’t overlook the role of accident in history. This book has been about the systematic differences across the globe that account for the separate trajectories of the Old World and the New. But accident surely played a part too. A good example of this is provided by a comparison between the Aztecs and the Incas, on the one hand, and pastoral nomads on the other. As described in chapter twenty-three, both the Aztec and Inca societies were inherently unstable, the practice of securing ever-increasing numbers of captives for sacrifice, and worshipping dead kings who kept hold of their land, being ultimately maladaptive. We don’t know where these maladaptive strategies would have led had not the Conquest intervened in either case, but the omens were not good.
    On the other side of the world, the way of life of pastoral nomads was equally maladaptive – in the long run they could not continue to survive in their traditional lifestyle and this is why they were continually breaking out of the steppes. But they had somewhere to go, more settled societies to attack or trade with and make the most of. Their shortcomings, as it turned out, were in the long run productive. But there was nothing inevitable about it.
    This book has been primarily about civilisations (not entirely, but mainly). Many groups of people, in both hemispheres, never developed into civilisations but this does not necessarily imply that those societies were failures in any way. To the contrary, such lifestyles as those of the Plains Indians in North America, whose coexistence with the bison endured for millennia, or the Native Americans of the north-west Pacific coast, who lived alongside rivers teeming with salmon for just as long, must be regarded as successful communities, thanks to the sheer abundance of food which surrounded them. The same may be said about the inhabitants of Australia, Melanesia, Micronesia and Africa, who also never developed ‘high’ civilisations. The people living in Australia in the seventeenth century, for example, when Europeans first arrived, had a Stone Age culture (with their own form of shamanism). 13 In his book, Man’s Conquest of the Pacific (1979), the Australian archaeologist Peter Bellwood concludes that, though the South East Asia mainland did not develop an urbanised civilisation until the period of intensive Indian and Chinese influence, at about the time of Christ, that New Guinea had no sizeable animals – mammals or otherwise – and that Polynesia had only a ‘half-civilisation’, nevertheless ‘the quality of life for the prehistoric South East Asian villager was probably no worse and perhaps much better than that of his Chinese, Sumerian or Egyptian urbanized counterpart’. 14 They had adapted : that is what people do. Civilisation is but one form of adaptation, as should be clear from this book.
     
    We can now see that the main difference between the Old and the New World civilisations (leaving the smaller polities to one side) is in their patterns of adaptation to different environmental circumstances, and that the Old World ideologies changed more often and more radically than did the ideologies of the Americas. And that while this was due to some extent to differences in climate and geography – the weakening monsoon in the Old World and the increasing frequency of El Niño in the New World – it also had a great deal to do with the role in the Old World of domesticated mammals and in the