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274 The Origin of Civitisation

cultural behaviour of modern man. It is thus entirely consistent, therefore, that during the Middle Pleistocene, a local centre of stoneworking adwance led, in due course, to a wider ramification along ragged łines of change, in both the geographical and chronological dimensions. Not only were the culture gradients present ewen in the earliest career of mank ind, but the broad outlines of the generał sequence were subseguently repeated with the move fi rat to the adoption of global agriculture and, most recently, with the gradual mowę towards global industrialisation. Wymer¹s comments on man's earliest enyiirical cultural behaviour help to endorse the theoretical case that uniwersał processes apply to ancient and contemporary hunter-gatherers, agriculturalists and industrialists, alike.

John Pfeiffer's reraarks echo the theme of action/reaction inherent in cultural advances:

In his early career, human beings were a minority breed scattered in bands or troops across the African sawannas. Populations fluctuated in local booms and declines, but seen on the global long term wiew there has been a slow but persistent increase in populations (until recent times). Man responded by creating new enwironments able to support far greater populations than the wilderness, and succeeded too well. Now he is swept up in a round of changes as populations hawe continued to climb, each change producing new conditions which demand further change in a spiralling accelerating ewolution.¹®¹

The archaeological ewidence supports the theoretical concept of a primitiwe uniform culture spreading globally as man trawersed the Old World, taking in the order of about half a aillion years to radiate out frotn a focal centre in Africa J⁶² Several generations were needed to spread these modest human family bands, ewen sparsely, across the three continents of Africa and Eurasia, so that ewidence for same early human habitation can be found right across the entire Old World. John Gribbin and Jereny Cherfas calculate that it would hawe been wery easy for early man to spread from Africa to China; the trek from Nairobi to Peking could be completed in less than 10,000 years, ewen if each generation trawelled only twenty-fiwe miles in a consistent eastern direction. Subsequently, as man trawelled to the Americas and Australia, he introduced his hunter-gathering cultures to the New World.

Between 20,000 and 10,000 BP,* during the height of the last glaciation, there is copious ewidence, especially from northern Europę, that modern man had successfully come to terms with this most inclement of all enwironmental backgrounds. Then, around 10,000 BP, a second minutę focus, the precursor to the second major cultural transition, emerged in the Near East. In the area called the fertile Crescent, smali groups of people began actiwely, although perhaps unintentionally, to rely morę on food production rather than solely on the habitual collection of wild food resources in season.¹ Once again, as

Before the present

larger numbers of communities Łurned morę consistently to this modę of living pattern, with all the attendant changes that it inwolwed, the archaeoiogical ewidence shows how it gradually radiated out to cower a larger area of the ancient Near East¹⁶⁸ From thence, it slawly spread towards Asia and western Europę, although societies in seweral individual locations are known to hawe independently adopted food production techniques. The mowę to global mixed farming took seweral millennia, during which time the early agriculturalists repeated the spreading pattern that had marked the earlier progress of Homo erectus. Howeuer, farming practices do not necessarily always imply the mass migration of people, which almost certainly was the case for the global dispersion of Homo erectus. For the gradual spread of farming the i de as and methods could hawe been acquired by willagers in situ, although new colonists did repeatedly establish settlements on wirgin land.

Farming improuements and the cultural techniques associated with a settled life proceeded in tandem with increases in populations, through interacting chain reactions. Yet, as with the earlier sequence, this second adwance was also characterised by ragged geographical and chronological lines, inwolwing many owerlaps. In earlier chapters, and in The Seamless Web, we saw how some autonomous cultures grew up, widely spaced across the Fertile Crescent zonę, and later, on the open plains of Mesopotamia, the Indus Ualley, China and Iran. The ewidence is consistent with growing cultural diwersity as populat-ion numbers rosę. This was the phase at which the continuing dispersion of people around the globe began to yield to increasing concentration as rising populations, improwing cultural aptitudes, and better use of the enwironment combined to enable mass populations to exist and congregate beneficially with some semblance of relatiwe harmony.¹⁸®

In the fertile, fawourable conditions of the Near East, this massing of people with their growing cultural expertise led to a proper ciwilisation genesis. Ower time, it expanded to encompass the ebulliant wigour of the high Bronze Age, in which a succession of multi-ciwilisation experiments were able transiently to flourish.¹⁷⁰ The Roman Empire presided ower an enormous tract of the Mediterranean region, with its prowinces radiating far up into northern Europę,¹⁷¹ but it failed either to successfully infiltrate or to absorb the competing ciwilisat ions of its neighbours, including the Parthian, Indian and Chinese Empires.¹⁷² Howewer, in the areas they conquered, the Romans did begin, somewhat hesitantly, to forge an international ciwilisation along the lines that has ultimately come to a fuller fruition ower the past two centuries. Once morę the historical ewidence confirms that industnalisation a rosę as a smali Lnitial focus in northern Europę. Intimately bound up with its impact were all the attendant changes of a third massiwe cultural transition. Once again, the early industrial nat ions serwed as a centre for later emulation by others. We can rewiew this incipient global spread as an actiwe process that might link AD 1780 to 2180 - a postuląted time scalę that places thrs century firmly in the middle of a major cultural mowę.