Modern humans-in the sense of people anatomically indistinguishable
from us-date back a good 130,000 years, and perhaps considerably
longer. However, as a segment of the human past that is accessible
through written sources history dates back no more than five thousand
years. But to start history five thousand years ago is to begin in the
middle of a story of rapid cultural change that actually began five
thousand years earlier, with the emergence of farming. In this sense
the last ten thousand years form a well-defined segment of the human
past that stands in marked contrast to the much longer period preceding
it. During this period, hunting and gathering were the only way of
life practiced by humans. If we call these last ten thousand years of
the human past "history", we may well ask, Why did history happen when
it did? Why has it all been packed into the last ten thousand years?
The first point is that the last 10,000 years-the period
geologists
call the Holocene-has been quite unusually warm. To find a comparable
time in the preceeding period, the late Pleistocene we would have to go
back to the Eemian period some 120,000 years ago. This in fact is
fairly typical of the pattern of the last million years: relatively
short warm periods recur every hundred thousand years or so. The second
point is that the Holocene was characterised by an extraordinary
climatic stability. The Eemian appears to be made up of a series of
climatic peaks and valleys that were respectively far hotter and far
colder than anything we have experienced in the Holocene. The Holocene
is thus a very unusual period. There has been nothing like it in the
last 100,000 years, which is most of the period during which modern
humans are likely to have existed.
History therefore fits snugly into the warm and stable
climatic niche
of the Holocene. This association hardly seems mysterious because human
history is founded on farming and its development and maintenance would
have been very difficult in a world climate that was cold and unstable
and stable; certainly no trace of farming has yet been found in the
Pleistocene.
The Holocene, then, was the window of opportunity for
the making of
history, and there is something about the general character of modern
humans that can help explain their response to the Holocene.
