Chapter 1

Tracing a Path to the Present

IN THIS CHAPTER

Pondering how the past shaped the present

Thinking about humankind's remarkable journey

Tracing a tapestry of historical threads

Just two decades into the 21st century, humanity hit a speed bump, in the form of a pandemic. The pandemic was a new viral disease - relatively benign in many patients but deadly in others and wildly unpredictable. Because it was new to our species, nobody had a ready immune response. Highly contagious, it spread rapidly around the world. Immunologists, the scientists who are experts at these things, had to figure out how to fight the disease on the fly.

The World Health Organization called the virus SARS-CoV-2, for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus, version 2 (after a predecessor in 2003). It called the sickness COVID-19, for coronavirus disease 2019, the year it was identified.

The nature of the threat and how it should be dealt with sparked worldwide debate. Some governments took quick, decisive action to contain it, while others decided to go more slowly. The latter approach proved to be ineffective as infection rates soared.

Another point of discussion was why the world was caught unprepared. "Public health experts have predicted we'd be hit by another pandemic for decades," puffed the pundits. "Why didn't leadership have a plan?" asked the journalists. "Why the heck didn't anybody see this coming?" queried podcasters. "It's all a hoax!" screamed too many conspiracy theorists.

The pandemic changed the world. According to Johns Hopkins University, it killed more than 4 million people worldwide by the middle of 2021, with case rates rising again. It stalled the world economy and influenced the way people did their jobs, as well as where and how they chose to live.

But this book isn't about a 21st-century pandemic any more than it's about the bubonic plague that ravaged Europe and Asia in the 14th century. It isn't about modern epidemiology or economics, either. It's about two broader questions: "How did things get to be like this?" and "Why is the world as it is?"

There have been too many years of human activity on this planet - too many lives lived, too many diseases, technological breakthroughs, migrations, wars, murders, weddings, coronations, revolutions, recessions, natural disasters, and financial meltdowns - to trace humanity's route simply. Too many historians have interpreted events in too many contradictory ways. But what I hope you find in this book is a general view of how human history has gotten you and the world you live in to current reality. To this. To now.

Firing Up the WABAC Machine

If you care about classic TV cartoons, you've heard of the WABAC Machine. Pronounced "way back," the machine was a fictional time-traveling device built and operated by a genius dog named Mr. Peabody. In every episode of the 1960s animated series Rocky and His Friends, the professorial pooch and his pet boy, Sherman, transported themselves to a historical setting - say, ancient Rome, revolutionary America, or medieval England - where they interacted with famous people and solved whatever ridiculously absurd dilemma was troubling cartoon Julius Caesar, George Washington, or King Arthur. Thus, Mr. Peabody and Sherman allowed the events we think of as history to take their proper course.

These episodes spoofed a classic science-fiction premise. Storytellers often use time travel as a plot device. American novelist Mark Twain did it in 1889 with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. England's H.G. Wells followed suit in 1895 with The Time Machine, although he sent his protagonist (identified only as "the Time Traveller") into the future. Other examples include British TV's numerous incarnations of Doctor Who to hundreds of novels, graphic novels, plays, films, and videogames.

Often, these stories involve someone going back in time to change something in the present or to prevent the present from being changed in some fashion that will cause a future catastrophe. One tiny interference in the "time continuum," as it's often called, can lead to a monumentally altered chain of events.

Nobody can do that, of course.

You can, however, understand more about the present if you time travel in your head - that is, think about the ways that yesterday's events shaped today. You can ponder how what happened a decade ago shapes this year and how a single change somewhere in the past could have made today different. Historians scoff at the "what if" game, but it's a tool for getting your head into history.

What if incumbent Donald Trump had won the 2020 U.S. presidential election instead of challenger Joe Biden? Would an angry mob have attacked the U.S. Capitol the following January? How different would American politics have been? How about if voters in the United Kingdom had not chosen, in a 2016 referendum, to withdraw that nation from the European Union? Would that nation's banks or fishing industry be better off or worse today? What about its people?

For that matter, what if Japan had not attacked the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor in 1941? Or what if the terrorists who crashed airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, had been stopped before they could board the planes? Think about the lives that would have been saved and the grief that would have been averted. Imagine the years since. What would have been different?

In the case of the World Trade Center, U.S. troops wouldn't have been sent to Afghanistan, for one thing. That invasion turned into a two-decades-long conflict, the United States' longest war. And if the Trade Center had not fallen, would there have been that other U.S. war in the Middle East - the one in Iraq? We can't know for sure, but we know that many lives changed because of that tragic 2001 attack.

Footpath to Expressway: Building on Humble Beginnings

Human beings used to be hunter-gatherers. There may be a slim chance that you're still living that way, getting all your food from the natural world around you. I doubt it, though. Instead, you're a student, an office worker, or perhaps a truck driver. Maybe you write code, or you're an IT specialist. You perform any of thousands of occupations unimagined by early humankind. You use tools like cellphones and GPS navigation - things hardly dreamed of even when I was born in the middle of the 20th century, let alone at the dawn of civilization. Yet here I am, clacking away on a computer keyboard, checking my meager investments online, and listening to my streaming playlist just like a modern human being.

In a way, here too are the people of 30,000 years ago, my ancestors and yours. They may have thought a lot about berries, seeds, insects and grubs, shellfish, and calorie-rich bone marrow from fresh or scavenged kills. But they were endowed with the same basic biological equipment we have today. They were big-brained, tool-using bipeds with opposable thumbs, and after tens of thousands of years living hand to mouth from what they could find or kill, some of them spread across the world.

Either pushed by circumstance (climate change, for example) or inspired by new opportunities, they traveled from the lush forests, savannahs, and seacoasts of Africa to face the harsh challenges of virtually every environment on Earth, including mountains, deserts, frozen steppes, and remote islands. Eventually, they traded in stone spearheads and scrapers for tools and weapons made of copper, then of bronze, and then of iron . and ultimately built things like microcircuits and Mars rovers. Those people traveled and adapted and innovated all the way to today. They are you and me. In a weird way, then is now.

Around 12,000 years ago, not very long after the last Ice Age ended, some people whose technology consisted largely of sticks and rocks settled down. They were discovering that if they put seeds in the ground, plants would come up, and that this process worked best if they stuck around to tend the plants. This realization eventually led to farming.

Scholars point to an area they call the Fertile Crescent (see Figure 1-1), as a hotbed of early farming. Shaped like a mangled croissant, the Fertile Crescent stretched from what is now western Iran and the Persian Gulf through the river valleys of today's Iraq and into western Turkey. Then it hooked south along the Mediterranean coast and the Jordan River through Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, and into northern Africa and the Nile Valley of Egypt. The crescent is where archaeologists have found some of the oldest cities in the world.

The chain reaction that starts civilizations goes something like this: Agriculture leads people to stay put in exchange for more food, and ample food enables population growth. When a group's population reaches a certain size, there's little chance of going back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, because there wouldn't be enough food for so many people. Ample food also gives the growing population commodities to trade. Trade leads to more trade, which leads to more goods and wealth. Not everybody works in the fields. Some folks can specialize in hauling goods; others can construct buildings or perhaps concentrate...