Parallel Foundations

Here is a fact that quietly dismantles one of the oldest assumptions about our origins: the founding of civilization was not a single event that happened once, in one privileged valley, and spread outward to a waiting world. It happened more than once, independently, on separate continents, out of contact, at roughly the same stage of the human journey, and that recurrence tells us something important about the kind of creature we are. Just as the eye was invented dozens of times and flight four times, the city, the monument, and the organized society were reached for again and again, by peoples who could not possibly have copied one another. The impulse was in us, not in any one place.

Look first, and this genuinely surprises people, at the far northwestern edge of Europe, where there were no cities at all and would not be for millennia, and yet where farming communities were raising monuments of staggering ambition. At Newgrange in Ireland, around 3200 BCE, and so older than the Great Pyramid, people built an enormous stone-and-earth mound with a long inner passage engineered so precisely that, on the morning of the winter solstice and only then, a narrow beam of the rising sun slides through a special opening above the entrance, creeps down the passage, and fills the deep inner chamber with light for a few minutes before the dark returns. That is a calendar, a temple, and an act of astronomical mastery, built by a people with no writing and no metal, five thousand years ago, to catch a single sunrise a year. Not far away in time stands Stonehenge, whose great sarsen stones weigh as much as twenty-five tonnes and whose inner bluestones were somehow carried nearly a hundred and fifty miles from the mountains of Wales, and on Malta a people built stone temples older than any free-standing building elsewhere on Earth, including an underground complex, the Hypogeum, carved three storeys deep into the living rock. At Varna on the Black Sea, in a cemetery dating to around 4600 BCE, one man was buried with more worked gold than had been found in all the rest of the ancient world combined up to that point, the oldest evidence anywhere of a society that had invented not just wealth but the towering inequality of it. And at Çatalhöyük in Anatolia, thousands of years before any of these, people had already packed themselves into a honeycomb town of houses so tightly joined that they were entered through holes in the roof, and painted their walls, and buried their dead beneath their floors.

Now cross an entire ocean, to a place that could not, by any stretch, have known a whisper of the Old World, and watch the same thing happen again. On the desert coast of Peru, in the Supe Valley, the people of Caral built a genuine civilization, with monumental stepped pyramids, sunken circular plazas, planned architecture, and a complex society supported by irrigation and trade, and they did it around 3000 BCE, at the very same time the Egyptians were raising their pyramids and the Sumerians their ziggurats, with no possible contact between them, and with one further astonishment: the people of Caral, and the great Andean civilizations that followed them for the next four thousand years, appear to have run all of it, the monuments, the administration, the astronomy, the trade, without any writing system at all, or with one we cannot recognize as such, keeping their accounts and perhaps their histories in knotted and colored cords called khipu. A complex civilization arose in the Americas independently of everything in this book so far, and it reached for the same pyramid, the same aligned plaza, the same organized monumental order, out of the same human material.

And it kept happening. In the Nile's deep south, the Nubian kingdom centered on Kerma built its own distinct civilization and would in time raise more pyramids than Egypt itself. Across sub-Saharan Africa, peoples speaking Bantu languages carried farming, herding, and ironworking on one of the great migrations of human history, remaking a continent. In China, along the Yellow River, another wholly independent hearth of civilization was taking shape that would produce, in time, one of the longest continuous cultural traditions on Earth. The pattern is unmistakable and it is the point of this chapter: wherever human beings settled in sufficient numbers and had the time, they reached, without instruction and without contact, for the same set of things, to mark the turning of the heavens in stone, to organize many hands toward a single enduring work, to bury their dead with meaning, and to bind themselves into something larger than the family and the band. Civilization is not the invention of one clever people who taught it to the rest. It is something like a standing potential in our species, waiting, in valley after valley and continent after continent, for the conditions that would let it stand up.

There is a quiet dignity owed here, and this book pays it deliberately. The story of the human past has too often been told as though it ran through a single privileged corridor, from Sumer to Egypt to Greece to Rome to the modern West, with everyone else a footnote or a latecomer. The evidence does not support that story. The builders of Newgrange, the goldsmiths of Varna, the pyramid-raisers of Caral, the temple-carvers of Malta, the city-planners of the Indus, were not waiting for civilization to be brought to them. They were inventing it, in parallel, in their own idioms, out of the same deep human fire. Hold that as we go, because it is easy to lose, and it will matter enormously when we reach the darker chapters where one part of humanity decided that another part had no history worth the name.

These parallel worlds did not stay wholly separate for long. Threads of exchange were already running between them, and it is those threads, and the crafts that traveled along them, that quietly wove the first international age and set the stage for everything the Bronze World would become.