The Other Half of the World

Imagine a navigator standing on the deck of a double-hulled canoe in the open Pacific, a thousand miles from any land, with no compass and no chart, steering by a memorized map of the rising and setting points of two hundred stars, by the shape of the swells rolling under the hull, by the flight paths of birds and the green underside of clouds that hang over unseen islands. This was one of the supreme feats of the human species, and it unfolded, unheralded, across the largest empty space on Earth. Beginning from Taiwan thousands of years ago, a seafaring people we call the Austronesians spread across the Pacific and the Indian Ocean in a migration of breathtaking scale, until their descendants had settled a triangle of islands from Hawaii to New Zealand to Easter Island, and had reached, in the other direction, all the way to Madagascar off the coast of Africa. They found and populated nearly every habitable speck in the vastest ocean on the planet, deliberately, by skill, and they did it while much of Europe still hugged its coasts in terror of the open sea.

And on the far side of that ocean, and across the Atlantic that no one crossed, an entire second humanity had built an entire second world. The peoples of the Americas had been separated from the rest of us since the end of the Ice Age, when the land bridge drowned. For more than ten thousand years they invented human civilization over again from scratch, and what they made is the closest thing history offers to a controlled experiment on our species. Run the tape of civilization a second time, on an isolated hemisphere, and what do you get? The answer is staggering, and it is one of the most important facts in this book. You get the same things. You get cities and states and kings. You get monumental pyramids, raised in Mexico and Peru by people who had never heard of Egypt. You get astronomer-priests who tracked Venus and predicted eclipses and built, in the Maya Long Count, one of the most sophisticated calendars ever devised. You get writing, and math with a symbol for zero invented independently. And, as we noted long ago, you get the serpent, the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl and the knowledge-giving culture-heroes like the Andean Viracocha, teachers who came, gave law and agriculture and the arts, and departed. Two human worlds, out of all contact for ten millennia, converged on the same institutions, the same monuments, and the same myths. Whatever human beings are, we are something that, given cities, tends to build the same things and dream the same dreams.

These were not small or crude societies. The Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, rising on causewayed islands in the middle of a lake, held more people than almost any city in Europe and astonished the Spanish who first saw it. The Inca ruled the largest empire on Earth in their day, four thousand kilometers of it, welded together without the wheel, without a writing system as we usually define it, and without money, its records kept on knotted cords called quipu and its roads and terraces and impossibly precise stone walls still standing in the Andes today. Even in North America, long imagined as an empty wilderness, the city of Cahokia rose beside the Mississippi around a thousand years ago to rival the London of its time, with a great earthen pyramid larger at its base than the pyramids of Egypt. We should say plainly why most people have never heard of it, because it belongs to the thread of this book: the achievements of the Americas were, after the conquest, systematically minimized and forgotten, their cities called natural hills, their skills attributed to anyone but their builders, in a long act of erasure that served the comfortable story that this hemisphere had been a wilderness awaiting improvement. It was not. It was full of nations, and their monuments are being rediscovered even now, as new tools like laser mapping reveal tens of thousands of lost structures under the jungle canopy that we had walked over for centuries without seeing.

We will not romanticize these worlds into paradises, because none of the human worlds in this book were that. The same Aztec cosmos that produced exquisite poetry and astronomy also fed the Sun, its priests believed, on an industrial scale of human sacrifice that we should neither exaggerate into pure monstrousness nor excuse into mere ritual; it was a genuine horror born of a genuine and desperate theology, the conviction that the very survival of the world required blood. Human beings, given isolation and ten thousand years, reinvent our glories and our cruelties alike. That is the sober reading of the parallel worlds, and it is truer and more interesting than either the fantasy of noble savages or the older slander of primitive ones.

Were the two halves of the world truly sealed apart? Almost entirely, yes, and the differences prove it: the Americas had no horses, no wheels in practical use, no immunity to Old World diseases, gaps that would prove catastrophic the moment contact came. But not quite perfectly sealed. The Norse reached and briefly settled the coast of North America almost exactly a thousand years ago, a fact now dated to the very year by the growth rings of the trees they cut. And a humble sweet potato, unmistakably South American in origin, was being grown across Polynesia centuries before Columbus, and carries in some Pacific peoples' very DNA the confirmed signature of an ancient meeting, somewhere in that enormous ocean, between the navigators of the Pacific and the people of the Andes. The two human worlds brushed fingertips, once or twice, in the dark, and then the full collision came, and it would end this age and open the next.

Before we cross into that rupture, though, we have one more thread to follow through these thousand years, back in the Old World, running underground beneath the golden ages and the orthodoxies alike. For the knowledge that the powers of this age drove into the dark did not die there. It went into hiding, and it kept working.