For many years I have carried around in my head an allegory of human time on earth. I can’t be arsed to look through my boxes and find it, but I’m pretty sure it comes from one of Carl Sagan’s books. In it, the age of the earth is represented by a hypothetical stack of sheets of paper from the earth to the moon, and the sum total of humanity is then represented by a single sheet of that paper.
It is a good, humbling image. Even more so when extrapolated down to the individual. A single human life is far less than a blink in time, yet as we study our own past we think of ourselves as ancient.
A long time ago — at least to us — back when all humans were still dark-skinned, mankind discovered farming and animal husbandry. The combination of those two discoveries allowed us to gradually take control of our own food cycle. All of modern civilization arises from the spare time created when we learned how to feed ourselves.
With our existence no longer simply a quest to stay alive, we were able to stop wandering and establish our own permanence. We created cities in which to live, languages with which to communicate and learn. We brought ourselves in from the wilderness.
Unfortunately, we brought with us the violence native to our existence in that wilderness. As we were building civilization, we were also building armies and weapons of war. In northeastern Syria, at a place called Tell Brak, archeologists have spent years excavating one of the oldest and largest cities ever discovered. From Discover magazine:
Close examination reveals the settlement extending over an astonishing 136 acres in the period of 4200 to 3900 B.C., larger than other settlements of the time, with the sole exception of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia.
The site is rife with information about early urban civilization, and many discoveries are yet to be made. One of their latest finds is evidence of a mass slaughter, hundreds of bodies dumped into pits, nearly 6000 years ago.
The Sumerians seem benevolent in many of the images that they left behind, which depict feathered skirts, round faces, and shaved heads. Some artifacts had hinted at violence, but the new evidence from Brak shows that the conflict at the time of urbanization was at times appallingly brutal. When forensic scientists pieced together what took place during that bloody event, it was gruesome by any standard. The corpses of the losers in this conflict were left for weeks to rot in the sun, then dragged and shoved into shallow pits. The winners carved pointed sticks out of some of their enemies’ bones, slaughtered prize cows, feasted on roast beef, and tossed the scraps and plates on top of the decaying bodies.
Our concept of time is limited individually by our short lifespan and cumulatively by our brief total time of existence, so it is impossible to fix our own position (or course) on the evolutionary scale. There can be no sense of direction, but that’s never been a bar to speculation.
As for me, I take some small comfort in the fact that we have always been as bloodthirsty and incapable of compromise as we are now. Knowing full well that from within the confines of a single sheet of paper in a stack reaching to the moon, “always” is meaningless.
Their gods probably said it was OK.
Yeah, the “always” you mention there at the last is still “now.” We got better plumbing, shinier surfaces these days; that’s about it.