Culture Passport

Introduction – Our Unknown Prehistory

Pick up virtually any history book written during the twentieth century which claims to tell a history of the world and you will be presented with a very linear and straight-forward story of the beginning of history in the first chapter or two. It runs as follows: human beings evolved from being great apes hundreds of thousands of years ago in Africa. They then spread out around the world and triumphed over rivals like the Neanderthals. During the last ice age, some 30,000 to 25,000 years ago, they began to show signs of the ability to form more evolved hunter-gatherer societies, painting on cave walls and fashioning basic stone implements. From this point onwards there was largely just a waiting game being played until the world warmed and the ice receded and then farming replaced hunting and gathering as the main form of sustenance favoured by humans. Once farming arrived things like writing, religion, trade, urbanisation and pottery soon began, with ancient Sumer and Egypt emerging as the first complex societies from 3500 BCE onwards. 

Many elements of this basic story are broadly correct, but today we are beginning to realise that the prehistory of humanity is much more complex and colourful than previously realised. For instance, it is now understood that early societies did not simply abandon being hunter-gatherers as soon as they discovered the benefits of agriculture. Some groups continued to hunt and gather and only used agriculture as an ancillary to other types of food production. Others experimented with agriculture for a time before giving it up in favour of returning to hunting and gathering. Similarly, archaeological investigations of sites like the city of Çatalhöyük that flourished in modern-day Turkey around 7000 BCE, four millennia before the first writing systems were devised, have revealed that sophisticated cultures existed back in the Neolithic era. Thus, a more complex version of the story of the beginning of history is emerging in the twenty-first century, one driven by new archaeological and historical methods. This is the story of the beginning of history. 

The Evolution of Homo sapiens

Modern human beings, known as Homo sapiens, evolved gradually over the last two and a half million years. Our ancestor is Australopithecus Africanus, an early hominid that is the progenitor of several Homo types of great apes including modern Homo sapiens. From there modern humans evolved gradually through other variants like Homo erectus until Homo sapiens emerged in southern Africa around 300,000 years ago. A sense of the changes that occurred during this evolutionary period can be gleaned from the fact that the skull of Homo sapiens are around twice as large as those of their Australopithecus Africanus ancestor. Homo sapiens would eventually win out in the evolutionary battle between early hominids, but they were far from alone amongst species which could potentially have developed to create complex societies. Neanderthals, for instance, existed in Europe and further east into Asia up until around 40,000 years ago. They evolved along very similar lines to modern humans for hundreds of thousands of years before diverging perhaps around half a million years ago. The popular notion of Neanderthals as being primitive and unintelligent, with a very large skull and brain that they did little with, is completely inaccurate. In reality, Neanderthals were evolving along much the same lines as Homo sapiens, fashioning primitive tools tens of thousands of years ago, making clothes of a kind, cooking food and even managing to sail on rivers and seas on rafts and primitive boats. Their extinction around 40,000 years ago was not the result of their being far less evolved that Homo sapiens but most likely owing to a combination of disease, inbreeding, climate change and competition from a more aggressive and violent hominid, Homo sapiens. All of this played out during the vast Stone Age era, a period which is deemed to run from when the first hominids evolved millions of years ago down to just a few thousand years ago depending on which part of the world is under discussion. 

The Evolution of Early Societies 

The shift from first evolving as Homo sapiens to creating complex societies where people began to use the environment around them to make their lives more comfortable was very gradual, glacially slow in modern terms. There were impediments to evolving, most notably how cold it was. For approximately 100,000 years between about 115,000 BCE and 10,000 BCE the world was experiencing an ice age known as the Last Glacial Period, one which saw much of the world covered in vast ice sheets. Luckily though, even before Homo sapiens fully evolved, early hominids had already begun to use fire after learning how to control it and extend its life after it finding it occurring naturally in nature, whether through events like lightning strikes, bushfires and the like. There were other things which began to occur early on which suggested a more evolved cognition in Homo sapiens. For instance, the earliest archaeological evidence of humans using material from their environment to fashion more comfortable beds to sleep in is now understood to date back as far as 200,000 years ago. 

The real major shift though in how Homo sapiens began to behave and interact with each other and the world around them began between 70,000 and 50,000 years ago when behavioural modernity emerged. What this behavioural modernity involved was the ability of humans to mentally process their environment and come up with creative solutions to problems they were experiencing or to utilise it in ways which expressed emotions beyond mere biological impulses. In short, Homo sapiens became more imaginative. This increased imagination found expression in many ways. For instance, humans began finding new ways of acquiring food, by fishing or using weapons to hunt big mammals. They gained greater control over fire and we find hunter-gatherer societies building large hearths that were sustained over lengthy periods of time to keep caves and other dwelling sites warm and well-lit. They also began fashioning sharper tools out of stone, flint and other substances like ivory and bone. Finally, there was a greater creative expression in so far as humans began burying their dead in ways which indicated social hierarchies and the expression of grief. Whether all of this amounted to a ‘cognitive revolution’, as one very prominent and popular study of Homo sapiens has recently suggested, is open to debate, particularly so given that this was a gradual process that occurred over tens of thousands of years between 100,000 BCE and 50,000 BCE. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that by the time we come to the second half of the Last Glacial Period, between 60,000 BCE and 10,000 BCE, that Homo sapiens had become a much more evolved species, one that was capable of creatively interacting with the world and each other in a manner which was previously unknown for any other hominid prior to this.  

Cave Painters

Surely the most striking aspect of this was the development of cave painting as the earliest form of art and cultural memory. A new study published in 2024 has revealed that the oldest cave painting ever discovered is found in Indonesia and dates back 51,000 years. Like so many other prehistoric cave paintings it depicts humans and other mammals and constituted an effort by the people who painted it using various pigments and substances they had access to record their hunting and daily lives. Cave painting became much more common from around 40,000 BCE and would increase in skill and frequency in the millennia that followed. Some of the most striking examples extant today are those found in the Lascaux Caves and the Altamira Caves in Spain and southern France dating back to around 15,000 BCE and 10,000 BCE respectively. What these complexes within caves that Stone Age men and women lived in indicate is that the people here were conscious of their own existences. They felt the need to record their daily activities, specifically their hunting of the mammals that provided them with food and sustenance. They did not have writing systems yet, nor did they have many of the other facets of complex civilization, but they were reaching towards these things, especially so when we consider that the earliest writing systems were pictographic, whereby the kinds of images that were put on cave walls were simply used as symbols for words. This was an emergent culture of sorts and indeed the Magdalenian culture that flourished in southern France between 17,000 BCE and 12,000 BCE, and which produced the Lascaux Cave paintings, had a claim to being one of the earliest civilizations of a kind, even before the Last Glacial Period ended. 

Dolní Věstonice 

One of the most striking examples of an early society is that found at Dolní Věstonice in the Moravia region of what is now the Czech Republic or Czechia. Humans began living here next to a stream at the base of Mount Devin around 30,000 years ago. These were hunter-gatherer peoples who subsisted on hunting large mammals like mammoths, the woolly elephant creatures that provided people in the Northern Hemisphere with not just meat but a wide range of other raw materials such as ivory and fur in prehistoric times. There are archaeological remains at Dolní Věstonice that are very well-preserved and it has become one of the richest sources for information on human societies in Europe tens of thousands of years ago. For instance, burial sites have turned up skulls and other remains that have allowed for the reconstruction of what the inhabitants here would have looked like using modern scientific methods. They also indicate that life spans were increasing, with numerous individuals being old enough to have been grandparents. Religious rituals were also emerging and archaeologists argue that there is evidence here for what we would term shamans. One theory that has emerged in recent decades based on analysis of human remains from sites like Dolní Věstonice is that such shamans and religious figures tens of thousands of years ago were quite often people with physical abnormalities or some sort of cognitive ailment. For instance, a person who was prone to schizophrenia or epilepsy might have been viewed in prehistoric societies as a religious figure that was in commune with the gods. 

Possibly the most interesting element of the archaeological site at Dolní Věstonice is the discovery of numerous Venus figurines. These are crude statues of women with large breasts that are believed to have been used as fertility symbols perhaps in some kind of ritual around conception, pregnancy or child-birth. Hundreds of these prehistoric fertility symbols have been found in a vast region stretching from Western Europe to Siberia in north-eastern Asia, but the largest concentration by far is in the region of Central Europe that Dolní Věstonice lies at the heart of. They point towards the broad emergence of a material culture here over 25,000 years ago, particularly so when we consider that while these Venus figurines were often carved from stone, ivory or wood, some were made from fired clay, a proto-industrial process which was a forerunner of the later development of pottery. Humans here were getting smarter. 

Ice Age Migrations

While the ice age was a very difficult period for early humans and the societies they were trying to create, it was also incredibly important in the development of humanity. Human beings often respond creatively to adversity. Consider that the Renaissance was born out of the appalling circumstances of the fourteenth century in Europe when the Black Death caused by the bubonic plague and mass famines devastated the continent. Similarly, the first advanced human societies began to emerge towards the end of the last ice age at places like Dolní Věstonice and, as we will see shortly, no sooner had the ice receded than complex cultures began to appear across the world in the temperate zone lying near and north of the Tropic of Cancer. Another formative element of the ice age was the manner in which it facilitated human migration to regions which were previously uninhabited by Homo sapiens. The most striking example is found in the Americas. Up until 20,000 BCE there were no humans in the Western Hemisphere. It is possible that humans began to move into North America from Asia as far back as 20,000 or so years ago, but most scholars and scientists of prehistoric America believe that the first human populating of the Western Hemisphere did not occur until around 15,000 years ago. This was made possible as the world warmed and it became possible for humans to migrate into the less hospitable parts of north-eastern Asia. There they discovered that the Bering Sea, the large waterway separating the eastern limits of Russia from Alaska, was covered by an ice sheet known as the Beringia Land Bridge, a product of the ice age which allowed humans from Asia to essentially walk across the Bering Sea to Alaska. From there they migrated southwards to the warmer climes of modern-day Canada, the United States and beyond. This was just one example of late ice age migrations which began to shape the prehistoric world as we exited the Pleistocene. Others involved humans finally being able to move from Southern and Central Europe to places like Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia as Northern Europe became warmer. Yet some geographical regions remained unpopulated throughout the prehistoric era and well into even the Iron Age or medieval times. A striking example of this is Iceland, which was not inhabited by humans until the Norse migrations of the ninth and tenth centuries CE. 

The Ice Recedes and the Fertile Crescent Emerges

They would have been completely unaware of it, but by the time the inhabitants of Dolní Věstonice were carving their Venus figurines, the last ice age was beginning to come to an end. Around 20,000 BCE the world began to gradually warm and the ice sheets stopped expanding. Over the next several thousand years they slowly receded at first, a process which made conditions warm enough for the intrepid first inhabitants of the America to travel north to the Beringia Land Bridge and then south again into the Americas. Around 12,000 BCE conditions began to warm much faster and the last ice age could be said to have come to an end around 10,000 BCE. There is no explicit reason for why this occurred. Over hundreds of millions of years Earth has flip-flopped between ice ages and more temperate eras around 17 different times, with the ice ages usually lasting far longer than the inter-glacial periods. This is related to how much sunlight reaches the Earth and specifically the Northern Hemisphere. When the last glacial period ended around 10,000 BCE, it created a geographical legacy in one part of the world lying near the Tropic of Cancer. This is the Fertile Crescent, something which was given its name in the mid-1910s by the British archaeologist, James Henry Breasted, in his books, Outlines of European History and Ancient Times: A History of the Early World. In these, Breasted highlighted how when the ice receded it appears to have left a particularly rich layer of alluvial deposits on the surface of the land lying in a crescent shape stretching from the River Nile in Egypt north-eastwards through the Levant and into southern Turkey and then south-eastwards into what are now Iraq and Iran. The theory then followed that the earliest complex societies developed here over the next 7,000 years as this was a region in which agriculture had very favourable conditions to emerge in. As we will see, the adoption of agriculture is no longer viewed as being as linear and straight-forward a process as this would suggest, but the theory of the Fertile Crescent still has much merit. What it argues is that the end of the ice age saw rich alluvial soil deposited on the earth after the ice receded and this created a sort of energy boon over the next several thousand years for more complex societies to take advantage of during a period of warmer weather. This would lead to a great acceleration in prehistoric human development and the emergence of the first proper Neolithic or Late Stone Age societies. 

Neolithic Beginnings

The theory of the Fertile Crescent has been challenged over the century since Breasted first put it forward. Elements of it have stood the test of time though as it has much to support it, namely the fact that it is in this region around modern-day Turkey, Egypt, Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Iran that we suddenly see a profusion of more advanced Neolithic or New Stone Age societies beginning to emerge as soon as the ice age had come to an end. It would be thousands of years before writing systems, organised religion and state bureaucracies capable of taxing citizens and maintaining armies emerged, but already by around 9000 BCE we begin to see some new innovations in parts of the Fertile Crescent. Stone tools and tools made from other substances become more sophisticated and of a better design. The types of houses people were building and living in improved, while utensils and vessels were being fashioned from various materials in a manner which foreshadowed the development of pottery in time. We also begin to see the domestication of various kinds of fruit, vegetables and cereals in the first stirrings of organised agriculture. For instance, seeds from a fig tree of a kind which cannot but have been produced by a domesticated fig tree grown from cuttings from a wild tree, have been found in archaeological sites at Jericho in the Levant dating to around 9000 BCE. Still, it was not all benign progress. Jericho was also one of the first human settlements in the world that a primitive wall was built around to protect the inhabitants from violent outsiders who wanted to rob them of their goods. Archaeologists and historians have long debated whether the earliest societies were former marauding gangs who simply settled down after a time, or whether or not the people here were more peaceful individuals who banded together to try and increase their collective security against bands of wandering warriors intent on stealing their food and goods and enslaving their people. Perhaps the first societies were even comprised of individuals who were forced to work for a warlord of some description? We cannot be sure, yet wherever humans go there are power structures, often ones that benefit the few over the many. Prehistory would have been no different. 

Çatalhöyük

As noted, it used to be believed that advanced human civilizations only really began to emerge in places like ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt around 3000 BCE when the Sumerians and Egyptians developed writing systems and technology such as the wheel. These were clearly important breakthroughs. However, there is a growing appreciation of just how sophisticated earlier Neolithic societies could be. Take the example of Çatalhöyük in what is now southern Turkey. This is a ‘tell’ settlement, tells being mound settlements that owe their elevated position partly to geography and the selection of an elevated site for settlement, and partly because of the land rising higher as humans build and live on it over a period of many centuries. The Çatalhöyük tell was inhabited for roughly a thousand years between 7500 BCE and 6500 BCE. It rises twenty metres above the Konya Plain in southern Turkey and was an ideal site for a hunter-gatherer society to develop, with the Carsamba River also flowing past the tell in those times and providing abundant water, though the riverine geography has changed substantially since. The site has only been excavated since the 1960s and is still revealing many secrets about how the people lived here 9,000 years ago. This was a proto-city, one in which an estimated 5,000 to 7,000 people lived in very close proximity to one another in houses built from mud-bricks. There were unusual aspects to the town. The houses were nearly all uniform in size and construction, indicating an egalitarian society of what might be called middle-class Neolithic hunter-gatherers. Unusually, there were almost no civic buildings or a town centre. Instead this was just a collection of houses and people carried out whatever civic activities they needed to in the open air or in each other’s homes. 

Another very interesting aspect of the town construction at Çatalhöyük was that the houses were entered into through the rooves by descending down a ladder. This meant that the city streets were effectively the rooftops, with people also using ladders as makeshift bridges to walk from rooftop to rooftop. We also get a sense of how different these people were from ourselves in their attitudes towards death. People buried their deceased family members in the ground inside their houses, while on the walls of their living spaces were the heads of game animals they had caught during hunting campaigns. Çatalhöyük had many aspects which we might consider strange today. Still, there is no denying the relative sophistication of the society here thousands of years before the traditional view of the beginning of history would have us think complex cultures first began to emerge in Egypt and Mesopotamia. 

The First Farmers

The inhabitants of Çatalhöyük, as the evidence of game skulls on the walls of their homes would suggest, acquired much of their sustenance from hunting and gathering. There was though a lot of farming going on here. The millennia from around 10,000 BCE to 4000 BCE saw farming emerge in various places around the world. The most well-attested and documented such sites are again found in the Fertile Crescent, but other regions of significance in this regard include China and India. Eventually farming techniques of one kind or another would develop in most parts of the world, though when it comes to Aboriginal Australia, Sub-Saharan Africa or Mesoamerica the timeframe involved could often be much different and much later. In the case of the Fertile Crescent what occurred was that hunter-gatherer societies in the millennia after the end of the ice age and the beginning of the Holocene geological epoch began noticing that certain plants that they gathered such as grains, fruit or vegetables which had discernible seeds often started growing again in new places when those same seeds blew to those locations. Clearly the seeds were producing plants and new crops over time. It wasn’t too much of a cognitive leap from there to realise that they could intervene artificially in this natural process and collect seeds to plant in locations near where they lived. In some instances it took several generations for the seeds to then mutate into a different form which was more conducive to this artificial, human-directed form of growth, but they did eventually. As this occurred, farming was born. 

As this happened, the very structures of early societies changed. No longer did groups of people have to move from area to area once they had exhausted it of animals to hunt and wild fruit and grains to gather. Instead they could become sedentary and settle down in burgeoning villages that over time became towns. However, we shouldn’t get locked into a kind of tunnel vision in assessing this, one which holds that as soon as the allegedly superior technology of farming emerged hunting and gathering was simply abandoned. In some regions farming was clearly quickly adopted as a means of sustenance which was much better suited to the environment. But in other regions hunting and gathering was used alongside farming for centuries or even millennia thereafter. There are even examples that have become apparent to archaeologists and anthropologists in recent decades which indicate that in some regions people adopted farming for a time and then went back to hunting and gathering as their primary form of subsistence. Thus, this First Agricultural Revolution, as it is often termed, was a very, very slow revolution, one which occurred over several thousand years. 

Emerging Polities

One of the things about the beginning of history which remains very mysterious is how the first polities emerged. A polity is a state or political entity, be it a kingdom ruled by a monarch, a city state, a republic or any other form of political system. They are marked by things like a central government, civic institutions and, importantly, though often annoyingly, taxation, whereby wealth and goods are redistributed to support services that benefit everyone within the community. The first clearly identifiable states or polities are those which emerged around 3000 BCE in ancient Sumer, Egypt, China and then in places like the Indus Valley on the border between modern-day India and Pakistan. These produced the first kings in recorded history, Narmer in the case of Egypt and Alulim in the Sumerian instance. However, there were clearly earlier polities in existence centuries or even millennia before this. The only thing is we don’t know how they functioned. Take the example of Çatalhöyük. Given the size of the settlement, the fact that disputes would have arisen periodically between the inhabitants and that certain aspects of life in the town such as the ability to fight fires or manage their water resources would have had to have been collectively managed, there must have been some form of government here, no matter how primitive it might have been. We are into the realm of conjecture here but there would have been thousands of years between 10,000 BCE and 3000 BCE during which many settlements like this had leaders or even rulers. Perhaps they were wise, benign rulers who governed by consent. Perhaps these communities were actually governed quite democratically by groups of individuals. Or perhaps they were much more aggressive, in-egalitarian societies in which the most violent members rose to the top of the social pyramid. Most likely all of the above occurred in various different places and times; what should be clear though is that polities existed during these millennia. The only reason why we do not know the names of the individuals who held political power in these early societies is that writing had not yet been invented with which to record their names. As soon as the first writing systems were devised in Egypt and Mesopotamia we begin to find evidence of rulers, namely the aforementioned Narmer in Egypt and Alulim in Sumer. 

Often geography and other circumstances continued to massively shape how prehistoric and primitive societies developed, sometime in very unexpected ways. For instance, on the western coast of North America there is a dividing line around the modern-day junction of the states of Oregon and Washington. South of this line societies developed along the coast which were much more egalitarian and did not engage much in slave-ownership. Conversely, north of this line into Washington and the western parts of modern-day Canada around British Columbia, we find societies in prehistoric times which were much more unequal and in which slavery was a major component of native life. Anthropologists now believe that the reason for this is to be found in the geography of the two regions and the resources available. In California and Oregon individuals subsisted as hunter-gatherers foraging for acorns and other goods to live off of. They had little need for slaves to provide large amounts of labour and in any event if they foraged too much their gathered goods would rot before they could be consumed. Slaves would simply be more mouths to feed and offer little benefit. The direct opposite applied to the north. The people here primarily subsisted off of fishing. The fish needed to be caught at particular times of the year, then gutted, cleaned and salted for preservation. This was work which involved intense seasonal work at certain times of the year and required large amounts of labour, thus making these societies far more likely to become slave-owning and unequal. There are few more striking examples of how primitive societies, often in close proximity to each other, could develop in strikingly different ways based purely on geography and the kinds of resources available locally. 

Differing Timescales – Skara Brae and Ancient Sumer 

By the fourth millennium BC numerous societies were evolving towards the Chalcolithic Period, what used to be termed the Copper Age, and the first development of writing systems, trade, organised religion, widespread urbanisation and the invention of things like the wheel. From there we arrive to the pyramid-building societies of Old Kingdom Egypt, the first policies of ancient China and the Sumerian city states of Mesopotamia. The latter in particular is viewed as the first very complex society, a major bridging point between the end of the prehistoric period and civilization as we understand it. Yet we need to be wary of such dividing lines. This was only the story of the Fertile Crescent and certain parts of the world lying between the 40th and 30th lines of latitude north near the Tropic of Cancer. Things were different elsewhere and the beginning of recorded history came much later. Consider that around 2700 BC, when the Great Pyramid at Giza outside Cairo was about to be built and the people of Sumer had been using their writing system, cuneiform, in their many cities along the course of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates for several centuries, most of Northern and Western Europe was still living firmly in the Stone Age or Neolithic Era. Some of these societies such as Skara Brae on the Orkney Islands off the coast of northern Scotland were sophisticated, but they were still Stone Age societies. In centuries to come when Europe had progressed through the Iron Age to the medieval era and beyond to the early modern period, parts of the Americas, Sub-Saharan Africa and Australia were still living in the Stone Age. There are cave paintings in Argentina of a kind not dissimilar to those found in southern France from 15,000 years ago. The only difference is that some of these Argentinian cave paintings date to the era of the Roman Empire in Europe, highlighting again how different the experience of societal development and the beginning of recorded history was in geographically distinct parts of the world. Recorded history and substantial societal change began at different times in different places and often through cultural osmosis, the most striking example being the changes which occurred in the interior of Africa and Australia in the two centuries following the arrival of Europeans in large numbers to these regions around 1800. What all of this makes clear is that the beginning of history and prehistory is a much more complex story than we often appreciate.