Sapiens: a brief History of Humankind

7.
 First pet? A 12,000-year-old tomb found in northern Israel. It contains the skeleton of a fifty-year-old
woman next to that of a puppy (bottom left corner). The puppy was buried close to the woman’s head.
Her left hand is resting on the dog in a way that might indicate an emotional connection. There are, of
course, other possible explanations. Perhaps, for example, the puppy was a gift to the gatekeeper of the
next world
.
Most Sapiens bands lived on the road, roaming from place to place in search of
food. Their movements were in uenced by the changing seasons, the annual
migrations of animals and the growth cycles of plants. They usually travelled back
and forth across the same home territory, an area of between several dozen and
many hundreds of square kilometres.
Occasionally, bands wandered outside their turf and explored new lands,
whether due to natural calamities, violent con icts, demographic pressures or the
initiative of a charismatic leader. These wanderings were the engine of human
worldwide expansion. If a forager band split once every forty years and its
splinter group migrated to a new territory a hundred kilometres to the east, the
distance from East Africa to China would have been covered in about 10,000
years.
In some exceptional cases, when food sources were particularly rich, bands
settled down in seasonal and even permanent camps. Techniques for drying,
smoking and freezing food also made it possible to stay put for longer periods.
Most importantly, alongside seas and rivers rich in seafood and waterfowl,
humans set up permanent shing villages – the rst permanent settlements in
history, long predating the Agricultural Revolution. Fishing villages might have
appeared on the coasts of Indonesian islands as early as 45,000 years ago. These
may have been the base from which 
Homo sapiens
launched its rst transoceanic
enterprise: the invasion of Australia.
In most habitats, Sapiens bands fed themselves in an elastic and opportunistic
fashion. They scrounged for termites, picked berries, dug for roots, stalked rabbits
and hunted bison and mammoth. Notwithstanding the popular image of ‘man the
hunter’, gathering was Sapiens’ main activity, and it provided most of their
calories, as well as raw materials such as flint, wood and bamboo.
Sapiens did not forage only for food and materials. They foraged for knowledge
as well. To survive, they needed a detailed mental map of their territory. To
maximise the e ciency of their daily search for food, they required information
about the growth patterns of each plant and the habits of each animal. They
needed to know which foods were nourishing, which made you sick, and how to
use others as cures. They needed to know the progress of the seasons and what
warning signs preceded a thunderstorm or a dry spell. They studied every stream,

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every walnut tree, every bear cave, and every int-stone deposit in their vicinity.
Each individual had to understand how to make a stone knife, how to mend a torn
cloak, how to lay a rabbit trap, and how to face avalanches, snakebites or hungry
lions. Mastery of each of these many skills required years of apprenticeship and
practice. The average ancient forager could turn a int stone into a spear point
within minutes. When we try to imitate this feat, we usually fail miserably. Most
of us lack expert knowledge of the aking properties of int and basalt and the
fine motor skills needed to work them precisely.
In other words, the average forager had wider, deeper and more varied
knowledge of her immediate surroundings than most of her modern descendants.
Today, most people in industrial societies don’t need to know much about the
natural world in order to survive. What do you really need to know in order to get
by as a computer engineer, an insurance agent, a history teacher or a factory
worker? You need to know a lot about your own tiny eld of expertise, but for the
vast majority of life’s necessities you rely blindly on the help of other experts,
whose own knowledge is also limited to a tiny eld of expertise. The human
collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual
level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history.
There is some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain has actually