The Great Divide Read online

  THE GREAT DIVIDE

  NATURE AND HUMAN NATURE IN THE OLD WORLD AND THE NEW

  PETER WATSON

  Dedication

  To Kathrine

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Author’s Note: The Aztecs ‘as evil as Nazis’

  Maps

  Introduction: 1500 BC–AD 1500: A Unique Period in Human History

  Part One: HOW THE FIRST AMERICANS DIFFERED FROM OLD WORLD PEOPLES

  1 - From Africa to Alaska: The Great Journey as Revealed in the Genes, Language and the Stones

  2 - From Africa to Alaska: The Disasters of Deep Time as Revealed by Myths, Religion and the Rocks

  3 - Siberia and the Sources of Shamanism

  4 - Into a Land Without People

  Part Two: HOW NATURE DIFFERS IN THE OLD WORLD AND THE NEW

  5 - Rings of Fire and Thermal Trumpets

  6 - Roots v. Seeds and the Anomalous Distribution of Domesticable Mammals

  7 - Fatherhood, Fertility, Farming: ‘The Fall’

  8 - Ploughing, Driving, Milking, Riding: four things that never happened in the New World

  9 - Catastrophe and the (All-Important) Origins of Sacrifice

  10 - From Narcotics to Alcohol

  11 - Maize: What People Are Made Of

  12 - The Psychoactive Rainforest and the Anomalous Distribution of Hallucinogens

  13 - Houses of Smoke, Coca and Chocolate

  14 - Wild: the Jaguar, the Bison, the Salmon

  Part Three: WHY HUMAN NATURE EVOLVED DIFFERENTLY IN THE OLD WORLD AND THE NEW

  15 - Eridu and Aspero: the First Cities Seven and a Half Thousand Miles Apart

  16 - The Steppes, War and ‘a new anthropological type’

  17 - The Day of the Jaguar

  18 - The Origins of Monotheism and the End of Sacrifice in the Old World

  19 - The Invention of Democracy, the Alphabet, Money and the Greek Concept of Nature

  20 - Shaman-Kings, World Trees and Vision Serpents

  21 - Bloodletting, Human Sacrifice, Pain and Potlatch

  22 - Monasteries and Mandarins, Muslims and Mongols

  23 - The Feathered Serpent, the Fifth Sun and the Four Suyus

  Conclusion

  The Shaman and the Shepherd: The Great Divide

  Appendices

  Appendix 1: The (Never-Ending) Dispute of the New World

  Appendix 2: (Available online): From 100,000 kin groups to 190 Sovereign States: Some Patterns in Cultural Evolution

  Index

  About the Author

  Notes and References

  Sources for Figures

  Also by Peter Watson

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THE AZTECS ‘AS EVIL AS NAZIS’

  In 2009 the British Museum in London staged an exhibition entitled ‘Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler’ which did not go down at all well in some quarters. Critics felt aggrieved that the ruler’s name had been changed from Montezuma to Moctezuma, the former spelling having been ‘in satisfactory use’ for 500 years. But beyond that, these critics found the quality of Aztec craftsmanship to be poor, no better than bric-à-brac to be found in London’s Portobello Road, a popular antiques bazaar. The art critic of the London Evening Standard found that, compared with the achievements of Donatello and Ghiberti (i.e., broadly contemporary European artists), the Aztec material ‘was pretty feeble stuff’, that there was ‘no art’ in the ‘barbarism of the Aztec world’, that many of the masks were of the ‘utmost hideousness’, gruesome and grotesque fetishes of a cruel culture. The London Mail on Sunday was equally forthright. In an article headlined, ‘BRITISH MUSEUM ARTEFACTS “AS EVIL AS NAZI LAMPSHADES MADE FROM HUMAN SKIN”,’ Philip Hensher, a writer listed as one of the 100 most influential people in Britain, wrote: ‘If there is a more revoltingly inhumane and despicable society known to history than the Aztecs, I really don’t care to know about it.’ On top of the moral and aesthetic ugliness of the Aztecs, this critic concluded that ‘It is difficult to imagine a museum display that gives off such an overwhelming sense of human evil as this one.’

  Strong words, but there are other ways of looking at the civilisations of the New World. In two recent books, for example, the authors stress the ways in which the ancient Americans outstripped their Old World counterparts. Gordon Brotherston, in his The Book of the Fourth World, describes the Mesoamerican calendar as ‘demanding greater chrono-metric sophistication than the West was at first capable of ’. Charles Mann, in his excellent book, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, points out not only that the Mesoamerican 365-day calendar was more accurate than its contemporaries in Europe, but that the population of Tiwanaku (in ancient Bolivia) reached 115,000 in AD 1000, five centuries ahead of Paris, that Wampanoag Indian families were more loving than the families of the English invaders, that Indians were cleaner than the British or French they came into contact with, that Indian moccasins were ‘so much more comfortable and waterproof’ than mouldering English boots, that the Aztec empire was bigger by far than any European state, and that Tenochtitlán had botanical gardens when none existed in Europe.

  Such ad hoc individual comparisons, though interesting enough on the face of it, may or may not mean anything in the long run. After all, there is no getting away from the fact that it was the Europeans who sailed westward and ‘discovered’ the Americas and not the other way round. There is also no getting away from the fact that, over the last thirty years, a body of knowledge has built up which does indeed confirm that, in some significant respects, the ancient New World was very different from the Old World.

  The most telling of these differences falls in the realm of organised violence. In research for this book, I counted twenty-nine titles published in the last thirty years – one a year – devoted to human sacrifice, cannibalism and other forms of ritual violence. Here, for example, are the titles published since the millennium: The Taphonomy of Cannibalism, 2000; Ritual Sacrifice in Ancient Peru, 2001; Victims of Human Sacrifice in Multiple Tombs of the Ancient Maya, 2003; Cenotes, espacios sagrados y la práctica del sacrificio humano en Yucatán, 2004; Human Sacrifice, Militarism and Rulership, 2005; Human Sacrifice for Cosmic Order and Regeneration, 2005; Meanings of Human Companion Sacrifice in Classic Maya Society, 2006; Sacrificio, tratamiento ritual del cuerpo humano en la Antigua sociedad maya, 2006; Procedures in Human Heart Extraction and Ritual Meaning, 2006; New Perspectives on Human Sacrifice and Ritual Body Treatment in Ancient Maya Society, 2007; The Taking and Displaying of Human Body Parts as Trophies by Amerindians, 2007; Bonds of Blood: Gender, Lifecycle and Sacrifice in Aztec Culture, 2008; Los Origines de Sacrificio Humano en Mesoamerica Formativo, 2008; Walled Settlements, Buffer Zones and Human Decapitation in the Acari Valley, Peru, 2009; Blood and Beauty: Organised Violence in the Art and Archaeology of Mesoamerica and Central America, 2009. Jane E. Buikstra, an expert on Mayan mortuary techniques, has calculated that the number of scholarly papers on Mayan ritual violence has grown from about two a year before 1960 to fourteen a year in the 1990s, a rate of publication that continued at least until 2011. On top of this, research into ritual violence in pre-Columbian North America has also grown. According to John W. Verano, professor of anthropology at Tulane University in New Orleans, each year brings a significant new discovery. Again, it is not so much the level of violence that fascinates researchers, so much as its organised nature and the specific forms of brutality that existed, and different New World attitudes and practices in regard to the associated pain.

  It was an awareness of these seemingly strange yet significant differences between the hemispheres, an
d a desire to make sense of the context, that sparked the idea for this book. Initially, my ideas were worked out in discussion with Rebecca Wilson, my editor at Weidenfeld & Nicolson in London, but they have since benefited greatly from the energies of Alan Samson, publisher at W&N. I would also like to thank the indexer Helen Smith, and the following specialist scholars – archaeologists, anthropologists, geographers – for their input, some of whom have read all or parts of the typescript, and have corrected errors and made suggestions for improvements: Ash Amin, Anne Baring, Ian Barnes, Peter Bellwood, Brian Fagan, Susan Keech McIntosh, Chris Scarre, Kathy Tubb, Tony Wilkinson and Sijia Wang. Needless to say, such errors and omissions as remain are the sole responsibility of the author.

  I would also like to thank the staffs of several research libraries: The Haddon Library of Archaeology and Anthropology, in the University of Cambridge; the Institute of Archaeology Library, in the University of London; the London Library, St James’s Square, London; the Library of the School of Oriental and African Studies, also in the University of London.

  From time to time, instead of repeating the phrases ‘Old World’/ ‘New World’, I have varied the wording and employed ‘western’/ ‘eastern’ hemisphere or ‘the Americas’/‘Eurasia’. This is simply for the great divide the sake of variety (and, occasionally, strict accuracy), and nothing ideological is implied by this usage.

  I have sometimes used BC to date sites, or events, and sometimes BP (before the present). This respects the wishes of the researchers whose work is being discussed.

  This is a book that concentrates on the differences between Old World and New World peoples. This is not to deny that there are also many similarities between the civilisations that existed in both hemispheres before the Europeans ‘discovered’ America. In fact, investigation of these similarities has thus far been the chief interest of archaeologists. For readers who wish to explore these similarities, they are referred to an appendix available online at www.harpercollins.com/books/greatdivide.

  Maps

  Map 1: Human migration, 125,000–15,000 BC

  Map 2: The extent of the major old world ancient civilisations

  Map 3: The natural distribution of the plough, wheeled transport and major food products before AD 1500. Note the minimal overlap between the spread of tubers and roots on the one hand, and cereals on the other

  Map 4: The distribution of certain natural and cultural features discussed in the text

  Map 5: Siberian/Alaskan settlements, the outline of the Bering Landbridge, and the distribution of the Kelp Forests around the Pacific rim

  Map 6: The distribution of the world’s major language families

  Map 7: Natural features of the Pacific rim and South Asia, discussed in the text

  Map 8: Worldwide distribution of tectonic plates and earthquake activity

  Map 9: The maximum wind speed (in mph) achievable by hurricanes over the course of an average year

  Map 10: Origin points of tropical cyclones over a thirty-year period

  Introduction: 1500 BC–AD 1500: A Unique Period in Human History

  Just after sunset, on Thursday, 11 October 1492, Christopher Columbus, in his ship the Santa María, was – by his own calculations, set out in his journal – some 896 leagues (or, roughly, 3,000 miles) west of the Canary Islands and on the verge of reaching, as he thought, Cipangu, or Japan. So far it had not been a difficult voyage, though the rudder of one of the two accompanying ships, the Niña (the other was the Pinta), had come adrift twice, causing delays, which more than one sceptic has put down to sabotage on the part of those in the crew who were reluctant to sail into the unknown. By the same token, the fact that Columbus calculated one distance travelled each day, but gave the men a smaller figure, has been attributed to his need to pretend that they were less distant from Spain than in fact they were. This ‘subterfuge’ is now generally discounted: a medieval league was the distance a ship could sail in one hour – say seven to twelve miles – and Italian leagues (Columbus was Genoese) were smaller than Spanish ones. The Spanish figures would have meant more to his men than the Italian variety.

  Nonetheless, Columbus was anxious to reach land. His expedition had experienced several days without much wind, causing the men to doubt whether they could, in such circumstances, expect ever to return home.

  In his journal as early as Sunday, 16 September – nearly a month before – they had been keenly interpreting signs that they were near land. On that day they encountered some ‘deep green seaweed which (so it seemed to him) had only recently been torn from land’.1 They saw a good deal more weed as the days passed. At other times the sea water seemed less salty, as if they were nearing the mouth of a large fresh-water river; they saw large flocks of birds flying west (as if towards land), plus gannets and terns, species which ‘sleep on land and in the morning fly out to sea to look for food and do not go further than 20 leagues’. At still other times they saw birds, including ducks, which they took to be river birds; or else it rained with a kind of ‘drizzle without wind, which is a sure sign of land’.2 The smaller ships were faster than Columbus’s own and, during the day, they often became separated. (The Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, had offered a lifelong pension to the first man to spot land.) But the three ships were instructed to keep together at sunrise and sunset, ‘because at those times the atmosphere was such as to allow them to see furthest’.3 In fact, land had been ‘spotted’ twice before but each time it proved illusory.

  On 11 October, however, the crew of the Pinta encountered a stalk and a twig and fished out from the sea another stick, ‘carved with iron by the looks of it, and a piece of cane and other vegetation that grows on land, and a small plank’.4

  They sailed on as the sun set that day and, at around ten in the evening, Columbus himself claimed to have seen a light. According to Bartolomé de las Casas, the sympathetic historian whose father travelled with Columbus on his second voyage, Rodrigo Sánches de Segovia, whom the king and queen had sent as comptroller, did not agree with Columbus though other crew members did. Later scholars have calculated that if Columbus did see a light, it must have been some sort of fire but it would have to have been a very large fire, because the Santa María, we now know, was then some 50 miles off land.

  In fact, the first undisputed sighting of land took place in darkness, at two o’clock the next morning, Friday, 12 October, the identification being made by a sailor whose name was given by Las Casas, in his summary of Columbus’s Journal, as Rodrigo de Triana. But since this name does not appear in the crew lists, scholars have concluded he must have been Juan Rodríguez Bermejo, a native of the town of Molinos.5 The land was about two leagues – fifteen to twenty miles – away.

  Columbus ordered his men to ‘lay to’ that night, taking down some of the sails, waiting for dawn. The next morning the captains of the three ships – Columbus, Martin Alonso Pinzón and his brother, Vicente Yáñez – went ashore in a small armed boat, accompanied by the comptroller, and they together witnessed Columbus claim the island in the name of the King and Queen of Spain. He called it San Salvador.

  Soon, however, many islanders gathered round. ‘In order to win their good will,’ Columbus wrote in his journal that night, ‘because I could see that they were a people who could more easily be won over and converted to our holy faith by kindness than by force, I gave some of them red hats and glass beads that they put round their necks, and many other things of little value, with which they were very pleased and became so friendly that it was a wonder to see. Afterwards they swam out to the ships’ boats where we were and brought parrots and balls of cotton thread and spears and many other things, and they bartered with us for other things which we gave them, like glass beads and hawks’ bells. In fact they took and gave everything they had with good will, but it seemed to me that they were a people who were very poor in everything. They go as naked as their mothers bore them, even the women, though I only saw one girl, and she was very young.’ After des
cribing the people (now known to be Tainos) physically, and how they painted their bodies, Columbus went on, ‘They do not carry arms and do not know of them because I showed them some swords and they grasped them by the blade and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron: their spears are just shafts without a metal tip, and some have a fish tooth at the end.’

  This date – 12 October 1492, and this encounter, between an Italian acting under royal Spanish auspices, and a people now known to have spread north from South America, near the Orinoco River in Venezuela – comprise an event of almost unrivalled importance in world history: the first meeting between the Old World and the New. Yet Columbus’s Journal, this part of it certainly, is a relatively tame document and even allowing for the fact that Spanish wasn’t his first (or even his second) language, it is not hard to see why. Columbus himself had no real idea of what he had discovered, or its significance. This is underlined by the fact that, even today, we don’t know where, exactly, this island was, or is. We know that it was in what are now called the Bahamas, and we know that the native name for the Bahamas was Lucayas. We also know that the native name for that particular island was Guanahaní but nothing more. Many islands in the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos group fit Columbus’s description and, in all, some nine locations have been suggested. The most likely, according to modern scholars, are Watlings Island or Samana Cay.

  Columbus and his crew were relieved to reach land, not least for the fact that they could take on fresh water. But he moved on quickly, the following day, on the afternoon of Sunday, 14 October. At that time it was not yet a legal requirement in Spain for ships’ captains to keep a log (that only happened in 1575), so we are perhaps fortunate in having anything at all in Columbus’s hand. But his style is very repetitive, his observations are very general and, as Barry Ife has observed, the admiral’s first aim seems to have been to make everything familiar – he constantly compared the terrain he had discovered with rivers and landscapes in Seville or Andalusia, rather than specifying what was new or exotic (though he did this later). ‘Columbus’s response to the natural beauty of the islands is undoubtedly genuine, but it is also strategic. Each island is the most beautiful that eyes have ever seen. The trees are green, straight and tall, fragrant and full of singing birds. The rivers are deep, the harbours wide, wide enough to embrace all the ships of Christendom . . . what Columbus describes is not so much what he saw, as the sense of wonder with which he saw it.’6