I'm back, baby!

Thanks for bearing with me while we've been on hiatus. I've moved in, the internet is working, and I've managed to get through a week as a home-owner without starving to death and/or setting myself on fire.

Amid all the chaos I've been reading Sapiens- a Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari and I've been bursting to give it my recommendation.


In Sapiens Harari attempts to describe and explain the entirety of the history of Homo Sapiens, from our creation to what could one day be our evolution.

 How did our species success in the battle for dominance? How did we become to believe in Gods, nations and human rights? Have we actually become happier and more peaceful in the process? By tackling these broad and significant questions and maintaining a critical historical stance Sapiens elevates itself into something special and worthy of a place on every good bookshelf.

The chapters are broken down by each revolutionary period in humanity's histories of thought and technology: the Cognitive Revolution ('A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve'), the Agricultural Revolution ('History's Biggest Fraud'), the Unification of Humankind ('The Arrow of History') and finally the Scientific Revolution (from 'The Discovery of Ignorance' to 'The End of Homo Sapiens'). Throughout this history Harari considers the reasons for human development, the impact we make to the world and people around us, how monotheistic religion conquered animistic religions, whether empires are truly evil or simply inevitable, how humanity managed to organise itself through the power of imagination and much more.




As you can see, the scope of the work is massive and it's something I can very much respect.

Using such large brush strokes, from a historical perspective, is always going to be problematic; a huge chunk of the discipline is dedicated to moving away from macrocosmic explanations of why history has turned out the way it has. But what Harari manages to do in Sapiens is effectively 'explain' human history's movement while still acknowledging that things could have turned out very, very differently and, in the end, history is always going to throw a curveball at you. Nothing is inevitable, but sometimes once humanity has chosen a path - as with the Agricultural revolution - it's almost impossible to move back to the way things once were. Instead of creating a deterministic view of history, Harari instead does something more clever in that he shows us the structures of human history and what built them. He, in a way, dissects human history down to its skeleton and shows you the movement of each ligament attached to it while still acknowledging that history is a living breathing creature. In doing so his arguments are far more convincing and you feel genuinely enlightened in places having read them.


The book has already appeared on the blog in various forms, lurking in the sources. Recently my post 'Was the Agricultural Revolution the Worst Mistake in Human History?' was pulled entirely from Harari's extremely convincing argument, so if you'd like to get a flavour for the content of the book please head along to there.

For a bonus, team this up with the equally excellent 'The Self Illusion' by Bruce Hood - that I reviewed in February - and proceed to feel like you know everything you need to know about how these funny little human animals tick. 

In short? Get it on your shelf, you'll be referring back to it for years to come.

Generally, people like to view history a one long linear road to progress.

A fish climbs out of water to walk on land; a monkey drops down from a tree and stands up in the long grass, stone tools turn to bronze and iron tools, hunter-gathering turns to farming, cities grow and soon enough we rocket off into space, all the while getting cleverer and living more fulfilling lives.
Of course this is all a lie: history just isn't that simple. Instead of a linear path, history can be a lot more...well...

For example, breakthrough inventions can be discovered simultaneously, or created 'early' and then forgotten, or even developed only to be deliberately rejected. History can be doomed to repeat itself, or can be wiped away in one sudden catastrophe. 'Progress' is relative and is inescapably tied to the values of the people who live at the time: values that often seem to make little logical sense. 

So, with that in mind, I wanted to take a look at what is viewed as the biggest leap forward in human history: the Agricultural Revolution. Was it the big and 'inevitable' leap forward that we have always been told it is? In his book 'Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind' Yuval Noah Harari argues that it was instead the worse mistake we could have made.

Hunting and Gathering

Part of the Gobekli Tepe Temple

In prehistory human societies (Sapien or otherwise) sustained themselves by hunting and gathering for around 2.5million years. The land they roamed could, on average, support around 100 individuals with relative ease. The ability to roam gave us a very varied diet, and one that could be flexible enough to support us when one stream of possible food ran dry. Humans could shape their environment if they wished, for example by using bushfires to clear areas to encourage herds to graze nearby. Without the need for static property, there was less anxiety about possessions being linked to survival, so warfare was less endemic than in modern societies. There is proof that humans at this time, following a hunter-gathering way of life were culturally diverse, intelligent, and could even pool resources to build fantastic structures. For example, the Gobekli Tepe Temple was built in 9,500BC before widespread agriculture.

The agricultural revolution began around 9,500-8,500BC in Southeast turkey, western Iran and the Levenant, though it was a phenomenon that cropped up in all corners of the globe quite individually. The idea itself seems a simple one - people began to discover that they could cultivate certain types of plant and by doing so, allow themselves to create a stable source of food that they could, in theory, rely on.
So far, so logical.
But, as Harari argues in 'Sapiens', humanity's choice to move into agricultural production was, in the end, the biggest mistake that humanity has made. Instead of improving our lives, it drastically reduced our quality of lives and set us on a path that was impossible to walk back from.

The Dark Side of the Agricultural Revolution

No one can fault the logic behind the agricultural revolution: people were simply trying to work nature into providing more food for them. But in tying themselves to the land and in forcing themselves into back-breaking seasonal work humanity lost much of it's freedom, encouraged greater warfare and effectively destroyed the variety of their diet and leisure. Now that humanity were dependant on one particular crop for their diet, a huge swathe of anxiety followed.

Cultivating wheat, for example, took from dawn until dusk. If the wheat got sick, humans had to worry about the sickness and invest time and effort into curing it. If the rains didn't come the humanity would starve because of the drought's destruction of their one real food source. Wheat demanded perfect ground so humans broke their backs clearing fields and weeding away competitors. Days were no longer flexible, but were forced into routines that forced humans to worry and plan years and decades into the future. If someone threatened the land that they had put all the effort into, everything could be lost at once. Retaliation was brutal because running away was simply not an option. 

The aim was to create more food so that the individual societies could prosper, but even in this the revolution failed. While agriculture allowed the larger production of one type of food, in line the settlement and reliance on this meant that the human population swelled. Instead of human population being controlled by the resources of the environment that they lived on, agriculture warped the environment into a factory. While human population could grow, this meant that - should the one vital link the the new much shorter food chain collapse - humans died in their thousands. Hunting and gathering, like most animals, had natural fertility checks: if a woman breast fed a child for four years or so, she was less likely to fall pregnant and when food was scarce puberty occurred later. In agricultural societies children could be fed on cow milk or paste made from the crops instead, female fertility recovered more quickly, and more children could be produced whenever there weren't full-blown starvation conditions. In Hunter-gatherer societies a small band of people were maintained with steady fertility rates dependant on a shifting environment that largely plateaued it people were creative about how they pursued their food. Instead, agricultural societies could be stable for a large period, but were far more vulnerable to extreme peaks and troughs that could wipe out a thousands with one bad harvest - thousands that had literally no other way to subsist. 

Even in the peaks, when the crops were well, the quality of life was still back breaking for the majority - over time any surplus was used to feed an elite. The common farmer - the majority - in the end had a far rougher life than his ancestors and farming was to blame.


Why Choose a Lifestyle That's Worse For Us?

The agricultural revolution was never a matter of humans becoming somehow more clever and taking 'the next logical step' towards farming. The very nature of the human species is that, genetically at least, very little has changed about them: we simply haven't evolved much past the original Homo Sapiens. Once we learnt to speak, and to imagine, evolution became a secondary concern: instead of growing to adapt to our environment, Harari argues, we instead created complicated myths and social structures that allowed us to pull together and make our environment and how we responded to it work for us. This could be achieved without the need for a shift to agriculture and certainly hunter gatherers were no less intelligent than even modern people today.

So, if people were as clever as we are now, surely they noticed that they had made a bad choice? Why carry on with agriculture if humans had more back breaking work, longer hours, higher chance of starvation, less nutrition, less free time and more anxiety for warfare? Harrari suggests that the reason for this was simply time.

Around 18,000 years ago the ice age shifted and global warming took hold, creating more rain and therefore a climate more suitable for wheat to grow. Eating wheat was no simple task, it needed to be ground and to be processed in order to be edible and so people would take the crop with them to their temporary settlements to prepare. People would have camped for this 'harvest', and the wheat seeds would have found favourable conditions near humans. A camp that may have lasted five weeks would, in generations time, last a little longer and a little longer. Villages would spring up and offer the benefits of settlement such as storehouses and granaries and places to store more and more advanced tools. While initially low level agriculture would mix with hunter-gathering, it is no surprise that creative children would attempt to improve on ideas they have seen from their parents. One child might discover that using a hoe and plough was far more effective and his granddaughter might find that making use of fertiliser and fences would be more effective. As more and more effort was put in, as people became more used to a more static lifestyle, and as each generation made small improvements on the previous generation, eventually humanity was locked into a lifestyle of permanent villages and permanent farms and a weighty routine that locked them in place. People worked harder and got creative to try to have a better life. But in doing so they became more dependant and the hardest work became the bare subsistence of normality. When the population swelled past the point that hunter-gathering could support the group of humans, there was no escape. Farming was here to stay.

Is it all bad?

That's one small step for man...

Like any big mistake in life sometimes all you can do is to accept it and move on as best you can. The way the majority humanity has structured itself means that there is no viable alternative while ever there are so damn many of us. But that is where things get interesting.
the huge population is held together by creative 'myths' that allow for unprecedented social cooperation. By compartmentalising a food production method, it allows urbanisation and it also enables many sections of society to focus on other tasks than the creation of food and to co-orperate towards seemingly impossible (and 'impractical') goals that could be realised. Without the agricultural revolution there could have been no renaissance, no industrial revolution, and no silicone revolution.

Nevertheless many societies still suffer under the agricultural yolk of a low nutrition and low quality of life. As a species, we are still staggeringly overpopulated and still vulnerable to terrible drought and to the wars and psychological anxiety of having static property. Farm animals are subject to horribly stunted life-expectancies and psychological  and physical suffering. The average person simply doesn't understand the natural world around them in the same detail. Arguably, even today there are many elements of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle that are superior. But we have made our beds and, lying in it, we strive to make the very best of it. While history isn't linear it is still difficult to imagine how, without the agricultural revolution, we could have ever put man on the moon.




Sources
- 'Sapiens': a brief histroy of humankind' by Yuval Noah Harari

I never thought I was much of a non-fiction person, but nowadays I love my own little library.


It really started when I finished university for good and I found that I was left with a bunch of course books that I couldn't bear to throw away. Some of them were pretty dry, but they were all fascinating and could pull me back into how interesting it was to learn about a whole myriad of different historical eras and topics. After uni I branched out further, nudging into whatever interested me, so nowadays I have a growing group of psychology, philosophy and weird science books joining the shelves. At the end of the day, you should never stop learning and they certainly look impressive all stacked together.


On Monsters and Marvels was a book that I picked up when writing my Master dissertation on how monsters were treated in Early Modern England and I needed access to decent primary sources. I still love it for its bright illustrations and quirky attempt to understand just what monsters really were.


The author, Ambrose Pare, was a contemporary at the time.


He was born about 1510 and his work is considered to be one of the most sustained attempts in the sixteenth century to ‘naturalize’ monsters. It was vitally important because it represents the transition that was happening in europe where monstrous births and other marvels were gradually moving into being regarded as a function of Nature rather than just God’s magical attempts to frighten a sinning public. Collecting together many many different examples of deformed births and ‘monsters’, Pare chronicles them and comments on them, categorising them into causes and anecdotes such as those caused by the female imagination during conception, ‘excess of seed’ and the like. Furthermore in this book it drifts into other examples of his works, such as descriptions of exotic animals (now recognisable as toucans, giraffes, manatees and elephants) and the elusive search for the unicorn.

What is truly interesting and charming to me is that the entire book is just swimming in woodcut illustrations of each monster, which is especially endearing with regards to the exotic animals, and morbidly fascinating when it examples the deformed births.
Pare, as a writer (especially an Early Modern writer) is incredibly approachable and easy to read, keeping a level headed, interested yet mostly neutral approach to his subject matter, and really allows you access into the early modern world view. The translator, Janis L Pallister, also does a fantastic job of bringing Pare’s text to a modern audience with his detailed and engaging introduction and his helpful notes throughout.

 

The book is quite small and the paperback, while it looks a little cheap, is flexible and nicely but together for slipping into your bag. The printing/page quality is crisp and clear too.
I recommend this for anyone interested in history, especially the history of science, medicine or the weird and wonderful. It’s certainly a favourite in my collection of history books.

If you want to, you can read a large chunk of it on Google books.

Things are very rarely what they seem.
 
Whatever your opinions on the paranormal - be it ghosts, portents or spoon-bending - it's clear that there is a lot more at work than the simple telling of fantastical stories. Even if you believe in the supernatural, it's unlikely that you are liable to designate every medium as the genuine article, or every ghost as a genuine echo of a life long passed. The internet and TV are brimming with shows on things that go bump in the night or individuals who are more than happy to take your money to show off their gifts. If not all of them are the Real Thing (or, indeed, any of them) then why do we buy so enthusiastically into their tricks? What supports their industry and why, given the right circumstances, do we even believe in the paranormal ourselves, unprompted?

Richard Wiseman approaches these questions with a brilliant mix of personal experience, academic knowledge, and an approachable laugh-out-loud snark that doesn't turn into full-out sneering. While it would be too easy to hold up the banner of "SCIENCE!" and use it to insult those who subscribe to the paranormal without further explanation, Wiseman instead takes the approach of focusing on what the psychology of paranormality is and how, through people's natural draw and experimentations in the supernatural, it actually taught science some amazing facts about our minds that we might never otherwise have known. He is critical of those who use their knowledge to deliberately fool other people, but always has a respect for the skill and knowledge involved to do so. While some more innocent believers may be a little irrational or annoying (see the 'reincarnation of Catherine Howard' who followed them around on one of their experiments), he nevertheless gives them some respect.

Whatever your beliefs in the supernatural, this book is well worth a read. For those who don't believe, the book is a fantastic insight into the psychology of our minds that allows us to perceive such spooky goings on as we do. For those who do believe, this insight shows how you can separate out the fakes from the potentially genuine.

Prof. Richard Wiseman

The book is very approachable in its style and for a non-fiction book has a nice narrative quality that leads you through all the short sections that make up each chapter. There are little exercises you can do at home to try out your own weird-and-wibbly skills. The gimmick that really made me smile was the Q.R Readers scattered throughout. These symbols can be scanned with your smart phone and will instantly take you to a video of a study that is mentioned in the book. If you don't have a smart phone don't worry - he also has included the website addresses themselves.

Some of the topics on offer are:

• Testing a 'psychic' dog
• Fortune Telling
• Out of body experiences and how to have your own
• The psychology of spoon bending and other magic tricks
• How two young girls and an apple on a piece of string created a whole new religion
• The power of cults
• How to contact the dead
• The tale of the talking mongoose in the Isle of Wight
• Ghost-hunting and how a group of psychologists almost shook a house to pieces
• Hypnotism, brainwashing and the psychology of persuasion
• Did Abraham Lincoln foresee his own murder? 
• The remarkable world of sleep science
• The instant superhero kit

And many more.

It's well worth a look for anyone interested in psychology or the supernatural, why not give it a go?

Whether you know him from his famous stories or as simply a Doctor Who character, there is no denying that Charles Dickens was a fascinating man.

 Personally, my relationship with Mr. Dickens is one that was formed on his second (or third, or fourth)-hand works. I had hoovered my way through at least six different variations of A Christmas Carol before I actually sat down and read the book. I adored the witty writing and the engaging narrative of the story when I finally did, but one can't help but feel that it was a little lacking in Muppets.
Oliver Twist brought bile to my throat with it's overuse of dodgy cockney accents to the point where I couldn't face reading it, and I found it almost impossible to think of David Copperfield without imagining bipedal cats as all of the characters.
In short then, I had a lot of catching up to do in order to learn about the great writer.

Claire Tomalin's biography Chalres Dickens: A Life promised to give a full account of the life and work of Dickens. Having previously won awards for biographies like The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft  and Jane Austen: A Life, the large task has been placed in good hands.

The book itself is a hefty object at some four and a half centimetres thick in it's hardback form. It's gorgeous to look at, with a low dust sheet with a gold title, which wraps a beautifully rendered full-cover portrait of the man himself. On the inside cover we are treated to a collection of coloured illustrations of some of the famous characters in his books and throughout there are glossy images of his dwellings and friends as well as charmingly drawn maps of his favourite haunts. It's a pleasure to look at and certainly a book you'd want to use to dress your booksheld, quite apart from the content inside.

It's a happy thing, then, that the content of the biography is every part as compelling as it's cover. 

Tomalin takes us through Charles Dicken's life in chunks of years. 'The Sins of the Fathers', 'A London Education', 'Becoming Boz'  deal with his early life as a young man who struggled with a father who was constantly in debt. As a result, Chalres had to work what he viewed as a humiliating role in a blacking factory alone as a child. It moves on to how he found his niche in writing and starts to reveal the hard work which would become the foundation of his success. We are taken through his life and celebrity, his philanthropy, his travels in America and how his growing brood of children affected him. Towards the end chapters Secrets Mysteries and Lies and beyond, we see the great man turn flinching and cruel in equal parts to his charm as he cast out his wife, entered into a secretive affair and how - in the chapter Pickswick, Pecknicks, Pickwicks - his health declined.

Tomalin is an excellent biographer well worth the praise that has been given to her before and after this work. She handles Dickens' life with a factual attention to detail yet with a skilful use of conjecture and narrative colour to really make the reader feel at one with the personality of her subject. There is no hero worship here: Tomalin praises his talent and hard work but also remains critical to his failings as a family man and as a product of Victorian prejudices. Though showing with transparency and care both his strengths and his weaknesses, we walk away feeling as if we truly know the man, which is surely the best compliment to give any biographer.

If you are also inclined to research further into his life (as I'm sure almost anyone would be after this book), Tomalin leaves a brilliant list of recommended works and notes for you to refer to.For example, I found Charles Dicken's philanthropic work in founding a house to care for (and re-educate) prostitutes fascinating, so will be seeking out Tomalin's reccomendation: Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women by Jenny Hartley (2008).


In short, this is an excellent work of history and writing well worth a read.

So much of our lives are defined by the objects around us.

Like it or lump it, as a western society we are firmly snagged in a web of consumerism.Collecting, as a hobby, unflinchingly embraces this way of living in all it's good and bad elements. For every person pulled into a financial black hole under the weight of the ever-growing pile of objects, there is a person who scouts out a rare beauty that defines a time period or an emotion encapsulated in a treasure.
Now I love to sit down and faun at the objects that turn up on The Antiques Roadshow,Bargain Hunt and Flog it, and I may or may not even have a little mental wish list of historical objects I'd love to own in a mini museum should I ever win the lottery (First Edition signed copy of The Picture of Dorian Grey, I'm looking at you). It turns out that, in the Victorian period, more people than ever before took their new wealth and turned to collecting. Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves tells their story.

Yallop's writing is engaging and tells the history of several prominent Victorian collectors. Through her research and a creative flourish in her writing that steps us vibrantly into the past, she tells a story of these people's passions, adventure, ambitions, frustrations and fortune.

From the pompous career focused stubbornness of John Charles Robinson we learn about the developments of museums and the tension between the public and private spheres of collecting in Victorian society. Through the domestic adventure of Charlotte Schreiber and her husband we see a private adventure as they explored war-torn Europe on their quest for treasure, with Charlotte challenging the assumptions of her gender with her enthusiastic engagement and the knowledgeablity of her collecting. From the inspiring business sense of Murray Marks we learn the fashions of collecting and threats of forgeries. And through the story of the eager and modest curiosity of the doctor Stephen Wootton as he took up residence in peaking, China, we see how collecting could not only make the career of even an ordinary man, but also aid in the appreciation of a foreign culture beyond ethnic stereotypes and imperial ambition. Lovely.
With charming well-researched writing Yallop creates a wonderful history book that is both well-researched yet not intimidatingly academic. You’re sure to leave the book with a few more historical heros and heroines for your own collection.


On an interesting note, you can to this day still pick up Charlotte Schreiber's journals of her travels collecting ceramics.