https://www.youtube.com/embed/h61SlDLEAgQ
Greetings, fellow Aliens! Welcome to the seventeenth episode of Earthlings 101. This is the second of two episodes about the development of Earthling civilization. If you didn’t see the first one, I suggest you do so first. Today we will observe the rise of civilizations from the first cities to modern times, and examine why civilizations on some continents evolved faster than on others.
About 500 solar cycles ago, two mighty empires smashed into each other in an uneven battle: the Spanish Empire under king Charles the Fifth, and the Inca Empire ruled by King Atahualpa. If you are interested in Earthling history, you will probably already know what happened. If you’re not interested, you won’t care. Therefore I will rather tell you what did NOT happen, in order to underline how unequal that encounter was. The first thing that did not happen was an Inca ship crossing the Atlantic and landing on the Spanish coast. The 168 foreigners who didn’t arrive were not led by Quizquiz, general of Atahualpa, the king of the mighty Inca Empire. They certainly did not bring firearms and cannons, and were not riding strange animals the locals did not describe as “large donkeys”.
When the Spanish king Charles did not hear of the arrival of the foreigners, he did not invite them to his capital. Anyway, such a small group of invaders wouldn’t have appeared as a threat to a king commanding over 80,000 soldiers. The parties did not meet in a large town square in Toledo, the Spanish capital. On one side, there were not 168 Inca soldiers armed with 4 canons and 12 handheld firearms, who did not hide in the buildings surrounding the square. On the other side, the Spanish King did not arrive at the square on a litter carried by lords, drinking Spanish wine, nor was he escorted by 6000 men armed with slings and battle axes.
No Inca priest emerged from a building, urging King Charles to pledge his allegiance to King Atahualpa and to the Sun God Inti. He did not hand Charles the holy book of the Inca religion, and Charles did not toss this peculiar object aside. In consequence, the Incas did not open fire on the Spaniards with iron weapons unknown to Europeans, nor did they emerge from the buildings on war Llamas, slaughtering the Spaniards. And finally, they did not capture King Charles to keep him for ransom, nor did they execute him months later in the same square. And those non-events were not the end of the once-mighty Spanish Empire, and even less the beginning of Europe being colonised by powerful American nations. Instead, history happened precisely the other way around. But why is my version of the story so absurd? Why were the Spaniards so much more advanced in navigation, animal domestication, writing, metallurgy and combat? That’s the question I want to answer in this video.
Spoiler alert: It’s neither because white people are evil, nor because brown people are lazy. It has to do with the cards different peoples were dealt at the beginning. So let’s go back to the beginning of the game, 5000 years ago, when the first cities had appeared on the playboard in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India and South America. As in the previous video, don’t take the heads with the funny little hats too seriously. They are neither historically accurate nor do they represent ethnicities - they are simply a visual shortcut for regions. Anyway, 5000 solar cycles ago, people in Eurasia and Egypt were cultivating wheat, barley, rye, figs, flax, peas, chickpeas, millet, rice and more. As for animals, they had domesticated dogs, goats, pigs, sheep, cats, donkeys, dromedaries, chickens, ducks, geese, pigeons, water buffaloes, bees, and, most importantly, horses and cattle.
I’m probably forgetting some, but you get the idea. In Subsaharan Africa, they were just starting to cultivate millet and sorghum and had no domestic animals. And Australians had no agriculture at all. What did people on the American continent have? They had maize, squash, sweet potatoes, and guinea pigs - that’s all. It wasn’t for lack of trying, but the local crops were hard to grow, or not very nourishing. Usually, when a planetary civilization is groomed by a bio-administrator, he takes care of distributing useful resources and slave creatures evenly around the planet. Distributing the cards unevenly would not only be against Galactic regulations but also lead to unnecessary tensions.
Not so on Earth. In Central America, for example, people had domesticated a crop called maize, also known as corn. Modern Earthlings know this as big juicy cobs - but at the beginning, maize was not more than tiny ears. It would take millennia of selective breeding to transform it into a useful crop. Other places had no cultivable crops at all. A second limiting factor is that the local animals in many places are impossible to tame. Take, for example, the punks amongst the horses: zebras. Anyone trying to tame them is in for a bad surprise: They have terrible social values, they can kick a lion to death, and they tend to bite - and not let go. In Australia, large domesticable animals were nowhere to be found.
50 millennia earlier there had been many large animals here, but now they were all gone. If you have watched the previous episode, you’ve probably an idea of what happened to them… The same in America. Africa did have large animals - but they were untameable. Hippos and rhinos are more dangerous than they look. Lions and cheetahs may eat you for lunch. And try to catch gazelles or giraffes in an enclosure - they will jump out of the fence, or step right over it. Elephants can be tamed, but breeding them takes ages. They are pregnant for 22 lunar cycles, give birth to one single child, and the time between kids is 4 to 9 years. As for zebras… we already mentioned their manners.
Maybe the secret of the success of Eurasia was that here, animals evolved long enough alongside Earthlings to avoid being taken by surprise like Australian animals, but not so long that they became hardened killer beasts like in Africa. Every bio-Administrator knows this principle: make the slave creatures not so naive that they get eaten early on, but not so wild that they eat their masters. A third factor is geography. See, climate zones on Earth go in the east-west direction, and plants spread more easily within the same climate zone. Now, Eurasia is east-west-oriented, and so, the agriculture developed in the Middle East and in China could spread easily over the whole continent.
A similar spread of goods and ideas has happened ever since, mainly along trade networks in the east-west direction: The Inner Asian Mountain Corridor, the tin trade routes of the Bronze Age, the Silk Road, the Mediterranean trade, the Hanseatic League, the Mongolian trade, the Spice Routes etc. On the other hand, the continent of America is north-south oriented, with a bottleneck in the centre. So it was more difficult for ideas to spread because that meant crossing several climate zones.
As for Africa, only the unfertile desert part is east-west oriented, the rest goes in north-south direction. There was a trans-Saharan trade network, but it was between different climate zones - so it couldn’t contribute much to spreading crops and animals. Back to 5000 years ago. While the people in Inner Asia were practising horsey riding and Australians were still unsuccessful in domesticating the kangaroo, civilizations in Eurasia made a new discovery: Bronze. Tools and weapons made out of copper had been known before - but they realized that when you mix copper with tin, you get a much harder metal: bronze. Such a mix is called an alloy. Why is it so important what metal people use? Because metals are great for crafting and tinkering. See, most metals are solid at typical Earth temperatures but can be melted in a furnace, cast into moulds, and forged by hammering the hot metal. So you can shape them into anything you want: Tools, nails, pans and trinkets, but also weapons, projectiles and armour. Military power has often been a question of who has the hardest metals, and the best ways to use them.
Even today, the best armour-penetrating ammunition is often made of extremely hard metals like tungsten or depleted uranium. But why is bronze harder than copper? See, metals like copper have few electrons in their outer shell. Those atoms form grids like crystals, but those grids are held together by a sea of roaming electrons. It’s the socialized variant of covalent bonds: Electrons are not shared between individual atoms but within the whole grid. When the metal is bent, the layers of the grid can easily slide over each other. But when you insert other atoms, this adds irregularities to the layers which makes it more difficult for them to slide.
That's why alloys are generally harder than pure metals. It’s like that Acruxi game where you stack silicon cookies upon each other: The stack will be much more stable when you use cookies with star nuts. Back to bronze. Of course, it’s not enough to know how to make bronze out of copper and tin - you also need copper and tin. Depending on where you live, that's kind of a problem. Copper ore was rather common, but tin ore was rare, especially in Southwest Asia. So, where did people in Mesopotamia get their tin from? It could have come from central Asia, but research shows that it was actually imported all the way from Western Europe, especially Iberia and the British Isles.
Those are the “tin trade routes” I mentioned earlier. Around the same time, Earthlings made another invention: the wheel. Pottery wheels had been known for a thousand years, but now someone placed them vertically under a sledge to create a cart. This vehicle could be drawn by an ox or even by one of these fancy new horses imported from inner Asia. Combining inventions like this is crucial in the development of civilizations. Take for example weaving twigs, and spinning flax or wool. The first gives you baskets and the second one threads. Combine threads with needles, and you get sewing, a technique developed thousands of years ago to stitch together animal hides.
But if you combine spinning and weaving and add some Earthling ingenuity, you get the loom, an apparatus for weaving fabric. It was invented in Egypt, around the same time as the wheel. Once you have fabric, you can combine it with sewing: You get tailoring linen and wool clothing, which was all the rage in ancient Sumer - at least for those who could afford it. But you can also combine fabric with boats and ropes to obtain sailboats, a great way to get around in a civilization based on rivers and canals. Today we won’t have the time to mention all the important inventions of mankind - maybe I’ll do another video about this. Back to the invention of the cart. Of course, the Sumerians, being Earthlings, didn’t take long to realize how to weaponize this thing: You take a horse cart, add some more horses to make it really fast, put two soldiers onto it, equip them with those new bronze weapons, and voilà: A war chariot.
The lighter, improved version of this vehicle would dominate the battlefields for over a thousand years. It was basically the bronze-age equivalent of an attack ornithopter. And they used it. Those heads with the silly headgear might give the impression that everybody stayed in one place, minding their own business. The contrary is the case: The whole history of mankind is a turmoil of wars, conquests, migrations, enslavements, colonisation, genocides and mass deportations. While people in Mesopotamia and Egypt were enjoying their new war chariots, Earthlings in West Africa had at least found an animal to domesticate, the guinea fowl. Not quite enough to draw a plough, let alone a war chariot - but still. In South America, Earthlings eventually domesticated two other animals: The llama and the alpaca. Both species are closely related and descendants of the North-American camel.
Llamas are decent pack animals, Alpacas produce wool. Nothing to milk, ride or pull a plough, but still better than the guinea pig. Llamas tend to spit, but that’s better than biting. In Central America, they had no pack animals at all. Llamas would have thriven here - but they never spread north because of the impenetrable jungles on the isthmus of Panama. About 3900 solar cycles ago, the Sumerians were succeeded by the Babylonians, from which we have the first written legal text: the Code of Hammurabi. It’s the first code of law in Earthling History, specifying punishments for all sorts of crimes. The code describes a clear hierarchy of society with castes: The elite, free commoners, and slaves. We see this kind of stratification of society throughout history and everywhere.
At that time, the civilizations in Egypt and South America were still thriving. Other civilizations had joined the party: South of Egypt, south of Babylon, on Crete, in Central America and China. Others were about to rise in Southeast Europe and North America, while the Indus Valley Civilization was approaching its end. Around this time, Earthlings discovered how to extract a new metal from rocks, even harder than bronze and more abundant than tin: Iron. But it would take a while to become widespread.
Then, about 3200 solar cycles ago, something happened: Suddenly, civilizations all over the eastern Mediterranean collapsed. At least 47 large cities were destroyed. What happened? The usual explanation is “The Sea People did it.” Nobody knows where those sea people came from, or who they were. They came with boats, overran the defences, sacked the city and left. City after city fell. Eventually, they were defeated by Pharaoh Rameses the Third, but it was too late - the Eastern Mediterranean civilizations of the Late Bronze Age were no more. In the following 500 solar cycles, new civilizations rose from the ashes, mostly based on that new technology: Iron. People in Africa even skipped the Bronze Age and passed right on to ironworking. Earthlings usually name stages of early civilization after the second most used material for tools and weapons in that era: Stone age, bronze age, and iron age.
Why the second most used material? Because the most used material has always been wood, one could even argue that it still is. But it wouldn’t be very useful to call all ages “wood age”. Also, wooden tools tend to rot, so there is not much left for archaeologists to examine. In America, iron smelting was never discovered. The Olmec Culture, which had risen in Mesoamerica, made trinkets and mirrors out of unsmelted iron ore. Mirrors seem to have played an essential role in Mesoamerican civilizations. There is even the possibility that the Olmec used magnetic iron ore to create a compass, a thousand years before the Chinese did. The Chinese were still using bronze, but they made another invention: money, trade tokens in the form of small spades and knives. The Greek would develop their own money some centuries later, in the form of round pieces of metal.
Similar coins are still in use to this day. Roughly 2500 solar cycles ago, with the Greeks and later the Roman Empire, Southern Europe entered a golden age of architecture, culture, philosophy and science. Tips for Tourists. The remains of Greek temples are usually white. Your guide might tell you that they were originally colored. But please don’t try to restore the original painting: The locals do not like this. In the Roman Empire, a metal called “steel” became increasingly popular. What is steel? Well: You smelt iron ore together with coal, so it will always contain a bit of carbon - which is a good thing because it makes the iron harder. It’s the same principle as for all alloys. Now, the great thing with alloys is that you can control the hardness with the quantity of other stuff you add - the more you add, the harder it is for the layers to slide over each other. Steel is just iron with a precisely dosed quantity of carbon. When there is too little carbon, you get wrought iron - easy to bend and shape, but not hard enough for weapons and tools. When there’s too much, you obtain cast iron: Very hard and rigid but with a tendency to break.
Steel is just in the middle: hard and elastic, thus ideal for weapons, tools and iron constructions. Anyway: Steel from India and the Middle East had been famous for a thousand years. But around 2000 years ago, the Roman Empire took the lead in steel production. Its advantage was that there are large iron and coal deposits in central Europe. Toledo, the old Spanish capital mentioned at the beginning of this episode, played a central role in steel production. We don’t have the time to discuss the turbulent history of the planet.
Empires rose and fell, religions arose, whole populations were enslaved, bloody wars were lost and won - and every now and then, those wild horsemen from Inner Asia attacked Europe, the Middle East or China, causing chaos and mayhem and destroying whole cities. You might know them from Crash Course history: Those are the famous Mongols. Starting 1200 years ago, the Islamic world lived an era of enlightenment and scientific progress known as the “Islamic Golden Age”. Great progress was made in architecture, mathematics, optics, astronomy, medicine, physics, and many other domains. The era ended about 800 years ago due to a Mongol invasion. This enlightenment didn’t keep those Muslim states from running one of the most extensive slave trades in Earthling history.
An estimated 9 to 15 million black slaves were imported from Sub-saharan Africa to the Muslim world. Subsaharan Africa had its kings and empires as well, albeit a bit later than Eurasia: The Aksum Empire in the East, the Kingdom of Zimbabwe in the South, the Empires of Ghana and Mali in the West, etc. You mustn’t imagine those African kings as glorified tribal chieftains reigning over some mud huts: Mansa Musa, the king of the Mali Empire, was arguably the richest Earthling who has ever lived. When he travelled to Mekka, he was supposedly accompanied by 60000 men dressed in silk, including 12000 slaves bearing tons of gold, as well as 80 camels carrying gold dust. In Egypt, he went on a shopping spree, as one does when on vacation - but he spent so much gold that it caused an economic crisis in the whole region.
About a thousand years ago, a new innovation appeared in China: Gunpowder, an explosive mix of chemicals, capable of propelling a projectile from a metal tube. Such a metal tube is called a firearm. This kind of weapon has dominated the battlefields ever since. Gunpowder has been a game-changer in Earthling warfare. Since the discovery of bronze, war had been mainly about stabbing each other with metal triangles on wooden sticks. But with the invention of gunpowder, it became about killing each other with fast-moving metal balls shot out of iron tubes. Strategic advice. You might be tempted to attack Earthlings with non-projectile weapons like laser rifles and electroshock weapons. However, be aware that centuries ago, Earthling elite warriors wore shiny metal armour - which would actually protect them against both beam weapons and electrical discharges.
The Mongols brought gunpowder to Southwest Asia and to Europe. There it was combined with European steel and sparked a series of military innovations in Europe. An interesting detail is that the firearm in the top left corner still launched a metal triangle on a wooden stick - the traditional way of killing people on the battlefield. At this time, Europe wasn’t one big monolithic empire. See, the continent is basically a large peninsula which has grown peninsulas and mountain ranges - kind of a continental labyrinth. On this fragmented landscape grew dozens of rivalling states, constantly at war with each other, and without one dominating power to reunite them under one ruler. This sounds like an inconvenience, but it was actually an advantage, as it forced the states to improve their equipment and tactics constantly.
China, on the other hand, is one big lump of land, and it had been a unified empire for ages. Sometimes it was attacked by the Mongols, twice even conquered. But even then, the new rulers quickly assimilated and turned into Chinese, not really changing anything. After the second Mongol invasion, the Chinese constructed a wall on the northern border, so that wouldn’t happen again. For thousands of years, China lived in the arrogant illusion of being the undisputed centre of the world. This attitude would eventually be their downfall.
600 solar cycles ago, Europe was still a bit of a backwater continent, compared to China and the rising Ottoman Empire. While European caravels, sent by the king of Portugal, took their first baby steps along the coast of Africa, the Ottomans controlled much of the land and sea trade between Europe and Asia, while the Chinese were sending an armada of ships out onto the Indian Ocean, commanded by eunuch admiral Zheng He. The purpose of the voyages was not exploration or trade, but to increase China’s “soft power”. Had China continued to send ships out onto the oceans, it might have been the Chinese that landed in South America and subdued the Inka empire. But in the same year when a European ship managed to sail past the dreaded Cape Bojador on the African Coast, the emperor of China called back the Chinese fleets. In the same decade, an Earthling in Europe invented the so-called printing press: An apparatus for transferring text to paper. The Arabs and Chinese had invented printing before - but the European version had movable types, which made it possible to mass-produce documents and whole books.
Shortly after, the Ottomans conquered Constantinople, a key city on the way from Europe to Asia. This motivated Europeans even more to find alternative sea routes to Asia. While Portuguese ships eventually found their way around Africa to India, the Spanish crossed the Atlantic and started to colonize America. Ironically, the colonization of America was kicked off by some idiot who looked for India in the West Atlantic. I’ve been told that to this day, many people in North America struggle with basic geography. Shortly after, 168 Spanish adventurers crossed the ocean and stumbled upon the Inca empire, still armed with bronze triangles on sticks, and conquered it with their horses and their metal tubes. In the following century, a religious reform movement swept over Europe, one that questioned traditional beliefs, practices and power structures - but, even more important, one that required people to own their own holy book and to read it regularly. As a result, holy books were mass-printed and more common people learned to read. This, together with the new sea routes to America and Asia, kicked off a new era of curiosity, art and scientific progress - not unlike the Islamic Golden Age, but building upon its achievements, which had in turn built upon the achievements of the Greek.
It was a bit like a relay race between Europe and the Middle East, to carry on the torch of knowledge. Earthling historians might shake their heads over this silly alien who lumped together the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment on one single screen - but this is a 28-minute video on 5000 years of World history, so I have to make compromises. One of the aspects of the new era was the flourishing of entrepreneurship. The biggest company in human history was created, the Dutch East India Company. Adjusted to inflation, it was at its height worth more than Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet today.
Europe had now something nobody else on the planet had: Oceangoing warships, armed with rows of steel guns, navigated with sophisticated nautical knowledge and instruments, staffed with well-trained seamen and soldiers, and funded by powerful companies. I mentioned this before: Since the invention of gunpowder, Earthling warfare is all about projectiles shot out of metal tubes - and a warship is a means to transport a whole lot of big metal tubes to just about anywhere. In other words, warships were the key to conquering the planet.
And conquering the planet, they did. Ships with explorers, adventurers, merchants, missionaries and soldiers parted from European ports, explored the planet, created colonies everywhere, and imposed European rule on local people - especially those still armed with metal triangles on sticks. Ships came back to Europe with precious metals and exotic goods - that’s how enterprises like the Dutch East India Company made their money. North America, in particular, was colonized by European powers. As the climate was similar to Europe, millions of Europeans emigrated to North America, became independent from Europe, steamrolled the whole subcontinent and killed most of the natives. Also, about twelve million slaves were bought in Africa and brought to America - a topic I may cover in another episode. Most European powers with sea access participated in the colonization game - except maybe for Germany who came late to the game and only played the tutorial.
While the Europeans were busy exploiting their colonies, south Asia had an era of stability: The so-called Gunpowder Empires were three centralized, stable and prosperous empires in Southwest Asia, Persia and India. However, in the long run, they couldn’t keep up with European progress and naval superiority. The last one to fall was the Ottoman Empire. Meanwhile, Europe underwent a new transformation known as Industrialisation. Manual workers were replaced by steel machines, food and goods were mass-produced, and technology made progress like never before. Europe and the former colonies in North America became unstoppable. Scientific advice. Today, most work is done by specialists with the help of machines. Abduct Earthlings from an industrialized country and ask them to milk a cow or spin some flax, and they won’t be able to do it. But it’s quite entertaining to watch them try. 180 solar cycles ago, China was rudely awakened from its over-confident imperial slumber by European steam-powered iron gunboats. This was the Opium Wars - the beginning of what is known in China as the “Century of Humiliation”. Fast forward to the present: Today, Southwest Asia, India and Egypt, the birthplaces of the first civilizations on the planet, have become secondary players on the global stage.
Most colonies have gained independence. European nations remain strong global players. After two bloody world wars, they consolidated and created the European Union. Those warriors from Central Asia are still harassing European countries, now with tanks. China is the second strongest economic power. Once again they send their ships out onto the sea, gaining soft power all around the Indian Ocean, and quietly investing in seaports all around the globe. The strongest economic and military power is the former British colony in North America, called the United States of America, which tries to rule the world with military bases and fast food restaurants.
This concludes our fast-forward run through Earthling history. If I didn’t mention your corner of the world or your favourite civilization or cut you off a map, I apologize - a video like this can never be exhaustive. Also, I’m not a historian, so I probably made some errors. Anyway: Civilization developed at a different pace on different continents, and in this video, we have covered the main reasons why this is the case. Except for the microbes. I’m serious. Microbes played an essential role in the game of civilization. Actually, this episode is partly based on the book “Guns, Germs and Steel” which has even microbes in its title.
I intentionally left this out because we will talk about microbes in another episode. Before we come to an end, a word from our sponsor, Orbital Solutions. Do you have a dissident problem? Subjects questioning your authority, talking about change, scheming and plotting your deposition, protesting openly in the streets? Don’t react with a desperate show of force - call in the professionals! We deliver opinion control hardware all over the Galaxy. Propaganda stations, orbital prisons, surveillance satellites, sniping lasers - whatever fits best your personal leading style. Orbital solutions. It’s not a moon; it’s a space station. To my Earthling viewers: What do you think, who won the game of Civilization? Regarding population growth, Southeast Asia is the winner - half of the planet’s population lives in this circle. But there are other criteria: Those are the happiest nations on Earth. Those are the most democratic ones. Those have the best-school education. Those have the biggest gross domestic product per capita. Those have the least people living in extreme poverty. Those have the most freedom.
Those tell their people they have the most freedom. Those have the best chocolate, or so I’ve heard. Those countries never lost a war… against birds. And those are some places where we still find hunter-gatherer societies - because maybe, just maybe, civilization is one of those games where the only winning move is: not to play. What do you think? Leave your opinion in the comments below. This was the seventeenth episode of Earthlings 1O1. The next episode will be about beverages: Tea, coffee, beer, wine, chocolate, etc. - and why Earthlings like them. Thanks for watching! Like, subscribe, click on the little rocket, and don't forget to be alien!.
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