The Great Shadow: A History of How Sickness Shapes What We Do, Think, Believe, and Buy

CHAPTER TWO

PARADISE, LOST

TWELVE THOUSAND YEARS AGO

For as long as anyone could remember, it had been cold and dry and windy. And then, in the space of a single generation, the world changed.

The winds began to die down. The air warmed. Snows, and then rainfalls, doubled. The damper, calmer earth no longer swirled up into vicious blinding storms of dust. A green film spread over lands that had always been brown. Shoots turned into saplings, baby forests sprouted where there had only been steppe or desert. Rivers swelled. Seas crept up and up and up over their shores, inundating ground that had always been dry, and not retreating.

The Ice Age was dying. These women and men would see it draw its final breaths.

We would recognize them, if we could cross the gorge of time and meet them on the other side. They are tall enough to look us directly in the eye. They are strong and lean; they move constantly, following their prey and gathering wild grains as they go. Their arms and shoulders bulge with muscle. One of them is cradling an elbow because their joints, in constant use, develop arthritis early. Their jaws are slightly more prominent than ours, providing necessary room for the wisdom teeth that they still use.

Their world is both smaller and more spectacular than ours. It ends at the horizon: they know nothing larger. But their sky, empty by day, fills at night with an extraordinary glittering light display that few of us have ever glimpsed. That sky is the residence of mystery, a mirror of the unknowable that surrounds them.

And they are watching, in real time, a massive shift in the most basic patterns of human life.

The Ice Age had been fading for a very long time. Nearly three thousand years earlier, the glacial temperatures that had gripped the globe for more than two million years had begun to break. An infinitesimally slow spring dawned: fifteen hundred years in which each century grew a little milder and a little wetter (known to geologists as the "Bolling-Allerod interstadial).*

This change was most pronounced in that stretch of land bordered by the eastern Mediterranean, the northern Persian Gulf, and the southern Caspian Sea. For millennia, Homo sapiens had been roaming through six of Earth's seven continents, seeking things to devour. From Africa into Asia, from there into Europe, over the then-dry Bering Land Bridge into the Americas, and even, somehow, across the forbidding ocean frontier into Australia: we followed game, and snatched up everything we could find along the way. We ate gazelle and boar, ducks and lizards, wild einkorn and barley, small hard fruits and berries, grasses and leaves. We hunted and gathered.

But east of the Mediterranean, during the Bolling-Allerod spring, small groups (two hundred souls, at the largest) became hunter-gatherer-settlers. They lived in caves with hearths and rooms; they built oblong huts. They left to hunt, but returned to these semipermanent hubs again and again—over decades, sometimes over generations. They figured out how to make and use harvesting scythes, grinding stones, mortars, and pestles. They were experimenting with a very early form of farming: not planting and cultivating, but tending the naturally growing grains for higher yields.

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* A slight caveat: the Bolling-Allerod interstadial was interrupted by a two-century cold snap known as the Older Dryas Stadial—it divides the Bolling from the Allerod—but overall, the warming trend held.

Higher yields meant more grain to store, so these "semisedentary hunter-gatherers" (known generally as Natufians, a label for behavior, not ethnicity) built bins for grain in their huts and caves. Stockpiled grain was attractive, in a hard and hungry world. For the first time, tiny birds and rodents crept into human living spaces and set up shop. These small innocuous creatures mingled with the newly settled hunter-gatherers, shared their food and their spaces, and began to change into slightly different forms: the earliest house mice and house sparrows.

Then, as the Bolling-Allerod interstadial drew to a close, another change: the Younger Dryas stadial, a twelve-hundred-year reversion to more frigid conditions. Its dry cold discouraged these early experiments in agriculture, and semisedentary didn't become fully sedentary—not until the Younger Dryas came to its sudden and precipitous close.

And that is where we meet our ancestors. In the past, shifts from colder to warmer to colder had been gradual, stretching over many lifetimes, happening so slowly that although a great-grandparent might recollect tales told by ancestors of a colder or warmer time, no one living actually remembered the difference.

Not so now. The blossoming toward summer was dizzyingly abrupt. It gave birth to new stories: of life emerging from dust and clay, of trees and green vines twining up from chaos and water, of suddenly fertile land where any kind of seed, even the body part of a god, would erupt up into growth.