We can decide to stay home, but even then, the wider world is always close to our skin. From global trade to ideas that travel across continents, our modern world is a global world.

How did we get here?

There is a modern story about globalisation — a story about telecommunications and aeroplanes and such — but this is the climax of a long process, not its beginning. To find the deeper roots of globalisation, we should turn our gaze to the medieval world, and specifically to events around the year 1000.

Or so argues historian Valerie Hansen.

In this episode, we discuss the various curious developments around the year 1000 that started connecting the world into an interconnected web. From Viking and Polynesian explorers to the Silk Roads across Africa, Hansen offers many fascinating windows into the surprising connections that were linking the medieval world together. We also discuss the spread of inventions and world religions, as well as the deeper forces that Hansen thinks have long been driving world history.

Enjoy!

Listen (47 min): Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Other players

Fact-checking

No errors have been detected in this conversation. If you notice one, please leave your correction to the comments below.

More reading & listening

• The Year 1000 by Valerie Hansen

• The Silk Road: A New History by Valerie Hansen

• The Golden Road by William Dalrymple

• Why the West? Colonies, Fossil Fuels, and the Lessons From China (On Humans with Kenneth Pomeranz)

• Restless Humanity: Our Epic Migrations Into America, Polynesia, and…. Beyond? (On Humans with Andres Moreno-Estrada)

Mentions

Names: Erik the Red | Bjarni Herjólfsson | Jacques Cartier | Vladimir the Great | Mansa Musa | William Dalrymple | Kenneth Pomeranz | Andrés Moreno-Estrada | Michael Coe | Mary Miller | Ralph Austen | Richard Davis | Paul Freedman | Thor Heyerdahl

Historical places: L’Anse aux Meadows | Greenland | Newfoundland | Chichén Itzá | the Yucatán Peninsula | the Baltic Sea | the Song dynasty | the Liao dynasty | the Abbasid Caliphate | Baghdad | the Indian Ocean | the Swahili Coast | Mali | Kaifeng | Hagia Sophia

Keywords

global history | macrohistory | economic history | medieval history | early global trade | long-distance trade | Silk Roads | Indian Ocean trade | trans-Saharan trade | maritime trade networks | Viking / Norse exploration | Polynesian migrations | population genetics | pre-Columbian contact | Viking–Maya contact hypothesis | Polynesian–Native American contact hypothesis | Song dynasty | Liao dynasty | Abbasid Caliphate | medieval Africa | Swahili Coast trade | medieval slavery | trans-Saharan slave trade | slavery and serfdom | slavery in China | spread of world religions | Christianisation of Europe | spread of Islam | Buddhism in Asia | diffusion of technology | history of inventions | paper, printing, gunpowder and the compass | Indian numerals and zero | Maya mathematics | history of food

…and here is the episode again! Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Other players

In 2002, a group of historians and economists gathered at the University of Oxford to discuss one of the most consequential questions at the intersection of their fields: when and why did Europe overtake China, India, and the Middle East as the dominant power in the world economy? 

“The conversation was amazing,” recalls Bishnupriya Gupta, an expert in India’s economic history. “But we did not see much data in it.” 

Gupta was particularly interested in the role of colonialism as a driver of this “Great Divergence” between Western Europe and Asia.

Together with her colleague, Stephen Broadberry, she started gathering numbers on early modern living standards in Britain and India, working through bills, receipts, and other hints of what was happening to the budgets of ordinary people in the two regions. They calculated day wages in local currencies for different time periods, then converted these to “grain wages,” based on how much food the wages could buy.

The data wasn’t quite what Gupta expected. “We need to show that colonialism was driving this,” she recalls saying before their work began. Yet data showed a more complicated picture. “India’s fall started before British colonisation,” Gupta explains. When the East India Company took power in Bengal in 1757, India was already in a century-long economic decline. 

Things were not always so. In 1600, living standards looked similar in India and Britain. British workers could afford slightly more food, but the difference was marginal. The ensuing decades were good for the British economy, while India’s fate went the other way: wages declined. By 1750, real wages in India were less than half of those in Britain. 

India’s troubles started before colonialism, but Gupta doesn’t think this supports a rosy view of British rule either. “Overall, I believe that colonisation was a story of extraction,” she says. “The British do not do much to the Indian economy. They don’t invest in agriculture.” There was no long-term growth in India.

For Gupta, farming is what really matters. 

Many polemicists have used reports of India’s courts to paint a picture of an affluent pre-colonial India. The Mughal courts certainly were glittering, with terms like “real estate mogul” carrying these connotations to this day. Yet the riches of a court told little about what was going on for the average Indian family, its prospects tied to a decent harvest. 

Gupta also warns against reading too much into India’s famous textile trade. The textile trade was good for weavers, but this was a small fraction of India’s economy. “India’s economic decline begins during the time of booming textile trade,” Gupta notes. Farming is the big story, and India’s agricultural productivity was in decline from the 1650s onwards. The British rule offered little relief. In the last decades of British rule, agricultural yields in India were below the levels they were in 1600. There is some truth, this shows, to the notion of a lost golden era under Emperor Akbar (1556–1605).

Yet even under Akbar, there was a curious way in which India’s economy was poorer than the British: Indians earned much less silver. Bread was more expensive in London than in Delhi, but British wages could buy many more things in the international market. “We see this in inventories of what people leave behind,” Broadberry says. “The British owned more luxury goods.” A kind of middle class had started forming in Elizabethan England. Both Gupta and Broadberry have argued against seeing this as a simple side-effect of American silver flooding the European market. Instead, they point to structural differences that were already making Britain a “high productivity” economy. ”Britain had a large sector specialising in trade, banking and insurance and manufacturing,” Gupta explains.

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Comparing Britain and India is but one of the many contrasts that historians of the Great Divergence work on.

“A lot of the debate has focused on China,” says Broadberry, adding that China as a whole was behind Britain already in late medieval times. Yet this is hardly a fair comparison, picking Europe’s most dynamic corner and comparing it to the whole of China. “I would focus on the Yangzi River delta,” Broadberry says. This region, which includes modern-day Shanghai, is often picked as the most economically dynamic region in imperial China, and Broadberry agrees.

Narrowing the focus on the Yangzi Delta leads Broadberry to date the divergence between China and Europe to 1700. This is later than some traditional estimates that root Europe’s rise to the Renaissance or conquest of the Americas, yet the date is also comfortably before the Industrial Revolution, beginning around 1760. This puts Broadberry into disagreement with Kenneth Pomeranz, the author of the field-defining book, The Great Divergence, who argued that Britain was not noticeably ahead of the Yangzi Delta until deep into the Industrial Revolution. 

My interview with Kenneth Pomeranz is available here.

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Moving beyond China, the data becomes sparser. Gupta says that it would be particularly interesting to have data from the Swahili Coast of East Africa, which was one of the most connected areas in early-modern global trade. Several other regions, such as the Middle East and Eastern Europe, have already been studied in the context of long-run growth.

“Each region has its own story,” Broadberry says. At the same time, he maintains that the broad contours of pre-industrial history are similar everywhere: the lines look flat. “There are periods of growth everywhere,” Broadberry explains, “but then there is a crash or decline, and incomes fall again.” Each region has its peculiarities, allowing for rich regional histories, but at a high level of approximation, the story is one of stagnation. There is but one exception: northwestern Europe. The British and the Dutch economies kept growing from the Black Death onwards, with clear gains to the masses. 

What explains the uniqueness of the British and the Dutch economies? 

Family dynamics might have played a role. One long-running argument holds that, compared to Asians, Europeans started marrying later and having fewer children. This allowed Europe to escape the “Malthusian trap” where new economic gains are dissipated by a rapidly growing population. Broadberry sees value in this hypothesis, adding that this pattern was actually restricted to northwestern Europe. 

Gupta adds that Britain and the Low Countries might have had another, much darker, shield against the Malthusian trap. “These areas were urbanising fast, and people died in unhygienic cities,” she notes. Referring to work by Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth, she points out that high mortality from disease in urban centres, together with Europe’s frequent warfare, might have put the brake on population growth. In an ironic turn of fate, the high death rate in London and Amsterdam might have allowed the survivors to capture more of the new economic gains, doing what contraception and a preference for smaller families did more benignly in the 20th-century.

Even if population growth might explain some of the Great Divergence, Gupta is emphatic that it is not the only explanation. 

“One difference between Europe and Asia lies in the capacity of states,” she says, explaining that small European states had much higher taxes than the large empires in India or China. “If you are a large empire, you are much more keen to keep the local elites on your side,” Gupta explains. “And therefore, you don’t tax them too much". This echoes the argument by Debin Ma, who has calculated that in the early 1800s, a Chinese person had to work only two days to pay the year’s taxes. In Britain, that number was 17-20. “The story was similar in Mughal India”, Gupta says.

My interview with Ma is available here.

Technology might be yet another driver of the Great Divergence. “I strongly believe that it’s the caste system which limits technological diffusion,” Gupta says. The technological scene in Europe was more democratic, with more possibilities for everyone to participate in new inventions.

Further theories about the rise of London and Amsterdam are in abundance, ranging from overseas trade and American colonies to parliamentary politics and early modern financial capitalism. Is the abundance of theories a blessing or a curse? “I think we can get some consensus on the proximate factors,” Broadberry says. “But it is much harder to agree on the fundamental forces driving this. We don’t really have a framework to compare them.”

What about the 21st century? 

Most of the world remains poorer than Western Europe and its settler colonies in North America and beyond. Yet the comparison most central to the Great Divergence debates – including that meeting “without much data” held in Oxford over twenty years ago – has been a comparison between the economic hubs of Europe and China. On this front, the picture is surprising.

“China’s GDP per capita is still far below that of Western Europe,” Broadberry says. “But if you compare Western European countries to Beijing or Shanghai, both with over 20 million people each, that gap has basically vanished.” Historians will keep studying the Great Divergence as a crucial pillar in the making of the modern world, but for economists interested in today and tomorrow, the Great Convergence is increasingly becoming the subject of choice. 

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You can listen to the full conversation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your shows.

This interview is part of the Great Divergence series produced by Warwick University’s CAGE Research Centre in collaboration with On Humans. The series explores explanations for why Western Europe and North America emerged as the most affluent and technologically advanced regions of the modern world. Guided by six expert guests, including a winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in economics, we approach this topic with balance and breadth, exploring everything from colonialism and fossil fuels to science and technology.

1 | Why the West? Colonies, fossil fuels, and lessons from China (Kenneth Pomeranz)

2 | Why did so many inventions come from Europe? (Joel Mokyr)

3 | Why did the Industrial Revolution happen in Britain? (Robert Allen)

4 | A view from the East: China, Japan, and the other paths to prosperity (Debin Ma)

5 | The big picture: Measuring the origins of the modern world (Bishnupriya Gupta and Stephen Broadberry)

Bibliography

Key references

Broadberry, Stephen, and Bishnupriya Gupta. “The Early Modern Great Divergence: Wages, Prices and Economic Development in Europe and Asia, 1500–1800.” The Economic History Review 59, no. 1 (2006): 2–31.

Broadberry, Stephen, Johann Custodis, and Bishnupriya Gupta. “India and the Great Divergence: An Anglo-Indian Comparison of GDP per Capita, 1600–1871.” Explorations in Economic History 55 (2015): 58–75.

Broadberry, Stephen, Hanhui Guan, and David Daokui Li. “China, Europe and the Great Divergence: A Study in Historical National Accounting, 980–1850.” The Journal of Economic History 78, no. 4 (2018): 955–1000

Gupta, Bishnupriya. An Economic History of India: Growth, Income and Inequalities from the Mughals to the 21st Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025.

Works mentioned in the episode

Acemoglu, Daron, and James A. Robinson. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Crown Business, 2012.

Broadberry, Stephen, and Runzhuo Zhai. “Innovation and the Great Divergence.” CAGE Online Working Paper Series, no. 771, Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy, 2025.

Maddison, Angus. The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective. Development Centre Studies. Paris: OECD Publishing, 2001.

Hersh, Jonathan, and Hans-Joachim Voth. “Sweet Diversity: Colonial Goods and the Welfare Gains from Global Trade after 1492.” Explorations in Economic History 86 (2022): 101468.

Voigtländer, Nico, and Hans-Joachim Voth. “The Three Horsemen of Riches: Plague, War, and Urbanization in Early Modern Europe.” The Review of Economic Studies 80, no. 2 (2013): 774–811.

Further reading

Li, Bozhong, and Jan Luiten van Zanden. “Before the Great Divergence? Comparing the Yangzi Delta and the Netherlands at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century.” The Journal of Economic History 72, no. 4 (2012): 956–989.

Ma, Debin. “Rock, Scissors, Paper: The Problem of Incentives and Information in Traditional Chinese State and the Origin of the Great Divergence.” LSE Economic History Working Papers, no. 152/11, 2011.

Parthasarathi, Prasannan. “Rethinking Wages and Competitiveness in the Eighteenth Century: Britain and South India.” Past & Present 158, no. 1 (1998): 79–109.

Solar, Peter M. “China’s GDP: Some Corrections and the Way Forward.” The Journal of Economic History 81, no. 3 (2021): 926–957.

The rise of China has surprised many, and not only foreign observers. “I don’t think anyone saw this coming”, says Debin Ma, an economic historian at Fudan University in Shanghai.

Ma himself was born during the Cultural Revolution, well before the reforms began. “I had no idea that there was anything other than what Mao’s worldview had given to us”, he recalls.

The Chairman died in 1976, and the reform era kicked in three years later. Ma left China less than a decade later to study in the US. “Being one of the people who left China in the 80s, one of the things that really struck me was the huge backwardness of China at that time.”

This realisation made Ma turn to history. Why had the land of compass and gunpowder been left behind? “This was extremely relevant for understanding contemporary China”, he recalls. “It really got everybody’s imagination.”

This is sometimes called the “Needham Puzzle”, in reference to Joseph Needham, a leading chronicler of ancient China’s technological advancements. The Needham Puzzle lives on, but it has increasingly been absorbed into a broader question about the “Great Divergence” between Europe and Asia. Instead of focusing narrowly on technology and a story of China’s long-lost glory, historians of the Great Divergence often focus on living standards and GDP. On this front, Ma sees a flat line in imperial China — not a falling one. 

The wedge between China and Europe may have already emerged by 1700, Ma thinks, but adds that “before the Industrial Revolution, any differences between economies were relatively minor”. The reverse was true in medieval times: Song China might have been richer than medieval Europe, but the difference was marginal. “The scale of divergence that we see today is coming from this enormous technology transformation during and after the Industrial Revolution,” Ma says.

So why did the Industrial Revolution happen in Britain, not in China?

One of the most popular answers comes from Oxford historian Robert Allen. Working with historical wage and price data, Allen noted that most of Europe looked similar to China around 1700, but not all: the British had unusually high wages. This was great for the workers, but business owners grumbled: Made in Britain was expensive. The solution? Invest in labour-saving machines.

My interview with Robert Allen is available here.

“It is important to note that Allen’s theory is not only about high wages,” Ma says. “He also stresses cheap coal”. Industrialisation made business sense in a land of expensive workers but cheap fossil fuels. It would not have made sense elsewhere, Allen argued, at least not before decades of efficiency gains brought about by British engineering.

“China provides a point of contrast,” Robert Allen wrote in his magnum opus, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective. “A hemp-spinning machine was invented there in the thirteenth century, but it was never generally adopted and fell out of use”. It didn’t make business sense.

According to Allen’s own slogan, “innovation is 1% innovation and 99% perspiration”. The 1% might come from culture and ideas; the 99% comes from business incentives.

“I like Allen’s argument”, Ma says. “But that 1% is very, very important”.

So why was the inspiration greater in Europe than in China? Ma believes that this had to do with various factors, including culture in a broader sense. “I’ve been a big fan of Joel Mokyr’s work”, he says, referring to the 2025 Nobel laureate, whose work is often positioned as the main alternative to Allen’s. Instead of business incentives, Mokyr focuses on a scientific culture.

My interview with Joel Mokyr is available here. 

“The artisan skills across Europe, they didn’t exist by accident,” Ma says.

Take silk. The Chinese had invented a simple silk reeling machine, which made its way to southern Europe. The French and Italians improved it, getting a technological lead as early as the 17th century.

“It’s not because of steam power”, Ma says. “It’s because of their use of the cogwheel and other complementary tools”. This is clearly not a story of British business incentives. This was a story about a broader European environment of technological skills.

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So did Britain’s lead over China lie in cheap coal, expensive workers, or a technological culture? Perhaps all. And perhaps there is a fourth element, this one coming from Ma’s own research: the Chinese state was weak.

Imperial China was an absolutist autocracy, a common stereotype says, with the emperor’s boot pressing hard against the face of private individuals. There might be truth to this image, but in terms of taxation, the Chinese emperor could at times be surprisingly laissez-faire.

“By the mid-19th century, when the British started the Opium War, the British per capita silver tax burden was about 100 times that of a Chinese person,” Ma says.

This is not a simple product of Britain being richer than China.

“In China, a peasant could work for about two days and pay off the entire year of taxes”, Ma calculates. “In Britain, that would take about 17 to 20 days”.

China wasn’t always a low-tax country. “Chinese taxation in percentage of GDP was probably the highest in the Song Dynasty (960—1279)”, Ma says. “It reached about 12 to 15%. Song was not just advanced in the technological frontier, but also in fiscal capacity.” The GDP lines may look flat, but on state capacity, the story of a falling China does have truth to it. The Qing dynasty (1644—1912) controlled a much greater territory, but its fiscal muscles were weaker. This was partially by design: by the late 1700s, Qing had eliminated most of its external threats. The focus was stability, and to maintain stability, the Qing kept taxes low.

In Europe, this wasn’t an option: chronic warfare ensured that states were either financially powerful or subsumed by those who were.

“The biggest financial shock to the state is always warfare”, Ma notes. To respond to this, European states did not just raise taxes. They raised loans.

The British and the Dutch had pioneered the use of government bonds. In practice, this meant borrowing money today against the tax revenue of tomorrow.

The Chinese logic ran in reverse.

When the legendary Macartney embassy from Britain reached the Qianlong emperor in 1793, the Qing ruler was confident that he needed nothing from the Europeans. His confidence was, at least partially, linked to his riches: the Qing government had over two years’ tax revenues saved up. And what did he do with all that silver? “He locked it up in a vault in Beijing, guarded by Manchu eunuchs,” Ma says with a grin.

For the Europeans, this made little sense. Why lock the money up? Why not use it — and then borrow more?

The European states ran big budgets. This gave them great military power, something China would witness during the Opium Wars. Not all of the money went to war, however. “In Britain, this allowed them to fund turnpikes and canals”, Ma says. “This made the country better connected even before the Industrial Revolution.”

What about Japan?

Japan was a fragmented state before the Meiji Restoration, and Ma sees this as crucial. In recent work with Jared Rubin and Weiwen Yin, Ma has argued that Japan’s lack of centralised policy allowed a kind of experimentation under fragmentation: entrepreneurial thinkers and leaders could test Western techniques at the margins, before these experiments were scaled up by the state.

Eventually, the radical ideas won the day. The Meiji Restoration of 1868 overthrew the Tokugawa order and launched Japan’s rapid programme of centralisation, reform, and Western learning.

“After the Meiji Restoration, there was a massive translation movement in Japan”, Ma explains. European texts were translated with fervour. “And with the translation movement, Japan learns about the theory of the modern state.” In 1870, Japan issued its first government bonds in London. In 1882, they established a central bank.

It wasn’t just government finance.

The Japanese became highly literate about Europe’s technical literature. This broke the old pattern, where industrial technologies spread only to British neighbours with existing cultural links.

“The British Industrial Revolution diffused to areas where there’s much greater cultural similarity”, Ma says. Translating manuals was easy. “The machine in English became la machine in French, and so on”. Not so in Japan. “For every new word, you need a new equivalent”.

Yet the Japanese kept at it, soon absorbing technological knowledge from Europe.  

Japan was the first, but not the last. North Korea aside, the whole East Asian region has had its own economic miracles. China’s per capita GDP is far from Western Europe or the US, but its technological advancements are in the daily news.

Why has East Asia had so many success stories? One answer lies in the old diffusion pattern, now running in the East instead of the West: Just as the British technologies flowed to France and the US, so did Japanese inventions flow easily to Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. A second stage of this process occurred during China’s opening up in the 1980s.

“Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore — these were crucial to the successful opening in China,” Ma says. “These people can connect. They understand each other”.

Another potential reason lies in East Asia’s well-known achievements in education.

Take China. We cannot reliably measure the literacy rates of historical peoples, but we have surprisingly good proxies. One of these is called age-heaping. In illiterate societies, most people report their ages as a round number like 10, 15, or 30. The more numerate people become, the more evenly spread the reported ages.

“The thing about age heaping is that you can compare countries internationally”, Ma says. His own results are striking: even if China was poor towards the late 19th century, Chinese age-heaping was low, resembling Western Europe more than India or Turkey.

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This finding echoes the argument made by generations of scholars, including lately Yasheng Huang in one of the most discussed China books of the 2020s: The Rise and Fall of the EAST.

My interviews with Yasheng Huang are available here. 

China’s unique system of distributing political power by using examinations, open to all men, created a culture that respected literacy and education. Importantly, this culture wasn’t only an elite phenomenon: it permeated the whole society, creating a large pool of economically relevant human skills – of “human capital” – even before this was put to the service of economic development.

“On this point, I totally agree with Yasheng Huang,” Ma says. “Very few people actually pass the keju civil service exam, but many people still try to take the exam again and again. That builds a large mass human capital base.”

Ma thinks that this is visible in China today. “China is particularly good at a mass lower-level education. People have this respect for education,” Ma says. “This is part of what makes China such a manufacturing powerhouse.”

The contrast to India is striking. “The Indian elites are highly educated,” Ma says. But the situation with mass education is very different. Take female literacy: at the onset of China’s economic miracle, twice as many women could read in China as in India.1

Ma left China in the late 80s and has lived between Japan, the US, and the UK. In 2025, he moved back to his hometown of Shanghai.

“The transformation is remarkable”, he notes, and not just in terms of material living standards. The Chinese society has transformed, with no going back. But what lies ahead?

“Most people believed that you have to change politics before you change the economics, but Deng Xiaoping tried to keep these things separate,” Ma notes.

“Today, we still don’t know how that combination goes.”

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 You can listen to the full conversation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your shows.

This interview is part of the Great Divergence series produced by Warwick University’s CAGE Research Centre in collaboration with On Humans. The series explores explanations to why Western Europe and North America emerged as the most affluent and technologically advanced regions of the modern world. Guided by six expert guests, including a winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in economics, we approach this topic with balance and breadth, exploring everything from colonialism and fossil fuels to science and technology.

1 | Why the West? Colonies, fossil fuels, and lessons from China (Kenneth Pomeranz)

2 | Why did so many inventions come from Europe? (Joel Mokyr)

3 | Why did the Industrial Revolution happen in Britain? (Robert Allen)

4 | A view from the East: China, Japan, and the other paths to prosperity (Debin Ma)

5 | The big picture: Measuring the origins of the modern world (Bishnupriya Gupta and Stephen Broadberry)

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Bibliography

Key references

Ma, Debin, and Richard von Glahn, eds. The Cambridge Economic History of China. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Baten, Joerg, Stephen Morgan, Debin Ma, and Qing Wang. “Evolution of Living Standards and Human Capital in China in the 18–20th Centuries: Evidence from Real Wages, Age-Heaping, and Anthropometrics.” Explorations in Economic History 47, no. 3 (2010): 347–359.

Ma, Debin, and Jared Rubin. “The Paradox of Power: Principal-Agent Problems and Administrative Capacity in Imperial China (and Other Absolutist Regimes).” Journal of Comparative Economics 47, no. 2 (2019): 277–294.

Ma, Debin, Jared Rubin, and Weiwen Yin. “Ideology and Economic Change: The Contrasting Paths to the Modern Economy in Late 19th Century China and Japan.” Journal of Government and Economics 15 (2024): 100122.

Works mentioned in the episode

Allen, Robert C. The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009

Broadberry, Stephen, Hanhui Guan, and David Daokui Li. “China, Europe, and the Great Divergence: A Study in Historical National Accounting, 980–1850.” The Journal of Economic History 78, no. 4 (2018): 955–1000.

Huang, Yasheng. The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023.

Kuo, Kaiser Y. “The Great Reckoning: What the West Should Learn from China.” Sinica, 18 Oct. 2025. Originally published in The Ideas Letter.

Lin, Justin Yifu. “The Needham Puzzle: Why the Industrial Revolution Did Not Originate in China.” Economic Development and Cultural Change 43, no. 2 (1995): 269–292.

Needham, Joseph. Science and Civilisation in China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954.

Further reading

Allen, Robert C., Jean-Pascal Bassino, Debin Ma, Christine Moll-Murata, and Jan Luiten van Zanden. “Wages, Prices, and Living Standards in China, 1738–1925: In Comparison with Europe, Japan, and India.” The Economic History Review 64, no. S1 (2011): 8–38.

Brandt, Loren, Debin Ma, and Thomas G. Rawski. “From Divergence to Convergence: Reevaluating the History Behind China’s Economic Boom.” Journal of Economic Literature 52, no. 1 (2014): 45–123.

Broadberry, Stephen, Hanhui Guan, and David Daokui Li. “China, Europe, and the Great Divergence: A Restatement.” The Journal of Economic History 81, no. 3 (2021): 958–974.

Elvin, Mark. “The High-Level Equilibrium Trap: The Causes of the Decline of Invention in the Traditional Chinese Textile Industries.” In W. E. Willmott, ed., Economic Organization in Chinese Society, 137–172. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972.

Sivin, Nathan. “Why the Scientific Revolution Did Not Take Place in China — or Didn’t It?” Chinese Science 5 (1982): 45–66.

Solar, Peter M. “China’s GDP: Some Corrections and the Way Forward.” The Journal of Economic History 81, no. 3 (2021): 926–957.

Rosenthal, Jean-Laurent, and R. Bin Wong. Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.

You can listen to episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your shows.

Alternatively, you can keep reading for a summarised essay and a bibliography

Why was industrial modernity born in Europe rather than, say, China? The explanations abound, but the very question might be misleading. The Industrial Revolution was not a European event. It was a British event. And a focus on Britain might also shift the explanation. Science, for example, was a European success story. So why was the steam engine invented in Britain rather than France or Italy?

Oxford historian Robert C. Allen has spent decades trying to answer this question. 

Allen thinks that the answer lies in wages.

British workers were expensive. And where does it make sense to invest in an expensive machine whose only job is to save time for workers? “It makes sense in Britain,” Allen says. “It does not make sense in France or Italy.”

China provides a dramatic example. “A hemp-spinning machine was invented there in the thirteenth century, but it was never generally adopted and fell out of use”, Allen wrote in his magnum opus, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective. The spinning machine existed, but it made no business sense.

Workers were cheap enough.

Allen is not the first to argue for a relationship between high wages and the incentive to industrialise. In 1780, a British pottery manufacturer explained that, due to the high wages enjoyed by British workers, British manufacturers ”must long ago have given up all hopes of foreign commerce, if they had not been constantly counteracting the advancing price of manual labour, by adopting every ingenious improvement the human mind could invent.” 

The French agreed. 

“Given the manner in which the French and English lived, [the English] could never make a plate [of glass] which could enter into competition with ours for the price”, wrote a French manufacturer in the 18th century, continuing to a proud description of how little the French consumed compared to the more gluttonous Britons.

As the producers opined on the business impact of wages, others simply celebrated the condition of the British labourers. In 1725, Daniel Defoe wrote that “the working manufacturing people of England eat the fat, and drink the sweet, live better, and fare better, than the working poor of any other nation in Europe.”1 Remarkably, Defoe was writing decades before the onset of the Industrial Revolution, often dated to 1760 or 1770.

This insight was long lost to historians. 

“English agricultural labourers were supposed to be at the bottom,” Allen recalls the received wisdom of his early career. Yet when Allen calculated their salaries as bread, beer, and so on, he noticed the same pattern celebrated by Daniel Defoe: The pre-industrial Britons lived well. The same was true for Britain’s neighbours in the Netherlands and Belgium, then known as “The Low Countries”, but not in other parts of Europe. People in Vienna and Florence lived close to bare-bones subsistence, as did people living in the key cities of China and India. 

Figure 1: Income versus the cost of the “respectability basket” in six cities (Allen 2009, 137). The “basket” includes basic goods like food and cloth, slightly above bare-bones subsistence.

The rise of the British economy started long before the Industrial Revolution. “And my theory is that it drives the Industrial Revolution”, Allen explains.

So why Britain and not, say, Amsterdam, which also had high wages? Here, Allen focuses on fossil fuels. Britain had ample coal deposits, making it the Gulf State of the early modern world.

The British reliance on cheap fossil fuels was not only a wedge between it and its nearest continental rival: it was a wedge between northern Britain and the rest of the world. In a vast comparison between world economies in the early 1700, Allen discovered that northern British energy prices were a mile below any other region of the world. Together with Britain’s high wages, this pushed the country to a long quest for ways to use machines and fossil fuels as a substitute for manual labour. The quest for modernity had begun.

“There was only one path to the 20th century,” Allen wrote. “And it traversed northern Britain.” 

If Allen is right, the so-called “great divergence” between the West and the rest happened in three stages. First, there is a “little divergence” where Britain and the Low Countries pull ahead of the rest. This gives British businesses an incentive to replace labour with fossil fuels and machines — an Act II that happens in Britain. In the final act, these inventions spread from Britain to its neighbours and settler colonies.

So what explains the high British wages that define the first act? 

Allen believes that Britain excelled in trade, which allowed it to focus less on basic farming and more on complex manufacturing. The wool industry is a big part of the story. The Black Death made workers scarce but land plentiful. Landlords turned to a strategy that required few workers but much land: raising sheep. 

“After the Black Death, there was a big conversion of farmland to pasture”, Allen explains. At the start, Britain exported raw wool, but eventually, Britain became a mass manufacturer of woollen cloths. British woollen products became an international success story, especially with the invention of a lighter woollen cloth, “the new draperies”, in the late 16th century. 

Yet Allen does not think that Britain’s rise was mostly a matter of manufacturing ingenuity. 

“I would focus on imperialism and the colonial system.”

The British Empire in Asia came much later, so Allen’s focus lies in North America and the Caribbean. The rapidly growing American farmland allowed Britain to outsource the growing of raw materials. At home, Britons could specialise in high-end products.

This echoes the views of Kenneth Pomeranz, a historian at the heart of debates surrounding the rise of Western economies.

My interview with Pomeranz is accessible here.

In his field-defining book, The Great Divergence, Pomeranz argued that American acres, together with cheap fossil fuels, were a prime ingredient giving the British a lead over China. “I think Pomeranz got it basically right”, Allen says. “If I have added anything, it is an explanation of how the colonies shaped British labour markets, thereby giving the incentive to use coal and capital as a substitute for the expensive labour.” 

Colonial trade had yet another impact, Allen thinks.

“It gave rise to a greater capitalist class of people getting rich in the trade in the slave colonies and so forth”, he explains. “They wanted the government to promote this kind of activity, and the parliament gave them a forum to influence things.” With time, British policy becomes increasingly favourable to overseas trade. “The British labour markets respond well. This is a good time to be a British worker”, Allen says. But the cost of it was borne overseas.

What about science and technology? A 2016 paper found that the price of British watches dropped by a dramatic 75% the 18th century. Clocks were not labour-saving devices, nor were they shaped by a steam engine. Does this not show the real driver was not a scramble for cheap fuels, nor a battle against high wages, but something broader in the know-how of British artisans?

Allen admits that the clockwork was an interesting development, and part of a larger increase in artisanal skill. “But you have to ask yourself, what is driving all this?” Allen says. “I think it is the rise in urbanisation powered by foreign trade. People in cities learn to read and calculate because they have to.” 

Allen does not agree with scholars, such as Joel Mokyr, who focus on science, the Enlightenment, and a cultural change towards curiosity about the natural world.

My interview with Mokyr is available here.

“I’ve studied Elizabethan math books”, Allen says. “I wanted to know why people were interested. Are they interested in science? No. The examples are all from business.”

Not all remain convinced.

Jane Humphries from Oxford has argued that British spinning wages were much lower than Allen claims. “There are a lot of nitty-gritty details in here,” Allen says. “But I want to highlight that Humphries has done very valuable work on women’s wages across the British economy. According to her, they all went up — all except the spinning wages. I’m not sure how that can be true,” Allen says. “People move between activities, and that tends to equalise wages.”

Despite their disagreements, Humphries and Allen share a goal in measuring the welfare of the common folk. What lessons have we learned? 

“After the Black Death, wages went up everywhere in Europe,” Allen begins. This makes sense: those who survived were much needed and could bargain for better wages. “But the wages start to shrink around the mid-1400s. This happens everywhere except for Britain and the Low Countries,” he says. British wages stayed high, even rising after the 1600s. “But this created an incentive to mechanise”, Allen explains. The results were uneven. Some gained immensely, but for most workers, incomes went down, whilst working conditions deteriorated. The Industrial Revolution gave the elites an unheard-of economic muscle, and whilst certain occupations benefited, the fruits were far from glorious for most Brits. “The British workers grew taller before the Industrial Revolution”, Allen explains. “Many occupational groups have falling heights during the Industrial Revolution.”  

The gloomy Dickensian period starts to taper out during the 1800s. As the century progresses, wages start to shoot up, not only in Britain but across the “West”. There are plenty of theories about the positive rupture, from technological breakthroughs and mass education to the labour movement and the plunder in Africa. 

For various explanations of the boom of the last 150 years, see The Birth of Modern Prosperity, featuring Acemoglu, Galor, DeLong, and Milanovic.

Whatever the explanation, the outcome was good for workers in the West. Incomes rose. Inequality plummeted. 

The hopeful era ends around the 1970s, Allen says. This is true especially in the US and the UK, where inequality started rising again. At the same time, many poorer countries grew richer. China led the headlines, but India, too, made great gains in poverty reduction. “How you see [the last 50 years] really depends on where you are”, Allen says. The gap between the West and the Rest started narrowing. 

But why did the West become rich in the first place? As Allen himself noted, continental Europe remained far behind Britain during the Industrial Revolution. So how did the rest of the West join the British trajectory? 

The first change had to do with the efficiency of machines. It took time, but eventually the British techniques were streamlined enough to make sense in, say, France. “The British engineers undid Britain's advantage”, Allen explains. By making their technology more efficient, “the British engineers made it accessible to everybody”. Yet not everybody imported the industrial techniques at a similar speed. So why was Western Europe faster than Russia, and Japan faster than China?

“The successful countries followed a standard model”, Allen explains. “It can be summarised as schools, banks, trains, and tariffs.” 

Not every country had the same mix. Japan was unable to impose tariffs due to American interventions, but the government did not sit idle: it built schools, trains, and imported European banking practices. Instead of tariffs, “the Japanese invented industrial policy”, Allen says. The government still helped strategic industries, this time by subsidies. “Indian nationalists wanted the standard model, too,” Allen notes. “One problem with colonialism is that they were not allowed.”

If the standard model worked in the 19th century, what should we do now in the 21st century, with AI potentially causing a historic wave of new mechanisation? 

“I’m not really a small-government person. The government should have an active role in setting good policy,” Allen says. “But what that policy is, I leave for others to decide.” Despite these reservations, he goes on to highlight one area where governments can have an outsized positive impact — an area where, according to Allen, “a lot of research shows that every dollar spent will pay back many times.” 

“That is investing in children.”

You can listen to the full conversation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your shows.

This interview is part of a series, produced by Warwick University’s CAGE Research Centre in collaboration with On Humans. The series searches for explanations of why Western Europe and North America overtook China and India as the richest regions of the modern world. Guided by six expert guests, including a winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in economics, we approach this topic with balance and breadth, exploring everything from colonialism and fossil fuels to science and technology. 

1. Why the West? Colonies, Fossil Fuels, and Lessons from China

   Kenneth Pomeranz

2. Did Science and the Enlightenment Give Europe the Edge?

   Joel Mokyr

3. Why Did the Industrial Revolution Happen in Britain?

   Robert Allen

4. A View from the East: China, Japan, and the Other Path to Prosperity

   Debin Ma

5. The Big Picture: Measuring the Origins of the Modern World

   Bishnupriya Gupta and Stephen Broadberry

Subscribe now

Bibliography

Key works

Allen, Robert C. The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Allen, Robert C. “The Great Divergence in European Wages and Prices from the Middle Ages to the First World War.” Explorations in Economic History 38, no. 4 (2001): 411–447.

Allen, Robert C. “The Industrial Revolution in Miniature: The Spinning Jenny in Britain, France, and India.” The Journal of Economic History 69, no. 4 (2009): 901–927.

Other works mentioned in the episode

The spinning wage debate

Humphries, Jane. “The Lure of Aggregates and the Pitfalls of the Patriarchal Perspective: A Critique of the High Wage Economy Interpretation of the British Industrial Revolution.” The Economic History Review 66, no. 3 (2013): 693–714.

Allen, Robert C. “The High Wage Economy and the Industrial Revolution: A Restatement.” The Economic History Review 68, no. 1 (2015): 1–22.

Humphries, Jane, and Benjamin Schneider. “Spinning the Industrial Revolution.” The Economic History Review 72, no. 1 (2019): 126–155.

Allen, Robert C. “Spinning Their Wheels: A Reply to Jane Humphries and Benjamin Schneider.” The Economic History Review 73, no. 4 (2020): 1128–1136.

Humphries, Jane, and Benjamin Schneider. “Losing the Thread: A Response to Robert Allen.” The Economic History Review 73, no. 4 (2020): 1137–1152.

Other

Kelly, Morgan, and Cormac Ó Gráda. “Adam Smith, Watch Prices, and the Industrial Revolution.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 131, no. 4 (2016): 1727–1752.

Allen, Robert C. “Technical Change, Globalization, and the Labour Market: British and American Experience since 1620.” Oxford Open Economics 3, Supplement 1 (2024): i178–i211.

Further reading

Crafts, Nicholas. “Explaining the First Industrial Revolution: Two Views.” European Review of Economic History 15, no. 1 (2011): 153–168.

Kelly, Morgan, Joel Mokyr, and Cormac Ó Gráda. “Precocious Albion: A New Interpretation of the British Industrial Revolution.” Annual Review of Economics 6 (2014): 363–389.

You can listen to episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your shows.

Alternatively, you can keep reading for a summarised essay and a bibliography.

Why did Western Europe become the wealthiest region of the early modern world? A litany of explanations has been given, from colonialism and capital markets to fuel prices and family size. 

Joel Mokyr focuses on science.

“The Industrial Revolution happened after the Scientific Revolution,” notes Mokyr, a 2025 Nobel laureate in Economics. “And that is probably not a coincidence.” 

Despite the popularity of this explanation among laypeople, many historians have remained sceptical. “Artisans with no scientific training were mainly responsible for the key inventions,” explains one. “The cause was not science”, writes another.

Mokyr agrees with the critics on one thing. “It’s not a simple model where science drives technology. They co-evolve and reinforce each other,” he says. For example, the we might not have thermodynamics without the steam engine, Mokyr explains.

But saying that science did not matter for the Industrial Revolution “is too strong”, Mokyr maintains.

Take the famous Watt steam engine. James Watt was not a scientist, but he spent a great amount of time interacting with people who were. His closest consultant was Joseph Black, one of the eminent physicists of the time.

Not all of Black’s advice was good. “Black did not understand the principles by which the steam engine worked,” Mokyr notes. But the very idea that craftsmen would consult scientists was revolutionary. And much of Black’s help was valuable. 

Black was not the only link between science and steam. 

“Evangelista Torricelli was a student of Galileo”, Mokyr says, “and he was the first to point out that the Earth is surrounded by an atmosphere – that we're living at the bottom of an ocean of air pressure. If you don't understand that, you'll never build a steam engine”. Together with other discoveries, such as vacuum pumps, this shaped the knowledge economy that gave rise to the Newcomen steam engine in 1712, and later, to the Watt steam engine in the 1770s. The inventors were not scientists, but they were the product of their times: a time ever more shaped by science. 

“People have always invented new techniques, but for thousands of years, they did not really know why these techniques worked”, Mokyr explains. “And if you don’t know how things work, it is very difficult to improve them.” Then things changed. “At some point in the 1400s or 1500s, after the Gutenberg printing press and the voyages of Columbus, you start seeing a process where people are really trying to study the natural environment in a more systematic way.” 

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This was not just a matter of science. A more general change took place, too – a change exemplified in the European “Republic of Letters” and the encyclopedia movement. Ideas started circulating fast. “This was a marketplace for ideas,” Mokyr says.

The encyclopedias are particularly telling: their detailed drawings of the latest gadgets took Europe by storm. 

The Chinese had great encyclopedias, too. Yet in China, the encyclopedias focused on science and technology never seem to have taken off: some were restricted to the emperor’s use, whilst others simply flopped, surviving to this day only by simple copies surviving by accident. What explains the different fates of China’s and Europe’s encyclopedias? 

A possible explanation lies in politics. Some encyclopedias faced marginalisation, if not outright bans, when they didn’t please the emperor.1 China’s centralised politics made this a greater threat than ever existed on the opposite edge of Eurasia. A book could be banned in “France”, but not in “Europe”. The combination of small states and a shared literary language, Latin, offered Europe a natural escape from total censorship. 

Furthermore, the Chinese reading public had its mind elsewhere. The centre of China’s intellectual culture was the civil service exams, all based on Confucian classics. “A real scholar will not read this,” admitted the preface of one Ming Dynasty encyclopedia. Real scholars were busy with Confucius. 

“One of the great differences between China and Europe is that the [scientific and technological] advances in China all happened within the Chinese imperial bureaucracy or the mandarinate,” Mokyr explains. “In Europe, on the other hand, the scientific edge was held by the private sector. I pointed this out in the 90s, and I still think it's true.” 

Mokyr is not alone in suggesting that the imperial Chinese state might have curbed its inventiveness. In a recent overview of ancient China’s inventions, a team from MIT and Tsinghua University discovered that China was at its most inventive at the time when its state was the weakest.2 As the power of the state bureaucracy grew, the number of Chinese inventions dwindled. 

Yet Mokyr does not want to focus on politics alone. “I think what is driving all the other things is culture”. 

The Scientific Revolution not only gave Europeans new knowledge. It gave them a new attitude. 

“The majority of human societies have had an undeserved respect for the knowledge of people who came before them, whether it's Confucius or Aristotle or the people who wrote the Talmud ”, Mokyr says. Even radical reformists in many societies had to explain their vision as a return to the pristine path. “Chinese reformists like [Neo-Confucian Zhu Xi] never claim that Confucius was wrong”, Mokyr notes. “Rather, they claim that we have to interpret Confucius more carefully.” 

Europe turns a different page. The Scientific Revolution proved that many of the ancient thinkers were wrong about the world — so did the “discovery” of the Americas.

Europeans started losing the veneration of past knowledge. 

The Renaissance is often framed as a return to the lost antiquity of Greece and Rome – this much follows the typical pattern – but something profound had changed by the time of the Enlightenment.

“They still read Greek literature, they still admire Cicero”, Mokyr says. “But they think they can do better. They know they can.” 

What about the dark side of the Enlightenment? Many of its thinkers were entangled with slavery and colonialism. How much praise do they merit from us? 

“No one is saying that these are nice guys”, Mokyr says. “But what counts about the Enlightenment is a belief in progress.” Yet even many self-identified “progressives” call for less focus on the European successes and more on their overseas costs: less on cotton spinning machines and more on the enslaved labour toiling in the cotton fields.

Mokyr maintains that this is a false dichotomy. “The Enlightenment led to the abolitionist movement”, he says. “The banning of slavery took longer than it should have, but it did happen.” 

Mokyr also believes that the Enlightenment belief in progress led to a greater search for technologies to reduce human suffering, from vaccines to farming practices.

“No critic of this period”, Mokyr exclaims, “wants to return to a time before it when life expectancy was 35, when people were constantly itching, covered with insects, and completely powerless against almost every disease imaginable – always living under the threat of hunger if the harvest fails.” Not only do we live longer and grow taller today. “We work far less than we worked in the past. We enjoy things that emperors and popes could not have dreamed about, like a retirement for 20 years,” Mokyr says with a laugh. 

Despite his enthusiasm for the role of science, culture, and the Enlightenment, Mokyr has not ceased searching for complementary explanations. He recently partnered with Avner Greif and Guido Tabellini to explore the ways that family dynamics might have influenced the rise of Europe relative to China.

“After the year 1000, large extended families, or clans, became more and more important in China”, Mokyr explains. “In Europe, it's the other way around: the focus turns to nuclear families. And once you have a world of nuclear families, you have to create voluntary organisations that provide local services.” In China, you were born into a clan; in Europe, you decided to join organisations. “That made a huge difference.” 

What about the future? “My optimism isn't particularly strong as far as politics is concerned”, Mokyr notes. “The world seems to be moving towards some kind of benighted form of populism”. On the other hand, “technological progress will only accelerate,” he maintains. “It's not that we're getting smarter, but we have better tools. Artificial intelligence is but the latest incarnation of these tools”, Mokyr says.

“And God knows what comes after that!”

Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your shows. 

This interview is part of a series, produced by Warwick University’s CAGE Research Centre in collaboration with On Humans. The series searches for explanations to why Western Europe and North America overtook China and India as the richest regions of the modern world. Guided by six expert guests, including a winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in economics, we approach this topic with balance and breadth, exploring everything from colonialism and fossil fuels to science and technology. 

1. Why the West? Colonies, Fossil Fuels, and Lessons from China

   Kenneth Pomeranz

2. Did Science and the Enlightenment Give Europe the Edge?

   Joel Mokyr

3. Why Did the Industrial Revolution Happen in Britain?

   Robert Allen

4. A View from the East: China, Japan, and the Other Path to Prosperity

   Debin Ma

5. The Big Picture: Measuring the Origins of the Modern World

   Bishnupriya Gupta and Stephen Broadberry

Subscribe now

Bibliography

Key works

Mokyr, Joel. The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700–1850. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

Mokyr, Joel. A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.

Mokyr, Joel, Avner Greif, and Guido Tabellini. Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000–2000. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023.

Other works mentioned in the episode

Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Lucas, Robert E., Jr. “On the Mechanics of Economic Development.” Journal of Monetary Economics 22, no. 1 (1988): 3–42.

Jacob, Margaret C. Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Further reading

Crafts, Nicholas. “Explaining the First Industrial Revolution: Two Views.” European Review of Economic History 15, no. 1 (2011): 153–168.

Ó Gráda, Cormac. “Did Science Cause the Industrial Revolution?” Journal of Economic Literature 54, no. 1 (2016): 224–239.

Berg, Maxine. “Useful Knowledge, ‘Industrial Enlightenment’, and the Place of India.” Journal of Global History 8, no. 2 (2013): 247–267.

Hodgson, Geoffrey M. “Culture and Institutions: A Review of Joel Mokyr’s A Culture of Growth.” Journal of Institutional Economics 13, no. 4 (2017): 1003–1010.

Galofré-Vilà, Gregori. “The Diffusion of Knowledge during the British Industrial Revolution.” Social Science History 42, no. 4 (2018): 809–835.

Prefer listening to reading? Find the episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your shows.

Subscribe now

Amongst the litany of theories about the rise of the West, it can be difficult to separate the good, the bad, and the ugly. Here, terms can help. The catchword 'great divergence' is increasingly used by historians who want to address this question whilst avoiding traditional East-West clichés.

The term was coined by historian Kenneth Pomeranz in his book of the same name. Europe’s rise was hardly a new topic when The Great Divergence was published in 2000, but Pomeranz’s background offered a fresh angle to the old question. 

“I was going to do graduate school in European history, and in fact, had my applications in the mail,” he recalls. “Then I wandered, largely by accident, into a Chinese history course. I loved it and started thinking about this crazy idea of switching fields.”

The crazy idea took hold, and Pomeranz became an expert in China’s ecological and environmental history. This background allowed him to approach Europe’s rise with a more nuanced understanding of the most widely discussed “other”: China. Unlike past literature on the rise of the West, the literature he pioneered became a tightly controlled comparative exercise – an exercise where to know one country was to know no country.

Pomeranz argued that even a careful comparison of whole countries could be misleading.

“China is really big”, he notes. Imperial China’s economy might have looked stagnant, but a weak average was hiding two dynamic cores: the Yangtze Delta (including modern-day Shanghai) and the Pearl River Delta (including modern-day Hong Kong and Shenzhen). In a stark move against theories rooting Europe’s headway to the Renaissance, printing press, or Columbus’s 1492 voyage, Pomeranz argued that China’s cores were just as economically dynamic as Western Europe at the eve of the Industrial Revolution. For him, the great divergence happened late, towards the end of the 18th century, perhaps as late as the year 1800.

The late timing has not gone without challenge. One of the critics is Stephen Broadberry, who has constructed wage and GDP comparisons that push the great divergence back by decades or even centuries. Despite the ongoing disagreements, Broadberry agrees with Pomeranz about the need to zoom into China’s dynamic cores. “I date the great divergence to 1700, but that’s because I focus on the Yangtze Delta”, Broadberry explains. “If you take the whole of China, the date is closer to 1300.” The magnitude of the difference underlines the impact of Pomeranz’s method — and the dangers of broad-brushed civilisational comparisons.

Pomeranz’s method had another novelty: he focused on ecology, especially the use of land. 

“In densely populated areas, there are trade-offs”, Pomeranz notes. “An acre that's growing grain for food is not growing cotton for clothes.” You could clear more fields from the forest, but then firewood becomes sparse. 

Trade could ease the tradeoff. “You could source your wood from upstream, sending them manufactured goods in return,“ Pomeranz explains. “But in a world of expensive transportation, there are limits to these purely ‘Adam Smith -style’ solutions.”

In early modern China, population growth was pushing hard against such ecological limits. China’s proto-industrial areas felt the effects: many areas de-urbanised, with manufacturing workers moving back to the countryside. 

Much of Europe was facing similar challenges. 

Take Denmark. Whilst Britain was undergoing the Industrial Revolution, Denmark was increasingly deurbanising, with urban artisans returning to more basic jobs, addressing problems such as deforestation or erosion. In a key passage, Pomeranz wrote that:

“These patterns persisted well into the nineteenth century, even though Denmark had reasonable amounts of capital, good transport, participated in European science, and had plenty of nearby and culturally similar models for industrialisation.”

In short, Denmark shared many features traditionally associated with the rise of Europe. Yet this did not help them – not at the start. 

“In the absence of some kind of ecological relief, Britain [could well have] entered a Danish pathway,” Pomeranz adds.

What helped Britain was a twin-set of ecological reliefs: coal and colonies.

For people of our century, it feels rather obvious that fossil fuels played a part in the making of the modern economy. “But it is interesting how long historians of this period did not pay attention to that,” Pomeranz says.

Pomeranz paid attention. “Coal is a really big deal,” he explains. “A ton of coal saves you roughly two tons of firewood. Yet the coal mine only takes up a small amount of surface area.” Coal eased the traditional tradeoff between fields-for-food and forests-for-fuel.

China had coal, too, yet small things made a big difference. 

The British coal industry was close to London. It was also well connected to rivers and canals. “This was not the case in China, where most of the coal mines were in landlocked areas, far from the economic cores”, Pomeranz says. 

The outcome was dramatic. 

In the early 1700s, a British sailor kept a detailed diary of the prices in Canton. His notes reveal a striking pattern: England was more expensive than Canton, with basic foods costing four times more silver. Yet fuel was the exception: it was five times cheaper in England. 

“Fuel power was around 20 times cheaper in London compared to muscle power,“ Pomeranz says. It is hardly a surprise, then, that England, not Canton, was becoming a fossil fuel economy: an economy in which architecture became synonymous with glass, bricks, and steel – heated in coal-powered furnaces – and in which manufacturing was increasingly done by machines, moved by the steam of coal-burning engines. 

Britain and its neighbours pulled ahead. Their advantage was not ingenuity or necessity, but a lucky geography.

What about the steam engine? The origins of the steam engine have traditionally been told as a story of clever engineering – perhaps a reflection of the growing scientific knowledge in Europe. Pomeranz’s focus lies elsewhere.

“As you dig deeper in [British] coal mines, they start filling up with water,” Pomeranz notes. This was bad news for the coal industry, but in battling the water, the industry struck gold. In 1712, the world’s first steam engine started operating. The purpose of the machine was simple: to pump water out of the mine. 

This “Newcomen steam engine” was deeply inefficient. “It lost over 99% of its power in conversion”, Pomeranz says. Yet it made economic sense, because it operated in the one location where coal was dirt cheap: by the coal mine itself. After all, “in the pre-industrial world, the price of coal is basically the cost of transportation”, Pomeranz says.

The steam-powered pumps later inspired the Watt steam engine, and eventually, the railways. This is true, but this well-known story had a much lesser-known origin: it started from British coal mines filling with water, something that never happened in China’s dry coal mines. 

We will revisit the role of cheap fossil fuels in episode three with Robert Allen. Yet coal was not the only part of Pomeranz’s ecological argument. 

“Britain gets its [ecological] relief partially from coal, and partially from its vast colonial possessions in the Americas,” Pomeranz explains. 

Pomeranz calls Britain’s lands in America “ghost acres”: they serve the British economy, but without taking up British land. This is best exemplified by cotton. It was still true that an acre of food is not growing cotton, but with the British fields spreading across America, this compromise was an increasingly small inconvenience. Indeed, cotton is a harsh reminder of some broader patterns of the time: the precious raw material of the British Industrial Revolution was grown on land “acquired” from Native Americans and worked by enslaved labour, mostly trafficked from Africa. 

If we move away from cotton, however, Pomeranz’s argument becomes more controversial. After all, very few other colonial imports were solving ecological bottlenecks. They were offering small daily pleasures: sugar, tobacco, coffee, and so on. 

“Saying that colonial ghost acres were necessary doesn't mean that everything grown on them was necessary”, Pomeranz begins. He adds that the luxuries helped European economies in other ways, for example, by offering an easily taxable commodity that funded European military might. Yet many questions do remain on the role of colonies. Could Britain have gained raw materials by honest trade instead? Were there really such hard limits on the ‘Adam Smith -style’ solutions? This remains an active area of contention. 

A further challenge to Pomeranz’s argument comes from its heavy focus on Britain and the British Industrial Revolution.

Take Denmark again: they stagnated whilst Britain industrialised, yet today, they are just as rich as Britain, if not richer. If we understand the great divergence as a broad rise of the Western economies, should we not focus on whatever links the rise of Britain with the rise of its neighbours and settler-colonies – the “West” that spans from Canada to Belgium, and from Denmark to Australia? 

Even in Britain, the Industrial Revolution hardly lifted the welfare of the average worker. The massive gains in welfare enjoyed by British and other Western workers started much later, around the second half of the 1800s. This period is often called the “Second Industrial Revolution”, and focusing on it might shift the explanation: science was central to this era of electricity. Does focusing on the broader rise of welfare in the West shift the explanation towards science and technology?

“Without science, you don’t get the Second Industrial Revolution. That’s true,” Pomeranz admits. “It is also true that it is the Second Industrial Revolution that really lifts life expectancies and living standards”, he adds. “But you don’t get to the Second Industrial Revolution without the First Industrial Revolution.” 

Furthermore, the ecological themes never disappear from the scene. “One of the reasons for this later boom [across Western Europe] has to do with grain and beef flowing from the Americas,” Pomeranz says. The themes are familiar. The food is grown on American soil. It is packed into trains and ships built from coal-powered steel. It is moved to distant lands with the power of steam. Again, overseas acres and fossil fuels are central players in the story – and we have not even mentioned the rubber plantations of Congo or the dawn of the oil boom.

The story continues as the new century opens. “One of the greatest transformations of the 20th Century was the capacity to turn fossil fuels into artificial land,” Pomeranz explains. The invention was the ‘Haber-Bosch process’, which uses energy from fossil fuels to capture nitrogen from the air, packing it into soil, and thereby increasing yields per acre.

How has this work shaped Pomeranz’s outlook on the future?

“Not surprisingly, I'm concerned about global warming,” he begins. “I keep thinking about how energy-drenched the modern world is. Can we get that energy in ways that don’t cook the planet? And what happens if we have to do with less energy in total? This is a big deal.”

What about the future of global inequality? 

Pomeranz’s own approach focused on Western Europe and East Asia. On this front, “there has been a great deal of convergence”, he notes. China is still a middle-income country, but its richest regions are catching up fast. The catch-up has basically happened in Japan and the East Asian “tigers” of South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore. “Is this the first phase of a convergence that's eventually going to include the rest of the world? Or did East Asia catch the last train?” Pomeranz wonders.

“I don’t think we know the answer yet.”

In the full episode, we also discuss the global origins of modern science and the coal-powered economy in Song Dynasty China. Towards the end, Pomeranz places the great divergence within the broader story of humanity: a story divided into four acts, with the fifth act beginning now. 

Listen to the full episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your shows. 

This episode is part of a series, produced by Warwick University’s CAGE Research Centre in collaboration with On Humans. The series searches for explanations to why Western Europe and North America overtook China and India as the richest regions of the modern world. Guided by six expert guests, including a winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in economics, we approach this topic with balance and breadth, exploring everything from colonialism and fossil fuels to science and technology. 

1. Why the West? Colonies, Fossil Fuels, and Lessons from China

   Kenneth Pomeranz

2. Did Science and the Enlightenment Give Europe the Edge?

   Joel Mokyr

3. Why Did the Industrial Revolution Happen in Britain?

   Robert Allen

4. A View from the East: China, Japan, and the Other Path to Prosperity

   Debin Ma

5. The Big Picture: Measuring the Origins of the Modern World

   Bishnupriya Gupta and Stephen Broadberry

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Bibliography

Key reference

• Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Works mentioned in the audio episode

• Allen, Robert C. “Mr. Lockyer Meets the Index Number Problem: The Standard of Living in Canton and London in 1704.” Working Paper, 2004

• de Vries, Jan. The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behaviour and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

• Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.

• DeLong, J. Bradford. Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century. New York: Basic Books, 2022

• Wrigley, E. A. Energy and the English Industrial Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

• Hodgson, Marshall G. S. The Venture of Islam, Volume 3: The Gunpowder Empires and Modern Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.

• Nate Hagens on Energy Blindness (‘Global Governance Futures’ podcast) 

Further reading

• Parthasarathi, Prasannan. “Review Article: The Great Divergence.” Past & Present 176 (2002): 275–293.

• Huang, Philip C. C. “Development or Involution in Eighteenth-Century Britain and China? A Review of Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy.” Journal of Asian Studies 61, no. 2 (2002): 501–538.

• de Vries, Jan. “The Great Divergence after Ten Years: Justly Celebrated yet Hard to Believe.” Historically Speaking 12, no. 4 (2011): 13–15.

• O’Brien, Patrick. “Ten Years of Debate on the Origins of the Great Divergence between the Economies of Europe and China during the Era of Mercantilism and Industrialization.” Reviews in History, review no. 1008, 2010.

• Goldstone, Jack A. “Dating the Great Divergence.” Journal of Global History 16, no. 2 (2021): 266–285.

Imagine a group of ancient humans, crafting stone tools at the dawn of humankind. What did these creatures look like? 

To find out, we can stare at the skulls in museums or glance at reconstructions made by paleo-artists. Here is one of the famous “Lucy”.

Not a bad start. But what if we move the lens and zoom into their surroundings? What was the scientific “Garden of Eden” like? Was it a lush forest, a dry savanna, or an icy cave? And what can the answer tell us about human nature more broadly?

⁠Denise Su⁠ is a world-leading expert on these questions. A paleoecologist at Arizona State University’s Institute of Human Origins, she uses ever-more imaginative ways to get a glimpse into the nature and the weather that set the stage for the human story.

In this episode, we focus on two kinds of “changes” in the ecology that engulfed our ancestors: both the actual climate change that drummed the beat of human evolution, and the theoretical changes in the views of scientists thinking about these topics. Indeed, this episode revisits one of the hotly contested questions about the reasons why humans evolved: "the savanna hypothesis".

According to the savanna hypothesis, our naked, upright species evolved because African forests were shrinking and dry savannas emerged instead. Other apes stayed in the shrinking forests, but our brave ancestors took the shot, conquering the vast flatlands. As they did so, they started standing upright to better walk on the savanna and lost their fur, to sweat away the heat of the scorching sun.

I have told versions of this story on the show, and so have many senior guests. Yet even a brief Google search will give you plenty of critics telling that the savanna hypothesis is nothing but a convenient myth.⁠ Articles by Denise Su⁠ are often included in the evidence. So what’s going on? Listen to the episode to find out!

Listen (54 min): Spotify | Apple Podcast | YouTube audio | Other players

You can also listen to my previous episode on the topic, with Yale’s Jessica Thompson: “How Climate Crafted Humanity (Or Did It?)“

Human evolution timeline

Below is a rough estimate of the timeline for key periods of human evolution.

• Last common ancestor with humans and chimpanzees: 6–7 million years ago 

• Ardipithecus ramidus (“Ardi”): 4.5–4.2 million years ago 

• Australopithecus anamnesis: 4.2–3.8 million years ago 

• Australopithecus afarensis (e.g. “Lucy”): 3.9–2.9 million years ago 

• Australopithecus deyiremeda: 3.5–3.3 million years ago 

• Earliest Homo: about 2.8 million years ago 

• Homo erectus/ergaster (e.g. “Turkana / Nariokotome Boy”): 1.9 million–112,000 years ago 

• Homo sapiens: 300,000 years ago till present (and going strong!)

Fact-checking

No factual errors have been detected so far. However, timing estimates and species names are still debated. Furthermore, the “hours” in the metaphorical clock can shift a fair amount based on the “midnight”: our last common ancestor with chimpanzees lived 6 to 7 million years ago, with some estimates pushing the date as far as 8 million. In the episode, our clock is tuned to 6 million years ago. 

If you see an error, you can get in touch using the form below.

LINKS

Support: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon.com/OnHumans⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Get in touch: https://forms.gle/h5wcmefuwvD6asos8⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

KEY WORDS

anthropology | archaeology | paleontology | human origins | human behavioural ecology | savanna hypothesis | paleolithic | paleoecology | hominid fossils | carbon isotopes C3/C4 | human evolution | human biology | climate change | human futures

Thanks for scrolling this far! Here are the links again:

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What was life like before farming? Was it nasty, brutish, and short? Or did our hunter-gatherer ancestors live lives that were relatively free, affluent, and ecologically stable?

In the lack of a time machine, many anthropologists have sought answers from studying the few hunter-gatherer communities that still exist today. In 1966, several leading names in the field were invited to present their results at a symposium at the University of Chicago. The symposium, called “Man the Hunter”, became a landmark event, but what exactly were the results? And have they stood the test of time? 

To mark the 60th anniversary of the "Man the Hunter" symposium, On Humans is glad to share the first-ever podcast with the legendary anthropologist and co-organiser of the symposium, Richard B. Lee. We discuss the legacy of the conference, Lee’s own experiences living with hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari, and his reflections on what we do and do not know about the ancient lifeways of hunter-gatherers. As we do so, we also discuss various controversies and mysteries, from archaeological black holes to The Dawn of Everything and the choice of the term “Man” in the conference name.

Below are links to the episode and more.

Enjoy!

Listen (59 min): Spotify | Apple Podcast | YouTube audio | Other players

Fact-checking

No factual errors have been detected so far. If you see an error, you can get in touch using this form.

Links

Support: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon.com/OnHumans⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Get in touch by responding to this post or via this form.

Mentions

Articles and more

• The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race by Jared Diamond (open access).

• The Original Affluent Society by Marshall Sahlins (open access)

• For my previous coverage on “woman the hunter” controversies, see “Is Man the Hunter Dead” and my interviews with Cara Ocobock and Katie Starkweather, all available here.⁠⁠

• For Richard Lee's own comments on the controversy, see his recent interview with Vivek V. Venkataraman ⁠⁠

Other mentions

• Names: Richard B. Lee | James Suzman | Marshall Sahlins | David Graeber | David Wengrow | Jared Diamond | Sarah Blaffer Hrdy | Jerome Lewis | Colin Turnbull | James Woodburn | Eleanor Leacock | Louis Henry Morgan | Karl Marx | George Armelagos | Irvin DeVore | Sherwood Washburn | Jay Desmond Clark | Harriet Rosenberg | Lawrence K. Marshall | Elizabeth Marshall | John Marshall | Greta Thunberg | Vivek Venkataraman

• Ethnic groups: San | Ju/’hoansi | !Kung | Khoisan | Khoikhoi | “Bushmen” | “Hottentots” | First Nations | Tlingit | Haida | Inuit | Australian Aboriginal peoples | Bayaka| Batek | Huron-Wendat | Iroquois | Six Nations | Plains Indians | Hopi | Navajo | Cherokee

Keywords

Anthropology | archaeology | ethnography | human origins | human behavioural ecology | hunter-gatherers | paleolithic | neolithic transition | original affluent society | Kalahari Desert | Botswana | Namibia | paleogenetics | gathering vs hunting | gender roles | women hunting | egalitarianism | origins of hierarchy | surplus | food storage | salmon economies | Northwest Coast hunter-gatherers | archaeology of early farmers | bioarchaeology | stature/height decline | teeth health | disease burden | zoonoses | cross-species infection | Neolithic fertility increase | population pressure and “intensification” | chiefdoms | states | empires | ecology vs culture debate | materialist vs idealist | concentration–dispersion | colonialism | exploitation | land rights | climate change | human futures

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The science of human origins keeps producing new theories. But are we any closer to telling a true story of human origins? Or are we simply drowning in data? 

Earlier this November, the chair of UCSD’s Department of Anthropology invited me to explore this question in a campus talk. You can either listen to the recording as a podcast (below) or read my illustrated essay (further below).

My optimistic claim was that underneath many of the field’s important debates, a powerful story has been emerging. At its core, this is a story about calories, cooperation, and climate change. And at the centre of it are not men hunting or women gathering.

At the centre of it are children playing and learning.

What do you think? Do I succeed in connecting the dots of existing consensus? Or is this another “just-so” story amongst others? Let me know in the comments!

For specific references and comments on the links to existing debates, see both the footnotes and the bibliographical essay at the bottom.

Listen (42min): Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube Audio | Other players

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Chapter 1: Setting the Stage

The story begins around 60 million years ago, in the vast lands vacated by the extinct dinosaurs.

Around this time, our ancestors were small, squirrel-like creatures moving through dense forests.

They lived mostly on insects and fruits, and their arboreal sweet tooth proved to be an especially good idea: fruit trees, called “angiosperms”, were the rising stars of the forests of this age.

As time went on, the ancient trees became filled with descendants of this early ancestor. They developed the two things that make us primates so special: nimble fingers and sharp eyesight. It takes little speculation to see how these might have benefited creatures jumping from branch to branch.

Yet there was a third trait, more powerful than even fingers or eyes, that our primate ancestors developed: their lives grew longer, with many more years spent in youthful play. In technical terms, primates slowed down their life history.

How could primates afford this luxury? Likely because the trees were a place of greater safety. Yes, snakes slithered in the branches and raptors made the occasional attack from the air, but as any chimpanzee will tell you today, the trees are safer than the ground. Unsurprisingly, chimps tend to spend their nights up in the trees.1

In greater safety, greater investment in children becomes possible. This is a well-known generalisation in biology: increase the predators and get short childhoods; decrease predators and get longer childhoods, with more investment from the parents.

With longer childhoods, our primate ancestors were also able to grow their brains more. The brains didn’t only grow “outside”, becoming bigger and bigger, but also “inside”, becoming denser and denser. Indeed, the rhesus monkey’s small brain hides as many cortical neurons as the giraffe’s much bigger one.

Primate brains are neural supercomputers. And the bigger the primate, the bigger the (potential) advantage. Primate brains scale well, not losing any density as they grow bigger.

We hardly need to state the implications for the human story.

So this is the setting: a primordial forest of relative safety, with longer childhoods of play, wonder, and brain growth.

Yet the peace was not to last — not for our ancestors, at least.

Change was coming.

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Chapter 2: The Drama

Enter climate change.

Soon after the end of the dinosaurs, the Earth started to cool down. Eventually, the weathers became more erratic, too, giving rise to the Pleistocene with its famous “Ice Ages” and the less famous “interglacials” — brief warm windows during which hippos could swim in British rivers.

As the weather cooled, Africa’s dense jungles started breaking apart. Sparser woodlands opened up. Webs of dry savanna lands soon appeared between the woods.

Africa’s primates faced a challenge: stay in the shrinking forest, or learn to venture out of the tree’s safety.

Our ancestors opted for the latter.

This story has been told many times, often with details that don’t hold up to scrutiny. Terms like “Savanna Hypothesis” and “East Side Story” have become dead labels. Indeed, each story was too specific in its own way. But the big picture is clear: humans evolved in an era of shrinking jungles and growing grasslands. Our ancestors surfed these tides of time: they became increasingly reliant on foods growing far from the jungle. We can see this easily from carbon isotopes, which, by a wonderful luck of chemistry, leave a different mark in open environments than in denser forests. The carbon label associated with an open habitat is C4; for a thick forest habitat, it is C3. Find any graph on this matter, and you’ll see the same trend.

Here is one graph, from a talk by Zeray Alemseged. The details might be difficult to see —the big picture hardly so.

Chapter 3: The Pains of Posture

As our ancestors left the trees, evolution started moulding their bodies for life on land. They had probably moved on the trees in a somewhat upright position, like gibbons do today. On land, they faced a choice: descend on a chimp-like “knuckle-walking” posture, or straighten their backs further, becoming fully committed to a life on two legs. Evolution opted for the latter. And as early humans committed to a life on land, they also committed to a posture with a fully straight back, their heads pointing to the stars.2

Humans are hardly unique in our tendency to travel on two legs alone. Dinosaurs, like T. rex, used to run on two legs. Ostriches do so today. Closer to us, kangaroos hop on two legs. Yet all these creatures have a tail. Using their heavy tail to balance their weight, they lean forward as they move. For body mechanics, this is a much easier position.

In the absence of a tail, humans adapted a most peculiar position, our head pointing straight up, and our back curved in a slight S-shape for support.

The human posture is an ergonomic disaster. Our modern lifestyles amplify the problems, but back pains and twisted ankles have been with us from the very beginning. And to make matters worse, we only have those two legs: twist one ankle and only have one working. A dog would have three.

Our posture makes injuries both more common and more problematic. Yet our ancestors did survive injuries in their legs and feet.3 They could not have done so alone. Someone was helping — perhaps many “someones”. More on this soon. But first, let’s continue on the pains of posture.

Our posture’s most devastating consequence is a tight birth canal. Don’t let anyone tell you that before Western medicine, women were fine giving birth alone. The biomechanics are not designed for this — just Google “human fetal rotation”. Births are a dangerous business across the world. And they are rarely done without support.4

Nor did the risks end with childbirth: as our toes were moulded for walking, and as our fur was lost to help cool the body walking in direct sunlight, our babies lost the capacity to cling to their parents. The chimpanzee mother can climb a tree with a baby clinging to her fur. Human babies cannot cling even to a still parent.

Yet despite all of its many risks, we do stand upright.

Why?

This is far from a settled matter. It might have to do with the energy efficiency of long-distance walking — and running. It also allowed us to spot predators and prey from far away. Finally, it freed our hands to carry things back to the camp. (This is the surest way to make a chimp walk upright: give it bananas to carry with two hands.)5

The reasons we became upright are elusive, but the consequences are more important: We get more injuries, our injuries are more problematic, our births are difficult, and our children are challenging to care for.

These pains of posture bring us to the climax of the story.

Everything said so far suggests that humans should not exist. Just imagine being a cosmic scientist making evolutionary bets 3 million years ago. The reasonable bet would go as follows:

Hominins’ increasingly risky lifestyle on land will lead to shorter childhoods. Together with the tighter birth canals, this will lead to a decrease in brain size. Instead of big brains, evolution will explore bodily defences against the dangerous land beasts, whether bigger teeth, stronger claws, or so on.

The bet would have made sense.

Yet here we are.

How?

I believe that to explain this puzzle, we don’t only explain a big chunk of human origins: we also illuminate major aspects of the human condition today.

Chapter 4: The Human Condition

Humans didn’t survive by growing tougher bodies. It is a cliché, but it is worth repeating: We didn’t become stronger; we became smarter. Instead of tougher claws, we get better tools. In the long run, this “allowed us to win every evolutionary arms race”.

Indeed, from the first fully land-living humans, c. 2 million years ago, our brain size has been skyrocketing.

In one sense, it was easy for humans to grow a smart brain. Recall the “primate advantage”: our brains are miracles of design, and able to pack a lot of neurons into a small space. Our brains are hardly the biggest out there, but they are packed with neurons. In the cortex — the “crust” around the brain most relevant to problem solving — humans have over twice as many neurons as any other species.6

The primate’s brain architecture made our super-brain possible. But it did not make it easy. To grow the human brain, our ancestors had to overcome two hurdles: one of time, the other of food.

First, the brain needs time to grow. The problems started from childbirth — remember those big heads in a narrow birth canal — and they continued to the long childhoods required for the brain to grow. So how did our ancestors do this despite abandoning the safety of the canopy?

Humans had to stick together.

This took many forms. Most obviously, vigilance and alarm calls became important. To fend off predators, spears and projectiles became useful, but throwing rocks helps little if facing a lion alone.

Child-rearing saw a more subtle yet powerful change.

Chimpanzee mothers do the work alone. Humans are strikingly different. From the moment of birth onwards, human babies are a matter of shared concern. Human dads are far from perfect, but many do stick around; so do many grandmothers.7 The whole village is alarmed if a child goes missing.

But the brain needs more than time to grow. It needs food.

The numbers are striking: the mushy insides of our skulls are only 2% of our body weight, but they suck 20% of our base-level metabolism. During childhood, that number climbs to over 50%.

How did our ancestors pay for this expensive organ? This puzzle becomes all the more striking when you notice what was already happening to the human body: our teeth shrank, and our bellies became slimmer.8

How did humans unlock calories to feed their brains with less digestive power?

There are many options. Cooking food is one. But even before fire, humans could process food by slicing, pounding, and grinding. Stone tools became very handy indeed. Tools also allowed humans to access fatty, easy-to-digest foods like bone marrow. Food storage might also have led, first accidentally, to fermentation. Whatever your preferred mix, the outcome is the same: humans depend on food technology. And technology is not in our genes. It must be taught. We are biologically dependent on culture.9

Indeed, I’d suggest that three kinds of “professions” illuminate the puzzle of human origins. First, we had to survive by sticking together. Nurses and midwives are the obvious extensions of this, but so are mundane jobs that depend on teamwork and cooperation. Second, we had to process our food with tools — a direct platform to get cooks, yes, but also all those other professionals who work with technology. Finally, we had to pass ideas to the next generation: we’ve always needed teachers. Without these roles, we would never have appeared.

Yet here we are.

We cook our food and take care of our children. We twist our ankles and visit the doctors. Perhaps more strikingly, some of us spend our adult days reading educational ideas from the glass screen of complex tools, each one crafted by the teamwork of thousands of tinkerers called “engineers”.

A bizarre outcome if there ever was one.

Endnotes

Thanks for reading till the end! In the talk, I also dwell briefly on the origin of language — a theme I’m less optimistic about. I believe this topic merits a more thorough exploration. Stay tuned.

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In this piece, I have purposefully avoided heavy referencing to specific articles. I had two reasons: to increase readability and to avoid leaning heavily on a single finding here or there. Indeed, I’ve tried to make claims that are so general as to be difficult to reference with a single source. This said, I do rely on a handful of recent findings, and more generally, I do emphasise certain strands of scholarship over others.

Specific claims and easily misunderstood claims are explained in footnotes. Here is a more general roadmap for the bibliography.

Chapter 1: A lot of this discussion was foregrounded by my conversation with Tim Coulson and Suzana-Herculano Houzel. You’ll find more sources there. The links between a) “safe canopy”, b) slower life history, and c) increased brain investment are still somewhat speculative, but each claim is well-supported by itself, especially the latter two. For the first one, see footnote 1.

Chapter 2: The graphs do most of the heavy lifting. For a longer conversation about the search for a “post-savanna hypothesis”, see my chat with Yale’s Jessica Thompson. Denis Su is one of the scholars most critical to the savanna hypothesis — for good reasons — but I don’t see anything in her work that goes against the broad trend as suggested here.

Chapter 3: I draw heavily on Jeremy DeSilva’s First Steps and Dean Falk’s Botanical Age. Very few of the details are controversial, though there is a lot of debate about the origins of bipedalism as well as the details of the obstetric dilemma. I don’t think either debate matters greatly to the story when told on this level of generality.

Chapter 4: Most of the statements are unifying themes behind modern debates. For example, there are debates about “who helped” the mother and “which food technologies” fuelled the brain growth. Both debates point to a shared premise: someone helped, and technology was used. For past conversations on child-rearing, see episodes with Sarah Hrdy, Kristen Hawkes, Helen Fisher, and Nikhil Chaudhary. For food, see Ian Tattersall and Chris Stringer.

Free will is one of the long-standing problems in philosophy. The modern formulation goes something like this:

All actions follow the laws of physics. The movements of the human body are no different. Therefore, all our actions are determined by the laws of physics. And these laws give no space for exceptions. You were always going to click on this article. The choice wasn’t yours.

Tim Coulson disagrees.

Coulson is the ex-head of biology at Oxford and the author of The Universal History of Us. Earlier this year, he helped me kickstart the “Origins of Humankind”, guiding us from the origins of life to the rise of humans. This was a fascinating conversation — one of my favourites so far — but it wasn’t all.

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Towards the end of the recording, Coulson and I discussed free will. It didn’t quite fit the context, so I left it out of the episode. I kept the section in storage, waiting for an opportune moment of release. Here it is, finally, as the epilogue to this fall’s brain series.

You can listen wherever you get your shows.

Prefer reading? Keep scrolling for some highlights.

Listen (16min): Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Other Players

Highligths

Coulson’s argument proceeds in two parts.

First, we do make choices. There is nothing mystical here, just the evolution of muscles and brains. The passage is worth quoting at length.

The evolution of muscles permits movement, which is the ability to, temporarily at least, resist the forces of gravity and electromagnetism. A rock, or indeed an adult sponge, is unable to resist these forces, but every time you walk, you use energy to resist gravity, lifting your feet and placing them in a new position. .. Being able to move opens up the way for choice and the option of making decisions: should I go over there, or stay here? The evolution of movement makes free will, and consciousness, a possibility even if not a necessity.

In short, we evolved the brain, and our brain makes choices. Nothing odd about that.

But could we have chosen otherwise? This is where the problem of scientific determinism comes to play.

Let’s imagine that the universe is running like a clockwork, determined to run as it does by the necessity of its own mechanical operations. Would this make our choices “unfree”?

This is a common intuition, though it is typically rejected by professional philosophers. Indeed, a majority of professional philosophers don’t think that we should contrast free will to physical determinism. According to this camp, it is bondage, not causation, that freedom should be contrasted to.1 Yet many wonder if we can really speak of “freedom” if we could not have chosen otherwise. This sceptical view has recently received a heavyweight supporter with neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky writing a book against free will.

Coulson agrees with Sapolsky in principle. For both biologists, freedom to choose means that we could have chosen otherwise. To make this concrete, Coulson writes that:

“If I could be a god, I would like to identically recreate the conditions at the instant our universe came into being, run the clock forward, and examine how many of the resulting universes develop to become a home for you and me.”

The question is: would you decide to read this article in each of these universes? If so, your choice wasn’t really free. Or so Coulson argues. Luckily, he doesn’t think that this is the case.

“If I was to rerun my replicate universe experiment, each outcome would be different”

Why so?

This issue hinges on the interpretation of quantum physics.

The Quantum Question

Many readers will be well aware that a standard interpretation of particle physics suggests that the universe “plays dice” in Einstein’s frustrated wording. This matter is all but settled, but Coulson is firmly on the side of the traditional interpretation. As he explained to me:

“Some physicists have tried to come up with ways to … turn the [findings] deterministic, and one of them is the Many Worlds theory, which says everything that can happen does happen. .. It’s a nice hypothesis, but it’s completely untestable at the moment. I think its nothing more than wishful thinking.”

But does the quantum randomness really solve the problem?

Assume that the traditional interpretation is correct and the universe is indeed playing dice. So far, so good. But the dice games being played are happening at the tiniest scales, and just as all casino owners know that, randomness disappears when you move to bigger scales. The house always wins. The same applies to physics: most objects, from cars to planets, can be studied perfectly well without taking the tiny dice games into account.

So what about the brain?

A Quantum Brain?

Many biological processes do exhibit quantum behaviour. Photosynthesis is one example. And as Coulson told me:

“There’s some work out there saying that consciousness itself and the way that brains work uses quantum behaviour of particles.”

He was quick to add that this is “far from proven!”, but all the same, Coulson was optimistic that we will find some areas where quantum biology does creep into neuroscience. If so, the conclusion is clear: our brains are not deterministic.

Perhaps so. But do we even need quantum biology to show this? I suggested that the situation might be even more favourable to Coulson. After all, quantum biology searches for biological processes that use quantum physics to their advantage. But there is a much dirtier way that quantum randomness might impact the brain.

As any science teacher knows, the classic way to explain “heat” to students is to ask students to imagine a room of balls, all in motion. The faster the motion, the higher the temperature. This “Brownian motion” exists everywhere (except at absolute zero), and if quantum mechanics is random, so is Brownian motion. For years now, I’ve held the firm hunch that our neurons must be impacted by Brownian motion all the time. The only paper I’ve seen on the topic supports the hunch. If so, fancy quantum biology is not necessary for Coulson’s argument. Our brains are constantly impacted by the hot noise of quantum dice games.

I was keen to hear Coulson’s view on this, but unfortunately, I expressed myself badly during the conversation. After some confusion, we simply moved on. (Comment if you have an opinion!)

But where does this leave us?

Between Chaos and Necessity

Many readers are bound to find the matter inconclusive. Some will insist on a different interpretation of quantum mechanics. Others will think that quantum physics is a red herring, as the very contrast between determinism and freedom is misleading. But either way, Coulson’s position is a good reminder of one thing: the debate about free will lives on, and will probably live on. Don’t let anyone tell you it was solved by Newton, Darwin, or the discovery of synaptic transmission.

Our conversation ended on another interesting point: it is not just free will that leads him to search for a point between pure determinism and complete randomness. It is the science of consciousness itself.

Coulson writes:

“Scientists have come up with ways of describing these electrical patterns by placing them on a scale from purely random, through to highly structured and entirely predictable. The electrical activity of a waking, conscious brain when you are thinking about the challenges of daily life lies between these two extremes.”

Somewhere between randomness and necessity lies not just consciousness, Coulson hopes, but our very freedom.

Is he right? Let us know in the comments!

Listen (1h): Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube audio | Other players

Science has learned much about the brain. But how well do we understand this organ of the mind? Are we close to cracking the neural code? Is a groundbreaking theory of consciousness just around the corner?

In the past four episodes, we’ve heard from some leading brain scientists about the remarkable progress in the field. From the evolution of intelligence to the brain chemistry of addiction, there’s plenty to learn from them.

But despite all the progress, we are surprisingly far from understanding the brain. Or so argues Matthew Cobb, a neuroscientist and historian.

Cobb is the author of The Idea of the Brain: A History. The book tells the story of neuroscience from the Greeks to the present day.

Cobb’s book is full of colourful stories about how we got to where we are. But more importantly, the story he tells is a humbling reminder of the limits of our understanding of the brain. Indeed, despite all our advances in neuroscience, we are not even close to “cracking the neural code”. As someone who spent his career trying to understand the maggot’s nose, Cobb told me that:

“I am  not terribly interested in human consciousness because I don’t think it’s a doable problem.”

This is not just a repeated version of the “hard problem of consciousness”. The problem goes deeper: indeed, our lack of understanding is so deep, Cobb explains, that we cannot even understand simple neural systems like the lobster’s stomach. The anecdote is revealing: the lobster’s stomach has around 30 neurons, all of which can be modelled in a simulation. Yet the scientist in question, Dr Eve Marder, is still unable to predict exactly how two simple rhythms arise from these 30 humble cells.1 (The lesson for me? Don’t bet your immortality on uploading your brain’s 80 billion neurons to a computer simulation…)

This is not just a problem for those interested in explaining the brain. This is also tragic, Cobb argues, for those who struggle with mental illness.

“No pharmaceutical company is trying to solve the mental health crisis. They got very lucky very quickly with a handful of [psychiatric] drugs. But the mechanisms involved remain very unclear.”

The outcome? There hasn’t been anything new in decades. And “there won’t be”.2

Indeed, Cobb thinks the situation is even worse than with treatment-resistant antibiotics.

“With antibiotics, we can imagine all sorts of things ways to solve the problem with AI or so. I don’t think there is anything equivalent in that kind of speculative futurology of psychopharmacology.“

But is the problem really so deep? Do we really need to cure schizophrenia or explain the lobster’s stomach before we can explain consciousness? We discuss this and much more in the episode.

Enjoy! Or head here for more episodes on brain science.

Listen (1h): Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube audio | Other players

Fact Checking

Contrary to the precise phrasing in the episode, a handful of new psychiatric drugs are entering the market. The general observation remains well-supported.3

If you spot an error in this or other episodes, please comment on this post.

Mentions

Names: Matthew Cobb | Galen | Aristotle | Andreas Vesalius | William Harvey | William Shakespeare | Queen Victoria | Karl Marx | Pierre Paul Broca | René Descartes | Eve Marder | David Marr | Francis Crick | Geoffrey Hinton | John Hopfield | Warren McCulloch | Walter Pitts | John von Neumann | Alan Turing | Kenneth Craik | Sir John Eccles | Elon Musk | Nicolaus Copernicus | Galileo Galilei

Terms and concepts: recurrent laryngeal nerve | phrenology | localization of function | strokes/aphasia | Broca’s area | plasticity | hemispheric lateralization | corpus callosum | split-brain | consciousness | anesthesia (halothane, etc.) | drugs & neuromodulators | SSRIs | serotonin | dopamine | psychedelics | lobster stomatogastric ganglion | three-body-problem | EEG “brainwaves” (gamma, theta, etc.) | David Marr’s levels | neural code | PDP / connectionism | backpropagation | LLMs (e.g. ChatGPT, DeepSeek) | biological plausibility vs engineering | von Neumann architecture | McCulloch–Pitts logical neurons | neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) | “Jennifer Aniston” cells | single-unit recording | connectomics | Human Brain Project | cochlear implants | BCI / robotic arm control | tetraplegia | problem of consciousness | enactive cognition

The monsoon winds created history’s first waves of merchant globalisation. They carried Roman diplomats to China and linked Muslim merchants from Africa to Indonesia. Despite the Silk Road’s brand value, the camel-powered caravans never compared to the oceanic travellers in terms of freight or might. The India-centred “Golden Road” was once the autobahn of global trade.1

In some ways, things haven’t changed. A handful of trains carry goods across the Eurasian steppe, but they are a side note in European trade with China. Cargo ships do most of the heavy lifting, all crossing the Indian Ocean.

But as some things stay the same, others change. India no longer plays a central role in this story.

What happened?

Take the following numbers: At the height of the Mughal Empire, India produced around 20% of the global GDP.2 When the British left in 1947, the number was close to 2%. Was this decline inevitable? Or did the British rule destroy India’s prosperity? And putting aside tales of long-lost glory, what has all of this meant for the bread and butter of an average Indian?

Few people alive can address these questions with the insight and rigour of Bishnupriya Gupta. Her magisterial book, An Economic History of India, was published in February 2025. I was lucky to get a copy before publication and savoured every page. Dense with original data, the book became one of the most colourful in my library, full of highlights, notes, and cross-references. After reading, I also had the privilege of engaging in a long discussion with Gupta herself, even giving a talk about the topic at her book launch.

Here is the story I heard.

The podcast version of these conversations is now available in a mini-series titled “What About India?”. You can listen to it, as well as the earlier “What About China?” series, wherever you get your shows.

For a shorter take, you can listen to my live talk on the subject at the British Academy.

You’ll find more links to the episodes at the end of the article.

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1. India Before Britain

Where was India before British colonialism? Not behind, argued Kenneth Pomeranz in his iconic book The Great Divergence.

In a welcome pushback against European self-arrogance, Pomeranz argued that Europe’s rise wasn’t an inevitable rise of a “Western civilisation”. Instead, it was an abrupt event, the result of a somewhat accidental windfall which helped one particular corner of Europe: Britain. The windfall was cheap energy and free acres. The cheap energy came from England’s abundant coal mines. The acres came from America. Together, they allowed more and more Britons to leave their farming lifestyles and move to cities. With an ample supply of life’s bare necessities, the British could focus on industry. Not so in China or India—or other corners of Europe, for that matter. Eyes on the plough, these nations were not within the purview of the revolution to come.

Pomeranz’s “coal-and-colonies” explanation is interesting in its own right. But more important to the historians of India is Pomeranz’s timing of the Great Divergence. According to him, the world before 1800 was a “world of surprising similarities”—a world where no one would guess it was Britain that would rise above Bengal or Canton.

This was a bold hypothesis. Yet it opened more questions than it answered. As Gupta explained to me:

“Pomerantz’s book is pathbreaking, but the data in that book was more limited. So people started gathering data on wages and prices to see where exactly Britain was relative to India and China.”

Gupta has been at the forefront of this project, working closely with her collaborator, Stephen Broadberry.

So, has Pomeranz’s hypothesis held up?

Not too well.

The current data suggests that the Great Divergence started long before the Industrial Revolution. Some debate remains, but according to Gupta, even Pomeranz has softened some of his views.

This is important for the analysis of India’s path. Indian living standards started declining before British colonialism. This is not to let the British off the hook. As we shall see, their colonial policies entrenched many negative trends in the Indian economy. But they cannot be blamed for everything. The British arrived in India in decline.

You can see the early divergence in GDP figures.

The data starts from 1600, a moment following the reigns of Emperor Akbar and Queen Elizabeth I. At this point, the economies of India and Britain were not wildly different. Britain’s GDP per capita was higher, yes, but not enough to put the countries into different leagues. (Indeed, the 60% difference is not far from a UK-US comparison today.) The gap shrinks towards 1650 but accelerates after. Importantly, this happened a century before the East India Company started swallowing Indian territories in 1757.

But GDP is an abstract term. What did this mean for the average Indian?

Data on Indian and British wages present a dilemma.

On the one hand, workers in India and Britain had roughly similar living standards, even more so than suggested by GDP. Looking at wages in terms of food and cloth, Indian wages were over 80% of those in Britain, as close as 95% in the mid-17th Century. Again, India is just a bit behind, and again, the British economy goes up while the Indian one goes down. This bolsters the trend shown by GDP numbers.

However, note that the numbers above, whether for GDP or wages, are adjusted for the cost of living. They reveal much about how much food or clothing workers could buy—the key question for material well-being. But they hide an interesting difference: Already in 1600, British prices were much, much higher. To maintain the same quality of life, Britons had to earn more silver. And they did. Looking at wages in silver, Indian workers were low-paid already in 1600, earning barely 20% of British wages. (Based on my informal research, this is similar to the wage difference between construction workers in Mumbai and Manchester today.)

In short, the British might not have had much more bread on their plates, but any savings from British wages could buy more stuff from the world market. From this angle, the roots of the British headstart crawl deeper into the medieval mist.

The high silver wage suggests that, for whatever reason, the British economy was more mature already in 1600, long before any dramatic expansion of the British Empire. These advantages played out. During the next century or two, the British economy pushed ahead. In India, the opposite happened. The drop in Indian living standards was dramatic, with the “grain wage” falling by a devastating 50%.

So what happened? Why did the small gap in 1650 widen to a big gap in 1750? And why was Britain so much richer in silver to start with?

Gupta didn’t pretend to know. But she gave some thoughts. For example, she mentioned that Britain urbanised early and was particularly affected by the Black Death. (In a curious reversal of fortunes, Britain’s high mortality led to a smaller workforce and higher wages.)

Turning to the Indian decline, she mentioned internal wars as one culprit. Indian farmers were also in trouble. Most of the best land was already in use. Farmers were scraping the barrel for new land.

But whatever the murky causes, we see the consequences plain and clear. Life in India became increasingly difficult. And it wasn’t about to get easier. The British didn’t just inherit a struggling economy—they reshaped it, often in ways that deepened India’s challenges.

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2. India Under the British

Today, very few historians argue that Britain was a blessing for India (though Niall Ferguson has tried something of that sort). Indeed, the Indian economy stagnated during British rule.

Agriculture was the heart of Indian life, and the British did little to boost their farming — except for exporting cash crops like cotton and opium. As Gupta told me:

“A lot of the British [agricultural improvements] were targeted towards the export sector. And what to me was a shocking piece of data is that if you look at rice productivity in the rice growing areas, this is negative in 1900 compared to 1600. The output per acre was higher in 1600 in all types of agricultural products.”

This is a striking failure from a coloniser who had, on its soil, managed to pull off one of the greatest agricultural revolutions in world history.

So, what kind of a failure was this? On the one hand, the British arrived in India in decline. They didn’t change things around, but Gupta’s macroeconomic data doesn’t suggest that they actively made things worse, either. Yet as I framed the alternative angle to Gupta:

“The British rule in Bengal is bookended by some of the worst famines in Bengal’s history that we have records of: first in 1770, and then during the Second World War.”

These famines were not produced by mere lack of sound policies, a kind of “too-little-too-late” situation. They were textbook examples of colonial violence. So were the Bengal famines outliers? Or emblems of the whole imperial project?

Gupta started by acknowledging that “this is a very important question”. Instead of a complete answer, she explained how these dynamics played out in the context of railways and the 1943 Bengali famine.

Let’s start with those infamous railways — a common topic for apologists of the empire.

“When the first railway lines were built, they did connect the ports to the hinterland. That's the picture you would get in 1870. ”

In short, they served the British interests in shipping raw materials from India. But:

“…as you move over time, in 1910, you'll see the railway network becoming quite dense. It’s not only connecting the ports to the interior. [Now] you could ship grain from a place of plenty to a place of disaster very quickly. And there is now enough evidence to show that the railways did mitigate the effect of harvest failures.”

We should be careful not to overblow the significance of this finding. As Shashi Tharoor once said, “many countries have built railways without having to be colonised to do so”. But counterfactuals aside, the railways did eventually benefit India. And this makes the Great Bengali Famine of 1943 even less necessary. In Gupta’s words:

“There are discussions on whether there was a harvest failure. I think that doesn't matter. Even if there was a harvest failure, you could have [used those railways to] move grain from other places to Bengal!”

Ironically, one of the possible upsides of the British rule — the railway network — makes the Bengali famine look all the worse for the Raj’s record.

But what about other aspects of the British rule?

Beyond railways, one of the hottest topics surrounds India’s “deindustrialisation”.

Here is Shashi Tharoor in his Inglorious Empire:

“[Before the British rule] the Indian textile industry became more creative, innovative and productive; exports boomed. But when the British traders took power, everything changed. In power, the British were, in a word, ruthless. … The soldiers of the East India Company systematically [smashed] the looms of some Bengali weavers and, according to at least one contemporary account (as well as widespread, if unverifiable, belief), breaking their thumbs so they could not ply their craft.”

Gupta did not name names, but she was generally unfavourable towards this approach. First, she was sceptical of the East India Company breaking an industry on which their trade depended.3 Perhaps more importantly, Gupta noted that the textile boom wasn’t a pre-British story of broad-based wealth in India. It didn’t only coincide with the rule of the East India Company—it also coincided with generally decreasing living standards.

The boom in luxury textiles was just that: a luxury. It certainly made some weavers and traders rich. But weaving was a tiny part of India’s economy. This story of gold and glory meant little for most Indians. As the graph below shows, India’s GDP didn’t give much of a damn about the rise and fall of the exported textiles.

This is not to deny that India did lose its industrious edge. And British legislators certainly played a role. In a textbook example of uneven trade policy, Britain first blocked most imports from India to protect its burgeoning cloth industry, then changed the rules when it suited them, flooding Indian markets with cheap machine-made cloth. This created a shock, which Gupta compared to the “China shock” in recent decades. The China shock is an interesting analogy, though, for neither shock was all bad for the receiving end.

“Indian weavers were the first to buy cheaper British yarn.”

The consumers also benefited, as they could now afford more clothes. This isn’t to diminish the human tragedy of the weavers who did go hungry. And as I suggested to Gupta, an independent India would have had much more leeway in their trade policy. The shock would have happened, but with more elbow room for India. Gupta nodded but added a cautionary note: even with elbow room, it is difficult to fight a shock this large. This seems like a fair point, especially when you are fighting against an item which poor consumers use to stay warm at night.

As a side note, the problem of boycotting cheap foreign cloth reminded me of Satyajit Ray’s film, Ghare Baire. If you are interested, the iconic movie is freely available on YouTube with English subtitles! This is historical fiction at its best.

What about mimicking the British industry? Indian wages were lower. Why didn’t Indians combine their cheap labour with imported British machines?

“Britain didn't allow the export of textile machinery until the middle of the 19th century. A lot of the technology that went to the US was taken by the artisans themselves, or kind of smuggled in. [The restrictions were lifted only] in the middle of the 19th century. And the Indian entrepreneurs did respond.”

India never regained control of the cotton weaving industry. But interestingly, they did so in the jute industry. This never happened on a scale that would compensate for India’s agricultural stagnation. Overall, economic growth was around 0% throughout the last decades of British rule. But it did make some entrepreneurs rich. Indeed, Indian inequality peaked before WWII. In 1940, the richest 0.1% of Indians captured a breathtaking 9% of India’s income. And these were not only British elites. These were primarily Indian industrialists in Bombay and Gujarat.

Inequality was entrenched by another trend of British policy: education.

“The British wanted to get a group of English-speaking, highly literate Indians who could be absorbed in the civil service. And you see these universities developing in Calcutta, Delhi, Madras, Bombay, going back to the 19th century.”

But primary education was not on their radar.

“However literate some Indians were, this doesn't really matter because the average Indian was still not educated. Literacy rate at the time of independence is 17%.”

Tellingly, there was a moment during the British Raj when the share of Indians in higher education was comparable to that of France, whilst the share of Indians in primary education was lower than in Brazil. India had exceedingly eloquent elites—think of Gandhi or Nehru—but deeply illiterate masses.

“Could the education policy relate to deindustrialisation?” I asked. I was referring to the theory of my past guest, Oded Galor, author of The Journey of Humanity.

Here is how I relayed his argument:

“Britain starts to use India as the supplier of raw materials, especially of cotton for the British machines. If you're industrial, you have a business incentive to increase literacy and numeracy. But you have to be purely benevolent to educate your farmers. So maybe you don't see [India’s deindustrialisation] in the GDP numbers, but it really locks India on this kind of agricultural path where primary education doesn't make economic sense.”

And this is not all:

[Galor] has a kind of additional flip to this: he sees education as the reason for families to start having fewer children. And therefore he would say the Indian population has been growing whilst the British GDP per capita has been growing — more people in India, more prosperous people in Britain.”

In a striking data point, Galor notes that:

“Since 1820, the size of the Indian population relative to that in the UK has doubled while income per capita in the UK relative to that in India has also doubled.”

Gupta’s response was hesitantly approving of Galor’s approach. She did note that educating farmers is not always a waste of time — a “purely benevolent act”, as I suggested. During the Green Revolution, for example, more educated farmers were quicker to employ new seeds and fertilisers. However, it is clear that most private individuals don’t do this from their own incentive. And she added:

“ If the private incentive is not there, it's for the government to be even more proactive.  And that's why I think the British failure is that much more serious. Primary education in every country has been spread by government interventions: compulsory schooling, banning child labour, and all those things. And none of these things happened [in British India].

Curiously:

“What did happen is every time a labour law was passed in Britain, Lancashire lobbied to get that passed in India, [fearing that] Indian industries got some advantage by not having labour laws. That happened almost instantaneously. But the education laws were never transferred to India.“

Ironically, the British “civilising mission” in India failed most dramatically in education, where its self-arrogance was most pronounced. And as we shall see, this will play an outsized role in the story of independent India.

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3. Independent India

India declared independence in 1947. The blood of the partition was being spilt, but in both India and Pakistan, the economic policy was finally in their own hands. And things did change. They changed for the better.

The first decades of independence are often seen as an economic failure; as a misguided attempt to emulate the Soviet Union in a pluralistic democracy with little capacity to implement an ambitious industrial policy — a “worst of both worlds” situation for the economy.

Gupta challenged this view. Although the growth was low compared to what followed, it was a break from the prolonged stagnation under the British, moving from basically 0% during the later Raj to 1.4% during the Nehru-Gandhi period.

And the growth served the people: the income share of the top 0.1% had dropped almost tenfold by 1980.

It is also worth noting that Indian businesses didn’t see the state as the problem.

“The people in the industry welcomed an active role. They were kind of unsure of investing in high-tech sectors. This market was not well known to them.”

Of course, India’s Soviet–style policies weren’t a happy-ever-after story. Abandoning them in the 80s and 90s led to immediate results. GDP grew faster. So did inequality, but the growth served the masses, too:

“The fast-growing provinces have seen faster reductions in poverty.”

All this said, the question remains: why is the Indian economy so perpetually behind East Asian countries (excluding North Korea)?

On this front, Gupta agreed with my past guest, Yasheng Huang: East Asian success is essentially an equation of education.

As Yasheng Huang explains in his excellent TED Talk, the main difference between India and China is not a difference between authoritarianism and democracy, nor a difference in infrastructure. There is a difference in literacy, especially for women. Female literacy in China was over double that of India in 1990. This is a striking difference, even if we forget the difficulty of mastering the Chinese writing system—a system I still struggle with after 7 years of learning!

From TED Talk: Does democracy stifle economic growth? See also my Origins of Modern China for more context.

Gupta’s work complements Huang’s conclusion by showing that India’s disadvantage was entrenched by British colonial policy. We saw earlier that the British tried to produce a select few highly educated elites—a handful of Gandhis and Nehrus who could work as middle managers of the empire. This strategy backfired in the eloquence of India’s independence movement. For the masses, though, it produced little improvement in literacy or numeracy. In this regard, Japan was a different coloniser. In both Taiwan and Korea, they invested heavily in primary education.

But what about China? I asked. Very little Japanese influence here. Doesn’t China demand something closer to Yasheng Huang’s theory that links East Asia’s educational attainment to an age-old Confucian culture where political power is distributed by civil service exams open to all men? Wouldn’t this culture of literacy-based social mobility — an ethos across historic East Asia — be a better candidate for the region’s overall advantage in educational attainment?

Gupta agreed wholeheartedly.

“Within this civil service exam system, you had an inbuilt path to social mobility. But India had an inbuilt mechanism in the opposite direction. [In the caste system], certain groups of people had to be literate because they needed literacy for their occupations. So think of the Brahmins as the priests; they needed to read the religious texts. Or think of the traders; they had to maintain their accounting books. When modern education came along, these groups had the advantage of being able to enter into new occupations like lawyers, doctors, and engineers. So there was a kind of interaction between the objectives of the British government and the society itself, where certain groups benefited from this [educational] system.”

The British didn’t invent the caste system, but their educational policy reinforced the existing divides in a curious example of “systemic casteism”.

All this made India less competitive than East Asia in the 20th Century. But it did produce one surprising advantage: it made India an overachiever in the service sector, especially IT. Indian elites kept being highly educated — much more so than in many other low-income countries. These English-speaking elites could run highly successful IT companies. Modern Hyderabad is a living testament to this legacy. So are the Indian-born CEOs of Silicon Valley.

Despite its socialist leanings, independent India never corrected the vast gap between educated elites and illiterate masses. For Gupta, this is one of the great mistakes of Nehru and his followers.

“I think Nehru was an incredible visionary who did some fantastic things. But on education, I don't see the policies to be that proactive.”

Focusing on primary education could be all the more critical for a country which has thus far failed to achieve rapid poverty reductions without an explosion of economic inequality. As I suggested to Gupta, investing in broad-based education is one of the few tools that can give you progress on both fronts. She agreed.

“Education, I think, is absolutely key to everything.”

For now, the world’s largest democracy has been unable to correct the educational imbalance left over by the unholy alliance of British colonialism and the caste system. But for the elites, this has created a curious combination of world-class education and the living costs of a low-income country. This was no recipe for East Asian–style growth sponsored by gadgets Made in India. But it was a recipe for the India of today: a country of contrasts that so fascinates foreign travellers like me, confused at the sight of eloquent urbanites riding on rusty rickshaws, surrounded by the vibrant chaos of a forward-looking nation still shaped by the age of empires.

Podcast links

• My talk at the British Academy

• Podcast episodes with Bishnupriya Gupta

• Podcast episode with Tirthankar Roy

Bonus links

• Origins of Modern China (article and podcasts)

Across Africa and Asia, European sailors arrived as merchants. They traded and negotiated. They defended their interests—sometimes with cannon fire. But they were not trying to govern a foreign land.

Yet things changed.

Why?

Historian ⁠Tirthankar Roy⁠ has a bold new answer.

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Roy is a professor at the London School of Economics, where he teaches a renowned course on the economic history of colonialism.

His most recent book is⁠The Origins of Colonialism⁠. And in it, Roy explains that we cannot understand the origins of European Empires in Asia and Africa by simply zooming into the actions of Europeans. We must understand what happened to the elites of the lands being conquered. And more often than not, that had to do with the rains, rivers, and access to water.

In this episode, Roy explains how his theory sheds light on the rise of the British Empire in India. Along the way, we also sketch many broader ideas about the story of global colonialism, from Chinese ports to the conquest of Burma and from the water problems of Mumbai to the rubber plantations of Congo.

Enjoy!

Thoughts about Roy’s points? Or mine? Voice them in the comments!

Listen (55min): Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Other Players

This is part two of this summer’s mini-series on the way climate has shaped the human story. Curious to hear more? Head to ⁠last week’s episode ⁠on how an ancient climate change paved the way for the very origins of humanity!

For more about the history of India, check out the two-part "⁠What About India?⁠" series from this February.

Keywords

Colonialism | Imperialism | British East India Company | European colonialism | Africa | Asia | India | China | History of Colonialism | Geographical Determinism | Environmental Determinism | Political History | Military History | Fiscal History | Great Divergence | Western Dominance | Early Modern History

To mark the summer heat, here is a two-part series on how climate has shaped the human story. In next week's episodes, we will explore the role of water and weather in the origins of European colonialism. But today, we start by crawling deeper into the past: to the origins of humanity itself.

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In this episode, Yale professor ⁠Jessica Thompson⁠ helps us navigate one of the most influential ideas in human evolution: that an ancient climate change pushed our ancestors out of the jungle, onto the savanna, and eventually toward big brains, meat-eating, and tool use.

This is a captivating story. It has been mentioned many times on the show. But do the details hold up?

What follows is a sweeping account of human origins, which nuances — but does not reject — the grand arc explored in ⁠The Origins of Humankind ⁠series. This is a story about a climate that has never remained steady. It serves as a poignant reminder of the weather's power to shape human destiny. But it’s also a story about human resilience and our capacity, from the very beginning, to defy the iron laws of ecology. Enjoy!

Thoughts about the episode? Share them in the comments!

Listen (1h06): Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Other players

Dig Deeper

• The savanna hypothesis was discussed in several episodes of The Origins of Humankind. Complement this with an episode about the end of the Pleistocene and the rise of farming with Andrea Mantranga.

• Ancient diets and brain growth have been discussed extensively on the show before. See especially the episodes with Suzana Herculano-Houzel, Chris Stringer, and Ian Tattersall.

• The peculiarity of human childcare has also been a frequent topic. See especially the episode with the “alloparenting” legend herself: Sarah Blaffer Hrdy.

  ---

Keywords

Human evolution | Human origins | Paleoanthropology | Human biology | Climate change | Miocene | Pleistocene | Brain evolution | Brain energetics | Deep history | Anthropology | Archaeology | Austrolopithecins | Genus homo | Bipedalism | Evolution of apes | Missing link |

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But what about biological sex?

Whatever we might say about diversity and fluidity, the idea of “male” and “female” seems essential in biology. I’ve taught biology. I’ve drawn arrows from anthers to ovaries. I’ve used the terms “dad cell” and “mother cell” while doing so. I don’t know how I could have done it any differently.

And maybe that’s just fine. Sex cells are binary. But here’s the twist: humans aren’t sex cells. Humans are animals. And animals aren’t so easily grouped. XY chromosomes don’t always produce a penis. And when we turn to hormones, brains, and behaviours, the picture gets even messier.

Or so argues Princeton Professor Agustín Fuentes, a leading expert on human biology. His new book, Sex Is a Spectrum, came out this week. It makes the case that biology no longer supports a sharp separation between male and female.

I approached this topic with a mix of curiosity and scepticism. And while I'm still unsure of what to make of the conclusion, I do not regret the conversation one bit. We had a great chat, ranging from hermaphroditic worms to sex-changing fish, and from gender stereotypes to intersex humans. At times, I pushed back. But I learned a lot throughout the conversation. I hope you do too.

Thoughts about Fuentes’s argument? Or my takes? Share them in the comments!

Listen (1h01) : Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Other players

Dig Deeper

Mentions

• Augustín Fuentes—Sex is a Spectrum; Creative Spark; Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You)

• Yuval Noah Harari—Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind)

• Jared Diamond—Guns, Germs, and Steel)

• Steven Pinker—How the Mind Works)

• Sara Blaffer Hrdy—Father Time)

Similar episodes

• Why Patriarchy? (Angarika Deb, Jan 2025)

• Mothers, Fathers, and the Many Myths We Have Held (Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, April 2024)

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Keywords

Biological sex | gametes | chromosomes | intersex | hermaphrodite | sex determination | sexual dimorphism | sex-changing fish | clownfish biology | evolutionary biology | human evolution | Agustín Fuentes | anthropology of sex | reproductive biology | nonbinary biology | developmental biology | sex differences | male and female | sex in animals | sex in humans | genetics of sex | human biology | science of sex | sex vs gender | flatworm c elegans sex | 5-alpha-reductase type 2 deficiency (5α-R2D) | PCOS (Polycystic Ovary Syndrome)

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And so it ends.

In the final episode of The Origins of Humankind, we explore the aftermath of the story so far—the story of how one peculiar species, Homo sapiens, evolved, spread, and outlived its relatives.

Guiding us through this final chapter is Johannes Krause, the director of the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology. Together, we uncover the emerging picture of the global spread of farming, pastoralism, and other key ingredients of modernity. Along the way, we explore some of the central questions of history—from the origins of inequality to the surprisingly pivotal role played by the peoples of the Eurasian steppe. (Yes, Mongols will make an appearance! But the story of the steppe goes much deeper...)

You can either listen to the full episode below or keep scrolling to read the highlights. For a more serious read, get a copy of Krause’s new book: Hubris — The Rise and Fall of Humanity.

Listen (1h03): Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Other players

This episode is part of the five-part series, The Origins of Humankind, produced together with UC San Diego’s Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny. You can enjoy each episode on its of head to the start here.

A New Era Begins — But Why?

Around 12,000 years ago, something strange started to happen. Farming appeared—and not just in one place, but in several unrelated regions. First, barley and wheat were domesticated in the Middle East. Rice followed suit in China. Millet and yams were soon domesticated in Africa, potatoes in the Andes, and corn and beans in Mesoamerica.

This cascade of events is surprising. In Krause’s words:

“It had not happened in 7 million years. We didn't domesticate anything as far as we know. Then suddenly everywhere in the world people are doing the same thing.”

Yes, the origins of agriculture coincide with the end of the Pleistocene “Ice Ages”. This is the textbook explanation for its sudden appearance. But it’s not as if the Ice Age had made farming impossible before. Even during glacial times, the tropics remained warm. So why hadn’t anyone farmed there?

I asked Krause what he thinks of the theory of Andrea Matranga, a previous guest, who thinks that farming was a response to a new kind of climate challenge: Compared to the Ice Ages, the new “Holocene” weathers were warm, wet, and relatively predictable each year—this much was benign—but the differences between seasons grew larger and larger. As Matranga explained:

“Hunter-gatherers could gorge themselves during the hot rainy summers, but they risked starving in the harsh winters.”

Seasonality put a premium on food storage. Storing food led to settling down. And settling down paved the way to farming. As Matranga points out, areas with low seasonality, such as Australia, were precisely the places where agriculture never emerged.

Krause nodded in agreement, but maintained that this probably wasn’t the full explanation. He said the sudden appearance is so striking that it might require a biological explanation, too, perhaps even a genetic mutation. At the same time, he noted that such a mutation would have to be much older than farming, as it was carried by both Africans and non-Africans, separated by the epic Out of Africa event a bit less than 50,000 years ago. Maybe population pressure? Possibly so. But in the end, Krause leaned toward a simple but humbling conclusion: the rise of farming remains a mystery.

Less mysterious is what happened next: farming spread like wildfire.

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Growing Farmlands

Why did farming spread so fast? This is no trifle of a question. From a planetary perspective, the story of the last 10 thousand years can be summarised into two words: growing farmlands.

Today, farming occupies a gigantic amount of land: around half of all habitable soil.

The spread of farming has been accelerated by modernity. But farming has always an expansive industry. Why?

For decades, the answer to this question remained something of a Holy Grail amongst pre-historians. Did farming spread as an idea, adopted by hunter-gatherers with farming fever? Or did farmers push into new areas, encroaching on the lands and hunting grounds of persistent foragers?

The ancient DNA revolution has mostly settled this question. Indeed, Krause and other archaeogenetists have shown that, time and time again, farming spread with farmers.

There are exceptions to this rule. The most important one is America, where farming seems to have spread as a cultural “meme”, often adopted by neighbouring peoples who maintain some parts of their forager lifestyle. (Indeed, the scarcity of domesticated animals led most American farmers to be “hunter-farmers” rather than full-time agriculturalists.) Krause also explained that ancient North African foragers transitioned to herding when cows were introduced to the then-green Sahara.

Yet the overwhelming trend is that early farming spread with farmers.

“It’s not necessarily people wanting to move to a ‘nice place with all this beautiful forests’. It's just that people have a farm, they have five kids, and there's not enough space on the farm.”

So why did farmers have more kids? We don’t quite know. Maybe crops made weaning easier. Maybe settled life eased the burden of childcare. But whatever the reason, the outcome is plain and clear: families grew faster than yields. Many young adults had to leave their parents’ farms. In theory, the unlucky children could return to foraging. But they didn’t have the know-how or the know-who. Most of them searched for more land.

Farmlands grew.

The same story unfolded on continent after continent. From the Middle East, generations of farmers pushed to Europe and North Africa. From southern China, farmers speaking various languages spread south towards Vietnam and east into the Pacific. On the ocean front, these oceanic farmers launched one of the most epic adventures in world history. They crafted canoes big enough to carry their pigs, seeds, and hoes with them. The waves were big, but so was the farmer’s imperative to find new lands. Taiwan came first. But the family’s kept growing and growing, and the island soon filled again. As before, some youngsters had to pack their canoes.

Eventually, these ocean farmers spread from Hawai’i to New Zealand and from Southeast Asia to Madagascar. Some islands were uninhabited by humans and awaiting discovery. Thus, humanity claimed some of the last remaining pockets of uncontacted land. On other islands, they met with native hunter-gatherers, sometimes even returning to the original economy. But with time, more and more of the Pacific islands became farmlands. Thus was born the Austronesian language family, connecting the Samoans and Tongans to Indigenous communities in Taiwan and Madagascar.

A similar story happened in western Africa, where farmers had domesticated yams, palms, and an African variety of rice. Boats played no great part here, as the farmers moved on foot. But as before, the thirst for land led to the birth of one’s modern world’s great language families: the Bantu languages, spoken across most of sub-Saharan Africa, from Cameroon to Kenya and from Tanzania to South Africa.

With the rising farmlands, humanity itself kept growing. Around the dawn of farming, our species had an estimated 4 million specimens to show for our success. Around the year zero, the estimated figure had climbed towards a third of a billion.

However, as humanity grew in size, humans themselves became smaller. Farmers had more stable diets in terms of average calories, but they lacked many essential micronutrients. Pharmacy supplements did not support their mostly vegetarian lifestyles, and they suffered from many deficiencies. In northern latitudes, their skins grew paler to soak up all the vitamin D the sun could give. Even this wasn’t enough to sustain the modicum of health hunter-gatherers had managed to maintain. Around the world, farmers were shorter and in worse health.

Poorer health was the main reason Jared Diamond asked if agriculture could have been “the worst mistake in the history of the human race”. But health wasn’t the only reason. Diamond also saw farming as a highway to inequality. Krause agreed:

“Almost throughout all of the Neolithic, we see something we call patrilocality: we have male lineages with a founding father and his sons and his grandsons — but all the females are coming from other communities. So the men stay and the women come in. If there is some kind of “birth of inequality”, then that's it, because hunter gatherer societies today, and probably in the past, are pretty much egalitarian.”

Krause’s thoughts here echo those of my past guest, Angarika Deb. But Krause added a twist to the story: these Neolithic villages were patrilocal, yes, but monogamous.

“They were nuclear families.”

The era of powerful men gathering large harems was still in the future. But that future was approaching. When did it become the present? We don’t know. But it might have something to do with farming’s forgotten twin: pastoralism.

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The Forgotten Twin

Farming wasn’t the only novelty in the human story. While most history books focus on grain-fed cities, a large chunk of recent history has been powered by a much less appetising energy source: grass.

Humans can’t eat grass. But cows, horses, and goats can. In pastoral life, these tame beasts act as conversion machines—turning grass into rich packets of milk and meat, and in the case of horses, into explosive power.

To the untrained eye, herders might look like hunter-gatherers: they, too, stay on the move, roaming the “wilderness.” However, like farmers, pastoralists produce their own food and store it for future use. Their storage, however, moves on four legs. Every day, they risk losing it all.

The constant risk of theft might be one reason pastoralists earned a reputation as fierce fighters—fierce enough to justify the construction of the Great Wall.

More broadly, a society that prizes fighting prowess tends to be one where men hold the upper hand. As Tamim Ansary writes in his altogether brilliant The Invention of Yesterday:

“Generals had to have brains. But brainiest once filled their front-lines with brawn. And men were generally bigger and stronger than women.”

As far as we can tell, life on the steppe wasn’t easy for women. If farming kickstarted a walk toward patriarchy, pastoralism turned that walk into a horse race. As Krause explained:

“We have in the Bronze age suddenly whole bands of people with the same Y-chromosome of some founding fathers of those steppe populations that start expanding around 5,000 years ago.”

It’s worth pausing here briefly. Our compressed overview couldn’t quite do justice to the magnitude of the event Krause describes here. I know many listeners might have been lost. So let’s unpack this.

The steppe is a vast corridor of grasslands stretching from Ukraine to Mongolia and northwestern China—an “ocean of grass,” as Krause called it.

It was the birthplace of the Mongols, the Huns, and other famous horse-riding “barbarians” that Eurasian city-dwellers so often loathed. And around 5,000 years ago, something happened that sent steppe societies—and their gender norms—roaring across Eurasia. This “something” has become known to us only during the last decade or so, thanks to a mix of old linguistics with cutting-edge genetics. In Krause’s words:

“It's probably also the biggest contribution of genetics to prehistory.”

So here’s the story:

Five thousand years ago, groups of nomadic pastoralists lived on the Western edges of the steppe, in what is now Russia and Ukraine. They settled near rivers, as humans must drink, and the steppe is dry. But things were changing. The wheel had just been invented—probably by these very people. Wheeled wagons, hitched to herd animals, allowed them to pack water supplies and leave the river valleys. Around the same time, horses were domesticated. The precise sequence is still debated.1 But one thing is clear: pastoralists from the western steppe began moving fast, across vast swaths of Eurasia.

In the west, they pushed across Europe, all the way to the British Isles, where Stonehenge was still being built. In the southeast, they crossed the mountains guarding India, a subcontinent where their reverence for cows persists to this day. In the south, they moved into the rocky hills of Persia, where their horse-riding skills paved the way for the world’s first mega-empire.

Wherever they went, these pastoral migrants carried their language. From their many dialects emerged the Indo-European family, linking Sanskrit to Spanish, and Farsi to Irish. They likely carried their gods too, which might explain the striking parallels between Hindu, Greek, and Norse mythologies.

As anyone familiar with Zeus’s sexual ethics can attest, these were myths told by tough guys—men who hardly regarded women as their equals. Indeed, the Indo-European migration was largely a migration of male gangs. This is surprisingly easy to read in the Y chromosome, which passes only from father to son. The pattern is stark. In Spain and Portugal, for example, just 200 years after their arrival, the population had about 40% steppe ancestry in their overall DNA. On the male line, the number climbs towards 100%. The Indo-European expansion was overwhelmingly a male expansion. (A similar pattern appears in Latin America, where paternal Y-chromosomes lean European, contrasting with the Indigenous ancestry in much of the maternal genes, found in the mitochondria.)

It’s impossible to know the details of these ancient events. Some scholars have warned against portraying the Indo-Europeans as simple genocidal warlords. They didn’t arrive in a single burst, but over centuries. And they were rarely buried with fighting weapons.

Yet it seems unlikely, to say the least, that these newly arrived men advanced women’s rights. These were, after all, men bound together by shared grandfathers, shared language, and shared stories of hyper-masculine gods. Indeed, the Indo-European expansion aligns roughly with the once-mysterious “Y-chromosome bottleneck”—a chilling moment in human history, when a select group of patriarchs began to dominate the genetic legacy of vast chunks of humanity.2

Indo-European migrations were the first time the people of the steppe played the leading role on the world historic stage. But it wasn’t the last. From Attila the Hun to the Mongol Empire, steppe pastoralism has often served as an engine of Eurasian history. Just look at the five great land empires of the early modern era: Safavid Persia, Mughal India, Ottoman Turkey, and Qing China all trace their origins to the “ocean of grass,” where horses and cows served as substitutes for canoes and caravels. The fifth one—Russia—emerged as a project to defend its farming core against raids from the steppe.3

The steppe also gave us the horses—beautiful creatures, yes, but most influential as a tool of war.

“Horses completely changed warfare. They were like early tanks.”

Indeed, this was true across much of the Old World, from China to Mali. And when Spanish ships crossed the Atlantic, the Americas would feel the devastating impact that even small cavalry forces could unleash.

The lesson? Focus on farming at your own peril. More often than not, it has been herders, shepherds, and ancient cowboys who shaped history. And that would be true even without mentioning the desert herders of the Middle East, whose ancient culture was evolving into the languages and symbols used by Abraham, Jesus, and Muhammad.

No More Frontiers

Where does this leave us? Krause was not inclined to romanticise the past over recent industrial times. Instead, he noted that much of the human past has been expansive. From the Bantu to the Indo-Europeans, humans have been migrating to new lands and territories, discovering new resources to support their expanding families. Today, such frontiers are rapidly vanishing.

“We will never live in space. The space is a deadly space”

I’m inclined to agree: No amount of climate havoc will make the Earth less habitable than Mars. But what’s the solution then? Krause didn’t pretend to know the answer. But we must change our ways, he said.

“There are good signs. Everyone talks about sustainability.”

Whether that’s enough remains to be seen. Yet one thing seems increasingly clear: the second chapter in the story of Sapiens has come to an end. The third chapter has begun.

What a time to be alive.

This concludes the Origins of Humankind. During the past five weeks, we have covered everything from the origin of fife to the rise and spread of Homo sapiens. It’s been a tremendous journey. Thank you for reading. Stay tuned for more adventures to come!

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Guiding us through this journey is Johannes Krause, director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and a pioneer of one of the greatest scientific revolutions of our time: the science of ancient DNA. This ability to extract genetic material from fossils has transformed our understanding of the deep human past, not just of kings and conquerors, but of ordinary people, long gone.

You can listen to the full episode below. Alternatively, you can keep reading for some highlights. For a deep dive, see Krause’s excellent book, Hubris: The Rise and Fall of Humanity.

Listen (1h10): Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Other players

This is part of the Origins of Humankind series produced with CARTA (UC San Diego). You can enjoy each episode as a stand-alone, or head here for the whole experience.

The Rise of Sapiens

We are all Made in Africa — doubly so. It is in Africa that the first hominins evolved. Some of them left. Others stayed. And from those that remained, a new form of human evolved. This was our form, the hubristically named Wise Man, or Homo sapiens.

The earliest remains of Homo sapiens are from Morocco, dating back approximately 300,000 years. Africa remained our sole homeland for millennia. But things changed.

Around 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens burst into the global scene. It was a world-changing wave, even if it was not the first of its kind.

Small groups of Homo sapiens had ventured out of Africa before. We find Sapiens remains in Greece from approximately 200,000 years ago and from the Levant 100,000 years later. And these were Homo sapiens all right. But they were not our ancestors. These populations were genetic dead ends — branches of our family tree that were cut short.1

But third time lucky.

Around 50,000 years ago, a new wave of Homo sapiens ventured out of Africa. In less than ten millennia, their descendants had reached India, China, Siberia, and Europe.2 As they spread, they encountered other humans, including the Neanderthals and Denisovans. They mixed and mated with them — with both males and females. But they didn’t stop at their territories. They pushed further into the unknown. In the south, they discovered Australia. In Asia, they climbed into the Himalayas. In the north, they pushed far into the lands of ice, further than even Neanderthals. As Krause said to me:

 “It's quite surprising for an African hominin, that after leaving Africa, the ‘first’ thing they do is go to the Arctic.”

How did they do this?

They didn’t have bigger brains than Neanderthals. Nor were their bodies as well adapted to the cold. As a striking example, these Europeans still had dark skin from their African ancestry — a feature which only disappeared from Europe with the arrival of farming-related vitamin D deficiencies.

So what was the recipe for our success?

“I think it's just technology that allowed it. We probably had more cultural abilities, better technologies, and that probably allowed us to expand into environments that no hominins were before: the Arctics and high mountains; crossing the seas; discovering new continents like America or Australia.”

This doesn’t mean that Neanderthals were the mindless brutes their name implies in pop culture. Like Chris Stringer told me, “that gulf between us and the Neanderthals” has been diminishing in the last 20 years. Perhaps so. But it hasn’t disappeared, Stringer added. Krause agreed.

Take the treatment of the dead. Neanderthals, too, sometimes buried their dead. However, they also ate them not infrequently. Indeed, Krause told me that cannibalism is a relatively typical finding from Neanderthal sites. We don’t know whether this was a ritualistic or purely survival-based practice. But it does contrast with Sapiens remains, where cannibalism is less frequent.

When buried, Neanderthals did not receive the same treatment either.

“There are no grave goods. That's something that's very different. When you have modern humans coming to Europe, you have some really beautiful burial with thousands of beads and figurines. Hours and hours went into producing them and they gave them to [the dead].”3

Sapiens humans also brought musical instruments and created elaborate cave paintings.

This might reflect a more “symbolic thinking style” as Ian Tattersall told me, or a more complex social organisation with bigger networks, as Chris Stringer suggested. But whatever the explanation, all evidence hints at some social peculiarity in the lifeways of our ancestors.

And this speciality reaped rewards.

Around 16,000 years ago, a group of humans ventured deep into the far east of Siberia, crossing the Bering Strait and discovering the vast lands of the Americas.4 With tremendous speed, they settled the whole supercontinent.

Except for Polynesia and the farthest edges of the Arctic, humans were now living on all habitable corners of the world. Indeed, only 35 millennia after their final explosion beyond Africa, humanity's spread had reached the edges of the world. And the Earth had been transformed. Gone were the Neanderthals, Denisovans, Hobbits, and the Dragon men. Mammoths and giant sloths followed suit, vanishing from the Earth in our wake.

Why?

Krause was confident that Homo sapiens caused much of the extinction of the megafauna.

“When humans came to Australia, all the megafauna was done within like 2000 years. When humans came to New Zealand all the big birds are soon gone. Same happened in Eurasia. Same happened in America. So we are such efficient hunters that we kill almost everything that is different and that we can eat.”

Krause was less convinced that we killed the Neanderthals.

“We might have killed some of them,” he said agnostically. But the traditional picture of a battle between Sapiens and Neanderthals has been overturned by ancient DNA evidence.

In the traditional model, Sapiens arrive in Europe, live alongside Neanderthals, and prevail as the winners. Even here, the story leaves much room for non-violent explanations. But this story is wrong. The DNA evidence shows that the first migrations to Europe were genetic dead ends. These populations perished, too — perhaps with the Neanderthals.

 “Around 39,000 years ago there's a volcano in Italy that erupts. It's a massive super volcano and it leaves an ash layer all over eastern Europe, deep into Russia. And that really coincides perfectly with the extinction of Neanderthals and with the disappearance of early [Homo sapiens] groups that were there.

Europe had to be repopulated. Luckily for us, Homo sapiens had already become a global species. In little time, newcomers filled Europe again.

If correct, this new picture no longer supports the notion of a European contest between two species of humans. Rather, we see a contest between one European (or western Eurasian) species — Neanderthals — and one global species — Homo sapiens. The deck was loaded from the start. It was loaded in our favour. And it was loaded because of our peculiar cultural knack for moving further and further than any other human the Earth had seen.

And thus, we had taken over the world.

But this was not the end of the story. This was the beginning of the greatest transformation in the story of humankind. It was the dawn of everything we call history and all things that resemble modernity.

It is the topic we will turn to next week, in the final episode of The Origins of Humankind.

Thanks for reading these highlights! We discussed many more topics in the episode, from war and peace in the Palaeolithic to the problem of thinking about “races” in genetics. You can listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your shows. For earlier episodes on The Origins of Humankind, head here. You can get Krause’s book here.

Enjoy!

Together, we trace the origins of the genus Homo, as well as the emergence and spread of Homo sapiens. While doing this, we meet many oddities, such as rhino hunting in Britain, but we also explore some of the biggest questions in human evolution, such as: What is a human? Why did we evolve big brains? Is Homo sapiens truly unique — or just one human among many?

You can now listen to the episode wherever you get your shows, or you can keep reading for highlights.

Listen (1h6min): Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Other Players

This is part of the Origins of Humankind series produced with CARTA (UC San Diego). You can enjoy each episode as a stand-alone, or head here for the whole experience.

Who Are We?

“What is a human?” I asked.

“Well, it depends,” Stringer responded with a laugh. On a narrow definition, only Homo sapiens deserves the term. But Stringer disagreed — if only because it raises awkward questions about the sex that did happen between Homo sapiens and other lineages, like the Neanderthals

“What would we call them if not humans? Animals?“

For Stringer, all Homo species deserve to be called human. So what earns an ape admission into this prestigious genus? Stringer’s list went as follows: We are apes with big brains who live fully on the ground, who walk upright, who rely on manufactured stone tools, and who have small teeth — especially small “canines”.

In comparison, “proto-humans”, like austrolopithecins, were upright walkers — just like humans — but they still had many adaptations for living in trees. Their canines were smaller than chimpanzees, but larger than those of humans. Their brains were barely bigger than the chimpanzees. And while they used and even made stone tools, they likely didn’t rely on them to the same extent as early Homo species.

“When I was just beginning my career, “Man the tool Maker” was the view; that only humans were toolmakers and tool users. We know that's not true. But it's the the extent to which we're really dependent on tools for survival, more than any other animal. So it's an essential part of the human adaptation.“

Armed with this evolving self-image, we turned to the fundamental question of human evolution: Why did we evolve?

2. Leaving the trees

Let’s start with ground living.

Why did our ancestors “leave the trees”? Stringer nodded in agreement when I explained the main theory discussed on the show time and time again: North and South America were joining around the time of human origins. As the Isthmus of Panama blocked warm ocean currents from the Pacific, Africa’s climate grew colder and drier. Forest cover retreated. A new ecosystem of grasslands and sparse woodlands was developing. With the slow but steady rhythm of evolution, humanity marched into the new niche.

This overview raises many questions — for example, why our ancestors stood upright while modern savanna-dwelling chimpanzees do just fine on all fours. But details aside, the picture seems relatively clear: the African climate was shifting, and with it came an opportunity for a terrestrial ape. Humans picked up the bill.

So that’s terrestrial living. What about the big brains?

The remarkable growth of the human brain hides two puzzles.

3. Fuelling the Brain

The puzzle first has to do with energy. According to a now-famous factoid, the brain is only 2% of our body mass but eats 20% of our calories. Dean Falk warned me against taking these numbers at face value. But whether they are exact or not, everyone agrees that our brains are a hungry organ. Indeed, the right question in brain evolution isn’t “why to have a big brain”. It’s rather, “how to afford a big brain”.

So how did we?

A famous answer argues that we did it by reducing the size of our gut. The gut is energy-hungry, too. According to the “expensive tissue hypothesis”, humanity swapped a small gut for a big brain. Indeed, even early humans had very slim bellies compared to australopithecine and chimpanzees.

Like all theories, this “expensive tissue hypothesis“ has its opponents. But details aside, we do have very small bellies. And this underlines the first of the two puzzles: How could early humans digest all the extra energy their brain needed while cutting the size of their digestive track? Did they cook their food with fire, as suggested by Richard Wrangham? Did they thrive on animal fats, like bone marrow or marine animals, which are easier to digest raw? Or did they ferment their foods by accident? What, if anything, can we say about this all-important question in human evolution?

Stringer said he finds Wrangham’s theorising about fire “very interesting” but doesn’t see evidence of fire use very early on. To make matters worse, he has excavated a Neanderthal site where meat was eaten raw despite the presence of fireplaces. By whatever means, these Neanderthals could fuel their massive brains — bigger than ours — without frying the steak.

Stringer took a similar view on aquatic foods: they were probably useful for some populations but not all. He didn’t comment on the fermentation theory. Instead, he added two important extra points, both linking to the importance of stone tools in human evolution.

First, “cooking” isn’t the same as “cooking with fire”.

“It doesn't necessarily have to be heated: it can even just be pounded and that makes it easier to digest as well to unlock the main source in nuts and so on. You break them open, you crush them down, they're easier to digest.”

Furthermore, any discussion on meat is bound to invite ideas of palaeolithic “steaks”. (See my earlier point!) But this is a mistake. Humans didn’t just eat muscle. They ate intestines. More precisely, humans would almost certainly eat the guts of other animals, which apparently “taste a bit like sour yogurt”, Stringer told me.

Crucially, the gut would provide humans a nutritionally elevated experience of the diet of the prey animals. The reindeer’s gut would break down berries. Humans would swallow the product. Shrinking our own guts couldn’t get more mechanical than this.

(On a side note, Stringer’s anecdotal evidence for “meat beyond the steak” comes from a truly extraordinary site in Boxgrove, England. The whole site is the stuff of tales: pre-Sapiens humans lived here half a million years ago, alongside hippos swimming in the River Thames. The “meat” on the menu was rhino brain.)

So that’s on fuelling the brain. But building a big brain takes more than fuel. It takes time. This brings us to the second puzzle: the puzzle of childhoods.

4. Slowing Down, Speeding Up

Many tearful parents have commented that time flies when children grow. Suddenly, they are small adults leaving home. But biologically speaking, the opposite is true: humans really take their time growing up.

Tim Coulson explained in part I of this series that all primates take life slowly. But humans have taken this pattern to an extreme. And it makes sense: brains take time to grow. But here’s the puzzle: in most animals, a slower life history means longer birth intervals. Yet humans have extremely short birth intervals. Chimpanzee siblings are never less than seven years apart. Amongst humans, three years is typical, and shorter is doable. So how could humans have both slower life histories and faster birth intervals? How could mothers afford this?

The short answer is simple: mothers couldn’t afford it. Not alone. Enter human-style child-rearing — the kind that truly “takes a village.” (It wouldn’t hurt to have a pair-bonded dad sticking around, too.)

Stringer agreed with this basic idea while acknowledging that this is not his expertise. He also added that childhood mortality was very high amongst pre-modern humans, even among modern hunter-gatherers who otherwise lived relatively healthy lives. So, the human pattern might have exchanged some quality for quantity. But even then, the puzzle remains: why go towards quality on the length of childhood whilst picking quantity on the length of birth intervals?

The means remain a mystery, but humanity did stumble onwards. Our brains grew. Our childoods got longer. Our teeth got even smaller. But this was not a simple story leading from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens. Before our domination, the Earth was full of different human species, each different from the other. So who were they? Which of them were our cousins? And which of them gave rise to us?

5. Muddle in the Middle Earth

Stringer is best known for his pioneering work towards the “Out of Africa" theory of human evolution. In his PhD work, he travelled across Europe to measure ancient skulls. As he recalls in his 2012 book, Lone Survivors:

“I survived many adventures, including several border confrontations and two robberies, but by the end of my 5,000-mile trip I had collected one of the largest data sets of Neanderthal and early modern skull measurements assembled by anyone up to that time.”

At the time, many believed that Neanderthals were the direct ancestors of modern Europeans. This was part of a broader “multi-regional” theory of human evolution, where modern “races” had deep roots in the distant past, stretching back over a million years. In this model, Europeans descended from Neanderthals, Chinese from the Asian Homo erectus, and so on, with small genetic flows ensuring that these “races” stay able to reproduce with each other.

Measuring Neanderthal skulls, Stringer noticed that this couldn’t be the case. As Stringer wrote:

“Neanderthal skulls were no more similar to those of recent Europeans than they were to Africans, Eskimo, or Native Tasmanians, and Cro-Magnon skulls did not neatly slot between the Neanderthals and recent Europeans. Early modern skulls from around the world seemed to cluster with their modern counterparts rather than with any archaic skulls from the same regions. ”

It took some time to work out the details, but “The Out of Africa” model grew directly out of Stringer’s PhD thesis: All Sapiens populations come from a recent ancestor in Africa. In this model, Neanderthals were not our ancestors but our cousins.

And Stringer was right — with a small caveat. Genetics has discovered small bits of Neanderthal DNA in most non-African populations. I have some. This shows that some “cousin marriages” has complicated the evolutionary family tree. But more than anything, genetics has vindicated Stringer’s groundbreaking work: Small admixtures aside, we are all from Africa.

But that doesn’t mean the story has gotten any simpler. The sheer number of human species has been growing fast. In Asia, we’ve found evidence of Denisovans and the “Dragon Man” — two species that Stringer believes might be the same. On islands of Southeast Asia we’ve even found small Hobbit-like species, like Homo floresiensis and Homo luzonensis. In Southern Africa, we find another human of remarkably short stature: Homo naledi, who buried its dead despite having a chimp-sized brain. The famous Homo erectus was probably still alive in Asia during the dawn of Homo sapiens, 300 thousand years ago. At this time, the Earth had an uncanny resemblance to Tolkien’s Middle Earth.

So, which of these many species is our real ancestor? If Neanderthals are our cousins, who is our shared grandparent?

The typical answer is Homo heidelbergensis — the same species that was buthering rhinos in pre-historic Britain. Stringer has grown sceptical of this model, suggesting that the split between Neanderthals and humans probably happened earlier. But we don’t know for sure. The period between the rise of Homo erectus and the dawn of Homo sapiens — is often called the “Muddle in the Middle”. We don’t know much about what happened here. But on this front, Stringer was beaming with optimism:

“Ask me again in two years. I think we will sort out the  muddle in the middle.”

Hopefully, we will one day have a clear family tree, linking us to our ancestors, like Homo erectus, and our cousins, like the Neanderthals. But whether we achieve it or not, one puzzle remains: Why are we the only branch left?

Will we sort out this Muddle in the Middle Earth? Subscribe to On Humans, and I’ll keep you posted!

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6. We, The Lone Survivors

Why are we the only humans left? Many answers tend to gravitate towards violence. “Do you think Neanderthals gave up the game without a fight?” one social media user asked me.

Well. Violence might certainly have happened. To be frank, we don’t have any evidence against our ancestors butchering Neanderthals. But we don’t have any evidence for it either. And crucially, we have many alternatives. As Stringer pointed out, Neanderthals might have been on the way out long before Homo sapiens entered their territories.

“Neanderthals were a species at the verge of extinction.”

And having more competition about the same Ice Age game hardly helped them. Indeed, the demise of the Neanderthals might have been as simple as increasing famines due to harsh climate and a new compatetitor for the same sparse game.

Indeed, Stringer believes that our numbers gave us one clear advantage over Neanderthals: our societies were more complex.

“Neanderthals and those earlier humans were living in smaller groups. probably less well connected across the landscape. Now networking is important to spread information and knowledge. Let's imagine that 300,000 years ago in Germany, there are a few [people who know how to] make spears.  Now if those individuals die in a hunting accident or disease, the group has lost that knowledge entirely. So larger groups and larger networking gives you that greater capability of maintaining your knowledge.”

Crucially, both archaeological and genetic evidence points to Homo sapiens having broader networks of knowledge and gene exchange.

“That was an advantage for Homo sapiens.”

I suggested that this might relate to one of the most noticeable curiosities in our fossils: the lack of a brow ridge.

Just compare the brow ridge below of three human species beliw:

All but Sapiens have some pretty hardcore brow ridges.

Here is a comparison of Sapiens to Neanderthals. You can probably guess which one is ours.

So what does this tell us? According to Brian Hare, this is part of a “domestication syndrome” — an ill-understood set of changes that occur when animals evolve more docile tendencies. Here is a relevant illustration, famous for its appearance in Rutger Bregman's best-selling Humankind.

Here is how Richard Wrangham — anohter proponent of the “self-domestication theory” — explained things to me:

“ If you are an archeologist and you find a canine: is it a dog, is it a wolf? The way you decide is: does it have the characteristics that dogs tend to have compared to wolves or that domesticated animals generally tend to have compared to their wild ancestors? .. And Homo sapiens show all those features in relationship to their earlier ancestors.”

According to Hare and Wranghma, Homo sapiens evolved by selection against impulsive or “reactive” aggression.1 Outcome? Less brawls, more cooperation. And here’s the link to Stringer: A more docile temperament might have been the biological condition for bigger groups and larger networks — the phenomena Stringer emphasised in Lone Survivors. And it explains this while tying into the most particular of our “hard” features: our small brow ridge.

So what does Stringer make of all this?

Stringer nodded in agreement to the self-domestication ideas but didn’t go as far as endorsing it directly. Instead, he told me that the mystery of our brow ridge is a big mystery indeed — so big, in fact, that one “experimental anthropologist” in the 70s wore an artificial band of erectus-style brow ridges for 6 months and reported the results. One result was clear: people were scared of him, “which might link to Wrangham’s idea about aggression”. But unlike Wrangham and Hare — who focus on brow ridges as an almost accidental signal of more interesting hormonal changes — Stringer was keen to find a direct adaptive story. He suggested that they could be part of an aggressive signalling system. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that Homo sapiens stopped signalling aggression.

 “We have many other ways of signaling. When you think of when you see a person: they may have a different hairstyle, they may have tattoos, they may have piercings, They may have makeup — their body may be adorned with all kinds of extra things like necklaces and jewelry and things. Plus they might have a great big weapon as well — that would also be a powerful signal. So I think that we have left that behind — that big brow ridge — as a signaling system.”

Perhaps. Or perhaps Wrangham and Hare are right, and the explanation lies in hormones, which Stringer said “will definitely play a part, too”. In short, we don’t quite know.

But amongst the many remaining unknown, I wil try to learn from Stringer’s optimism about the way forward. During our covnersation, he was most curious about “proteomics” as a way to move into the early epochs from which DNA doesn’t survive. But more generally, he might be the most wonderfully forward-looking thinker I’ve interviewed. He has worked for over 50 years at London’s Natural History Museum — “childhood dream come true” — and shows no signs of losing enthusiasm. What was especially meaningful for me was a small hint he left about the possible ways that science journalism can change lives. Talking about his upbringing in the Cockney area of East London, he recalled how:

“…there was a school broadcast on BBC called “How Things Began” that we used to listen to. I was about eight or nine when they had a broadcast about the Neanderthals on this program. And so there was this crackly radio speaker in the classroom and we had a poster on the wall to go with these talks. And it was by the artist Morris Wilson who had painted a picture of Neanderthals burying a child. And in the program they reconstructed this with these wailing Neanderthals mourning their lost child. This gripped me.”

I couldn’t help mentioning my genuine wish that some clever young person out there hears our conversation today and is gripped in a similar way.

“I hope so,” Stringer replied, with great warmth in his voice.

Thanks for reading! This was episode III of The Origins of Humankind. Next week, we will zoom into the journey of Sapiens with more detail — and face a big plot twist in the story of Neanderthal extinctions. Subscribe for free and join the journey!

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Want to listen to the episode? Here are the links again: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Other Players

Finally, if you want more tales from post-war London, check out this clip from our conversations. It follows my asking how Stringer got into a career in anthropology. Trust me, you want to hear this!

Guiding us through this shadowy stretch of prehistory is Dean Falk herself — Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and one of the world’s foremost experts on human brain evolution.

You can now listen to the episode wherever you get your shows, or you can keep reading for highlights.

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This is part of the Origins of Humankind series produced with CARTA (UC San Diego). You can enjoy each episode as a stand-alone, or head here for the whole experience.

Highlights

Prefer reading to listening? Not a problem. Here’s a summary of our conversation in three parts.

1. The Misty Epoch

Humans and chimpanzees split around 6 million years ago, give or take a million. The first stone tools appeared a bit over 3 million years ago. What happened in between? This first half of hominid evolution is clouded in mystery. But Dean Falk thinks it set the stage for much of what would come. And in early 2025, she coined a name for it in a book of the same name: Botanic Age.

Why the “Botanic Age?” Because our ancestors almost certainly made tools from plant materials. After all, even chimpanzees do this. And we don’t have to go to extreme examples, such as the female chimpanzees in Senegal who craft wooden spears to hunt bush babies. All great apes practice botanical crafts. They do so daily. Why? Because they sleep in trees. But for great apes — big in size — this is a risky business that requires a supportive “bed” or “sleeping nest” to avoid falling. Indeed, every chimpanzee, gorilla and orangutan alive starts their bedtime routine by weaving an elaborate basket from branches. No monkey does this. All great apes do it. Most likely, so did our ancestors around 6 million years ago.

This activity is all-around the ape world. It happens every night.

But human ancestors left the trees. They did so gradually. But as they did, they adopted an upright posture.1 This had cascading effects.

As Darwin observed, our ancestors freed their hands for more extensive tool use. But equally important, Falk argues, they lost their nimble feet. Indeed, the chimpanzee feet look like an extra pair of hands. They can be used to grab things and manipulate things. The more our ancestors spent time on the ground, the more their feet shaped for walking — not grabbing. In Falk’s words, “Our feet became weight-bearing instruments.”

2. Speech, Song, and Child Support

Babies were the first to notice the new foot design. It got increasingly difficult to cling to the mother for support — something all other primate babies do. This might have triggered one of the greatest revolutions in the human story.

Falk believes that mothers probably carried their babies in baby slings — a portable version of the “ape-like-tree-nests” they were used to making anyway. But even with this caveat in mind, babies had to be put down sometimes. And babies don’t exactly like this. They cry. And mothers try to soothe them with vocalisations. Falk’s famous “putting-the-baby-down hypothesis” suggests that language’s roots may lie in an unlikely cradle: the soothing murmurs of mothers who, no longer able to let infants cling, traded touch for vocal comfort. This is not to say that our early ancestors were speaking. But Falk thinks this began the long march towards modern human language.

Like all theories about this early epoch, this one is speculative. But I was happy to support Falk’s speculation with one remark: Babies learn language, not adults. Therefore, any theory of the origins of language must explain why language fitted into the early development of the human infant well before they hunted, gossiped, mated, or did any of the myriad of things that language proved useful for. Falk’s theory does this with ease.

On the other hand, her theory does meet a formidable foe: the school of linguistics who, in the footsteps of Noam Chomsky, focus on the capacity of all human languages to create infinite arrays of meanings from a finite set of signs. In technical terms, such scholars try to explain how humans evolved brains capable of grasping recursive grammar — the ability to embed one thought inside another, like the nested clause in the sentence “The dog that scratched the cat went to sleep.”

Soothing baby talk seems to have little power to explain this Holy Grail of Chomskyan linguistics.

Falk responded by taking me through the baby’s journey from womb to grammar. It takes around two years. Grammar might be the end-point. But much needs to happen before it. And “baby talk” between parents and infants is a big part of this path. The same goes, she said, for the origins of language.

“You can learn a lot about the evolution by looking at the development.”

All this said, the origins of language will hardly be solved by just one theory. Language contains multitudes. As Falk noted, standing upright might have also contributed to language via another path.

Rhythm.

Human speech swings—it leans on rhythm like a drummer on a beat. No other primate matches our cadence: neither the hoots of chimps nor the howls of gibbons. And this capacity has leaked beyond the boundaries of language. Humans are dancers and drummers with an exceptional capacity to keep the beat. Why? We don’t know. But it might well have to with upright walking. Once our ancestors started walking more upright, their fetuses became exposed to the steady beat of the bipedal walk. Chimpanzee-style walking does not produce a clear beat for fetuses to hear (and feel) in the womb. Human walking does. And the persistent rhythm of these ancient footsteps might have paved the way towards our propensity — unique amongst primates — towards drumming, singing, and dancing.

3. Towards the Human Brain

We should be wary of the cliché that bipedalism merely liberated our dexterous hands. Walking trapped our feet more than anything else. But Darwin wasn’t entirely wrong. Hands were freed — and he believed this kicked off a virtuous cycle: freed hands led to tool use, which led to bigger brains, which led to even better tools.

For decades, this idea fell out of fashion. Fossils showed that bipedalism came millions of years before stone tools and larger brains. But I asked Falk: might Darwin have been more right than we’ve assumed?

My hunch was based on two observations.

First, the tools. Stone tools arrive late — but as Falk often reminded me, our ancestors almost certainly used tools long before that, made from botanical materials. That soft technology has vanished, but the behaviors may stretch as far back as bipedal walking.

Second, the brains. Australopithecines indeed had (roughly) chimp-sized brains. But in 2000, Falk demonstrated that some of them already had more human-like brain organization. Size isn’t everything.2 Wiring matters.

By pushing back the start of extensive tool use and human-like brain organization, we might be making Darwin’s theory plausible again. Is Darwin back in the game? Falk nodded approvingly.

“Absolutely! It makes perfect sense.”

(Off the record, she warned me many times of taking pure brain size as the only measure that matters in brain evolution. For example, she did a famous analysis of Homo floresiensis — the famous “Hobbit” of Flores Island — and found that, again, its chimpanzee-sized brain was hiding a remarkably human-like organisation.)

All this suggests that brain evolution might have been more gradual than we have come to believe. Yes, brain size starts a rapid increase quite suddenly with the rise of Homo erectus and such. But the brain might have been re-organising much before. Beyond square footage, it might have been the new floor plan that welcomed the dawn of humanity. And as Falk said, by the time you see the re-organisation in the broken skull, internal rewiring must have been going on for a long time.

This is not to say that brain size doesn’t matter. “It clearly does”, Falk said. So leaving the Botanic Age behind, we can ask: Why did our more recent ancestors start growing their brains? Floor plans aside, why was the real estate growing so fast?

Falk believes language was key in driving the need for a bigger brain. But need alone isn’t the whole story. We also have to ask: How could the body afford such a metabolically expensive organ? Most theories focus on energy. Brains burn calories — a lot of them. So how did our ancestors feed this growing appetite? By cooking meat? Digging for marrow? Cracking open shellfish? Perhaps even fermenting foods by accident? No one quite knows.

But Falk has added another crucial piece to the puzzle — not about energy, but about heat.

A brain can overheat. A big brain overheats easily. According to Falk’s “radiator theory”, human ancestors lucked out. Standing upright had changed the way blood circulated to the cranium. As luck would have it, in one lineage of Australopithecins, this new “plumbing” happened to be well suited for cooling a big brain. Indeed, the “radiator theory” implies that chimpanzees could never have grown a big brain, even if they’d “wanted” one. Their heads would have overheated.

As before, it looks like the seeds of our human oddities were sown already in the mysterious aeons of the Botanic Age.

But seeds have to mature. And mature they did! The Stone Age began. And the first proper “humans” soon walked on Earth. Next week, we will walk through this all-important chapter with the iconic Chris Stringer.

In this sweeping first episode, we cover the entire planetary backstory of human existence – from the origins of life to the climate change that kickstarted human evolution. Our expert guide on this journey is Tim Coulson, the Head of the Department of Biology at the University of Oxford and the author of ⁠A Universal History of Us. ⁠

You can now listen to the episode wherever you get your shows. Alternatively, you can keep reading for highlights.

Listen (1h04): Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Other Players

1. Made in Space?

How did life emerge? It remains one of science’s greatest unsolved problems. But we’ve got clues.

As Coulson explained, it probably began in warm waters linked to volcanoes (think oceanic vents or Icelandic baths). Long before digestive systems or photosynthesizing plants, life got its energy from the Earth itself. This allowed for the first jitters of life to take hold.

But if life’s energy was pulsing from deep within, the materials rained from afar. Or so goes an increasingly plausible hypothesis.

Take the Murchison meteorite that crashed in Australia in 1969. It carried over 90 amino acids, the raw materials of life. Back when Earth was young, such cosmic deliveries were constant. Our planet vacuumed debris as it orbited, stockpiling life’s starter kit from the space junk.

How early Earth cradled life, we don’t exactly know. But it didn’t do it alone. The seeds had fallen from the heavens.

2. Why animals?

Early Earth had no oxygen in its atmosphere—which was good news for most living things: Oxygen is toxic stuff. Just think of rusting metal.

But change was coming. Long before plants existed, cyanobacteria began making food through photosynthesis. As every biology textbook explains, photosynthesis creates sugars by breaking CO₂ into carbon (which stays) and oxygen (which gets released). As Coulson explained, “The first global polluters were the cyanobacteria.”

As photosynthesis spread, Earth's atmosphere became filled with oxygen. This Great Oxygenation Event caused the planet's first mass extinction (anaerobic microbes still curse that day...).

But oxygen also supercharged energy production. The survivors learned to harness this toxic gas as powerful fuel. As Coulson puts it, this allowed life to "crank up" its metabolism and speed up operations. Like a historic city transitioning from horses to cars, these ancient organisms became far more complex.

First, one organism engulfed another, forming the first eukaryotic cells (think of modern yeast—still single-celled, but with nuclei and specialized structures). Later, cells began collaborating in organized groups, each type taking on specialized roles. Plants and animals stepped onto the scene of life, all powered by the toxic gas we call “oxygen”.

3. Tough Life

For 3 billion years, life was soft, squishy, and largely peaceful. Some predation might have happened, yes, but all animals were soft-bodied. This isn’t exactly a recipe for gladiatorial living. As Coulson explained, “You need hard parts to break into another animal.”

This era, sometimes called the “Ediacaran Garden”, ended with the Cambrian Explosion, which saw a sudden explosion in hard-bodied animals. The catalyst? A sudden abundance of calcium carbonate in the oceans allowed animals to build hard parts like shells, teeth, and skeletons. This didn’t only end the peace of the “Ediacaran Garden”. It also made life sturdy enough to leave the seas.

Arthropods, encased in calcium-rich exoskeletons, were the first pioneers to enter dry lands. With time, they evolved into all the millions of insects we know today. Meanwhile, in the seas, early fish were supported by another calcium innovation: bones. With time, these bony swimmers also ventured onto land, their fins gradually evolving into the four limbs of all tetrapods—from hippos to humans and from turtles to dinosaurs.

4. Our Phoenix Ancestors

Dinosaurs weren’t always Earth’s dominant tetrapods. Before their reign, our ancestors held the throne. Ancient synapsids—those pioneering "proto-mammals"—were to dinosaurs what dinosaurs are to us: the charismatic giants who ruled until a mass extinction wiped them out.

Of course, not all of them died. We wouldn’t be here if they did. (The same goes for dinosaurs. Birds wouldn’t be here if they all died.)

With time, these small survivors evolved towards the mammalian forms we know today. Evolution kept them small during the time of the dinosaurs, “shrew size” Coulson told me. But after the legendary asteroid impact 66 million years ago, the scene opened for mammals to grow in size.

5. Grande Finale

One curious branch of mammals evolved in the trees. After dinosaurs vanished, angiosperm forests flourished. In plainer English: fruits became abundant.

Some mammals specialized in this calorie-rich bounty. These were the first primates.

With nimble fingers and toes, early primates feasted on fruits with few predators to fear. "Ditto, snakes!" Coulson noted. (No Garden of Eden here, but this might explain our deep-seated fear of serpents.)

This lack of predators allowed evolution to embark on a new experiment: primate lives slowed down. Childhoods became longer, and deaths came later. As Coulson explains, “All primates have a slow life history compared to animals of a similar size.” With longer childhoods, brain development could intensify.1 Primate brains became the supercomputers of the animal world, packing huge amounts of neurons into a neat design. The legendary intelligence of apes and monkeys was taking shape.

In some ways, humans fit right into this picture. But in other ways, we are an oddity.

North and South America were joined around 3 million years ago. With the rise of the isthmus of Panama, warm ocean currents from the Pacific could no longer reach the Atlantic. This led to a cooler and drier Africa. Forests shrank. Grasslands expanded. And within a geological blink, the genus Homo appeared.2

It’s worth quoting Coulson in depth here:

“Our ancestors were forced to the ground as Africa dried out. You are now an animal adapted to live on fruit and leaves with a slow life history where it takes you a long time to raise your offspring—and now you are on the ground where there are things that can potentially eat you and are certainly evolving to eat you.“

But here’s the twist:

“Instead of evolving a faster life history or armor, we evolved larger brain sizes and more advanced technology.”

And this is a big deal. Our technology has made our nimble, slow, and relatively weak species into the most dangerous predator the world has ever seen.

“We became special because we were able to develop tools much faster than we could evolve morphological characteristics — we create spears much faster than we could evolve large claws. It meant that we could win every arms race that we got involved in.

The Earth has felt the effects.

“Some people don't like this argument, but for me it's pretty compelling: if you look at the spread of humans around the world … every place we arrived, we killed off the large animals. It happened again and again. So about 75,000 years ago, there were 57 terrestrial animal species that weighed over a ton. There are 11 alive now.  Very few other predators are able to drive their prey extinct. We are really unusual. And the reason we are unusual is because we have been able to evolve tools or adapt tools more quickly than our prey can respond.”

We are the only species to shape the fate of others on a planetary scale—not with fangs or claws, but with minds, stories, and tools.

And this is only the beginning.

In the next four episodes, we trace the human journey from our first steps on the savanna to the birth of language, fire, farming, and beyond. If you're curious where we came from—and where we might be headed—hit subscribe to follow the series.

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