The World in 3300 B.C.

THINK OF THE ICEMAN AS A SORT OF prehistoric Daniel Boone: a leather-clad outdoorsman, equipped with the Stone Age equivalent of a bowie knife and plenty of mountain know-how. Now imagine the reception the roughhewn pioneer might have got if he had shown up, coonskin cap and all, to greet the erudite Thomas Jefferson at Philadelphia’s Second Continental Congress — or if he had strode into the elegant court of Louis XV to mingle with the bewigged nobles of France.

That sort of culture clash — mountain man meets high society — would have happened had Iceman ventured to meet his contemporaries on other continents. While the Alpine mountaineer and his people were foraging for berries and perhaps herding sheep or cattle, the Sumerians in what is now Iraq were already living in cities, drinking beer, keeping time with a primitive clock and transporting goods with their new invention: the wheel. Furthermore, they could record these deeds in the world’s first written language. Along the Lower Nile, Egyptians were beginning to construct monumental buildings and decorate stone palettes and other objects with hieroglyphs; craftsmen worked skillfully with copper and silver. In China and Mesopotamia merchants were keeping track of their accounts with primitive numbering systems. In the southwestern Pacific, islanders were sailing double-hulled canoes, having mastered the rudiments of offshore navigation.

By the Iceman’s day, much of the world had made the transition from Paleolithic to Neolithic society — from the Old to the Late Stone Age — a change that University of Frankfurt prehistorian Jens Luning calls “the revolutionary event in human history.” It marked the transition from subsistence hunting and gathering to agriculture and the domestication of animals; the stockpiling of food; extensive use of copper; the manufacture of increasingly sophisticated tools and pottery. A dependable food supply in turn led to a population explosion: by about 4000 B.C. there were an estimated 86.5 million people on earth, about eight times as many as there had been 2,000 years earlier.

But like all other major upheavals in human society, including the Industrial Revolution, the Neolithic period arrived in different places at different times. The Iceman and his European brethren were hardly at the forefront of civilization.

EUROPE

By 3300 B.C., Europe was already relatively crowded. Farm villages had spread from the fertile plains and river valleys of Central Europe toward northern Germany and Denmark, and south to the foothills of the Alps. Herdsmen like the Iceman, on the lookout for new pastures, began to move to higher ground. On the rims of lakes and marshes, settlers built wooden homes, some on stilts, and cultivated barley and peas. Communities of 50 to 200 people dotted the shores of Lake Constance and a number of Swiss lakes, with central buildings for social functions. These villagers evidently traveled across the Alps; parsley and peppermint from the Mediterranean region have been found in some of their Neolithic dwellings. In exchange, they may have offered daintily fashioned white stone “pearls” of Alpine limestone, which have shown up in neighboring regions.

Down in the lowlands of France and Germany, the inhabitants’ spiritual and social life was sufficiently developed so that they indulged in such time- consuming projects as the construction of burial mounds and complexes of standing stones. Some 500 years before Stonehenge, predecessors of the Celts near Locmariaquer in Brittany may have used the 385-ton stone Grand Menhir, now toppled and broken, for astronomical observations. The neatly aligned rows of standing stones at nearby Carnac may have served a similar purpose. Civil engineering existed around this time as well: researchers have found remnants of 5,000-year-old wooden trackways, used as roads through the marshes of southwestern England.

On the Continent’s southern flank, villages on the Aegean islands were busily trading olive oil, wine and pottery with the Greek mainland and Crete. In Crete fashionable women sported ankle-length dresses, with necklines low enough to make Madonna blush. (The art of weaving originated more than a millennium earlier.) And in the Balkans metallurgists were hard at work crafting elaborate tools of lead, copper and iron and spectacular ornaments of gold.

MIDDLE AND NEAR EAST

While the Neolithic period was just flowering in Europe, it had long since come and gone in the Middle and Near East, and a transitional epoch, known as the Chalcolithic (copper and stone) period was approaching its zenith. The first Chalcolithic culture appeared suddenly — and mysteriously — in the Near East in about 4000 B.C. and quickly spread toward the Indus River basin and the Mediterranean.

In Mesopotamia the fertile land between the Tigris and Euphrates, the Chalcolithic people were building the first large city-states — Uruk, Ur and Eridu Larsa — in what is now southern Iraq. All grew to be thriving and fiercely competitive commercial centers. City life was centered around a ziggurat, or temple, that served as both a place of worship and a storehouse for surplus food. For the first time people were divided into several distinct social classes according to status and occupation.

In the surrounding countryside, newly developed irrigation systems nourished the barley, wheat, flax and other crops that fed the growing cities. Period drawings from Sumer, part of Mesopotamia, provide the earliest known evidence of wheels — essentially wooden planks rounded at the ends and fitted together in a circle — which were used on ox-drawn carts and, later, chariots. Sailing ships embarked on distant trading missions. By 3000 B.C., the world’s first written language, cuneiform, had appeared on small clay tablets, replacing the strings of marked clay tokens that merchants had previously used to keep track of their transactions. And at least one familiar superstition was established: when the Sumerians spilled salt, they would throw a pinch over one shoulder to ward off bad luck.

As transportation improved, thanks to the wheel, sailing ships and the domestication of donkeys, connections between far-flung villages and towns expanded dramatically. A flourishing international trade developed in copper ore, gold, ivory, grain, olive oil, wine and other wares. Explains anthropologist Brian Fagan of the University of California at Santa Barbara: “This was the beginning of a global economy.”

One of Mesopotamia’s trading partners was the Chalcolithic people in what is now Israel — a peaceful group who built houses of stone and planned their towns and streets in an orderly fashion. “They had excellent knowledge of animal behavior and of botany,” says Israeli botanist Daniel Zohary, and had managed to domesticate and improve wild grapes, olives, dates and figs, which they traded throughout the region. Their elaborately designed churns were used to make a kind of yogurt and possibly for brewing beer.

Chalcolithic smiths had determined that naturally occurring arsenic-laced copper was shinier and easier to work than the unalloyed metal. The discovery contributed to the extraordinary beauty of their ceremonial objects, jewelry and vessels, exemplified by the Judean desert treasures — a cache of objects found in a cave in 1961. “Their art was versatile, so beautiful, so different from anything that came before or after,” says Miriam Tadmor, senior curator at Jerusalem’s Israel Museum. Indeed, in the opinion of her colleague Osnat Misch, “the culture of the later Bronze Age was inferior aesthetically.”

AFRICA

Northern Africa was a somewhat wetter place five millenniums ago, and the land was fertile in a broad swath on either side of the Nile. Many Egyptians still lived in huts made of papyrus or mud; raised wheat, barley and livestock; and paid homage to the local chiefs. Within just a few hundred years the Pharaoh Narmer would forge the entire area into the great Egyptian Empire. But recent scholarship shows that local chiefdoms were already coalescing into larger kingdoms, as they were in the neighboring land of Nubia, just upriver. As in Europe, a stable food supply created a population boom and with it the need for a more centralized government.

The lives of Egyptians were closely tied to the Nile’s annual flood cycle, and they were acutely aware of its influence on agriculture. They erected huge monolithic statues representing the god Min — who symbolized fertility and the harvest — and period tombs inevitably contain pottery, jars of wine and beer or platters of food. People were often buried with items related to their occupation: hunters with spearheads, political leaders with symbols of office.

Some scholars believe that during this period Egyptian flintworking techniques reached a level that was never surpassed. Like the Sumerians to the east, the Egyptians developed a writing system, though their hieroglyphs were pictorial rather than sound-based. They also invented rudimentary arithmetic and accounting systems. “It was a simple culture compared to what came later,” says Kent Weeks, an Egyptologist at American University in Cairo. “But the quality of the work and variety of raw materials show it was in fact a fairly complex and sophisticated society.”

The Egyptians were far ahead of anyone else in Africa, but the 4th millennium B.C. was a crucial time for the rest of the continent as well. The climate started to get progressively dryer, and the Sahara expanded into a vast desert. Nomadic tribes that herded cattle, sheep and goats on the fringes of the Sahara and the Sahel and in the Sudan were forced southward to the Central African savannas, where they gradually displaced hunter-gatherers who had dominated the area for thousands of years. Only in southern Africa, where farming was difficult, did the Stone Age hunter-gatherers and fishermen continue to hold their own. In caves and rock shelters of the Kalahari, remote ancestors of the San (Bushmen) left their mark in the form of magnificent paintings of animals and hunting scenes.

ASIA

Like the rest of the world, Central Asia and East Asia were experiencing a population boom, though the great Bronze Age civilizations of India, Japan and China were at least a millennium away. Nomadic hunters and fishermen appeared for the first time along the shores of the Caspian and Aral seas and Lake Baikal. On the Iranian plateau, farmed since at least the 6th millennium B.C., people lived in houses of sun-dried brick, while craftsmen in the city of Anau used the potter’s wheel to turn out elaborately shaped and painted clay vessels. These prehistoric Persians carried on trade with small villages in what is now northern Pakistan.

The ancestors of the Chinese had begun farming along the Yellow River in the north as early as 7000 B.C. Excavations at Banpo and other sites show that by the Iceman’s day, farmers of the Yangshao culture were living in semiunderground circular huts built of mud and timbers on terraces overlooking the water. Communities were divided into living areas; large kilns, which turned out distinctive painted pottery; and cemeteries. The Yangshao buried goods with their dead, indicating a belief in the afterlife, but the homogeneity of the buried objects suggests that social classes had not yet appeared. Like the other principal culture of that region and time, known as the Longshan, the Yangshao kept pigs, sheep, chicken, buffalo and oxen, and used finely crafted tools made from stone, bone and wood.

AUSTRALIA AND OCEANIA

Superficially, at least, the Aboriginal people of Australia would have struck the Alpine Iceman as primitive. Their stone tools in 3300 B.C. were hardly different from those used in past millenniums and, for that matter, in millenniums to come, right up to the 20th century. Yet the Aborigines were ingeniously adapted to their environment, and around Iceman’s time they took two important steps forward. The first was the semidomestication of dingoes, wild dogs introduced from Asia and employed mostly as social companions. Archaeologist Josephine Flood believes that the dogs served as an object of affection and a child substitute in a society that killed babies it could not afford to feed (the dogs foraged for themselves; they were probably also used for hunting). The second, and more profound, breakthrough: for the first time, Australian Aborigines mounted stone points onto shafts to form spears.

On the nearby islands of the South Pacific, by contrast, enterprising natives of the New Guinea highlands were clearing forests and using irrigation to cultivate yams, bananas and taro root. Coastal people were developing double-hulled ocean-going canoes and mastering the rudiments of navigation, which led to an explosion of interisland trade. The dominant traders, peoples known to archaeologists as the Lapita, who lived in the Bismarck archipelago, did a booming commerce in food, obsidian, seashells and elaborately stamped pottery from island to island, eventually venturing as far away as Fiji and Tonga.

THE AMERICAS

By some 12,000 years ago, toward the end of the last Ice Age, small bands of Asian nomads began to cross the dry land bridge that spanned what is now the Bering Strait, between Siberia and Alaska. The migrations continued intermittently, and when melting ice flooded the land bridge, they stopped. These were the ancestors of the Sioux, Cherokee, Maya, Aztecs and all other Native Americans, and when they first arrived, they were hunter-gatherers like their Asian cousins.

North American native cultures showed enormous diversity by 3300 B.C. Among the oldest village sites ever found is the Koster settlement, in the Illinois River Valley. Villagers there were barely beginning to cultivate wild plants, relying mostly on nuts, grasses, fish, deer and migrating waterfowl, while people across Europe, Africa and Asia were already accomplished farmers. But elsewhere in the U.S. Midwest, populations of hunter-gatherers had staked out territories and built an extensive trading network that dealt in copper, hematite, seashells, jasper and other minerals. Fishing societies along the Pacific Coast were also becoming more complex, as natives took to the sea to hunt seals, whales and other marine mammals.

Society was also growing more complex in Mexico and Central America, but it was at its most elaborate in parts of South America. Settlers in the Ayacucho region of the Andes had domesticated guinea pigs and llamas by the time Iceman lived, and farmed potatoes, squash, beans and corn. Along the coastal desert of what is now northern Chile, the Chinchorro used woven fishing nets and hooks made of cactus thorns, shell and bone to harvest a rich diet from the sea. The Chinchorro, who were savvy hunters, developed elaborate mummification techniques some 2,500 years before the Egyptians, probably as a sacrament in ancestor worship. After removing internal organs and drying the cavf mdavers, they stuffed the remains with feathers, grass, shell, wool and earth. Then the bodies were covered with clay, fitted out with wigs and propped up in family- like groups. The Chinchorro then took care of their mummies, judging by evidence of frequent repairs.

Eventually, the Iceman’s region and the rest of Europe would catch up with other parts of the world. By 500 B.C., flourishing civilizations had sprung up in Greece, then Rome, and soon spread throughout the Continent. But back when he was plodding through the Alpine passes, the concept of a Eurocentric view of civilization would have been laughable, especially to the sophisticated societies that were thriving in Africa and Asia.