Book Review: Origins
By Lewis Dartnell
About three weeks have passed since I finished Lewis Dartnell’s Origins: How the Earth Shaped Human History, and I am seriously bummed. This is one of the best books I’ve read in quite a while, but seeing as how I can’t remember what I had for dinner last night, I’m doubtful that I’ll be able to do the work justice. Fingers crossed I get into a groove and all those things I wanted to say float to the top of my brain and down my fingers into the keyboard.
Humanity in the last 300 or so years has usurped the role of maker, shaping the Earth to our desires and taking from the planet not only what we need for sustenance and survival but anything we damn well want to meet our whims as well as our basic needs (as someone high enough on Maslow’s hierarchy to have the luxury to sit on a Saturday and write a book review, I have a lot of first world problems for which to be grateful and put myself firmly—but not proudly—in the looter/polluter category). However, for the two million plus years before modern man turned the tables on nature, it is the Earth that has shaped us. To students of disciplines ranging from evolutionary biology to geography to history, this is obvious. The skeletons, muscles, senses and brain of Homo sapiens evolved as they did in response to environmental conditions in the Great African Rift. Agriculture was developed in areas with fertile soil near rivers, lakes and streams and not in mountainous landscapes of glacier and rock. Cities and civilizations arise when and where natural resources are available, and the encounters between and among cultures and countries documented in the history books are often driven by the luck of location and/or the need/greed for those resources.
If Dartnell stopped here, his work would be, no doubt, interesting but hardly unique; this ground has been trod many a time. Where Dartnell departs from others is in digging deep into the Earth and its past to show how those landscapes and resources were produced through planetary processes. For instance, in Chapter 1, “The Making of Us,” Dartnell relays the oft-told tale of how the changing environment of east Africa’s Rift Valley drove the evolution of our species, but he doesn’t stop with the fact of the change. Instead, he explains why the change occurred, tracing the variability of east Africa’s climate to a peculiarity of plate tectonics in that region:
The landscape of the tectonic rift creates a sharp contrast in the conditions between the high ground and the bottom of the valley. Rain falls over the tall rift walls and volcanic peaks, where it then flows into the lakes dotting the valley floor, a much hotter environment with high rates of evaporation. This means that many of the lakes in the Rift Valley are exceedingly sensitive to the balance between precipitation and evaporation, and even a slight shift in climate causes their water levels to respond very considerably and rapidly—far more so than other lakes around the world and even elsewhere in Africa. As small changes in the regional climate cause very large changes in the levels of these vital bodies of water, they are known as ‘amplifier lakes’—they act like a hi-fi amplifier intensifying a weak signal. And it is these peculiar amplifier lakes that are thought to provide the key link between the long-term trends of tectonics creating the rift valley and the Earth’s climate swings and the rapid fluctuations of habitats that directly, and dramatically, affected our evolution. (21)
Dartnell, a professor of science communication at the University of Westminster, is a master of synthesis, tracing our path from Africa to the Anthropocene with the eye of an historian, the mind of a scientist and the gift of a natural storyteller. Focusing on his homeland in the last portion of Chapter 2, “Continental Drifters,” he describes how, in rather dramatic fashion, England came to be an island:
During the ice age around 435,000 years ago (five ice ages before the most recent glaciation) a vast lake of water became trapped between the Scottish and Scandinavian ice sheets and the 30-kilometre-wide ridge of rock then still linking England and France. This lake was filled with meltwater from t ethe ice sheets as well as the discharge from rivers like the Thames and Rhine. And with no outlet to escape through, the water rose and rose, until inevitably it began to spill over the top of the land bridge. These colossal waterfalls scooped out vast plunge pools on the channel floor and gouged backwards through the barrier until this natural dam collapsed. The entire trapped lake emptied itself as a catastrophic megaflood, widening the gaping breach in the barrier and carving the landforms on the floor of the Channel we can see with sonar today. This first megalflood 425,000 years ago is thought to have been followed by a second event around 200,000 years ago, and between them they wore way what is now the Strait of Dover, leaving the white cliffs as the stump of the former isthmus. (57)
This scene unspools in my mind as clearly as a movie, tens of thousands of years compressed into a few frames, though the catastrophic violence of those loosed waters was, surely, worse than however bad I imagine it to have been. But so what that a sea channel separates what is now England from what is now France? So what indeed. Considering a few counterfactuals, Dartnell asks, “If Britain were still linked to the continent by a land bridge, would the blitzkrieg sweep of the Wehrmacht across Europe also have defeated this last bastion of resistance against Nazi Germany? Would Britain have fallen to Napoleon’s Grande Armee in 1805, or would Spanish forces have invaded in 1588 (without the need for an armada)?” (59) These are not necessarily the point, but “thinking about the potentially profound alternative outcomes underscores the importance of geology in how we find the world today” (59). Of course, the history of England—and of the world—would have been far different long before any of the events Dartnell ponders had its geology been different, which is precisely Dartnell’s point.
I’ve quoted extensively from the first couple of chapters to give a taste of both the author’s style and how he accomplishes his aim of giving voice and view into the often obscure and overlooked connection between geology and us. In some instances this connection is fairly obvious—say, how the Carboniferous plants that fossilized into coal powered the Industrial Revolution. But the always-insightful Dartnell takes this a step past industry and into politics, noting how, when plotted on a map, votes for the Labour party in the 2017 election coincide closely with a plot of Britain’s coal regions (with coal-poor, Labour-rich London as a marked exception), a logical result since the Labour party has had close ties to coal miners since its founding in 1900. Dartnell provides a similar observation regarding the so-called “Black Belt” in the American south. The 2016 election results show a string of Democratic counties sweeping in a long arc from Virginia through Georgia and west to the Mississippi that correlates to the swath of fertile soil from which the agricultural wealth of this region springs, wealth that was gathered for centuries by enslaved peoples and delivered to the men who owned plantations—and these people. Though numerous African Americans left this region in the decades following the Civil War, many remained, and even though much of the American south is deeply red, these counties, with majority African American populations, are steadfastly blue. As a southerner, I was aware of the “Black Belt” before reading Origins. What I was not aware of was why the soil along this arc is so fertile: the Western Inland Sea. During the Cretaceous period, the sea “protruded right up through the middle of the US . . ., and lapped at the toes of the Appalachian Mountains along the eastern side of the continent” (125). The materials that were eroded from the Appalachians were deposited on the seafloor, and these clay deposits eventually turned into a layer of shale, which produced the dark, nutrient-rich soils planters exploited from the 1600s forward. How different might history have been had the waters of that ancient sea lapped the Berkshires or the Catskills to the north instead of the southern Appalachians?
The connections Dartnell draws are what I, as a geology nut, find so compelling about Origins. Any geologist familiar with the historical geology of the United States can explain why there’s insanely fertile soil in this swath of the American south. Any historian of the United States can explain how this fertility led to the entrenchment of the “peculiar institution” of slavery in the American south and trace the consequences from the 1600s to present day. Any political scientist who focuses on the United States can link the presence of African Americans in these counties to the outcomes of elections. Hell, even I, neither an historian nor a political scientist but a somewhat informed US citizen, can make the last two connections. But I required Dartnell to link the results of the 2016 Presidential election to the shoreline of the Western Inland Sea 70 million years ago—that’s his magic. And whether he’s explaining why gold is, well, gold in color (Chapter 6, “Our Metallic World”), why Europe was invaded by the Mongols and a host of other peoples from the Asian steppes (Chapter 7, “Silk Roads and Steppe Peoples”) or why Portugal was uniquely situated to become an early seafaring power (Chapter 8, “The Global Wind Machine and the Age of Discovery), Dartnell is working magic, teaching me to see the facts of the human world and the world world as inextricably bound with an intricacy I had not imagined. I love me some Harry Potter, but I’ll take the true magic of Origins any day.
Learn more about Lewis Dartnell and his work.