Bronowski on Man 1

The history of man is divided very
unequally. There is his biological
evolution, all the steps that separate
us from ape ancestors. That occupied
some millions of years.

And then there is his cultural history.
All that [separates] us from the few surviving
hunting tribes of Africa, or food grabbers
of Australia; and all that huge cultural
gap is in fact crowded into a few thousand years.

It's extraordinary to think, that
only in the last 12,000 years, has civilization
as we understand it, taken off.

There must have been an extraordinary
explosion in 10,000 BC, and that was a
quiet explosion. It was the end of the
last Ice Age.

This is spring in Iceland which replays
itself every year, but which played
itself once over Europe and Asia when the
ice retreated….

And Man, who had come through
these incredible hardships, and marched up
from Africa over the last million years and battled through
three ice ages, suddenly found ground
flowering, the animals surrounding him.
And moved into a different kind of life.
It's usually called the Agricultural
Revolution; but I think of it as
something much wider, the Biological Revolution...

There was intertwined in it the cultivation of
plants and the domestication of animals
in a kind of leapfrog.

And under this ran the crucial realization
that man makes his environment, not physically,
but at the level of living things.

And animals.

With that, there comes an equally powerful social revolution.

Because now it became possible - more than that, it
became necessary - for man to settle.

And this creature that had roamed and marched
for a million years had to make the crucial decision
whether he would cease to be nomad, and become
a villager.