Nature's Evil

Groups of people moved from place to place looking for firewood. These people had neither maps nor even word-of-mouth information about their environment. When they found a forest they could use, they settled there until they had burnt everything flammable. In need of timber, humankind migrated north, to the wooded tracts of Europe. But there were already similar creatures living there – the Neanderthals. Shorter but more heavily built than Homo sapiens , the Neanderthals were intelligent and aggressive. They lived in small communities, were capable of collective action and used fire and stone tools. They coped with the cold climate more easily than H. sapiens . Their brains were bigger than the brains of early modern humans, their sight was sharper, their muscles stronger. For five millennia, H. sapiens and Neanderthals lived side by side in Europe, mating and learning from each other. Then the Neanderthals died out. Archaeologists have found teeth marks from H. sapiens on their bones: early humans had eaten Neanderthals. The anthropologist Pat Shipman has proposed that the main difference between the Neanderthals and the ancestors of modern man was the symbiosis between man and wolf. Homo sapiens and wolves complemented one another. One species could track game; the other could kill it. One was swift-footed and had a superb sense of smell; the other had a big brain and tools. Hunting with dogs gave early humans their greatest advantage over Neanderthals. 4

American archaeologists investigated adjacent settlements of humans and Neanderthals in the mountains of the Southern Caucasus. The main source of food there was the Caucasian goat. Both groups knew this animal’s seasonal migration routes and settled in the vicinity. They behaved more like breeders than hunters, eating only adult animals and leaving the juveniles to mature. The Neanderthals lived in smaller groups than the humans. Their tools were more primitive because they made them out of local stone. In the human camps the archaeologists found knives made of obsidian, the nearest source of which was 100 kilometres away. With these knives, humans could split strong bones into needles. 5 These implements were highly prized and used over and over again for scraping skins and sewing them together, making clothes and shoes. These goods entailed a huge amount of labour, but they could be exchanged for other things such as obsidian. This is probably the first example of long-distance trade in human history, but the pattern was fully developed: a rare, distant natural resource was exchanged for products of human labour.

Having left their subtropical Eden, humans needed to dress in furs and skins. The Neanderthals had more subcutaneous fat and more body hair, and they did not need fur garments in the temperate climate. They could scrape animal skins but used them as bedding. In contrast to the human traders who exchanged sheep and skins for obsidian, the Neanderthals lived by subsistence farming. Along with dogs, trade gave humankind an advantage in its first battle for survival. Perhaps humans’ symbiosis with wolves was connected to their ability to carry out trade. Hunting with dogs relies on the ability to relate to another creature who has different needs from your own. This is also the basis of trade.

Roman fires

The level of harnessed energy reached a temporary peak in ancient Rome. The historian Ian Morris has used the number of kilocalories harnessed per head of population per day as ‘the measure of civilization’. 6 Those religions that worshipped the sun as the ultimate source of life – the religions of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaton and the Persian prophet Zoroaster – understood this. Burning wood provides energy that can warm man and raise him up but can also destroy him. It is up to man which of these alternatives happens.

The building boom in ancient Rome required enormous quantities of timber. The exhaustion of forests caused the move from wooden walls and roofs to structures made of brick and ceramics; but the firing of clay in kilns also needed fuel. 150 cubic metres of dry firewood were needed to make 1 cubic metre of bricks; it took 10 tons of firewood to burn the limestone to produce 1 ton of cement. To heat ancient Rome, with its underfloor heating, huge baths and cooking stoves, required the cutting down of 30 square kilometres of forest per year. 7 Those who worked on the felling, transporting and processing of timber were not slaves but hired hands, either peasants or barbarians. The smelting of bronze, iron and silver created the need for quality wood to make props for the mines and charcoal for heating the smelting cauldrons. Time after time, the authorities claimed the forests as state property, but this did not improve the supply. Rome’s drive towards the north, to the forests of Germany and even Britain, was connected with its thirst for timber and energy.