“All right. Humans appeared here about what—five million years ago?”
“Three million is a widely accepted estimate.”
“Okay, three million. Humans appeared about three million years ago. They were scavengers. Is that the right word?”
“They may well have been scavengers originally. But I think the word you’re looking for is foragers.”
“Yeah, that’s right, they were foragers. Nomads. They lived off the land, like Native Americans used to do.”
“Good. Go on.”
“Well, they went on living off the land right up to about ten thousand years ago. Then for some reason they gave up the nomadic life and started farming. Is that right—ten thousand years?”
Ishmael nodded. “New findings might push it back, but until they do, ten thousand is the generally accepted figure.”
“Okay, so they settled down and started farming, and that was basically the beginning of civilization. All this stuff. Cities, nations, wars, steamboats, bicycles, rockets to the moon, atomic bombs, nerve gas, and so on.”
“Excellent,” the gorilla said. “Alan had to perform the same feat for me, but it took him almost two hours.”
“Really? Why?”
“Partly because he’s male and must show off a bit. And partly because he’s been listening to the voice of Mother Culture for so long that he thinks it’s his own voice. He has a hard time distinguishing one from the other.”
“I see,” I said, trying not to sound smug.
“In any event, the basic lie is now in place: Around ten thousand years ago people gave up the foraging life and settled down to become farmers.”
I looked at it for a minute then asked him which part of it was wrong. “The date is right, isn’t it?”
He nodded.
“The foraging part is right, too, isn’t it? I mean, before people were farmers, they were foragers, right?”
He nodded again.
“Then they started farming. That’s what they did, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Then where’s the lie?”
“The lie’s hidden in the only part of the statement you haven’t thought about.”
“Will you repeat it for me?”
“ ‘Around ten thousand years ago people gave up the foraging life and settled down to become farmers.’ ”
“Wow,” I said. “I don’t even see any room in there for a lie.”
“Nor would most people of your culture. It is, after all, your culture’s version of the story, so naturally it appears completely unexceptional to you. You’ll see it (or some variation of it) repeated in all your textbooks. You’ll see it repeated again and again in newspaper stories and magazine articles. If you keep your eyes open, you’ll come across it in one form or another two or three times a week. You’ll see it repeated routinely by historians, who would certainly recognize it as a lie if they weren’t just repeating it routinely.”
“But where’s the lie?”
“The lie is in the word people, Julie. It wasn’t people who did this, it was the people of your culture—one culture out of tens of thousands of cultures. The lie is that your actions are humanity’s actions. The lie is that you are humanity itself, that your history is human history. The truth is that ten thousand years ago one people gave up the foraging life and settled down to become farmers. The rest of humanity—the other ninety-nine percent—went on exactly as before.”
I went into a coma for a minute or two, then I said, “Here’s the way it seems. It’s like this was the next step in human evolution. Homo forager became extinct, and Homo farmer took over.”
Ishmael nodded. “That’s very perceptive, Julie. I hadn’t seen that myself. It’s exactly the impression one receives, but of course it isn’t true.”