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Universal History: Sizing Up Humanity in Big History*
ANDRE GUNDER FRANK
Luxembourg
David Christian. Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 642 + xxii pp. $34.95.
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No brief review can possibly do even minimal justice to an author and his summa cum laude opus whose foreword by the father of modern world history, William H. McNeill, invites us "to have a great experience, read on, wonder, admire ... this extraordinary book, a historical and intellectual masterpiece [of] truly astounding dimension" (p. xvi). This "great achievement, analogous to [how] Isaac Newton united the heavens and earth is even more closely comparable to Darwin's uniting the human species and other forms of life within a single evolutionary process [and] is also a creation of the twentieth century [uniting] the efforts of physicists, cosmologists, geologists, and biologists, anthropologists, historians, and sociologists" (pp. xv, xvi). Significantly, Christian not only melds their accounts into his own but also stresses when and how—and often why as part of evolution itself—those who came before him made their own discoveries. For McNeill, "the supreme achievement of this work [is] Christian's discovery of order amid chaos and complexity" (p. xvii) since the Big Bang in the universe, in the formation of our solar system and this planet Earth, in the formation here of life and its evolution through natural selection to human kind and its social organization from over one hundred thousand years ago in family and tribe, to the neolithic revolution of agriculture over ten thousand years ago and state formation about five thousand years ago to the present—and onward to the future. I have two reasons to believe that McNeill did not choose his terms of praise gratuitously: one is that he did not use the same in his foreword to my own book on only the last of these periods, and the other is that I agree with him on both counts. |
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Christian devotes eighty pages of Big History to the modern creation myth from the Big Bang through the history of the Earth, sixty pages to the evolution of life thereon, another sixty pages to the evolution of humanity and its early history, 120 pages to its history before the modern world and another 120 pages since then, and thirty pages to visions of the future. It would be fruitless even to attempt an endless task of cataloguing five hundred pages of text, and about fifty pages each of notes, bibliography, index, and fifty maps and illustrations as well as two technical appendices on dating techniques and timelines as well as on the transformation of chaos into order. |
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Among the dating techniques and timelines, Christian offers the following perspective for our recent—one second!—history within the 13.6 billion years age of our planet Earth, by converting each billion years to a scale of one year:
History of the Universe before Our Sun: From 13 to ca. 4.5 Years Ago
The big bang occurs ca. 13 years ago.
The first stars and galaxies appear by about 12 years ago.
The sun and solar system form about 4.5 years ago.
History of Earth and Life on Earth: From 4 Years to ca. 3 Weeks Ago
The first living organisms appear about 4 years ago.
The first multicelled organisms appear about 7 months ago.
Dinosaurs are driven to extinction after a meteor impact about 3 weeks ago; mammals flourish.
The Paleolithic Era of Human History: From 3 Days Ago to
6 Minutes Ago
First hominids evolve in Africa about 3 days ago.
First Homo sapiens evolves in Africa about 50 minutes ago.
First humans reach Papua New Guinea and Australia about 26 minutes ago.
First humans reach the Americas about 6 minutes ago.
The Holocene Era of Human History: From 6 Minutes Ago to 15 Seconds Ago
First agricultural communities flourish about 5 minutes ago.
First literate urban civilizations appear about 3 minutes ago.
Classical civilizations of China, Persia, India, and the Mediterranean and the first agrarian civilizations in the Americas emerge about 1 minute ago.
The Modern Era: The Past 15 Seconds
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