McNeill J.R.&W.H. (2003). The Human Web: A birds-eye view of world history.

New York,
London: W.W. Norton & Company.

Preface (p. xvii p. xviii)

This book is for people who would like to know how the world got to be the way it is but dont
have time to read a shelf or two of history books.

- authors are father and son;

Introduction: Webs and History (pp. 3-8)

- Book focuses on the centrality of webs of interaction in human history (p. 3)

- A web, as we see it, is a set of connections that link people to one another. These
connections may take many forms: chance encounters, kinship, friendship, common
worship, rivalry, enmity, economic exchange, ecological exchange, political cooperation,
even military competition. In all such relationships, people communicate information and
use that information to guide their future behaviour. They also communicate, or transfer,
useful technologies, goods, crops, ideas, and much else. Furthermore, they inadvertently
exchange diseases and weeds, items they cannot use but which affect their lives (and
deaths) nonetheless. The exchange and spread of such information, items, and
inconveniencies, and human responses to them, is what shapes history.(pp. 3-4)
- The human web change a lot over time we now have to talk about human webs (in the
plural) (p. 4)
- Human web dates back to the development of speech = > created social solidarity (p. 4)
- Humans lived in small bands -> migrated - > but the fact that we are still a single species
today is proof that genes were exchanged between bands (p. 4)
- Early exchange of bows and arrows proves technologies could be communicated from
band to band These exchanges are evidence of a very loose, very far-flung, very old
web of communication and interaction: the first worldwide web. But people were few and
the earth was large, so the web remained loose until about 12,000 years ago.(p. 4)
- Agriculture => The first worldwide web never disappeared, but segments within it
became so much more interactive that they formed smaller webs of their own. (p.4)
- Development of cities => metropolitan webs based on interactions connecting cities
to agricultural and pastoral hinterlands, and to one another (p.4) but they did not link
everyone some people still isolated, economically self-sufficient, culturally distinct, and
politically independent (p.4)
- Some metropolitan webs spread, and absorbed or merged with others. Others prospered
for a time but eventually frayed and fell apart: the process of web building had many
reversals. (pp. 4-5)
- In the last 500 years, oceanic navigation united the worlds metropolitan webs (and its
few remaining local webs) into a single cosmopolitan web.
- But in the last 160 years extremely electrified and much faster exchanges => today
everyone lives inside a single global web, a unity of maelstrom of cooperation and
competition. The career of these webs of communication and interaction constitutes the
overarching structure of human history. (p. 5)
- All webs combined cooperation and competition. The ultimate basis of social power is
communication that sustains cooperation among people. This allows many to strive
towards the same goals, and it allows people to specialise in what they do best. -> both
cooperation and competition foster progress, but can also make society more stratified,
unequal (p 5)
- Those groups that achieved more efficient communication and cooperation within their
own ranks improved their competitive position and survival chances. They acquired
resources, property, followers, at the expense of other groups with less effective internal
communication and cooperation. So the general direction of history has been toward
greater and greater social cooperation-both voluntary and compelled-driven by the
realities of social competition. (pp. 5-6) => large metropolitan webs developed faster
military, economic etc benefits but also disadvantages poverty, diseases, warriors
turning against people etc. => Nonetheless, the survivors of these risks enjoyed a
marked formidability in relation to peoples living outside such webs.(p. 6) - did they
really?
- Webs are unconscious and unrecognised features of social life. (p. 6)
- Leaders played a key role in the expansion of metropolitan webs -> sought to enhance
their power and status through expanding the webs they were using (pp. 6-7)
- Advances in communication and transport also helped metropolitan webs expand (p. 7)
- Webs constantly and expanded and grew => increased efficiency: Between 12,000 and
5, 000 years ago, at least seven societies around the world invented agriculture, in most
cases quite independently: parallel pressures led to parallel solution. But the steam engine
did not have to be invented 7 times to spread around the world: by the 18 th century, once
was enough.(p. 7)
- We have inaugurated a new era of earth history the Anthropocene in which our
actions are the most important factor in biological evolution, and in several of the planets
biogeochemical flows and geological processes (pp. 7-8)
- Aim of the book: How people created the webs of interaction, how those webs grew,
what shapes they took in different parts of the world, how they combined in recent times
into a single cosmopolitan web, and how this altered the human role on earthis the subject
of our book.(p. 8)

I: The Human Apprenticeship (pp. 9-24)

- our apelike ancestors ventured onto savanna landscapes something like 4 million years
ago(p. 9)
- Protohumans = versatile, adaptable (9-10):
 o Varied diet
o Adaptation to climate changes (glaciation and melt periods)
o Developed toolmaking (1.8 million years ago) stone and wood
o Used and controlled fire (uncertain -1 million years ago?)
- Homo erectus (p. 11):
o 1.6 million ago attained same stature like humans nowadays
o Larger brain
o Migration from African savannas to Asia and Europe => adapted to diverse
natural conditions
- Homo sapiens (p. 11-12):
o Larger brain
o Changes in skeletal design
o 40,000 years ago persistent technological development started => spread of
different tool types; spread of humans everywhere;
o Expanded into Australia, Americas and absorbed Neanderthals in Europe and
Southwest Asia
o This astonishing expansion was made possible by the development of language
created social meanings => Once human beings were able to construct a world
of agreed-upon meanings by talking things over, and assigning conventional
names to objects, actions, and situations, they interposed a verbal filter between
personal experience and everything outside (including all the other individuals in
the immediate community and their possible or likely actions). This, in turn,
allowed social behaviour to attain increasingly precise coordination. For, as with
tools and with fire, agreed-upon meanings could be changed and improved
whenever experience disappointed expectation.(p. 12) => innovation
o Before language -> song and dance used to communicate -> larger groups took
over smaller ones, but too large meant war=> split between two groups => dance
and song became universal as a mean of communication( p. 13)
o Expansion triggered by need to find food and shelter turned more towards
hunting
o In Australia and Americas => the arrival of human hunters closely coincided
with a widespread die-off of large-bodied animals (p. 15) - > but also uncertainty
whether humans were responsible, but likely they played a key role
o Species of potential use as domesticates also disappeared - ex. Horses and camels
in the Americas
o Use of fire to destroy landscape ex. Starting wildfires to make hunting easier
o Developed tools and arms for killing animals
o Gathering: developed different techniques and knowledge about different types of
food, when and where to find them
o Women and children were specialised as gatherers => share of food between
male hunters and female gatherers => family units transmission of skills from
parents to children (p. 17)
 o Communication -> specialisation: priests and other spirit men (p. 17)
o The concept of a spirit world, invisible and parallel to human society first great
intellectual system it explained all human experiences: life, death, dreams etc
o Most important form it took animism not dismissed by any other religious or
philosophical system (p. 18)
o When there was extra food or more than usual they gathered together to sing,
dance, arrange marriages (important cause breeding with their own small group
was harmful) and exchange information and precious objects => festivals =>
important in establishing a first web of communication (p. 18)
o Humans survived other environments because they were colder parasites died
less diseases (pp. 18-9)
o Yet, armed with fire, even small wandering human bands were capable of
radically transforming the natural world around them, and changes in pollen
deposits show that they did so to plant life on every continent except
Antarctica.(p. 19)
o Population growth + they learnt to preserve food + housing easier when settled =>
more leisure time => more ritual => cultural diversification
- Examples of gathering and hunting societies (pp. 20-21):
o The ones along the Pacific and Arctic coasts or North America (the Inuits):
Relied on fishing and whaling
Potlatches gift meal => share of food, ideas etc + defined social
ranking with communities
Adapted to the cold environment by exploiting all resources
available
o Magdalenian groups in Southern France and northern Spain:
Extraordinary cave art
Great tools made of bone, wood, stone and ivory
Harvested migratory reindeers
Climate change => reindeers changed migration to northward =>
downfall of the Magdalenian society? Migrated with them?
o Southwest Asian groups:
Harvested ripe
Tools: sickles to cut grain stalks and grinding stones to make flour
Also hunting antelopes
Climate change => some groups continued to migrate; some
settled and learn how to cultivate wheat on their own

II: Shifting to food production, 11,000-3,000 years ago