Figure 2.3. Farmers and fighters: the lucky latitudes

Figure 2.3 shows the same ancient empires .....The areas marked in gray show the agricultural heartlands where humans first invented farming, in the years between about 10,000 and 5,000 B.C. the beginning of farming was one of the two or three real turning points in human history, and I described it in some detail in my book "Why the West Rule -- for Now"; I return to it here, though, because of the coincidence between the places where farming began and the places where ancient empires appeared several thousand years later. The reason that war gave birth to Leviathan [ a sea monster, identified in different passages with the whale and the crocodile] in these lucky latitudes, while life outside them remained as poor, nasty, and brutish as ever, is that farming made war productive. Page 75

The story begins about nine thousand years before the Persians and Greek fought at Plataea, when the world began warming up after the last spasm of the Ice Age [Paleoclimatologists technically date the end of Ice Age proper around 12,700 BC but regularly treat the twelve hundred year mini ice age known as the Younger Dryas (10,800-9,600 BC) as the Ice Age's final phase.] Plants and animals, including humans, reproduced madly. At the coldest point in the Ice Age, twenty thousand years ago, there has been barely half a million people on earth; ten thousand later there were ten million.

Then as now, global warming affected some parts more than others. What made the lucky latitudes lucky was that in this part of the world, climate and ecology conspired to favor the evolution of large-grained grasses and big, meaty mammals. The hunting and gathering were better here than anywhere else on earth, and of the ten million people in the world of 8000 BC., more than half lived in the lucky latitudes. ~ Page 76