Free Why the West Rules--For Now by Ian Morris

not imagine great waves of migrants like something out of a cowboy movie, though; the ape-men were surely barely conscious of what they were doing, and crossing these vast distances required even vaster stretches of time. From Olduvai Gorge to Cape Town in South Africa is a long way—two thousand miles—but to cover this ground in a hundred thousand years (the length of time it apparently took) ape-men only needed, on average, to expand their foraging range by 35 yards each year. Drifting northward at the same rate would take them to the threshold of Asia, and in 2002 excavators at Dmanisi in the Republic of Georgia found a 1.7-million-year-old skull that combines features of Homo habilis and the newer ape-men. Stone tools from China and fossil bones from Java (then still joined to the Asian mainland) may be almost as old, implying that after leaving Africa the ape-men picked up speed, averaging a cracking pace of 140 yards per year. *
    We can only realistically expect to distinguish Eastern and Western ways of life after ape-men left East Africa, spreading through the warm, subtropical latitudes as far as China; and an East-West distinction may be just what we do find. By 1.6 million years ago, there are obvious Eastern and Western patterns in the archaeological record. The question, though, is whether these contrasts are important enough that we should imagine distinct ways of life lying behind them.
    Archaeologists have known about these East-West differences since the 1940s, when the Harvard archaeologist Hallam Movius noticed that the bones of the new, brainy ape-men were often found in association with new kinds of flaked stone tools. Archaeologists called the most distinctive of these tools “Acheulean hand axes” (“ax” because they look like axheads, even though they were clearly used for cutting, poking, and pounding as well as chopping; “hand” because they were handheld, rather than being attached to sticks; and Acheulean after the small French town of St. Acheul, where they were first found in large numbers). Calling these tools works of art might be excessive, but their simple symmetry is often much more beautiful than Handy Men’scruder flakes and chopping tools. Movius noticed that while Acheulean hand axes were common in Africa, Europe, and southwest Asia, none had been found in East or Southeast Asia. Instead, Eastern sites produced rougher tools much like the pre-Acheulean finds associated with Homo habilis in Africa.
    If the so-called Movius Line ( Figure 1.2 ) really does mark the beginning of separate Eastern and Western ways of life, it could also provide an astonishingly long-term lock-in theory—one holding that almost as soon as ape-men moved out of Africa, they divided between Western/technologically advanced/Acheulean hand ax cultures in Africa and southwest Asia and Eastern/technologically less advanced/flake-and-chopper cultures in East Asia. No wonder the West rules today, we might conclude: it has led the world technologically for a million and a half years.

    Figure 1.2. The beginnings of East and West? This map shows the Movius Line, which for about a million years separated Western hand-ax-using cultures from Eastern flake-and-chopper-using cultures.
    Identifying the Movius Line, though, is easier than explaining it. The earliest Acheulean hand axes, found in Africa, are about 1.6 million years old, but there were already ape-men at Dmanisi in Georgia a hundred thousand years before that. The first ape-men clearly left Africa before the Acheulean hand ax became a normal part of their toolkit, carrying pre-Acheulean technologies across Asia while the Western/African region went on to develop Acheulean tools.
    A quick glance at Figure 1.2 , though, shows that the Movius Line does not divide Africa from Asia; it actually runs through northern India. This is an important detail. The first migrants left Africa before Acheulean hand axes were invented, so there must have been subsequent