Humans

Humans, also known as Homo sapiens or Man(kind), are, according to Wikipedia, "the most widespread and abundant species of primates, characterized by bipedality and large complex brains enabling the development of advanced tools, culture and language."

History[]

Early humans[]

Humans evolved from earlier forms of hominids such as Australopithicus (2.8 million years ago), and Homo erectus emerged in Africa between 1.8 and 1.3 million years ago. In around 300,000 BC, Homo sapiens, the modern Human, evolved from the African Homo erectus (the Homo ergaster) and migrated out of East Africa in two waves, from 130,000-100,000 BC, and from 70,000 to 50,000 BC, gradually replacing local populations of other archaic humans. Humans arrived in Europe and Asia in 125,000-60,000 BC, Australia in 65,000 BC, the Americas in 15,000 BC, and on Hawaii, Easter Island, Madagascar, and New Zealand from 300 to 1280 AD. Modern humans interbreeded with other species of archaic humans, such as Neanderthals, and early Humans lived as hunter-gatherers until 12,000 BC, when the Neolithic Revolution and the invention of agriculture led to humans establishing permanent settlements and living off the land.

Rise of Human civilization[]

During the 3000s BC, the development of city-states occurred in Mesopotamia, and the earliest form of writing, cuneiform, originated in 3000 BC; at the same time, Human civilizations emerged in the Indus Valley and Ancient Egypt. Over the next 2,000 years, great empires emerged in the early Human civilizations, such as Babylonia in Mesopotamia, the Egyptian empire in North Africa, the Hittites in Anatolia, the Shang dynasty in China, and the Minoans and Mycenaeans in Greece, but, in 1200 BC, the Late Bronze Age collapse led to the demise of several major civilizations due to a series of invasions such as the Sea Peoples in Egypt and the Dorians in Greece, as well as due to natural disasters, such as the tsunami which destroyed the Minoan civilization. The Greek Dark Ages set in, with much of human history being lost to memory. In the 5th century BC, however, human history began to be recorded as a discipline, and, from the 8th to 6th centuries, Europe entered into the Classical period, during which the Ancient Greek and Roman civilizations flourished; at the same time, China was torn apart by incessant civil war during the Warring States Period, and the Persian Empire rose to power in the Middle East. In Central America, the Mayans built cities and created complex calendars, and, in East Africa, Axum became a major trading power.

The 1st century AD saw the Roman Empire establish its hegemony in Europe and North Africa, the Han dynasty in China, and the Gupta Empire in India, but, following the Fall of the Roman Empire to invading Germanic tribes in the 5th century AD, Europe entered into the Dark Ages, marked by the decline of standards of living, the collapse of Roman cultural hegemony, the fragmentation of Europe into warring kingdoms and principalities ruled by fuedal lords, migratory invasions by peoples such as the Magyars and the Vikings, and the onset of the Middle Ages. China's Han and Jin dynasties likewise collapsed due to perennial infighting and, ultimately, barbarian invasions amid the War of the Eight Princes and the Sixteen Kingdoms era, while Indian civilization came under threat from the invasive White Huns.

Great religions and empires[]

Religious map of Eurasia from 750-1450 — A religious map of Eurasia from 750-1450

By this time, several great religions had emerged among humanity, with Christianity emerging in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa from the Jewish religion (in large part due to staunch support from the Roman emperors after 380 AD) and Islam emerging in Arabia in the 7th century AD and establishing itself as the dominant faith in North and West Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and parts of South Asia and Southeast Asia. Christianity and Islam often confronted each other on the battlefield as powerful Christian kingdoms such as England, France, and the Holy Roman Empire fought to hold back the rapid advance of the Muslim caliphates into the Iberian Peninsula, southern France, and Italy, and the Eastern Christian Byzantine Empire's call for Latin Christian assistance against the Muslim empires resulted in the bloody Crusades in the Levant from 1095 to 1291. Elsewhere, the Aztec Empire came to dominate Mexico, the Inca Empire came to dominate the Andes of South America, and the Mali Empire emerged as the largest empire in West Africa. In Japan, feudalism was firmly established as the result of the Genpei War, after which the samurai warrior caste came to dominate government in the form of the Shogun (military dictator) and local society in the form of daimyo (feudal lords). China continued to undergo a cycle of unifying empires and periods of anarchy and division, with the Mongol Empire's emergence in East Asia in the early 13th century leading to the demise of powerful dynasties from China to Baghdad.

Map of world empires and trade, 1500-1600

The early 16th century saw Europe emerge from the Middle Ages and experience a rebirth of classical culture, science, history, and arts known as the Renaissance, facilitated by the rediscovery of Roman and Greek classics through trade with the Muslim dynasties or through the Sack of Constantinople in 1204. Europe's kingdoms were soon consolidated into nation-states as feudal lords lost their power to growing centralization and kings ruled through their self-professed "divine right" and as all-powerful absolute monarchs. The Protestant Reformation of the early 16th century led to a schism within Latin Christianity as Protestant reformers sought a return to the fundamentals of Christianity and the elimination of manmade theological traditions from the all-powerful Roman Catholic Church, which held immense theological and secular power alike from its seat in Rome. Europe went through a series of wars of religion during the 16th and 17th centuries, most notably the French Wars of Religion, the Dutch Revolt, the Anglo-Spanish War, and the Thirty Years' War; at the same time, the wealthy Catholic empire of Spain launched overseas expeditions to spread the Catholic faith after driving the Muslim Moors out of Iberia in the Reconquista by 1492, resulting in the Spanish conquest of the Americas, the rise of the Spanish Empire, the start of a centuries-long genocide against the Native Americans of North and South America, and a wave of European attempts to colonize the Americas. This resulted in the creation of Spanish and Portuguese-speaking Latin America in South America and the Caribbean and the emergence of English-speaking civilizations such as America and Canada. European colonialism spread across the world during the Age of Discovery from 1492 to the 18th century, resulting in the emergence of powerful colonial empires such as Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, and Holland, and greater interconnectivity between Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas through trade, diplomacy, and war.

The Age of Discovery brought with it the implementation of the Atlantic slave trade, the implementation of race-based slavery in the New World, the exchange of foods, crops, and other materials between Europe and the Americas (such as cattle and apples from Europe and potatoes, tomatoes, tobacco, sugar, and corn from the Americas). During the 18th and early 19th centuries, the Americas underwent a violent wave of decolonization as the United States broke free from the British Empire, the nations of South and Central America won their independence from the Spanish Empire, and Haiti emerged as the first nation to win its independence in a successful slave uprising, against France. At the same time as decolonization in the New World, the Old World experienced the Industrial Revolution (leading to the growth of cities, the manufacturing industry, and international trade and the decline of farming, standards of living, and environmental health) and the Scientific Revolution (resulting in major advances in maths and the sciences). Europe's technologically-advanced superpowers soon evolved away from colonialism and towards imperialism, this time targeting Africa, Australia, and Asia with the objective of establishing colonies from which they could extract vital resources without the need for settler colonialism. The disunited civilizations of Africa, Australia, India and the declining powers of Qing China and Southeast Asia were soon overwhelmed by the Europeans, with the British, French, Germans, Portuguese, Spanish, Italians, and Belgians colonizing almost all of Africa, the British conquering the Indian Subcontinent, the French conquering Southeast Asia, the Dutch conquering Indonesia, and the European powers forcing China to grant them treaty ports after two devastating Opium Wars.

World Wars[]

The European great powers used diplomacy to settle their imperial disputes during this period, rarely resorting to war, apart from the Crimean War, the Italian Wars of Independence, and the Austro-Prussian War and a few other major, yet brief outbreaks of violence. However, the rise of political ideologies such as liberalism, radicalism, socialism, and communism led to the gradual demise of reactionary absolute monarchies and the Western world's transition towards parliamentary democracy in the form of constitutional monarchies or republics. The emergence of nationalism among several oppressed nations such as the imperial subjects of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Ireland, and Italy originated as a positive force for national self-determination, but the great powers themselves adopted an aggressive form of nationalism which emphasized national glory and jingoism. A series of arms races, political and diplomatic crises, and alliance formations between the Great Powers ultimately led to World War I from 1914-1918, resulting in the demise of the German Empire, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire of the Middle East, and the Russian Empire of Eastern Europe and the fragmentation of these empires into newly-independent nation-states such as Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Belarus, Finland, and the Baltic states.

At the same time, China's last imperial dynasty, the Qing, was overthrown in the 1911 Xinhai Revolution, resulting in nearly 40 years of anarchy during which rival warlords and political factions grappled for power until the Communist Party of China seized power during the Chinese Civil War of the 1920s-1950s. The Interwar period of 1918-1939 saw political, economic, and social upheaval across the world, including the Great Depression, successful campaigns by the Suffragettes to empower women to vote in several Western democracies during the 1920s, the rise of politically-extreme movements such as fascism and communism in nations such as Nazi Germany and Italy on one side and the Soviet Union on the other, and revolutions, civil wars, and wars of aggression such as the Russian Civil War, the Spanish Civil War, the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, and the Second Sino-Japanese War. The United States, which had first emerged as an imperial power in the 1890s due to the Spanish-American War and then during World War I, entered into a period of isolationism during the 1920s, separating itself from European affairs and instead promoting its own economic and political interests in the Americas through a series of Banana Wars. In the Pacific, Japan had established itself as a powerful empire following the First Sino-Japanese War, the Righteous Armies Wars in Korea, the Russo-Japanese War, and the invasion of Manchuria. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union (USSR) reconquered most of the former subject nations of the Russian Empire, establishing itself as a major power in Eastern Europe.

Technological advances such as the radio, submarines, tanks, new types of artillery, handheld (sub)machine guns, and planes led to a rise in militarism among the world's great powers, and, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, the Allied Powers of Britain (including its massive Commonwealth) and France came to Poland's aid, leading to the start of World War II. The Second World War II touched nearly every continent and every ocean, as, over the course of six years (1939-1945), the democracies of the West and the communist Soviet Union formed an uneasy alliance to fight against the expansionist fascist powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan. The war resulted in the demise of all of the fascist regimes wo had taken up arms as allies of Germany; the fascist regimes of Spain and Portugal would survive until the 1970s, partly through the toning down of their extreme rhetoric and the moderation of their views to a strong form of national conservatism.

The Cold War and social revolutions[]

Power movements of the 1960s — The "Power movements" of the 1960s

The war also resulted in a confrontation between the democratic Western Bloc and the Marxist-Leninist Eastern Bloc in the "Cold War", during which the major powers (the United States and the Soviet Union) engaged in a series of proxy wars such as the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Soviet-Afghan War rather than engaging in direct confrontation. During the 1950s and 1960s, disillusionment with the rigid social rules of the World War II era led to revolutions in popular culture (such as the rise of the television industry, rebellious "Rock n' Roll" music, and drug use), civil rights (such as the African-American Civil Rights movement in the United States and the international feminist, gay rights, and pacifist movements), sexuality (the rise of "free love", counterculture, and birth control), and politics (the emergence of the interventionist Keynesian consensus and the mainstreaming of social democratic political parties across the West). The Cold War ended in 1991 with the Dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Breakup of Yugoslavia, the rapprochement of the West and a modernized China, and the installation of pro-Western governments (including many dictatorships) in the Third World.

Birth of the 21st century[]

Collage depicting 1990s America — A collage depicting 1990s America

The 1990s also saw the start of a major technological revolution, which would eventually lead to the widespread ownership of computers and cell phones by the 2010s, as well as the spread of social media (which, by the 2010s, had come to serve as an, albeit highly unreliable, news source for millions around the world). However, the geopolitical themes of the 21st century also began to emerge in the 1990s as the United States and a conservative-dominated Russia once again became rivals as the result of the Yugoslav Wars and the continued existence and expansion of NATO, globalization led to conflicts such as the EZLN insurgency in the Mexican state of Chiapas, the Western powers gradually turned against the military strongmen in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa who had once proved useful allies against communism (starting with the Gulf War of 1990-1991), and China established itself as a major economic competitor with the West.

The 9/11 attacks, which led to the War on Terror

The 2000s began with the 9/11 attacks of 11 September 2001, in which radical Islamist terrorists from al-Qaeda (which drew its support from Islamic fundamentalists opposed to the West's cultural and political influences in the Muslim world, as well as the West's support for Israel against Palestine) hijacked four airliners and used them for suicide bombings against the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon against Arlington, both in the United States. The 9/11 attacks resulted in the United States, then governed by George W. Bush's neoconservative-dominated Republican Party, assembling a "Coalition of the Willing" and initiating a "War on Terror" against radical Islamist groups around the world, from Afghanistan and Pakistan in Central Asia to Iraq and Syria in the Levant, Yemen in the Arabian Peninsula, Somalia and Mozambique in eastern Africa, Algeria and Libya in North Africa, Mali and Nigeria in West Africa, and the Philippines and Indonesia in Southeast Asia.

Globalization and Polarization[]

As Islamophobia rose across the West as the result of the War on Terror, neoliberalism dominated Western economic thought in the aftermath of the presidencies and premierships of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, social conservatism became a major political force as the result of a post-Vietnam War backlash against the counterculture movement, and globalization presented new economic issues such as the Great Recession of 2007-2009, political polarization rose once again. The presidency of Barack Obama in the United States led to a racist and populist backlash in the form of the far-right Tea Party movement, while the increasing economic moderation of social democratic parties in Europe (such as the PSOE in Spain, PASOK in Greece, and Democratic Party in Italy) led to their decline (in a process known as "Pasokification") as left-wing radical movements such as Spain's Podemos, Greece's Syriza, Italy's Five Star Movement, and the United States' own "progressive" movement (personified by democratic socialist leaders such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) called for an end to globalization and neolibealism and attacked fellow center-left politicians for being insufficiently progressive.

At the same time, several waves of immigration from the Middle East and Africa (caused by the civil wars which followed the Arab Spring, as well as by the poor economic situations of several Third World countries) and the moderation of center-right parties such as the conservative-liberal David Cameron's Conservative Party in the United Kingdom, the liberal-conservative Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union of Germany, the Gaullist The Republicans party in France, the People's Party in Spain, the big tent Forza Italia party in Italy, and the Moderate Party in Sweden, led to the rise of right-wing populist and identitarian parties such as the extremely Eurosceptic UKIP in Britain, the neo-Nazi-linked Alternative for Germany in Germany, the "souverainist" National Rally in France, the anti-Muslim Vox party in Spain, the separatist Lega Nord in Italy, and the originally-fascist Sweden Democrats in Sweden. Issues such as gay rights, women's rights, the rights of racial minorities, immigration, globalism, nationalism, and religion exacerbated the tensions between the left-wing and right-wing extremist movements in almost every Western country (as well as in Latin America), and, as the United States-led NATO alliance and the Russian-dominated and authoritarian Eastern Bloc (also including China and North Korea) entered into a "Cold War II", Russia covertly supported efforts to further polarize and weaken the Western democracies through disinformation campaigns, the spread of "fake news" on social media, and even through cyberattacks.

In 2016, the far-right businessman Donald Trump was elected President of the United States at the head of a coalition of anti-establishment, nativist, socially conservative, predominantly white working-class and Christian, and fanatically loyal followers who seized control of the Republican Party, leading to the primary defeats or retirements of several prominent "Establishment Republicans" and the Trumpist takeover of the GOP, which endured even after he was twice impeached by the US House of Representatives, defeated for re-election by the moderate Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, and failed in his attempt to overturn the election results in the 2021 United States coup d'etat attempt at the Capitol building in Washington DC. Meanwhile, the progressive left in the United States grew in strength due to a shift in popular culture (particularly after the George Floyd protests of 2020-2021), backlash against the rise of Trumpism, and the increased diversification of the American populace. The Russian government was directly involved in both sides of the American "culture war", sabotaging Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign to benefit both Trump and her own intraparty rival, Bernie Sanders, as well as by using Russia Today (RT) to amplify far-left voices in American politics and boost pro-Russia and far-left organizations such as the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Also in 2016, a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment led to the United Kingdom narrowly voting to exit the European Union in "Brexit" (which formally occurred in January 2020), and the late 2010s also saw a conservative wave evict socialist governments from power in South America, and far-right parties win parliamentary representation in several European nations' parliaments.

Crises of the 2010s and 2020s[]

While the world teetered on the brink of a third world war due to conflict flare-ups in Ukraine (between NATO and Russia) and the Persian Gulf (between Iran and the US-led alliance of Arab kingdoms), political tensions in the West reached their breaking points, the Arab World was devastated by waves of uprisings and civil wars, and the COVID-19 pandemic devastated the world economy in 2020-2021, climate change also threatened the future of humanity, as it was projected that, between 2027 and 2042, the effects of global warming (and climate change as a whole) would become irreversible and lead to calamities such as an increase in heat waves and heavy precipitation, decreased water in semi-arid regions, and lead to more natural disasters such as floods and droughts. Human population growth also became unsustainable as the human population skyrocketed and water and food supplies gradually dwindled due to global warming, leading to fears of a "Malthusian disaster" of conflict over resources.