All language subtitles for BBC_Ascent_Of_Man_1973_E02_DVDRip_XviD-eBwoy

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The history of man is
divided very unequally.

There is his biological evolution.

All the steps that separate
us from our ape ancestors.

Those occupied some
millions of years.

And then there is
his cultural history.

All that separates us from the few
surviving hunting tribes of Africa,

or food gatherers of Australia.

And all that enormous cultural gap is, in
fact, crowded into a few thousand years.

It's extraordinary to think that
only in the last 12,000 years

has civilisation, as we
understand it, taken off.

There must have been an
extraordinary explosion

in 10000 BC.

And there was.

It was a quiet explosion.

It was the end of the last ice age.

This is spring in Iceland.

Which replays itself every year.

But which played itself once over
Europe and Asia when the ice retreated.

And man, who had come through
these incredible hardships,

had marched up from Africa
over the last million years,

had battled through three ice ages,

suddenly found the ground flowering,

the animals surrounding him.

And moved into a
different kind of life.

It's usually called the
agricultural revolution.

But I think of it as
something much wider -

the biological revolution.

There was intertwined in it
the cultivation of plants,

and the domestication of animals,

in a kind of leap frog.

And under this ran
the crucial realisation

that man dominates his environment
in its most important aspect.

Not physically,

but at the level of living things,

plants and animals.

With that, there comes an equally
powerful social revolution.

Because now it became possible...

More than that, it became
necessary for man to settle.

And this creature that had roved
and marched for a million years,

had to make the crucial decision:

Whether he would cease to be a nomad

and become a villager.

We have an anthropological record

of the struggle of conscience of
a people who makes this decision.

The record is the Bible.

The Old Testament.

As for people who never made it,

there are few survivors.

There are some nomad tribes

who still go through these vast transhumance
journeys from one grazing ground to another -

the Bakhtiari in Persia for example.

And you have actually to travel with
them and live with them to understand

that civilisation can
never grow up on the move.

Everything in nomad
life is immemorial.

The Bakhtiari have
always travelled alone.

Quite unseen.

Like other nomads,

they think of
themselves as a family.

The sons of a single
founding father.

The Jews used to call themselves
the children of Israel or Jacob.

The Bakhtiari take their name from
a legendary herdsman of Mongol times,

Bakhtyar.

"And the father of our people,

the hill man Bakhtyar, came out of the fastness
of the southern mountains in ancient times.

His seed was numerous as
the rocks on the mountains

and his people prospered."

The patriarch Jacob had two wives

and he worked as a herdsman for
seven years for each of them.

Compare the patriarch
of the Bakhtiari.

His first wife had seven sons.

"Fathers of the seven
brother lines of our people."

His second wife had four sons.

"And our sons shall take for wives the
daughters from the father's brothers' tents,

lest the flocks and
the tents be dispersed."

Sheep and goats were first
domesticated about 10,000 years ago.

Only the dog is an older
camp follower than that.

The life of the nomads
is an endless struggle.

An endless ritual to live by
keeping their animals alive.

The object of the system of
cross-cousin marriage, for example,

is to ensure that the flock and the
simple technology that goes with it

is preserved within the family.

The Bakhtiari bake bread
in the biblical manner,

in unleavened cakes on hot stones.

The girls and the women wait
to eat until the men have eaten.

The function of women is
to produce men children.

Too many she-children are a
misfortune. They threaten disaster.

Like the men, the lives of
the women centre on the flock.

They have only the simple technology that can
be carried on daily journeys from place to place.

They milk the herd and they
make yoghurt from the milk

by churning it in a goatskin
bag on a primitive wooden frame.

The simplicity is not romantic.

It's a matter of survival.

When the women spin wool,

with their simple, ancient
devices, it's for immediate use,

to make the repairs that are
essential on the journey and no more.

(Simple repetitive tune)

The Bakhtiari life is too narrow to
have time or skill for specialisation.

If they need metal pots,

they barter them
from settled people.

A nail, a stirrup, a toy...

or a child's bell... is something
that is got from outside the tribe.

There is no room for innovation,

because there is not time between evening
and morning to develop a new device

or a new thought.

Not even a new tune.

The only habits that
survive are the old habits.

The only ambition of the
son is to be like the father.

It's a life without features.

Every night is the end
of a day like the last.

And every morning will be the beginning
of a journey like the day before.

(Cock crows)

When the day breaks,
there is one question.

Can the flock be got
over the next high pass?

This is the pass
Zadeku, 12,000 feet high,

which the flock must
somehow struggle through.

The tribe must move on.

The herdsmen must find
new pastures every day,

Because at these heights, grazing
is exhausted in a single day.

The Bakhtiari undertake a
journey of 250 miles every spring

over the high mountain passes
to reach their summer pastures.

And in the autumn, they
will come all the way back.

Before 10000 BC,

nomad peoples used to follow the
natural migration of wild herds -

as the Lapps still
follow the reindeer.

But sheep and goats have
no natural migrations.

When man domesticated them, he took
on the responsibility of nature.

The nomad must lead
the helpless herd.

They crossed six
ranges of mountains.

They marched through snow
and the spring flood water.

And in only one respect

has their life advanced
beyond 10,000 years ago.

They have pack animals,

horses, donkeys, mules,

which have only been
domesticated since that time.

Nothing else in their lives is new.

And nothing is memorable.

Nomads have no memorials,

even to the dead.

Where was Jacob buried?

The only mounds that they
build are to mark the way.

This is the pass of the women.

Treacherous but easier
than the high pass.

It's a heroic adventure

and yet the Bakhtiari are
not so much heroic as stoic.

Resigned because the
adventure leads nowhere.

The summer pastures themselves
will only be a stopping place.

There is no promised land.

Who knows in any one year whether the
old, when they've crossed the pass,

will be able to face the final test?

The crossing of the Bazuft River.

Three months of meltwater
have swollen the river.

The tribesmen, the
pack animals, the women,

and the flocks are all exhausted.

It will take a day to manhandle
the flocks across the river.

The head of the family has
worked seven years, as Jacob did,

to build a flock of
50 sheep and goats.

He expects to lose ten
of them in the migration,

if things go well.

If they go badly,

he may lose 20 out
of his flock of 50.

Those are the odds of nomad
life, year in and year out.

And beyond that, at
the end of the journey,

there will still be nothing except
an immense traditional resignation.

But this here now
is the testing day.

Today is the day on which
the young become men.

Because the survival of the herd and
the family depends on their strength.

Crossing the Bazuft River
is like crossing the Jordan.

It's the baptism to manhood.

For the young men,

life for a moment comes alive here.

And for the old...
for the old, it dies.

~ SHOSTAKOVICH: Symphony No5 Opus 47

What happens to the old when
they can 't cross the last river?

Nothing. They stay to die.

Only the dog is puzzled
to see a man abandoned.

The man accepts the nomad custom.

He has come to the
end of his journey.

The largest single step
in the ascent of man

is the change from nomad
to village agriculture.

What made that possible?

An act of will by men surely.

But with that a strange
and secret act of nature.

At the end of the ice age,

a hybrid wheat appeared
in the Middle East.

It happened in many places,

a typical one is the
ancient oasis of Jericho.

Jericho is older than agriculture.

The first people that came
here and settled by the spring

in this otherwise
desolate foreground

were people who harvested wheat,
but did not yet know how to plant it.

That's an extraordinary
piece of foresight.

They made sickles which
have survived out of flint.

Garstang found these when he
was digging here in the 1930s.

The holders in which these
were fitted have been found.

And so I've reconstructed the kind of sickle
with which they went out and found the wild wheat

and harvested it.

Here it is.

The ancient sickle edges set in a modern piece
of gazelle horn of the kind that they used,

or they used bone.

There no longer survives up here on the tell
the kind of wild wheat that they harvested.

But the grasses that are still here

must look very like the
wheat that they found.

That they gathered for the
first time by the fistful

and cut with that sawing
motion of the sickle

that reapers have used for all
the 10,000 years since then.

That was the Natufian pre-agricultural
civilisation and of course it couldn 't last.

It was on the brink
of becoming agriculture

and that's the next thing that
happened here on the Jericho tell.

The turning point of the spread
of agriculture in the old world

was almost certainly the occurrence of two
forms of wheat with a large, full head of seeds.

Before 8000 BC, wheat was not
the luxuriant plant it is today.

It was merely one of many wild grasses
that spread throughout the Middle East.

The time-lapse film shows six weeks of
growth of a primitive wild wheat of this kind.

By some genetic accident, the wild
wheat crossed with a natural goat grass

and formed a fertile hybrid.

That accident must
have happened many times

in the springing vegetation that
came up after the last ice age.

In terms of the genetic
machinery that directs growth,

it combined the 14 chromosomes of wild
wheat with the 14 chromosomes of goat grass

and produced emmer
with 28 chromosomes.

That's what makes
emmer so much plumper.

The hybrid was able
to spread naturally,

because its seeds are attached to the husk
in such a way that they scatter in the wind.

For such a hybrid to
be fertile is rare,

but not unique among plants.

But now the story of the rich plant life that
followed the ice age becomes more surprising.

There was a second genetic accident,

which may have come about because
emmer was already cultivated.

Emmer crossed with
another natural goat grass

and produced a still larger
hybrid with 42 chromosomes,

which is bread wheat.

That was improbable
enough in itself.

And we know now that bread
wheat would not have been fertile

but for a specific genetic
mutation on one chromosome.

Yet there's something even stranger.

Now, we have a
beautiful ear of wheat,

but one which will
never spread in the wind.

Because the ear is
too tight to break up.

And if I do break it up,

why, then the chaff flies off and
every grain falls exactly where it grew.

Can I just remind you that's quite different
from the primitive wheats like emmer.

You see, the ear is much more open.

And if this ear breaks up,

then you get quite
a different effect...

You get grains which
will fly in the wind.

The bread wheats have
lost that ability.

Suddenly man and the
plant have come together.

Man has a wheat that he lives by,

but the wheat also thinks that man was made
for him, because only so can it be propagated.

That happened about
10,000 years ago.

And it happened in the fertile
crescent of the Middle East

of which this is a
characteristic piece.

This is the ancient sweet
water city of Jericho.

The oasis on the edge of the desert whose
spring has been running from prehistoric times

right into the modern city.

Here man began civilisation.

Here, too, the Bedouins came with their
dark muffled faces out of the desert,

looking jealously at
the new way of life.

That's why Joshua brought the tribes of
Israel here on their way to the Promised Land.

Because wheat and water,
they make civilisation,

they make the promise of the
land flowing with milk and honey.

Wheat and water turned that barren
hillside into the oldest city of the world.

All at once, Jericho is transformed.

People come and almost at once
become the envy of their neighbours.

So they have to fortify Jericho,
turn it into a walled city

and build 9,000 years
ago this stupendous tower.

The tower is 30ft
across at the base,

and, of course, well
over 30ft in depth.

And climbing up beside it, layer
upon layer of past civilisation.

The early pre-pottery men,

the next pre-pottery men,

the coming of pottery
7,000 years ago.

Early copper. Early
bronze. Middle bronze.

Each of these civilisations
came, conquered Jericho,

buried it and built itself up.

So that we are under 45ft
of past civilisations.

When Kathleen Kenyon rediscovered
this ancient tower in the 1950s,

she found that it was hollow.

And, to me, this staircase is a sort of taproot,
a peephole to the rock base of civilisation.

And the rock base of
civilisation is the living being,

not the physical one.

By 6000 BC, Jericho was a
large agricultural settlement.

Kathleen Kenyon estimates
that it contained 3,000 people

and covered eight or ten
acres within the walls.

The women ground the wheat
with the heavy stone implements

that characterise
a settled community.

The men shaped, patted and moulded the clay
for these bricks, some of the earliest known.

The marks of the brick-maker's
thumb prints are still there.

Man, like the bread wheat,
is now fixed in his place.

A settled community also has a
different relation to the dead.

The inhabitants of Jericho
preserved some skulls,

and covered them with
elaborate decoration.

No-one knows why,

unless it was a reverential action.

No-one who was brought up on
the Old Testament, as I was,

can leave Jericho without
asking two questions.

Did Joshua finally
destroy this city?

And did the walls really
come tumbling down?

Those are the questions that
bring people to this site

and turn it into a living legend.

To the first question,
there's an easy answer.

Yes.

The tribes of Israel were fighting
to get into the fertile crescent,

which runs up the
Mediterranean coast,

along the mountains of Anatolia,

and down the Tigris and Euphrates.

And here, Jericho was the key

that locked their way up
the mountains of Judea,

and out into the
Mediterranean fertile land.

This they had to conquer.

And they did,

about 1400 BC -

about 3,300, 3,400 years ago.

The story was not written
up until perhaps 700 BC.

That is, the Bible story...

is about 2,600, 2,700 years
old as a written record.

But did the walls come
tumbling down? We don 't know.

There's no archaeological
evidence on this site

that suggests that a set of walls
one fine day really fell flat.

But many sets of walls
did fall all the time.

There is a Bronze Age period here where a
set of walls was rebuilt at least 16 times.

Because this is earthquake country.

There are tremors
here still every day.

There are four major
quakes in a century.

The Bible is a curious history.

Part folklore...

and part record.

History is, of course,
written... by the victors.

And the Israelis, when they burst through
here, became the carriers of history.

The Bible is their story.

The history of a people

who had to stop being
nomad and pastoral,

and had to become an
agricultural tribe.

Agriculture creates a technology from
which all physics, all science, takes off.

Let me remind you,

at the beginning, I
showed you two sickles.

And at first glance,
they look very much alike.

The sickle of 10,000
years ago of the gatherer

and the sickle of 9,000 years
ago, when wheat was cultivated.

But look more closely.

The cultivated wheat is sawed...

with a serrated edge.

Because if you hit the wheat,

then the grains will fall.

But if you gently saw it,

the grain will be held
in the ear of corn.

And sickles have been made
like this ever since then,

into my boyhood in
the First World War

when the curved sickle with the serrated
edge was still what you cut wheat with.

Technology like that,
physical knowledge like that,

comes to us out of every
part of the agricultural life.

The most powerful invention in all
agriculture is, of course, the plough.

We think of the plough as
a wedge dividing the soil.

And the wedge is an important
early mechanical invention.

But the plough is also
something much more fundamental.

It is a lever which lifts the soil.

And it is the first application
of the principle of the lever.

When, long afterwards, Archimedes explained
the theory of the lever to the Greeks,

he said that with a lever
he could move the earth.

But thousands of years before that,

the ploughmen of the
Middle East had been saying,

"Give me a lever and I
will feed the earth."

Agriculture was invented at least
once again much later in America.

But the plough and the wheel were not,
because they depend on the draft animal,

The step beyond simple
agriculture in the Middle East

was the domestication
of draft animals.

The wheel is found for the
first time before 3000 BC

and from then on, the wheel and the axle
become the taproot from which invention grows.

For example, it's turned into
an instrument for grinding wheat.

And using the forces
of nature to do that,

the animal forces first, and
later the forces of wind and water.

The wheel becomes a model
for all motions of rotation.

About the time that
Joshua stormed Jericho,

the mechanical engineers
of Sumer and Assyria

turned the wheel into
a pulley to draw water.

At the same time they designed
large-scale irrigation systems.

The vertical maintenance
shafts still survive.

They go down 300ft to the qanats or
underground canals that make up the system.

3,000 years after they were made,

the village women of Khuzistan still
draw their water ration from the qanats

and carry on the everyday
chores of ancient communities.

They are a late construction
of a city civilisation

and they imply the existence by
then of laws to govern water rights

and land tenure and
other social relations.

In an agricultural community, the
rule of law has a different character

from the nomad law that governs
the theft of a goat or a sheep.

Now the social structure is bound up

with the regulation of matters that
affect the community as a whole.

Access to land.

The upkeep and control of waterways.

The right to use, turn and turn
about, the precious constructions

on which the harvest
of the seasons depends.

By now the village artisan has
become an inventor in his own right.

He combines the basic
mechanical principles

in sophisticated tools which
are, in effect, early machines.

This is a lathe which is turned
by moving a bow to and fro,

so that the string rotates the
drum that holds a piece of wood,

which is scored by a chisel.

The combination is
several thousand years old.

But I saw it used by gypsies making
chair legs in a wood in England in 1945.

A machine is a device for
tapping the power in nature.

That's true of the simplest spindle
that the Bakhtiari women carry,

all the way to the historic first
nuclear reactor and all its busy progeny.

How is it that the machine in its
modern form now seems to us a threat?

It begins when man first harnessed
a power greater than his own.

The power of animals.

Every machine is a
kind of draft animal,

even the nuclear reactor.

It increases the surplus
that man has won from nature

since the beginning of agriculture.

Agriculture was one part of
the biological revolution.

And the domestication and harnessing
of village animals was the other.

The animals add a surplus
much larger than they consume.

But that's true only so long as the animals
remain modestly in their proper station

as servants of agriculture.

It's unexpected that the
domestic animal should turn out

exactly to contain within
itself, from now on, the threat...

...to the surplus of grain, by which
the settled community lives and survives.

Most unexpected.

Because, after all, it is the
ox, the ass as a draft animal,

that has helped to
create this surplus.

But round about 5,000 years
ago, a new draft animal appears,

the horse.

And that is out of all proportion.

Faster, stronger, more dominant
than any previous animal.

And from now on, that
becomes the threat...

...to the village surplus.

The horse had begun by drawing
wheeled carts, like the ox,

but rather grander, drawing
chariots in the processions of kings.

And then, somewhere around 2000
BC, man discovered how to ride it.

They were men out of central Asia -

Persia, Afghanistan and beyond.

In the west, they were
simply called Scythians -

a terror that swept over the countries
that did not know the technique of riding.

The Greeks, when they saw the Scythian riders,
believed the horse and the rider to be one.

That's how they invented
the legend of the centaur.

We cannot hope to recapture today

the terror that the mounted horse struck
into the Middle East and eastern Europe

when it first appeared.

That's because there is
a difference of scale,

which I can only compare with the
arrival of tanks in Poland in 1939,

sweeping all before them.

In a sense, warfare was created
by the horse as a nomad activity.

That's what the Huns brought.

That's what the Phrygians brought.

That's what, finally,
the Mongols brought.

And brought to a climax
under Genghis Khan much later.

The remnants of that remain...

in the war games
that are still played.

War strategy is always regarded
by those who win as kind of game.

And there is played to this day in
Afghanistan a game called Buzkashi,

which comes from the kind of competitive
riding that was carried on by the Mongols.

The men who play the
game are professionals.

That is to say, they are retainers.

And they and the horses are trained
and kept for the glory of winning.

On a great occasion like this,

300 men from different
tribes will come to compete.

Though that has not happened
now for 20 or 30 years.

They don 't form teams.

The object of the game is not to
prove one group better than another,

but to find a champion.

There are famous
champions from the past.

And they are remembered.

The president who supervised this game
was a champion who no longer played.

This is the president.

He gives his orders
through a herald.

(Man shouts in local dialect)

Where we should expect to see a ball,
there is instead a headless calf.

And that macabre plaything
says something about the game,

as if the riders were making
sport of the farmers' livelihood.

The carcass weighs about 50lb.

And the object is to snatch it up,
defending it against all challengers,

and carry it off through two stages.

The first stage of the game is riding off
with the carcass to the fixed boundary flag,

and rounding the flag.

After that, the rider heads for home

and the goal, which is a marked
circle in the centre of the melee.

The game is going to
be won by a single goal.

So no quarter is given.

This is not a sporting event.

There's nothing in the
rules about fair play.

The tactics are pure Mongol.

A discipline of shock.

The astonishing thing in the game is what
routed the armies that faced the Mongols.

That what seems a wild scrimmage
is, in fact, full of manoeuvre.

And dissolves suddenly with the
winner riding clear to score.

Only after the game is the winner
himself carried away by the excitement.

He should have asked the
president to sanction the goal.

And by missing that point
of etiquette in this uproar,

he's jeopardised the victory.

It's nice to know that
the goal was allowed.

(Shouts in local dialect)

(Applause)

The Buzkashi is a war game.

What makes it electric is the cowboy
ethic, riding as an act of war.

It expresses the monomaniac
culture of conquest.

The predator posing as hero,

because he rides the whirlwind.

But the whirlwind is empty.

Horse or tank, Genghis
Khan or Hitler or Stalin,

it can only feed on the
labours of other men.

~ PROKOFIEV: Romeo And Juliet

(Thunder rumbles)

And that conjunction says something important
about the origins of war in human history.

Of course, it's tempting to
close one's eyes to history

and instead to speculate about the roots
of war in some possible animal instinct.

As if, like the tiger,

we still had to kill to live

or like the robin red breast,
to defend a nesting territory.

But war, organised war,
is not a human instinct.

It is a highly planned and
co-operative form of theft.

And that form of theft
began 10,000 years ago

when the harvesters of
wheat accumulated a surplus

and the nomads rose out of the desert to rob
them of what they themselves could not provide.

The evidence for that we saw

in the walled city of Jericho
and its prehistoric tower.

That is the beginning of war.

Genghis Khan and
his Mongol dynasty...

...brought that thieving way
of life into our own millennium.

From 1200 to 1300, they
made almost the last attempt

to establish the supremacy of
the robber who produces nothing

and who in his feckless way comes to take
from the peasant, who has nowhere to flee,

the surplus that
agriculture accumulates.

Yet that attempt failed.

And it failed because in the end
there was nothing for the Mongols to do

except themselves to adopt the way
of life of the people they conquered.

When they conquered the Muslims,

they became Muslims.

They became settlers,

because theft, war is not a
permanent state that can be sustained.

Of course, Genghis Khan still
had his bones carried about

as a memorial by his
armies in the field.

But his grandson Kublai Khan was already
a builder and settled monarch in China.

You remember Coleridge's poem.

"In Xanadu did Kublai Khan a
stately pleasure dome decree."

The fifth of the heirs in the
succession of Genghis Khan,

was the Sultan Oljeitu,

who came to this
forbidding plateau in Persia

to build a great new
capital city, Sultaniyya -

of which, what remains
is his own mausoleum,

which later was a model
for all Moslem architecture.

Oljeitu was a liberal monarch,

who brought here men from
all parts of the world.

He himself was at one time a Christian, at
another time a Buddhist, and finally a Muslim.

And he did at this court attempt
really to establish a world court,

the one thing that the nomad
could contribute to civilisation.

He gathered from the four corners of the
world the cultures, mixed them together

and sent them out again
to fertilise the earth.

It's the irony of the end of the bid
for power by the Mongol nomads here

that when Oljeitu died, he was
known as Oljeitu the Builder.

The fact is that agriculture and the settled
way of life were established steps now

in the ascent of man.

And had set a new level for
a form of human harmony...

...which was to bear
fruit into the far future.

The organisation of the city.

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