Part Two: How Wanderlust Became Conquest

If you read the first post in this series, you’ll know it ended with a quietly unsettling conclusion — that humanity is one family that simply forgot it was related. Science, theology and genetics all point in the same direction. We started together. One ancestor. One origin.

So how did we get from there to here?

How did a species that began as small, cooperative, nomadic bands of extended family end up building empires, drawing borders, and constructing elaborate justifications for why some humans were worth more than others?

I went looking for the answer. As usual, the rabbit hole was deeper than expected.

It started with a grain pit.

The World Before Ownership

For approximately 95% of human history — we’re talking roughly 290,000 years out of our 300,000 year existence as a species — humans lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers in small bands of around 20 to 50 people.

And here’s what’s remarkable about that way of life when you examine it closely.

Nobody really owned anything.

Not because early humans were philosophically opposed to ownership. Simply because ownership had no practical application. You cannot own land you’re constantly leaving. You cannot hoard food that spoils in three days. You carry only what you need and you move with the seasons.

Leadership existed, but it looked nothing like what we’d recognise today. The best hunter led the hunt. The wisest elder navigated disputes. Authority was earned, temporary, and specific. The best hunter had no particular say over where the group camped. The wisest elder didn’t control the food supply.

Power was distributed because concentration of power had no mechanism to exist.

Then, approximately 12,000 years ago, in the region we now call the Fertile Crescent — modern day Iraq, Syria and Turkey — something shifted that changed the entire trajectory of human civilisation.

We started farming.

The Grain Pit Changes Everything

The implications of agriculture are so enormous and so far-reaching that it’s genuinely difficult to overstate them.

Farming created something humanity had never experienced before — surplus. Food you didn’t immediately eat. Wealth you could accumulate, store, and build upon. For the first time in human history, it was possible to have more than you needed.

And the moment surplus existed, three questions emerged simultaneously that our species had never needed to answer before: Whose is it? Who protects it? And why them?

Those three questions — ownership, protection, and justification — are the architectural blueprint of every power structure humanity has built since.

Here’s what archaeology tells us though, and this part genuinely surprised me.

The earliest farming settlements weren’t immediately hierarchical. One of the world’s first known towns, Çatalhöyük in modern Turkey, dating to around 7500 BC, shows remarkably equal sized dwellings in its ruins. No grand palace dominating smaller structures. No elaborate royal tombs towering over simple graves. The burial sites suggest broadly similar social status across the population.

Equality, it turns out, appears to have been the human default setting.

So what tipped it?

The Problem of Scale

Small communities self-regulate beautifully. When you live among 30 people you’ve known your entire life, social pressure is extraordinarily effective. Your reputation is everything. Cheating, hoarding, or grabbing more than your share has immediate and visible social consequences. Everyone sees. Everyone remembers.

But surplus attracts people. Successful farming settlements grew. And as they grew, something subtle but catastrophic happened to the social fabric.

You started living among strangers.

The intimate accountability of the small band dissolved. And into that vacuum — that space where social pressure no longer worked because nobody knew everybody anymore — stepped something entirely new.

Institutionalised authority. The first chiefs. The first priests. The first soldiers.

And with them, for the first time in human history, the urgent need to answer that third and most dangerous question …

Why should WE be in charge and not YOU?

The Original Protection Racket

This is the part of the history that makes you sit back in your chair.

When archaeologists and historians trace the emergence of the earliest states and kingdoms, a pattern repeats itself across cultures so consistently it can’t be coincidence.

The earliest rulers essentially presented surrounding farming communities with an unspoken proposition.

“You have something valuable. Others will come for it. We will protect you — for a price.”

Which sounds reasonable until you examine who the threat actually was.

In many cases, the people offering protection were the threat. Or were indistinguishable from it. Pay tribute to the warlord who protects you from other warlords — who are running identical operations in the next valley.

Political scientists have a term for this dynamic. They call it a protection racket. The rest of us might recognise it from organised crime narratives. The structure is identical because the underlying logic is identical.

Create or amplify the threat. Position yourself as the solution. Extract payment indefinitely.

But here’s where it gets genuinely clever.

Pure force is expensive and unstable. You need a lot of soldiers. Those soldiers need paying. They develop their own loyalties and ambitions. Empires built on naked power alone tend to collapse relatively quickly because someone stronger always eventually comes along.

The really durable power structures needed something more than force.

They needed a story.

When God Joined the Payroll

Every major early civilisation independently arrived at the same masterstroke.

The ruler wasn’t just the strongest man in the valley. He was divinely appointed. God’s chosen representative on earth. The Pharaoh wasn’t merely a king — he was a god in human form. The Emperor of China ruled under the Mandate of Heaven. European monarchs ruled by Divine Right.

The genius of this move is almost elegant in its cynicism.

Because if the ruler’s authority comes from God, then questioning that authority isn’t just dangerous — it’s blasphemous. You’re not disagreeing with a man. You’re arguing with the divine order of the universe.

Dissent became not merely illegal but cosmically wrong.

And the priests — the interpreters of divine will — became the indispensable partners of political power. A relationship that has shaped human history in ways we are still untangling today.

Religion didn’t create this dynamic because religious people are inherently corrupt. Early spirituality was genuine community meaning-making — humanity trying to understand its place in a vast and mysterious universe. That impulse is deeply human and largely beautiful.

But power recognised a useful tool and picked it up.

The spiritual became the political. The political wrapped itself in the spiritual. And for thousands of years the two were functionally inseparable.

What This Built

By the time you reach the great ancient empires — Egypt, Mesopotamia, Rome, China, the Aztecs — the structure is fully formed and remarkably consistent across cultures that had no contact with each other.

A tiny elite at the top, holding wealth, military force, and divine sanction simultaneously. A slightly larger administrative class managing the machinery. A vast base of farmers, labourers and slaves generating the surplus that fed the entire pyramid.

And crucially — a story explaining why this arrangement was natural, inevitable, and ordained.

The wandering, curious, egalitarian bands who had shared meat around fires for 290,000 years had become, in the space of a few thousand years, a species of hierarchies.

The Thread That Connects

Remember in the first blog we noted that the diversity of human skin tones is simply evolutionary adaptation to geography? That your ancestors’ skin colour is just a postcode from 50,000 years ago?

Here’s where these two threads begin to weave together.

The power structure we’ve just traced — surplus, protection, divine justification, hierarchy — was operating across human civilisations for thousands of years before skin colour became meaningful to it.

Ancient Rome enslaved conquered Britons and Germanic peoples — pale-skinned Europeans — without any racial ideology. Slavery was about conquest, debt, and defeat. It crossed every colour line indiscriminately.

So when did skin colour get conscripted into the machinery of power?

That’s a very specific historical moment. With very specific economic motivations.

And that’s exactly where we’re going in Part Three.

The Uncomfortable Summary

Pull back far enough and the arc of the last 12,000 years looks something like this.

Humans are by nature cooperative, curious, and — when communities are small enough for accountability to function — remarkably egalitarian. The archaeological evidence suggests equality was our default, not our aspiration.

Surplus broke the scale that kept us accountable to each other.

Power rushed into the gap.

And power, in every culture it emerged, reached for the same two tools — force and story. The sword and the scripture. Usually in that order, though sometimes simultaneously.

The wanderlust that carried us out of Africa and across every continent on earth was a genuine and beautiful human trait. The same curiosity that drove us over mountains and across oceans eventually brought us into contact with peoples whose surplus we wanted.

And somewhere in that collision, exploration became conquest.

Not because it had to.

Because the power structures we’d already built at home made it profitable.

Part Two: How Wanderlust Became Conquest

The World Before Ownership

The Grain Pit Changes Everything

The Problem of Scale

The Original Protection Racket

When God Joined the Payroll

What This Built

The Thread That Connects

The Uncomfortable Summary

Further Reading

Share this:

Related

Published by Juanita Kees

Leave a comment Cancel reply