Six million years ago, in the Rift Valley of Eastern Africa, there were creatures who were very much like modern-day chimpanzees. And they were the ancestors of today's chimpanzees. But a group, isolated from the others, appears to have been driven by harsh conditions into wading out from the shore often to retreat from predators. Through a chain of circumstances, this group changed in many ways such that one made the next one necessary, and they were our ancestors.
More than once, this new creature, being uniquely advanced, left the Rift Valley and Africa, and settled much of the world. But it was in the Rift Valley that still more fully human beings emerged, Homo erectus after Australopithecus, Homo sapiens after Homo erectus. The later varieties also spread out through the world, and displaced their less-advantaged predecessors.
As Darwin noted from Malthus, it is a tendency among many kinds of living things to have more children than can be reasonably supported. This resulted in conflicts between groups of people. It also meant that in some areas, the extra innovation of planting seed to make food supplies more abundant in one's locality, and the later related innovation of raising game animals instead of hunting them, was carried far forwards. At first, a supplement to a carefree hunter-gatherer lifestyle, in relatively democratic tribes, ultimately it enabled high densities of human population to be supported in small areas.
The price of this, however, was all too often a life of backbreaking toil, spent under a harsh, autocratic rule. Such were the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and China, and such too was Rome, Mediaeval Europe, and most of the poorer countries of the Earth to the present day.
But this was the period that gave humankind the gift of writing, which did so much for freedom and knowledge.
The foundations of many of the modern arts and sciences were laid in one of the brighter spots of the ancient world, Greece. Soldiers from enemy armies were kept there in slavery, and the relatively recent innovation of equality for women was not present there, and at times in its history, it too engaged in expansionist warfare. But these things cannot overwhelm the importance of Athenian democracy, and the products of free minds, from geometry onwards.
The Roman Empire, carrying on some of the knowledge of Greece, ruled nearly the entire Western world for a time, sometimes with respect for their subject peoples. But in time, the need to pay the cost of maintaining the empire was felt less keenly, and the division of Romans into rich and poor led to the empire becoming more autocratic.
Meanwhile, in Judaea, a man touched people's hearts speaking of the importance of kindness, of helping the poor and refraining from violence. Upon his death, legends and rumours about him gained currency. People desperate about departed loved ones, people who could not read or write, wanted badly to believe some of the wilder rumours, so that they could know, instead of just wishing, there was a better place people went to when they died.
Of the world's religions, Christianity seems the soundest in its ethical precepts, and it has also in its theology perhaps best addressed the question of what it is that means a human being sees what he sees, hears what he hears, rather than being a silent, empty, biological machine.
When the Roman Empire fell, Christianity caught the pieces. First, there were the Dark Ages, where Christian communities had to defend themselves against robbery from the North. Then, there were the Middle Ages, which were sometimes happy. But near the end, the lines between rich and poor grew. And Christianity became a jealous ideology; as prosperity led to the building of towns and cities, the Church began to see those who questioned the faith in its simple, literal form as deadly threats.
Martin Luther, with anti-Semitism and anti-Copernicanism, did not offer something better, but he did break the back of the physical power of the Catholic Church, and other Protestant denominations that did not seek power over those outside their ranks were able to spring up. In Britain, for political reasons, an imitation Catholicism was imposed as the official religion, and this led to suffering among those who felt that God, not kings, decided matters of worship, and therefore could do naught else but remain Catholic.
By this time, the Western world had become the leading part of the world. The Chinese rulers were able to abandon exploration, to avoid the threat of new ideas to the existing rule. But the West had reached the Americas, and would feed on their resources, once again repeating the story of the more advanced taking where they could. Of course, in many cases, in conflicts between the nomad and hunter and the ultimately successful agricultural peoples, it was the nomad and hunter that fired the first shot.
The idea of democracy sprang up in Europe. It grew gradually in Britain. In France, there was a terrible regime of ideologues that was succeeded by Napoleon, who improved things in France, and in the early part of his career pointed countries like Italy in a more democratic direction, but who was ultimately another aggressive conqueror. In the United States, a short revolution produced democracy in a very healthy and pure form, although not without its defects.
In much of the New World, because so much land was freely available, crops that had to be reaped with hard labor could not be reaped economically with people who had the choice of starting new land of their own. So people were kidnapped from Africa and used as slaves.
The United States was divided by climate into areas where this was done, and where there was no need of it. As America prospered and developed, the injustice of slavery was seen by more and more people. Finally, the areas that practiced slavery saw themselves threatened, and tried to break away from the country.
Primitive nationalism did what concern for the slave could not, and a war was fought in which the South was defeated.
The relative tranquility of the Victorian Era for Europeans was broken by World War I. It was an agonizing struggle, with an immense number of deaths, and this had as one result a new generation of people who would not easily be led to war. Except in the defeated countries. This led to Hitler overruning France so easily in World War II.
World War I also led to the downfall of the Tsar in Russia; then, Germany intervened to gain Russian neutrality by helping a cruel radical group, the Bolsheviks, strangle the infant Russian democracy. Later, half of Germany would spend decades under Communist rule.
Bad economic conditions led to the rise of a demagogue in Germany, Adolph Hitler. The war he started, World War II, was the largest one ever waged. The cruelties he perpetrated on the Jewish people of Europe finally led a large segment of the Western world to seriously question racism and even ethnocentricism, which in one form or another were nearly universal human values until then.
In the wake of victory in World War II, the nature of Communist Russia gradually became apparent. Events in postwar Eastern Europe showed that it was not all that unlike the just-defeated Nazi Germany. This was a bitter disappointment to Americans, who expected a long period of peace and justice to come from victory in World War II.
While some Americans, before hostilities, had said positive things about Hitler or Mussolini, generally these people were wealthy and powerful, and their remarks were often private ones. Once the war was started, they were able easily enough to indicate they realized they were mistaken; many people admired some of the accomplishments of these dictators without sharing their ideology.
Among writers, artists, and intellectuals, there were many who professed admiration for Communism, because they rightly wanted to see a compassionate society begin seriously addressing poverty. Many of these were caught up in the wave of postwar revulsion against Communism, and this created serious divisions in the Western world, particularly in the United States, where this phenomenon reached its height as "McCarthyism".
Today, despite the fall of Communism in Russia, we have a Communist regime in China, and in the former Yugoslavia and now in Chechnya, we have wars against people because they are of the wrong ethnic group, and dared to want not to be subject to those who later showed little compunction about killing them.
The Atomic Bomb means the world's democracies can't simply go back to dominating the world as in the Victorian era. The suffering caused by wars, and that caused by poverty, do not look as though they will be soon done away with, or even suddenly subjected to a major reduction.