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[Expositions 8.1 (2014) 39–60]  Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 
 

An Introduction to Big History 
 
LOWELL GUSTAFSON  
Villanova University 
 
 
Big historians place the written record of the human past within the natural record of the entire 
past, beginning with the big bang almost 14 billion years ago. By drawing on the natural 
sciences, they have revolutionized the field of history that in academia has normally been placed 
within the humanities or social sciences. They have studied light, rocks, bones, and blood as well 
as written texts, and then rethought the narrative of time and the place of humans in it. They 
study nature to tell a story of the entire past from which humanity has emerged and remains 
embedded. This provides a context for understanding the present and options for exerting 
constructive influence in the future.  

Historians often argue that we cannot understand where we are in the present without 
understanding where we came from in the past. Big historians have pushed back the traditional 
point for when the past is thought to have begun. The story of humanity does not begin with 
writing, it starts with the components that gradually, in fits and starts over a long time, gradually 
combine to form a good deal many things, including humans and our relationships. 

By integrating the evidence discovered by the natural sciences, they present a series of time 
periods that lead us from the first origins of matter immediately after the big bang, to stars and 
galaxies about half a billion years later, the combination of atoms within molecules, minerals, 
and rocks in space, the formation of a second generation star like our sun just under 5 billion 
years ago, the accretion of Earth 4.5672 billion years ago, the first emergence of life about 3.8 
billion years ago, increasingly complex life starting about a half billion years ago, the evolution 
of hominins just under 8 million years ago, the appearance of Homo sapiens about 200,000 years 
ago, and then key cultural developments such as collective learning, agriculture, industrialization 
and urbanization, and the digital age. 

The big history approach challenges traditional history in content and method. Traditional 
historians have often labored in archives to read primary written sources, as well as in libraries to 
compare historiographical secondary sources. With this research, they have analyzed past 
centuries and millennia. Big historians add to that their study of the results from the natural 
scientists to include all that which eventually was combined within human society. Humanity did 
not emerge fully blown, but evolved out of very long complex processes that continue to 
influence who humans are today. We cannot understand humanity without understanding 
humanity’s past and the pre-human past. 

Not only does the work of big historians challenge their own discipline to redefine itself, it 
does the same for other disciplines in the liberal arts, including ethics, theology and religious 
studies, literature, political science, and others. The physical sciences and big history, sometimes 
also called “cosmic evolution,” offer much to those who focus not only on time, but also culture, 



An Introduction to Big History  40 
 

art, politics, and other human endeavors. In one way, this is nothing new. The famous ancient 
Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote books such as one on physics, another on politics, a third of 
ethics, and many others. In the Politics, he wrote that “man is by nature a political animal.” In 
the European medieval period, Thomas Aquinas developed Aristotelian thought on natural law; 
he argued that humans were created within a politically constituted community. By the 
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such State of Nature political philosophers as Thomas 
Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau postulated human politics before or without 
such institutions as the state. They wanted to determine how to construct states so that they 
helped resolve the basic problems of human nature. For all of their differences, they all saw 
humans as rooted in nature. None of them had the same understanding of nature as has 
developed since Darwin, Einstein, Hubble, and others in the past couple centuries. 

Big history and contemporary physical sciences lead us to new understandings of human 
nature within the rest of nature. The emergent complexity of sustained, structured relationships 
that incorporate earlier ones in new combinations and with new properties is possible due to 
access within pockets to high quality energy. The second law of thermodynamics would lead us 
to expect entropy, or transitions from greater to lesser order rather than emergent complexity. 
However, from the big bang to our current period of partial globalization, we can observe in 
certain places a process of increased complexity. If we can resolve our current energy crisis in a 
sustainable way, and if we have the imagination, this process may continue. However, there was 
no uniformity in emergent complexity in the past and there is no guarantee it will continue in the 
near future. 

 
Baryonic Matter 

Big history begins at the beginning of time with the first appearance of the elementary particles 
from which humans and all else are formed. If the big bang theory is correct, nothing turned into 
something 13.82 billion years ago, and began expanding from an infinitely hot and dense point 
without mass into our universe. It may be that nothing is always pulsating and is regularly 
turning into a variety of forms of something. Perhaps we live in a popcorn multiverse with an 
infinite number of big bangs going off all the time in ways we cannot not detect or fully imagine. 
Other universes may be sharing our space or off in other locales. We used to think there was only 
one galaxy: the Milky Way. Then we wondered if there were other inhabitable planets. We now 
know there are great numbers of both. Why should ours be the only universe? Or maybe our own 
yo-yo universe has an infinite set of cycles of trillions of years. However, for now we will 
prosaically restrict our attention to our own universe, or at least this most recent cycle of it. 

Our current universe did not emerge immediately after the big bang full blown, only in 
miniature. Not only were there no humans then, there was no Earth. No Milky Way. No stars. 
There was just plasma, rather like the interior of our sun today. The infinitely hot and dense 
radiation immediately after the big bang was dramatic, but largely as uniform a situation as has 
existed in our universe’s history. Incredible variation would emerge after the radiation period 
immediately after the big bang. 



41  Gustafson 
 

All but immediately after our own universe’s big bang, when energy first congealed into 
normal or baryonic matter, six types of quarks appeared. They can appear again if protons and 
neutrons are smashed into each other at sufficient energy levels. Four of them led extraordinarily 
brief lives before returning to energy; they did not go on to form more complex forms of matter. 
However, two of them—the up and down quarks—did form relationships as they appeared. This 
will be a pattern. Some things go on to participate in emergent complexity. Many things do not. 

At least those quarks that survived formed relationships. For a billion and one bits of matter 
that appeared, a billion bits of anti-matter with opposite spin did as well. Rather than playing 
well together, matter and anti-matter annihilate each other. This mayhem is a rather good thing 
from our point of view, since if all the matter that appeared survived, the universe would have 
been just too crowded to ever have developed into us. And plenty remained. Enough matter to 
eventually make a hundred billion galaxies each with an average of a hundred billion stars all 
have been formed by the leftovers of the great annihilation. Destruction can be very creative. 

The lucky surviving quarks do not exist in isolation; they always exist in threesomes. Their 
relationship is structured by the strong force that is mediated by the exchange of the charmingly 
named gluons. Two up quarks and a down one form a positively charged proton; two downs and 
an up form a neutron. Why is the strong force exactly as strong as it is and not weaker or 
stronger? Is it different in other universes?—Who knows? It is just the way we do things in our 
universe. But if it differed at all, we would not be here and neither would anything else that we 
know of. 

The quarks do not merge into one undifferentiated blob. Each proton and neutron is 
constituted by two different types of quarks. They relate to each other through the strong force, 
but they keep their distance as well. Relative to their own size, quarks have a rather pronounced 
need for personal space. Each of these three move in a constant dance around the others. They 
are always related, always moving, always distinct. Nature at rest is hard to find. Nature is 
spinning, moving, and restless. 

The protons and neutrons that were formed quickly after the big bang are with us still after 
almost 14 billion years. In fact, they are us, and everything else that we can see or feel. The 
structured relationships among individual quarks have been remarkably sustained. As inventive 
and creative as nature is, it also keeps certain things around for a long time. If liberalism is about 
change and conservatism about keeping things the way they are, we can answer an interesting 
question. Something came from nothing at the big bang. That is change. Quarks can maintain 
their relationships for tens of billions of years. You can’t get much more of a status quo than that. 
So is the universe liberal or conservative? Every inquiring person wants to know. And the 
answer is—yes. 

About 300,000 years after the big bang, when the universe had expanded enough to cool 
sufficiently, the electromagnetic force mediated by the exchange of photons could structure a 
sustained relationship between positively charged protons and negatively charged electrons. 
Atoms appeared. Hydrogen, with one proton and one electron, appeared in the greatest numbers. 
If you add up their mass, about three quarters of all atoms in the universe are still hydrogen. If 



An Introduction to Big History  42 
 

you count atoms by number, they constitute about 90% of all atoms. They also constitute 63% of 
the number of atoms in your body (10% by mass). As has been said, hydrogen is an odorless, 
colorless gas that, given enough time, becomes you. And me. And Congress; it’s not the quarks’ 
fault. 

Helium, with two protons and two electrons each, formed about a quarter of all atoms’ mass 
that then existed (9% by number). There was also a dash of deuterium, or heavy hydrogen (one 
proton, one neutron, and an electron), helium isotopes, and lithium (three protons and electrons). 
Vast primal clouds of hydrogen and helium atoms, millions of light years across, still 
majestically float in certain areas of space nearly 14 billion years later. Some have gone on to 
form greater complexity; many have not. Sometimes complexity emerges; more often it doesn’t. 

Once formed, and left on their own, these atoms tended to keep their distance. While the 
strong force bound quarks together and protons and neutrons together within atoms, these atoms 
left to themselves generally liked their own company. They might approach each other as they 
moved about, but usually swerved off, avoiding connections with each other. Helium had 
virtually no interest in other atoms. A hydrogen atom might hookup with another one, but that is 
as far as it went. 

We sometimes hear about an “atomistic society.” This usually refers to a rather asocial 
condition in which individuals have little to do with each other. The analogy might be a billiard 
table, with hard billiard balls usually sitting by themselves, but occasionally knocking into each 
other, sending each other off in various directions. Atoms may be the basic building blocks; in 
our experience, blocks usually just sit there by themselves. We are each made of about 6.7*1027 
atoms. What are we, then, like at our most constitutive level? Are we like the individuals 
discussed by Hobbes in the Leviathan (1651)? Do we live lives largely isolated from others? By 
nature, are we as asocial as atoms? Should libertarians seek out new sympathizers among the 
universe’s vast majority of unaffiliated atoms? If we seek to form relationships, do we need to 
find ways to overcome our natural proclivity for individualism? Are atoms the ultimate 
existentialists, destined to live lives of lonely desperation and then die alone, on a dark, rainy 
night? And since we are built from atoms, is that what we are really like, all niceties aside? 

But what if the story is one of emergent relationship rather than individualism? Recall that 
even the simplest of atoms—those that have only one or two protons and are still the most 
abundant in the universe—are each a set of sustained, structured relationships. Quarks which just 
moments before had not existed, started to be related through the exchange of gluons mediating 
the strong force. Atoms, which had not existed before the big bang plus 300,000 years, added a 
relationship between protons and electrons. Atoms are sets of sustained, structured relationships. 

At our most constitutive core, we are built more from relationships than from building blocks. 
Quarks and electrons are more fuzzy than blocky. And there is relatively a great deal of space 
between quarks within protons, and between protons and their electrons within atoms. The 
“hardness” of matter comes from forces defining the relationships between things that are far 
apart. What exists between things is as real as the things themselves. 
 



43  Gustafson 
 

Stars 

But what about atoms naturally avoiding each other? Positively charged protons avoid each 
other. Helium has little interest in any combinations, and hydrogen by itself doesn’t go beyond 
becoming H2. Clouds of these atoms millions or light years across would not have led one 13.7 
billion years ago to be very optimistic about the eventual emergence of anything much more 
complex. Relationships within atoms of one or two protons are fine, but beyond that, nothing 
much happens by these two types of atoms by themselves. Happily for us, these hydrogen and 
helium atoms were not left to their own devices. They existed within a larger framework that 
acted upon them. 

When they did form, atoms were not perfectly distributed, if by “perfect” you mean 
“absolutely equally.” They were a little more densely distributed here, a little less there. This 
asymmetry, unequal distribution, or imperfection was another very fortunate occurrence. Gravity 
has no force at the incredibly small distances between quarks. However, the space between 
atoms can be just enough to let it start operating. A clump of atoms here can exert gravitational 
attraction on a smaller clump there. If all atoms had been equally distributed, their gravitational 
attraction on each other would have canceled it all out, and they would never have been drawn to 
each other. However, with the asymmetry, the denser regions could start drawing in the slightly 
less densely packed atoms. Gravity kept pulling them together, increasing their density and heat. 
As they were pulled closer together, they began to spin faster like a figure skater drawing in her 
arms. Once sufficient density and heat developed, with atoms moving about more and more 
quickly, the protons within atoms overcame their preference to stay away from each other. 
Hydrogen nuclei began fusing. They not only ran into each other; hydrogen nuclei could stick to 
each other, forming helium, with its two protons and two neutrons, all held together by the strong 
force. Gravity was the great matchmaker for atoms that on their own would have stayed standing 
awkwardly along the wall at the middle school dance. 

But the newly joined atoms were less than the sum of their parts. Each new helium atom 
weighed slightly less than the hydrogen atoms which had combined to form it. The missing 
matter had turned into energy. The fusion caused energy to burst out. Gravity kept trying to draw 
the atoms in. The equilibrium between these two forces resulted in the formation of stars. The 
black sky began twinkling. Not only can there be new things under the stars, the stars themselves 
were something new. 

As the helium was formed, gravity drew it in more, until it heated up enough for it to start, 
within a couple hundred million years of the big bang, fusing into heavier elements, such as 
nitrogen. This released energy and permitted gravity to draw the newly formed elements further 
in, until they too began to fuse, forming carbon and neon. This was repeated as oxygen, 
magnesium, silicon, and sulfur were each fused. The largest stars with enough mass to permit 
gravity to keep drawing the newly fused elements further in developed an onion-like structure, 
with the lighter elements on the periphery; the heavier ones successively formed layers closer to 
the core. Each layer required higher temperatures to fuse even heavier elements. The strong 



An Introduction to Big History  44 
 

force, electromagnetism, gravity, and fusion formed relationships between increasingly heavier 
atoms within the structure of a star. 

Gravitational attraction between stars and perhaps dark matter formed galaxies or groupings 
of stars in distinct patterns. Galaxies formed relationships due to gravity in local groups and even 
larger patterns. The theoretical work of Fr. Georges Lemaître, confirmed by the evidence 
collected by Edwin Hubble, demonstrated that not only were there more galaxies than our own 
Milky Way, but that once they got to be further away from each other than those in the local 
group, they are racing away from each other. It may be that dark energy or anti-gravity is causing 
the galaxies to keep falling out, with space and the universe expanding at ever faster speeds the 
further from each other they are. 

When the largest of the stars began to make iron with its twenty six protons, energy was 
consumed rather than released. The equilibrium between gravity and fusion was broken. Almost 
immediately, the star exploded in a supernova. The sudden increase in temperatures during the 
explosion permitted the almost instantaneous formation of all of the elements with more than 
twenty-six protons per atom, all sent streaming into space at incredible speeds, often mixing with 
pre-existing clouds of hydrogen and helium that had been floating since the big bang. 

 
Minerals and Molecules 

Some atoms organize themselves in structured patterns. A couple examples of this in early space 
came from carbon atoms. Fitted together in one way at certain temperatures, they formed 
diamonds. Fit together in a different way at another temperature determined by distance from 
heat sources of stars, they form graphite like in our pencils. These are among the first minerals 
that existed space early in universal history.  

There can also be bonds between different types of atoms. Atoms form in such a way that 
electrons orbit protons in shells. The innermost shell is full with two electrons, the second with 
eight, the third with eighteen, the fourth with thirty-two, the fifth with fifty. Hydrogen, with its 
one electron, has a vacancy sign out in its only electron shell. That shell seems to want one more 
electron to form a full house. Oxygen, with its eight electrons, has two in its first shell and six in 
its second. This leaves two vacancies in its second shell. This is a match made in the heavens. If 
two hydrogen atoms hook up with an oxygen atom, each sharing their electrons, each hydrogen 
atom can have two electrons in its only shell and oxygen can have eight in its second shell. 
Everybody is happy because a new relationship between atoms is formed: H2O—water. This 
molecule has a new property. At the right temperature, it has the property of wetness, which did 
not exist before. Water, which is abundant throughout space, is not the only molecule that forms. 
Dozens of molecules with two, three, four, five, or more atoms evolve naturally. Many atoms 
due to the way electron shells work lead to the formation of these new relationships called 
molecules. 

Not all atoms are anxious to form molecules. Helium has two electrons in its only shell and 
has a No Vacancy sign well lit. It is called a noble gas. Having all they need, nobility does not 
require additional relationships with the lesser types that are needy. Relationship added to 



45  Gustafson 
 

relationship is not much part of helium’s story. While hydrogen becomes us, helium often just 
goes floating off into space. Not everything is social. Not everything forms polity, or sustained, 
ordered relationships. We saw that same aloofness with four of the six quarks. A subatomic 
particle formed in nuclear fusion, neutrinos, are much the same. Like photons, they go shooting 
from stars off into space, but almost never interact with anything. They can sail through twenty 
miles of lead and never hit anything. It has taken extraordinary measures to detect them at all. 
History and polity are not built on the backs of two-thirds of quarks, neutrinos, helium, or other 
asocial phenomena. They are indeed the rugged individualists of the universe. The story of 
emergent complexity is not uniform. 

 
Earth and the Emergence of Life 

After a nearby supernova shot its star dust out into neighboring space, disturbing pre-existing 
clouds of hydrogen and helium, gravity again began pulling together the mixture of elements and 
molecules. A second generation star with mostly hydrogen and helium but also with traces of 
heavier elements in it—including oxygen, carbon, neon and iron—eventually began shining as 
our sun 4.6 billion years ago. It is not big enough to permit gravity to create densities high 
enough to fuse elements heavier than helium. This is good for us, since huge stars live fast and 
die young. Our sun goes along at a nice leisurely pace of fusing 600 million tons of hydrogen 
each second, turning it into 596 million tons of helium and more energy than mankind has ever 
produced in our species’ entire history. It is because of all their mass that stars like our sun 
produce so much heat and light. 

The sun’s rate of consuming its stock of hydrogen will permit it to continue shining for a total 
of about 10 billion years, meaning it is at mid-life now. Its 5 billion year history has provided 
energy and the time for Earth to develop. We’ve got billions more years before the sun turns into 
a red giant, evaporates the oceans and engulfs the earth. There is plenty of time before anyone 
needs to get tickets for a trip to another solar system. 

While gravity drew together 99.86% of the total mass of the solar system to make the sun, the 
leftover debris went to good use. On the outskirts of the spinning disk that eventually ignited as 
the sun, these leftovers from part of the supernova started accreting through the power of gravity. 
Chunks of iron, nickel, silicon, and bits or gold, silver, uranium, and other elements and 
molecules bumped into each other and stuck together. All this knocking together that created 
kinetic energy, not to mention the radioactive decay of uranium and other such elements, made 
for a molten, hot planet that formed its own structure from thousands of molecules and the 
minerals they produced. Heavier iron and nickel sunk into a dense core that is still as hot as the 
surface of the sun. Silicon and other lighter elements rose to the top. Eventually, a thin layer 
made of the frothy basalt and granite could cool enough to permit the ocean floor and land to 
form. Lighter, cooler outer layers spinning around denser iron and nickel produced a magnetic 
shield around the planet that protected it from solar winds that would otherwise blow away 
Earth’s atmosphere. 



An Introduction to Big History  46 
 

The process of chemical evolution that had begun in space continued on Earth. The most 
common elements on the surface of the Earth continued to combine in many ways. Hydrogen, 
carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sodium, magnesium, phosphorus, sulfur, chlorine, potassium, calcium, 
iron, and other elements on earth interacted to form over 4,700 minerals. Around black smokers 
at the bottom of the oceans where tectonic plates separated and mineral-rich, heated waters 
bellowed up, or on sun-soaked pools of water on rocky beaches, the process of chemical 
evolution continued. Lipids that created films formed, eventually forming membranes. Carbon, 
with its four electrons in its second orbit and a total of six overall, was able to combine with 
many other elements, and was central to the Krebs cycle which spins off amino acids. These 
molecules continued to combine until they integrated membranes, metabolism or access to 
energy, and RNA and DNA that permitted reproduction with variation in response to 
environmental changes. The Last Common Universal Ancestor—LUCA—was combined in the 
most complex relationship in universal history to date, that we know of. The first prokaryote 
cells were earthlings, formed of the commonly available chemicals and elements on Earth’s 
surface. They were also children of the universe, with elements forged in stars that had died long 
before. 

 
Biological Evolution 

It has been said that the dream of every bacterium, the simplest of cells, is to become two 
bacteria. Reproduction has to be important for any species that plans on surviving, since the 
death of any given individual is part of the way life works. Sustained relationship is not eternal 
relationship. The nice thing about being a bacterium is that your dreams can come true about 
every twenty minutes. Reproduction with variation in response to environmental changes is a 
skill perfected by prokaryote cells. You just can’t argue with success. They live in virtually any 
setting, however extreme the condition on earth can be. From deep underground to thermal 
waters, prokaryotes are there. There are more bacterial cells in and on your body than there are 
cells that constitute your body. They help you digest food. And when you die, they will digest 
you. These types of cells have survived for almost 4 billion years. They will be on earth long 
after humans have vanished. Many prokaryote cells follow a plan that isn’t broken and doesn’t 
need fixing, although they do keep adjusting to new conditions such as antibiotics. They evolve 
quickly, but as a group, they have not become fundamentally more complex. 

However, after a couple billion years of happily reproducing at their same level of 
complexity, some did become more complex. About 2 billion years ago, eukaryote cells 
developed with a membrane covered kernel in which more complex DNA was kept. It also began 
hosting a mitochondrial cell, which provided an ability to burn carbohydrates and permits us to 
enjoy eating donuts. 

A more complex set of relationships within the cell led to more complex relationships among 
cells. Films of bacteria on the surface of the ocean or accretions of them in rock like formations 
of stromatolites in tidal pools were steps towards multicellular life forms. Another step in 
multicellular cooperation came with creatures like the sponges. These are formed by the same 



47  Gustafson 
 

type of cells that could still specialize in serving different functions. Some cells drew in nutrient-
rich water; others expelled nutrient drained water. Same type of cells; different tasks. Push these 
cells through a sieve so that they are separated as they fall to the bottom of a tank, and they scoot 
back together to form another new sponge. These are cooperative cells, not hardy individualists. 

Relationships among increasingly complex body structures formed by different types of cells 
are seen in such examples as cnidarians, or jellyfish, first seen about 800 million years ago. They 
have little harpoons that can inject prey with poison, have such structures as a mouth/anus, and 
have two layers of tissue. Their nervous system is pretty uniformly spread out throughout the 
animal. Jellyfish are still around and doing fine. The Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz seemed to 
get along pretty well without a brain, and so have the cnidarians. They have existed 4,000 times 
longer than Homo sapiens have. They see no reason to develop more complexity. 

Still, there were additional mutations that worked out in the environment of the time. 
Flatworms introduced a body plan about 590 million years ago with a right and a left side, an up 
and down, and a front and a back. Sense organs were put up front, along with a ganglia of nerve 
cells to interpret the incoming data. Chordates like the currently existing hagfish put a cord along 
its back to protect the flow of information from the ganglia to the rest of the body, as well as 
putting the mouth up front and an anus in the rear. About 525 million years ago, vertebrates 
started breaking that cord into bony segments, offering better protection and definition. The first 
animals to venture out from the seas onto land, such as tiktaalik, had wrists to help scoot on land 
and a neck to help look around. About 360 million years ago, the first amniotes could recreate 
the watery world in which reproduction had originally taken place, and start producing eggs with 
a protective shell and watery interior. About 360 million years ago, mammals first appeared, 
which had, among other things, a more complex auditory system with more parts that helped 
them hear better. The story of evolution is in part a story of increasing complexity of body 
structures, with more complex relationships among greater numbers of parts. 

It is worth recalling a few things: First, part of the reason for this development was in 
response to the bitter competition between and among species. An arms race of those seeking to 
eat others and those seeking not to be eaten was good to select which individuals would survive 
to reproduce the next generation. Increasingly complex relationship was spurred in part by harsh 
competition. Secondly, there was no steady rise from simplicity to complexity. Five major 
extinction periods between 450 million years ago [mya] and 65 mya caused huge interruptions. 
This is only part of the reason why over 99% of the species that have ever existed are now 
extinct. We may be going through a sixth (self-induced) extinction period that we hope does not 
conclude with our own species’ disappearance. It would be a shame to be a mere 200,000 year-
long flash in a pan. 
 
Relations among Animals and Plants 

Relationships among quarks, protons and electrons, atoms, molecules, cells, and body parts were 
followed by increasingly complex relations among and between species. Edward O. Wilson’s 
The Social Conquest of the Earth (2012) offers a fascinating discussion of this phenomenon. 



An Introduction to Big History  48 
 

From quorum sensing of bacteria to schools of fish, bee hives, ant colonies, flocks of birds, herds 
of bison, troops of chimpanzees, and many other examples, animals often live in groups and 
groups often form ecosystems. 

Not all animals live in groups. Many seem to exist in splendid isolation for most of their lives, 
coming together just long enough for reproduction without any care for offspring after birth. 
Mother guppies and sharks would just as soon eat their babies. Sea turtles lay their eggs on the 
beach, return to the sea, and may hope for the best for their offspring, but likely don’t think about 
them. Crocodiles help their offspring out of their eggshell and out of the nest; after that, the kids 
are on their own. Childcare is of course more of an issue for various lengths of time for many 
species. From weeks of care to a couple years is common. Mothers, fathers, and others are 
involved in different ways, depending on the species. 

By the time we get to hominins, our ancestors’ survival strategy and increasing sociability 
went hand in hand. Australopithicus and its ancestors were likely more often the hunted than the 
hunters. They may have scavenged, eating bone marrow of leftover carcasses, but gathering 
fruits, nuts, tubers, and leaves likely provided a mainstay of their diet. Other than that, they tried 
to stay out of the way of predators. They had few natural weapons. Their teeth were no match for 
those of lions. Their speed was no match for cheetahs. They had neither shells for defense nor 
wings for flight. No wonder that there do not seem to have been huge numbers of hominids, that 
most species went extinct, and that our own ancestors came close to extinction. They just did not 
have that much going for them. 

Bipedalism, for whatever reason it was adopted, did permit more use of the arms, hands, and 
opposable thumbs. A parent could hold a child and pick fruit all at once. But it also altered the 
skeleton, restricting the birth canal, making childbirth that much more dangerous. This became a 
greater problem once the hominids’ greatest weapon did finally start to develop. Brain size from 
Australopithicus to Homo sapiens tripled, with Neanderthals winning the brain-size competition. 
(Brain size for Australopithicus averaged between 375 and 550 cm3, Homo habilis from 500 to 
800, Homo erectus 750 to 1225, Homo Sapiens 1200 to 1750, and Neanderthals 900 to 1880 
[Sawyer et al. 2007, 18, 58, 65, 79, 87, 96, 107, 117, 124, 133, 141, 151, 158, 168, 176, 185, 
194, 201, 210, 222].) Hominids couldn’t outfight competing species, but they could start to 
outthink them. Brains rather than brawn would eventually win the day. 

Even with only partial brain development and soft skulls at birth, delivering children had 
become highly risky. To permit time for the brain to develop to maturity, grow a bony skull, and 
learn all that they required to survive, childhood for hominids took years. Breastfeeding and 
childcare-giving mothers developed close relations with offspring over long childhoods. 

Child mortality was still likely high. For a handful of children to reach sexual maturity, birth 
would need to be given to a number more. Especially with life-spans in the 30s or so for adults 
who got through childhood, this meant that most or all of a female’s adult life was involved with 
pregnancy and childcare. Working mothers were the norm. They likely provided the bulk of the 
calories through gathering and carried out many other important tasks. Still, they would have 
needed support as they did the primarily important work of getting children to adulthood so the 



49  Gustafson 
 

species could survive. Long-term relations between mothers and children and between child 
care-taking females and males were necessary for the fat-headed hominids to survive. 

It is one thing to get together briefly to copulate. That is all sharks need to do since child care 
is not a problem. It is a wholly other set of problems to stay together for many years to raise 
children, a problem that hominids did have to figure out if they were to survive. Resolving the 
issues of food, shelter, and other necessities for a kinship group over years takes problem-solving 
and relationships to a whole different level. The increased demands of a long childhood and the 
long-term adult relations it required selected for an increased ability to figure out how to live 
together for many years at a time. The gender relations made necessary by being a big brained 
bipedal species is a root of hominid polity. Sexual politics has changed markedly recently with 
longer life spans and lower mortality rates. Mothers no longer spend their entire adult lives 
dealing with pregnancy and childcare, and have the time and energy to do much else. 

Many species have long developed their own ways of developing and maintaining 
relationships. Baboons groom each other, checking for parasites in the fur. Frans de Waal (2006) 
discusses how bonobos use sex for much the same purposes. Social primates, who were not 
genetically identical like ants within a colony are, developed a “theory of mind”; they could 
understand each other’s reactions. They could even sometimes “feel for each other,” or 
empathize. The law of the jungle, as de Waal argues, includes the social practices and 
understandings that would later be self-consciously developed into ethics (2006, 1–3, 182–87, 
197–8, 225, 247–8; 2009, 6–7, 20–21, 25–29, 122–24, 138–39). 

Picking lice out of children’s hair and having sexual relations has forever been part of 
hominid mothers’ lives as well. Hominids’ survival strategy led to developed abilities to relate to 
each other. For their relations to develop, they would need to exchange a lot more than just 
gluons and photons. If you thought physics was hard to grasp, just try politics. 

 
Memory, Imagination, Symbolic Thinking, and Exchange 

Virtually all species remember, although in very different ways. The long childhoods in which 
each person remembers their period of dependency creates long-term memories of caretakers. 
Hominid adults still remember their own childhoods and their caretakers. They remember how 
these important experiences were carried out by those who are now old or dead. What was so 
important is now gone, but remains important in memory. Memories of what is no longer may be 
pondered while going about present tasks. 

Child-bearing for hominids also entails the expectation of repeating a long-term set of 
relationships. I am going to have to do for my children what was done for me. This baby will 
require years of nurture to get it to sexual maturity. What is a baby now will in a number of years 
become an adult if I do what I need to do to help it survive. I can imagine a long-term future 
which does not yet exist, but which I can help create. Memory, imagination, planning, and 
execution go hand in hand. 

Being able to remember what no longer is—and imagine what is not yet—is facilitated by 
symbolic thinking and language. Vervet monkeys will make one call for threats from above such 



An Introduction to Big History  50 
 

as an eagle, another for threats in trees such as snakes, or those on the ground such as big cats. 
When one monkey makes such a call, others in the troop look in the right direction. One screech 
signifying eagle causes other monkeys to look up. A sound and an expressed/perceived meaning 
are linked correctly, helping the group’s survival. However, the monkey does not make the 
sound in the absence of the threat. They do not discuss how to better prepare for a future threat. 
Vervet monkeys do not sit around at night discussing that day’s eagle attack. They do not draw 
pictures of eagles. They do not intellectually manipulate or exchange symbols. 

The development of syntax or grammar and vocabulary went along with that of symbolic 
thought. Being able to consider words and meaning in the absence of immediately present 
referents, adjust them, move them around and think of alternative arrangements, was facilitated 
by language. Being able to communicate these ideas in novel yet understandable ways meant that 
new meanings could be created. 

Remembering and imagining in the absence of the referent is a source of symbolic thinking, 
planning, and eventually realizing possibilities. The road from the communication of monkeys to 
the symbolic thinking of hominids is long, complex, and still not exactly understood. But that it 
took place seems clear. By over two and a half million years ago at the Gona River in Ethiopia, 
Australopithecus or Homo habilis was making stone tools. Other species use tools as well. 
Crows, wolves, chimps, and others will use stones and sticks to achieve various purposes. 
However, the Gona River chipped tools were fashioned by toolmakers. They had to first select 
which type of rock they wanted to alter. Some types of rock are too soft to make good tools. 
Then they had to be able to imagine the tool that was in the right kind of rock, to imagine how it 
could be made into a cutting, scraping, or digging tool. Then they had to carry out a series of 
steps to create the tool. This was probably done with others looking on and learning how to do 
this as well. And remember, all of this was going on over two million years before Homo sapiens 
appeared. 

Tool-making was added to older tool-using skills when symbolic thinking and imagination 
was possible due to eye-hand and brain development, relative to earlier species. Those who had 
emerged from nature now began to adjust what they found in nature. Nature in these complex 
pockets called hominids could begin to select what helped them survive and live better. 
Evolution could begin to be not only in response to environment, but determinative of it. Nature 
became partially self-selecting in hominids. 

Nature had long exhibited how creative it is. There was nothing and then there was something. 
There were not protons and then there were. Same with atoms, molecules, stars, terrestrial 
planets, and life. The transition from one to the next is a time of change and natural creativity, 
but there were long periods of stasis in between each one. Relative to these periods, the time it 
took for hominids to develop their tool-making was rather quick, even if it seems to be 
agonizingly slow to us. By the Oldowan period from about 2.6 to 1.7 million years ago, 
Australopithicus and/or Homo habilis had developed more sophisticated tools. By the Acheulean 
period about 1,650,000 to 100,000 years ago, tools had become bifacial, larger, and more varied. 
The oval or pear shaped tools are not only functional; they also have shapes that are pleasing to 



51  Gustafson 
 

us and perhaps to their makers. Natural emergence had become hominids’ creativity. The road 
from physics to art was being paved. 

Adjusting nature was done in various ways. Eating meat and tough tubers was hard on the 
digestive tract of early hominids. Cooking them made them easier to digest and taste better. 
Exactly when this began is not certain, although it seems to have started between 1,500,000 and 
790,000 years ago with the fire-altered stones at Gesherbenot-Ya’aqov in Israel. The transition 
from scavenging to hunting had been made at least by half a million years ago, as indicated by 
spear points and skeletal wounds in prey found at Boxgrove, England and Kathu Pan 1 in South 
Africa. 

Burials indicate a new level of relationship. Other species such as elephants will clearly 
mourn dead members of the group. But the careful burial of the dead is a human activity. Again, 
exactly when this began is not clear, but there are burials from 80,000 to 120,000 years ago in 
Qafzeh, Israel. Here, we have living members of the group remembering the people who had 
died and imagining they have an obligation to them even after they die. Burial is a relationship 
with the dead, requiring memory of who is no longer. What is real in the present is only part of 
what matters. Memories of the past—kept in the electrical/chemical relationships among 
neurons—can be more important than the hard stuff that one can feel now in the present. 

Hunters had long understood the difference between life and death. Causing an animal to 
bleed from wounds transformed the beast from one running through the woods to one lying on 
the ground. Did the hunters begin to think symbolically about the “life” being in the blood that 
sank into the ground? Does the life of the body go into the earth looking for a new form to 
inhabit? Is the spirit of the dead animal believed to be angry at the hunter, planning to return to 
the surface world to make trouble if proper steps of propitiation are not taken by the hunter? 

Once grave goods become included in the burials, we seem to also have imagination of the 
future added to memory of the past. Burial goods suggest that people thought they could indeed 
take it with them. Everything had a spirit: people, mountains, rivers, pots, weapons, etc. The life 
or spirit of the dead person will need the spirits of various tools or weapons in the next life. 
Members of the group were socially close to those now dead. They remembered them and valued 
these memories. They wanted to imagine that their beloved would live on, and that proper 
actions by the living could help the dead live well. Ancestor worship may be one origin of 
religion. This seems to indicate the powerful social attachments our ancestors had with each 
other. 

The discoveries at Blombos cave in South Africa from about 75,000 years ago include an 
etched, rectangular rock. A net or diamond like design is scratched, with diagonal and parallel 
sets of lines. This is not just aimless doodling. This is done by a person interested in perceiving 
and creating patterns. What other patterns were being perceived and analyzed? Seasons? Plant 
growth? Movements of animals? Behaviors of fellow members of the group? Did the patterned 
lines have symbolic meaning of some sort in a way that etched crosses, six pointed stars, or 
crescents often have for us? 



An Introduction to Big History  52 
 

Shells with drilled holes were also found at Blombos. The cave is near the coast, and a diet of 
sea food sustained them. Did they wear the shells as a way to offer the spirits of the dead animals 
a place to live after their bodies had been ingested? Did they wear necklaces of shells out of a 
sense of beauty made possible by using or improving on what nature offers? What do these 
artifacts indicate about their symbolic thinking? 

 
Migration from Africa 
 
About the time that people at Blombos were etching patterns in a rock and drilling holes in 
shells, others in northern Africa were beginning to leave Africa, where it seems now that they 
had all evolved. This had happened again over a million years earlier with homo erectus, who 
made their way all the way from Africa to East Asia before eventually dying out much later. 
About 80,000 years ago, homo sapiens were unknowingly retracing many of the routes from 
Africa, across modern day Sinai, Israel, along the coast of India, East Asia, up to Central Asia, 
and by about 50,000 years ago by boat to Australia. It would take tens of thousands of more 
years to figure out how to survive Siberia before by about 20,000 years ago people made their 
way across Beringia (the land bridge before about 10,000 years ago between Russia and Alaska) 
to what truly was then a new world for hominins in the Americas. It may well be that our kind 
existed in extraordinarily small numbers 80,000 years ago and that there was a common ancestor 
for all currently living people who lived at that point. It is almost certain that we were all 
Africans originally, and our subsequent differences in appearance evolved since the great 
migration from Africa. 

It was only after Asia had been populated that homo sapiens made their way to Europe. They 
brought with them the symbolic thought that they had been developing in other areas. By perhaps 
48,000 years ago, at the El Castillo Cave in Spain, an artist painted animals and designs from 
dots and lines on the walls. This was the case later as well at Chauvet, Lascaux, and elsewhere. 
The animals that were painted were not modeling for them. The artists worked from memory. 
What purposes did they have in painting these animals and designs underground? What were the 
artists thinking about the animals and designs they painted? It is hard not to speculate. Was the 
cave where the spirits of dead animals went to live after their blood drained from their bodies? 
Were these spirits looking for new bodies to inhabit? What was the meaning of the paintings for 
those who drew or first viewed them? The artists also spit-painted the outline of their hands 
multiple times. Were they leaving their signature, wanting those who would view the painting in 
the future to know who painted them? Were they touching the rock behind which the spirits of 
the animals they painted lived? 

The importance of reproduction and fertility is made explicit by the so-called Venus figures 
found at Hohle Fels in Germany from the Upper Paleolithic period, the Woman of Willendorf 
from about 24,000 years ago, the Woman of Laussel from about 20,000 years ago, and many 
others. These palm-size statuettes of women with exaggerated breasts and hips may have offered 
comfort to mothers going through pregnancy or delivery, or had any number of other possible 



53  Gustafson 
 

meanings. Whoever made the statues did so while thinking about fertility and sexuality rather 
than engaging in sex. These statues demonstrate symbolic thinking about sex in the immediate 
absence of sexual behavior. 

The big history of music is also noteworthy. The hardware necessary to transforming the 
waves through a medium such as air into perceived sounds in the brain began with early land 
dwellers feeling vibrations in their bones. Sight is great, but you can’t see around the bend or 
over the hill. Sound provides crucially important information. The patterns and tones of sound 
provide important information about the environment. Many species produce sounds as well as 
perceive them. Some birds will sing to announce territorial claims or attract mates. Whales and 
others too will sing to communicate over long distances. Sounds can convey information to 
others. 

With the malleus, incus, and stapes as part of their auditory system, mammals became able to 
hear in ways that reptiles cannot. Listening to the sound waves caused by ocean waves, lion 
roars, chirping crickets, and howling winds all had important meanings for hominids. Hearing 
and responding to a dependent babies cry, parting the lips and calling “Ma” with various 
inflections of tone elicited powerful responses among caretakers. Different sounds would have 
elicited other profound emotional responses, such as fear or sexual desire. Rhythmic music and 
drumming would have enhanced group identity during kinship groups’ dances. Eventually, fife 
and drums communicated information and bolstered courage during battle. Campaign theme 
songs would identify candidates. National anthems would stir patriotism. Perceiving and making 
music has a long history of the relationships between animals and their environments, and 
animals such as humans with each other. 

Symbolic thinking and imagination made combination beyond natural referents possible. A 
wonderful example of this is the Löwenmensch, or Lion Man, from Germany from about 30,000 
years ago. A bipedal man’s body with a lion’s head was not something the artist had ever seen. 
This was work not from memory alone but from imagination and combination. This indicates the 
ability to manipulate symbols separate from natural perception. It also indicates a crucially 
important political ability of combining what had not yet been combined in nature. 

Nature had combined much in the past through increasingly complex relationships. Quarks, 
atoms, molecules, minerals, cells, body parts, animal groups, and ecosystems all kept putting 
things together in larger and novel combinations. Now, humans could do this at a faster pace and 
self-consciously. 

Placing value on symbols for their own sake was exhibited by early artists as well. For 
example, there is a beautiful ivory horse sculpture from Vogelherd, Germany from about 32,000 
years ago. The artist did not try to include all the musculature of a real horse. Instead, it is an 
idealized shape with a series of flowing curves. This is not so much a representation of a physical 
horse as an ideal one expressing a sense of beauty. The artist took delight in abstraction. Plato 
was a bit of a Johnny-come-lately with his theory of the forms. Relationships through the 
exchange of words, music, and symbols developed human relationships. Exchange of goods did, 
too. This too has a long history, going back to sharing food to enhance group relations. 



An Introduction to Big History  54 
 

Specialized tool production Homo habilis sites relatively far from sources of rock that were used 
indicate trade as much as two million years ago. Trading routes become increasingly extensive 
and established until by 14,000 years ago the obsidian trade in the Near East and then the famous 
Silk Road established what some see as a central core political system. 

 
Political and Social Development 

Kinship 

The growth of symbolic thinking and exchange of goods, words, glances, gestures, musical 
sounds, and artistic images facilitated political development. We have discussed the importance 
of kinship groups. Long-term bonding of childcare givers required sophisticated relationships 
demanding lots of exchanges. Kinship groups within a scavenger/gatherer and then 
hunter/gatherer economy likely became complex, but were still limited in size to perhaps fifty or 
a hundred persons. Larger trading routes would have permitted development of complexity of 
relationship. Family groups needed to exchange offspring for mating in the next generation. This 
led over generations to complex sets of inter-kinship relations. Terms such as “second cousin 
once removed” start to indicate such complexity. 

In kinship relationships, lineage is important. Loyalties are to caretakers and common 
ancestors. Family and kinship remains important in our own day. The powerful resonances are 
indicated by larger groups attempting to appropriate kinship relations. Nationalists sometimes 
have referred to their country as a Motherland. In the United States, George Washington is 
referred to as the “Father of the Country.” Members of the Roman Catholic Church call their 
priests “Father.” Larger, non-lineage groups often seek to call upon the powerful forces of 
kinship. One of the values of big history is its scientific story of the real lineage of all persons, 
going back to a small group in Africa about 200,000 years ago; of all life to LUCA, and the 
universe to a single point. It turns out that we really do all have a common background. Big 
history is the scientific story for a period of human politics. 

 
Agriculture and Villages 
 
One of the major thresholds of big history is the agricultural revolution. The transition from 
hunting and gathering to growing crops and raising certain animals is of crucial importance. It 
also entails a stage of political development. Hunting/gathering went along with kinship polities. 
With agriculture came settled villages of increasing size, beginning to include different kinship 
lines. This presented the village with an enormous political problem: how to establish a 
sustained, structured set of relationships beyond kinship. 

One way to do this was to create dynasties; village lineages that all could be persuaded or 
forced to adopt. Lineage now became a symbolic political category rather than a biological one. 
In many regions of the world, mounds and other monumental burial sites enshrined the lineage of 



55  Gustafson 
 

the village. Those within one lineage might still have the right to rule, but all needed to exchange 
the symbols that helped nurture loyalty to it. 

The political leaders of these settlements or villages during the early agricultural era were 
sometimes those who had access and control over the best growing areas. We start to see 
increased social stratification and inequalities in wealth as the agricultural era proceeded. Some 
residences and some graves are noticeably grander than others. Hierarchy in the hunter/gatherer 
era was more likely based on strength, size, or cunning. In each period, leadership could also be 
exercised by those we call shamans, or those who could impress their fellows with their special 
insights and relationships. When some went through fasting, whether by choice or necessity, 
carried out rhythmic dancing while listening to repetitive rhythmic music, added various 
hallucinogens, and perhaps inflicted self-flagellation, they likely could report any number of 
special insights and experiences. Shapes would have shifted, experienced as traveling in other 
realms. These were similar to dream-like states. Dreams while sleeping and trances while awake 
offered symbolic connections with what was beyond normal referents. Imagined relationships 
with abstract designs, ancestors, and the supernormal by some could have impressed others and 
established a claim to leadership. 

Village identity could be developed and expressed through styles of clothing, certain verbal 
expressions, or other identifiers. Stories about the village could be told at gatherings. It took 
enormous effort and creativity to incorporate loyalty to the family within loyalty to the village. 

 
Cities and Empires 
 
Monumental, ceremonial architecture reinforced the claim by some of symbolic leadership that 
legitimized claims to political leadership. Standing in awe not directly of the universe, but of 
some people’s special connections with it, was impressive. From Watson Brake in Ouachita 
Parish in Louisiana from about 5,400 years ago to Imhotep’s Saqarra in Egypt about 4,700 years 
ago, grand burial sites began to announce the emergence of full-time leading families. Large, 
stylized burial mounds called attention if not of the gods, at least of the humbled onlookers who 
stood before them during ceremonies. Equivalents in modern America are the tall, stiff obelisk in 
honor to the Father of the Country, or the Jefferson or Lincoln Memorials in which political 
pilgrims can stand reverently in front of larger-than-life leaders who have mythical meaning and 
personify the presidential succession that leads to the current national leader. 

Large, monumental architecture also announces the emergence of new political units of cities 
with larger populations and relations of cities within regional associations and nations or 
empires. Eridu, Uruk, Ur, Çatalhöyük, Jericho, Damascus, Mohenjo-daro, Tenochtitlán, 
Teotihuacan, Xi’an and other great cities represent a transition to larger, more complex political 
units. Sometimes these became the hubs of empires; sometimes they were combined with other 
cities within empires such as the Akkadian Empire of Sargon the Great from 2,400 BCE, the 
fifteenth century BCE New Kingdom of Ancient Egypt ruled by Thutmose III, the Assyrian 
empire of 2000–612 BCE, the Median Empire in Persia by the sixth century BCE, the 



An Introduction to Big History  56 
 

Achaemenid Empire from 550–330 BCE, the Mauryan Empire from 321 to 185 BCE, the 
Roman, Han, Byzantine, Qing, Mongol, Arabian, Ottoman, Ashanti, and Mughal empires. 

The modern European empires were transformative through their incorporation of the 
Industrial Revolution. The British, French, Dutch, German, and Japanese empires were built 
from steel, oil-powered ships, railroads, and gasoline-powered vehicles. The Russian and 
American empires combined these in the information age with nuclear power and nuclear 
weapons. 

The struggles for power within empires and between some of them are the stuff of traditional 
history. The endless lists of battles and army flanks can make for a depressing account of the 
human past. Homer’s account of the Trojan War is heroic enough, but it is also just another 
deadly battle scene. And things don’t seem to have improved much. We started the twentieth 
century with a war to end all wars, followed by a horrific Second World War twenty years later. 
Since the end of WWII, there have been about 250 wars with over 50 million people killed, tens 
of millions more wounded, and countless made homeless. 
 
Where are we going? 

What can we conclude from our 13.82 billion year journey so far in this universe? The access to 
high quality energy in certain pockets has permitted increased complexity in relationships 
between quarks, atoms, molecules, cells, animals, and humans within families, cities, nations, 
empires, and the world. Each of the earlier relationships continues to be part of our current ones, 
although often in transformed ways. You and I are the beneficiaries of the relationships that have 
been developed. We are made from the relationships among quarks, atoms, molecules, cells, and 
many intricately related body parts. We live within kinship groups, nations, and empires. Many 
of us are connected with others around the world through the almost instantaneous exchange of 
digital information. We have evidence for a common origin of all of us and indeed everything it 
the universe. All of us on earth have a common origin and ultimately a common destiny. 

Big history is ultimately not only about the past. It helps us understand what brought us to the 
present and how we may participate in the future through long-developed processes. Will we 
continue to have access to high quality energy and remain as the pockets which continue to 
develop the most complex relationships of which we are aware in the universe? Can we use this 
energy without polluting our world and making it uninhabitable? Even if the energy crisis is 
resolved in a sustainable way, do we have the imagination to combine national, ethnic, and other 
types of groups within new and meaningful relationships? Can we be as creative as nature was 
earlier when it first combined protons and electrons, atoms in molecules, molecules in cells, cells 
in plants and animals, and animals in various groupings? Can we be as imaginative as the artist 
who carved the Löwenmensch, imagining the combination of lions and people? Or the shaman 
who imagined how to combine kinship groups in the village? Can the study of big history be 
formative enough to teach us how to combine families, ethnic groups, cities, nations, empires, 
humans, and our environment in ways that protect all of them? Can this be done even while there 
are many in less complex relationships who show little or no interest in participating in big 



57  Gustafson 
 

politics, who are satisfied with staying at their level of complexity? Can enough people make the 
transition to the next level of complexity? Can we fashion a more complex, sustainable, 
structured set of relationships? Can we experience politics as sustained, creative, structured 
relationship rather than a struggle for dominance? Can we understand ethics as developed from 
the empathy and sense of fair play that makes sustained relationships possible? Can we 
experience religion as the sense of awe of the forces that have bound us together and the 
creativity that leads to new and more complex, structured, and sustained relationships? Or will 
entropy overtake us before it needs to? 
 

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An Introduction to Big History  60 
 

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