“Throwing Fire” turns on the deceptively simple observation that humans do a few things no other species does: stand upright, throw things and make fire. By standing up, we forfeited speed but freed two limbs for fashion-ing weapons and hurling things. Upright and aiming (rocks, spears, flaming arrows), our ancestors made short work of mammoths, saber-toothed tigers and lots more “Paleolithic Gotterdmmerung,” Crosby writes. In no time, early man went from lunch to lord, chucking his way to the top of his phylum. But that was only the beginning. Our penchant for throwing things took us all the way to the moon and beyond, aboard fireborne rockets. Sadly, it also sponsored mass extinction and battles when we turned our lethal talent on one another.
“Throwing Fire” is a slight book, running just 199 pages, but Crosby whisks us breathlessly (too quickly?) through our entire bellicose history, reviewing projectile technology from the atlatl, a notched stick for throwing spears which added deadly thrust to the toss (“the Stone Age AK-47”)–to laser-guided missiles and Osama bin Laden’s Boeing bombs. In 1347 the Mongols catapulted Black Plague victims over enemy ramparts–the medieval version of anthrax in an envelope. At first read, Crosby’s approach seems preposterously simplistic, to reduce the whole of history to an arms race. But Crosby’s throw is much greater. What the first hominids and, later, full-dress humans were on to was not just a way to get a bigger bang, but rather remote control, or “how to effect change at a distance.” More important, the changes we wrought using ingenuity were all out of proportion to mankind’s puny means and scale. Put plainly, history is the tale of “superior weaklings.” Fortunately, “Throwing Fire” is a tale told with flashes of wit and healthy reserve, a rarity for a genre dominated by military wonks and weapons fetishists. “Humans glory in detonation,” Crosby comments dryly. “With detonation… we achieve self-expression, colossally.”
Crosby has been telling such stories for a while now. In “The Columbian Exchange: Biological Consequences of 1492” (1972) he argued that sophisticated pre-Columbian indigenous agriculture (maize) in the New World saved Europe from hunger and nurtured such a population surplus in Africa that it made the slave trade possible. In 1986, in “Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900,” Crosby tackled the riddle of how Europe conquered the world. His answer: biology more than guns. The millennial coexistence and competition among plants, animals and people of ancient Europe left the geologically “mature” Old World biologically “fitter” to prevail in the fledgling New World. Crosby is a ranking member of a dissident school known as Big History, whose scholars–Fernand Braudel, Jared Diamond–leapfrog over the standard deeds-and-dates brand of history, drawing on everything from cosmology to microbiology to take in the whole arc of human exist-ence. “I wrote this book because I think that historians too often focus on the finest grained and most subtle evidence,” he writes, “so finely grained and subtle as to be quite nearly unintelligible.”
For all its boundless energy and scope, “Throwing Fire” is hardly a cheerful book. As Crosby tells it, much of the human experiment has been an exercise in murder, either of other creatures or of ourselves. True, the same technology that ravages this planet may one day transport us to others. And after all, against monstrous odds, we are the ones who survived. However you want to look at it, Crosby’s message is clear. Whether it’s the galaxy or Armageddon, we will be throwing our way to the future.
