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There are no pure cultures – we have always been global
All of our religions, stories, languages and norms were muddled and mixed through mobility and exchange throughout history
This process inaugurated what the historian Alfred W Crosby Jr in 1972 called the ‘Columbian exchange’: a vast, human-driven intercontinental movement of animals, plants and disease-carrying microorganisms that forever changed Earth’s biological profile and the socioeconomic, cultural and political life of its inhabitants. Consider our (quasi-)universal agrarian mode of subsistence, and our single nutritional and psychotropic order, which is based on an incredibly small number of starchy crops (including wheat, maize, rice), domesticated animals (cows, chickens) and stimulants (coffee, sugar) uniformly consumed across the planet. Or might they, on the contrary, elevate the Neanderthalian or Denisovan gene as a marker of Eurasian ‘distinction’ to recreate narratives of racial superiority, similar to those that once plagued archaeological thinking about the allegedly more ‘advanced’ nature of those human fossils laying the farthest away from the species’ original African homes?
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