Chapter 4 Summary

Ishmael starts the recorder when the narrator says he has written a Nova-like treatment for the middle and end of the story. It takes man 3 million years to figure out the world is made for him, not jellyfish, and he lives at the mercy of the world. He is unable to become distinctively human while remaining a hunter-gatherer, because of inevitable food-exhaustion. Only when he learns to produce more food, by becoming an agriculturalist, do things change. That is some 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent. It marks the biggest moment in human history to that point and man's rise thereafter is meteoric. Settlement gives rise to division of labor, which gives rise to technology, which produces trade and commerce, and then mathematics, literacy, science, etc. That is the middle of the story.

Ishmael is impressed the narrator has identified the birth...