The Great Divide

Peter Watson compares the development of humankind in the Old World and the New across the long stretch during which the two halves of the world were out of contact with one another, from the closing millennia of the last ice age to the year fifteen hundred. His question is what the separate careers of these two populations, each developing without knowledge of the other, can reveal about nature and about human nature. Watson combines findings from archaeology, anthropology, geology, meteorology, cosmology and mythology, setting the two hemispheres side by side so that the comparison itself does the explanatory work, and from it he offers what he presents as a new understanding of human history. The book is written as an all encompassing overview of how human civilisation grew and expanded, and its ambition is to show what the two worlds shared and where they parted company, tracing the differences to the different landscapes, climates, plants and animals the two populations had to work with. Watson's claim is that the resulting picture yields uniquely revealing insight into what it means to be human.

Written from the public record for the book.

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• Peter Watson