How Trees Made Us Human | The New Republic

Source: How Trees Made Us Human | The New Republic

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It is strange, when you think about it, that the leading metropolises in one of the world’s most technologically advanced countries should have been fashioned out of humanity’s oldest building material. But we rarely think about it. Wood has a way of slipping from view. We characterize historical epochs by their most advanced materials and energy sources: the Stone, Copper, Bronze, and Iron Ages of prehistory and the recent fossil-fuel–powered Anthropocene. Yet, as the biologist Roland Ennos argues, if you looked at people’s actual lives, you’d conclude that nearly the whole of human history deserves a different title: the Age of Wood.

“Who can tell of every use that wood has?” the theologian Martin Luther once asked. To chronicle them all, as Ennos aims to do, is to write a history of the world, because once you look for wood, you see it everywhere. It has been not only a ubiquitous presence but also a driving force, helping to explain the European colonization of the Americas or the rapid expansion of the United States. More to the point, in emphasizing how resolutely wooden the past has been, Ennos shows the deep continuities that connected Luther’s day to prehistoric times—and just how abrupt our recent ejection from the wooden age has been…