Chapter 5: The Future of Humankind

If We Compare the History of Humankind to the Life of One Person

The evolution of humankind can be compared to the life of one person. In humanity's infancy, people lived depending on the food their mother supplied and on her protection, and when those two conditions ceased, life ceased too. In the same way, Homo erectus kept appearing on Earth and then disappearing. Later came Homo sapiens, equipped with more evolved abilities of being, feeling, and intellect, who adapted a little more easily to the changing environment of nature and survived. The process of human evolution from an animal state to a human state took one to two million years, and at last, some 100,000 to 200,000 years ago, the new human, Homo sapiens, was born. Humanity's infancy lasted until as recently as 20,000 years ago; then, from the time humankind began settled farming life in Southeast Asia, humanity's childhood began. As clan society grew into village society, the need for language rose sharply, and together with the development of language, the growth of intellect proceeded rapidly. From this time humankind began the process of physical and emotional growth that one goes through in childhood.

Just as a growing child, while under its parents' protection, likes to play with other children, so people, while under the protection of clan society, came to lead more of a social life involving neighboring clans; village society was formed, and people experienced the capacities of independence, equality, and competition. Of these, the capacity for independence was a way of life that began man-made self-reliance in place of dependence on nature — the ability to pioneer and shape one's living environment. The capacity for equality was the instinct to share the bounty of nature and coexist, an essential condition of primitive social life. The capacity for competition was the instinct to choose the better and obtain good results, and it became the driving force of evolution.

The evolution of humankind is like the life of one person: just as a child grows up learning language in childhood, language began to develop as the modern humans who had lived on the coasts of Southeast Asia since 60,000 years ago began village life. The linguist Johanna Nichols has pointed out that human language began in the coastal regions of Southeast Asia before the ice age. The beginnings of Southeast Asian language divide into Austronesian in the south and Austro-Asiatic in the north. The southern languages connect to the island nations, to the Dravidian of southern India, and to the Hamito-Semitic of Arabia and North Africa, and are used as modern languages. The northern languages were used as Sino-Tibetan throughout eastern and Central Asia, then grew northward into Ural-Altaic and southwestward into Indo-European, becoming the languages spoken by the most people in the modern world. In the course of the northern languages' growth, as their speakers migrated in the past into the southern language regions, they often replaced the southern languages with northern ones.

Johanna Nichols explained the historical connections among three types of language: two orderly language forms, "subject–verb–modifier" and "subject–modifier–verb," plus a disorderly, unsystematized form. The Korean, Japanese, and Mongolian languages belong to the second form, while European and Chinese languages belong to the first. Along China's east coast the languages were originally of the second form but were later replaced by the first. The third, disorderly form is common in the languages of undeveloped regions, the second form is common in the northern languages, and the first form in the southern languages. It is clear that every language form in the world exists in Southeast Asia and that their roots, too, lie in Southeast Asia.

In its growing childhood, humankind loved to draw pictures, sing, and dance. It loved to run and play tirelessly, and full of curiosity, it wanted to see, touch, and know everything. The more it did, the faster its intellect grew; there were more and more things it wanted to say and questions it wanted to ask, so conversation with neighbors grew lively, which helped human village society grow quickly into city-states. A city-state had sovereignty centered on the throne, citizens each engaged in their own specialized field, and the territory they owned. Among city-states there was cooperation and competition, and at times friction. Just as children easily adapt to their surroundings as need requires, cooperation and conflict shifted often. Several city-states linked in cooperative relationships, avoiding friction, sometimes elected a lord and founded a feudal state. Later, coming into more recent history, this led to times when feudal states warred and unified, or when lords elected an emperor and founded an empire.

As for the empires that appeared in East Asia, it is presumed that even before the Xia dynasty there were long-standing states that met the conditions of empire. The empires identified so far in historical documents are known as the Xia, Shang, Zhou, Qin, Han, Sui, Tang, and so on, but it is presumed that there was a great Baekje state that ruled the Korean Peninsula, Wa, Liaodong, and the Shandong Peninsula before the Baekje of our Three Kingdoms period, and that before that too there were coastal empires. This is because the source of culture and civilization in East Asia uniquely preserves in this region the phenomenon of evolution through historical stages: from the Neolithic on, on the Korean Peninsula and the Yellow Sea coast, people dug embankments to gather water needed for farming and piled up earth into hills; then, as they raised dolmens, a religion-centered social organization formed; and finally they built stone-mound tombs (pyramids) in the Yalu River basin.

China's Toehaechaek is a book that describes man-made hills and man-made embankments. The custom in East Asia of digging embankments to collect water and piling up the earth into hills has left Neolithic relics from eastern India along the Yellow Sea coast, through the Korean Peninsula and Japan, to the Great Lakes region and the Mississippi River basin of North America. In Europe, small relics transmitted during the ice age remain on the coasts of Denmark and Britain. This farming culture is a phenomenon carried to other continents over thousands or tens of thousands of years.

These East Asian systems of city-state, feudal state, and great empire were passed to places where people farmed and herded and population concentrated, spreading from East Asia to South Asia, Southwest Asia, eastern Europe, and western Europe. Along the coastal regions — to the Ganges basin, the Indus basin, Mesopotamia, and then on the Mediterranean to the Nile basin, Greece, and at last Rome — they were gradually carried over a long history from the eastern end of Eurasia toward the west.

In writing down the meaning of speech in picture-characters, too — on bamboo, animal bone, tortoise shell, bark cloth,
silk, clay vessels, stone slabs, metal, and at last on paper — the oldest and most numerous records have accumulated in East Asia. Examples of the evolution from pictures to writing are countless in Southeast Asia, and the kinds of scripts are many and varied. Existing scripts date from 7,000 years ago, but it is presumed that writing was done from before the great thaw. Even the records the Sumerians left baked in clay are interpreted as descriptions of the East Asian dragon. The forms of the thousands of Chinese characters were also established more than 2,600 years ago and used in the Taoist classic the Book of Changes, which Confucius is said to have loved to read as a young man. If we imagine the process of evolution of writing that went on for thousands of years before that, it leads us to imagine that in Southeast Asia, before the European thaw, the forms of writing already existed in tribal society.

The languages, scripts, and sciences of the Southeast Asian states were the intellectual growth of humankind in childhood. We can surmise that from 60,000 to 30,000 years ago people lived on the coasts by gathering, in the form of clan societies; then, between 30,000 and 20,000 years ago, as the population expanded in tribal societies settled by gathering and farming, they migrated inland along the rivers and along the coastlines into the Americas and to the coasts of Europe. As they began settled farming life, they began using the labor of oxen, and it seems the plow for digging the soil was soon made and put to use as well.

As archaeology and excavation grow more active in Southeast Asia, such suppositions will gradually and quickly be confirmed; but it was from around 10,000 years ago, in step with the great thaw, that farming coastal peoples suddenly began to gather in the arid climate of Southwest Asia. Because these farming coastal peoples migrated there already equipped with an established culture and civilization, it leads us to imagine that their homeland was Southeast Asia and that the roots of their culture and civilization lie in Southeast Asia, which went through tens of thousands of years of evolution.

According to Han dynasty records, there was a Xia dynasty before the Shang. The large volume of Shang oracle-bone records from before that are still merely stored in museum storerooms and have not been read. But we can see that for 20,000 years before the Xia there existed many city-states and feudal states at the river mouths of Southeast Asia, and that among them the city-state of Ur was founded in the Indus basin. In the excavation records of the Ur region, religious relics with the features of East Asians were unearthed from the oldest layer. After that, the Sumerians appear in the Mesopotamian region with the languages and scripts of Southeast Asia, the Code of Hammurabi is introduced in Babylonia, peoples who worshiped birds and bulls appear on the Mediterranean, and soon after, metal culture appears. Because these cultures are not sudden inventions or discoveries but appear after an evolutionary process of more than ten thousand years, I think they were possible only in Southeast Asia, with its greater population and longer history.

The culture of the Yangtze and the Yellow River, where the Xia and Shang stood, was carried to the cultures of Mesopotamia and the Nile, and the cultures of the Minoans, Mycenaeans, Jews, Palestinians, and Phoenicians who appeared on the Mediterranean are also branches of the culture and civilization carried from Southeast Asia to Southwest Asia and the Mediterranean. We can see that the nomadic culture of East Asia passed through Central Asia and connected to the Scythian culture of eastern Europe, which built great burial mounds. Before the cultures of Persia and Greece there were the cultures of many East Asian states, including the Shang, and even the ability of Alexander the Great of Greece to conquer Southwest Asia was part of the civilization passed to Greece from the ability of East Asia's nomadic states, including the Zhou, which already ruled the territory of today's Soviet Union and China stretching from East Asia to eastern Europe.

At that time, in the architecture of the nomadic states of East Asia, there was the practice of setting sculptures of the sapsal dog in front of palaces, and later this appeared in Alexander the Great's practice of setting lion sculptures before the gate as guardian spirits. After the First Emperor of Qin unified China, the Roman Empire followed his example and became an empire in Europe. When China passed through the Han and reached the Tang, the capital, Chang'an, became the cultural center of the world, and the Romans for the first time bought silk garments from Chinese merchants and wore them. From that time the Silk Road, which Asian nomads traveled, became known to Europe, but the nomads of East Asia had been traveling it long before, Asians had been migrating to eastern Europe, and the culture and civilization of Asia had been passing to Europe. By then the empires of East Asia had already built the Great Wall, a military highway thousands of kilometers long dividing steppe from farmland, as a great road linking the Korean Peninsula with Mongolia, and the Grand Canal linking the Yellow River and the Yangtze was nearing completion. In scale and technique they are masterpieces of human civilization surpassing the pyramids of Egypt dozens of times over.

The population expansion of East Asia's coastal states and nomadic states sent its shock like waves into South Asia and Central Asia, and the states of South Asia and Central Asia, migrating into Southwest Asia and eastern Europe, passed on the aftershocks. The Scythians into Greece, the Celts into Rome, the Gauls and Germans into central Europe, the Saxons of northern Europe into the island of Britain, the Phoenicians from the southern coast of Asia to the whole Mediterranean coast — countless nations and peoples migrated into Europe carrying the culture and civilization of Asia. The greatest shock among them was the invasion of the Mongol Huns led by General Attila, which ended the history of Rome.

The migration of Central Asian nomads into northern India through the Ganges basin in the east and the Indus basin in the west — conquering the native Dravidians, assimilating with them, and driving them south — began more than 4,000 years ago. It was the phenomenon of the advanced culture and civilization of the temperate zone migrating into the regions of less advanced peoples in the tropics, and in the Nile basin of Africa, too, East Asians came in and occupied the lands of Arabs and Black Africans. At this time in East Asia too, as inland nomads invaded the coastal farming states, those coastal states scattered to the coastal regions of the world's many continents, and East Asian culture and civilization were spread across the world. The metal civilization that entered eastern India from East Asia developed into the culture of cave sculpture. The metal culture of East Asia, the religion of the dragon, and the sculptural culture of India later gave rise to Persian culture in Southwest Asia.

As the city-states and feudal states of East Asia formed their social organization, organized religious rites took shape. As people recognized the mystery and power of nature, nature religion appeared and Taoism began. Sun worship developed into a celestial religion tied to the climate of farming and came to occupy a large part of Taoism, and the formation of yin-yang thought by comparing the moon and the sun shows that human intelligence developed from monistic to dualistic thinking. The rites of burial or cremation at the parting from family members formed an ethic of offering rites at ancestral graves and establishing order in clan society, and became the foundation of Confucianism. The beginning of philosophy on the basis of Taoism and Confucianism, and the development of Confucian learning, together with the establishment of writing, marked the transitional period of human growth in which civilization evolved out of culture, and it reached its height in the competitive society of the Shang and Zhou periods in East Asia.

2,600 years ago, around the time East Asia's imperial social organization was carried through eastern India into India, the Taoism and Confucianism that had begun in clan society appeared on the Ganges, between China and India, as Buddhism, an imperial religion suited to imperial society. Together with Indian sculptural art it spread along China's east coast, and Buddhist culture blossomed in East Asia in the Yungang Grottoes of the Northern Wei. The Gupta state in the Indus basin to the west of India became a Buddhist state, and Greek kings of the Mediterranean coast came to the Buddhist temples of India and China, became Buddhist monks, and learned and trained in the culture and civilization of Southeast Asia. The yin-yang thought they learned then later became the foundation of the Western philosophy of Plato and Aristotle.

The East Asian religion of the moon and sun can also be seen in the Pyramids of the Moon and Sun of the Aztec culture of Central America. Six hundred years after Confucius, Mencius, and the Buddha were born, Jesus was born in Southwest Asia, and Christianity, based on Buddhism, began. The forms of Catholicism have much in common with those of Buddhism, and it spread into eastern Europe. Then, 600 years later, Islam, based on the Old Testament of Christianity, appeared. After the Mongols occupied the medieval nations of Europe in the twelfth century and passed on East Asian culture to them again, the Reformation began in western Europe and Protestantism appeared.

Over 2,000 years, from world religion's beginning in East Asian Taoism to the Protestantism of western Europe, the wave of East Asian culture reached western Europe. The history of religion, too, shows the process by which world culture and civilization began in East Asia, crossed the Eurasian continent, and reached western Europe. Taoist culture on the Korean Peninsula has deep roots in Goguryeo culture and left many remains in the Goguryeo tombs. As for Buddhist culture: in the reign of King Dongseong, Baekje occupied the Northern Wei in Shanxi Province, and the Northern Wei halted work on its Buddhist temple, the Yungang Grottoes, and moved to the Longmen Grottoes at Luoyang south of the Yellow River. Around this time (494), the Buddhist culture of the Northern Wei was passed to Baekje at the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula, and later to Silla and Japan.

In Europe, classical culture came to an end when Rome was invaded by the Mongol Huns, and while the European nations remained in the Dark Ages, humanity's childhood growth continued in East Asia. The Han Chinese, who grew up in the Central Plain of the Yangtze, followed the Zhou, fused with the coastal states of the east coast, founded the Han empire, and took hold of Southeast Asia. Han culture and civilization became the consolidation of East Asian culture and civilization. Around the time the First Emperor of Qin succeeded the Zhou and founded a unified empire, the Yuezhi, one of the nomadic states of the Liaodong region, migrated to the Ganges basin and founded the Kushan state, which expanded to build the great Kushan Empire, securing territory that stretched across most of northern India and as far as the Caspian Sea in eastern Europe.

Later, trading with the Tang dynasty of China and with Rome in Europe, it brought Buddhist culture in India to its peak, and the history of unified empire began in Indian history. The metal tools of East Asia revived the sculptural art of India, and Indian sculptural art was carried to Greece by the Phoenicians, where Greek sculpture developed. In the time of India's Kushan Empire, Buddhist art reached its zenith, and through the routes opened by Rome, the Buddhist sculpture of the Kushan state extended to cave sculptures in Africa and along the Red Sea coast. The Kushan Empire of India, founded by East Asians, became the link connecting the Mediterranean and East Asia, and the peak of the culture of humanity's childhood began.

The power of East Asia had already burst out into the world in the times of the Xia and Shang, carrying the stone-mound tomb (pyramid), which began on the Liaodong Peninsula, to the Pacific coasts of Central and South America and to the mouth of the Nile in Africa. As for transport networks connecting to the world, in China's Tang dynasty a world empire was built centered on the Tang capital, Chang'an (Xi'an). At this time on the Korean Peninsula the Buddhist culture of Unified Silla reached its peak, and Baekje, around the time it was being driven out by Silla, crossed to Japan and gave rise to Japan's Asuka culture. The Mongol Huns, fleeing the power of the Tang, conquered Rome and at the same time entered India and invaded the Kushan Empire. The East Asian culture and war civilization of the Mongol Huns were carried to eastern Europe, and some of them migrated to northern Europe and became Viking pirates. They raided the coasts of Britain and Europe for 300 years and settled in England, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.

Tang culture contrasts sharply with Han culture. Han culture was the consolidation of East Asian culture, beginning from the cultures of the coastal states and fused with the nomadic states. Tang culture was the culture and civilization of a great world empire, connected to the Eurasian continent, Africa, and the Americas after East Asian culture had advanced into India through eastern India and into Europe through Southwest Asia and the Mediterranean. After the Tang had held power for 300 years, East Asia saw the Jin dynasty, ruled by the Manchus, grow in the north, and the Yangtze culture of the Song dynasty grow in the south. The Mongol state, which had been competing with the Jin in the north, united the peoples of the same blood in the Manchurian and Tibetan regions, and at last the power of East Asia set out on the history of conquering the world.

The Xiongnu empire, formed of the Huns, conquered Rome and Europe, and competed with the Han dynasty while ruling the nomadic belt stretching from eastern Europe through East Asia. Around the seventh century they built the Uyghur empire and contended with the Tang, and Genghis Khan, born in AD 1167, once again united the nomads and founded an empire unifying the Eurasian continent, bringing the greatest change in human history. It gave the Europeans, passing through the dark period of the European Middle Ages, the opportunity to learn again the culture and civilization of Asia they had forgotten. From that time, modern civilization began in the world.

In humanity's childhood, becoming independent of the natural environment and growing according to one's own consciousness and will was a period in which humanity's instinct to depend on its parents compromised with its own instinct for independence. Out of the instinct to depend on nature and religion, an intellectual instinct grew. The evolutionary process of growth from clan society to village society, regional society, city-state, feudal state, and empire began in Southeast Asia and was achieved in East Asia. The process of spreading east to the Americas, west to Central Asia and eastern Europe, and south to India, Southwest Asia, the Mediterranean coast, and western Europe was humanity's growth in childhood, and the process by which the nomads of East Asia fused with farming culture and unified the world.

Humankind survived on Earth in the form of living organisms until at last, two million years ago, a mammalian (a kind that drinks its mother's milk), upright (standing) higher creature, Homo erectus, the forefather of Paleolithic people, appeared in Africa. Its fossil remains can be seen in many places around the world, except the North and South American continents. If we think of this period as humanity's gestation, it resembles the process by which a mother receives the father's single-celled sperm and it evolves within her womb until at last the form of a baby appears; so the Earth possessed the physiology of a mother. Astonishingly, these Paleolithic people used wood and stone as tools for living, and made fire to warm their caves and cook their food.

According to recently published genetic tracing of human bloodlines, the modern humans living on Earth were born in East Africa 100,000 years ago. From this time, human history begins in the form of one person's infancy. Just as a baby drinks its mother's milk and grows in her arms, people began to live in places with an abundance of natural food produced on the Earth and a gentle climate and natural environment. Their population increased toward the south and west of the African continent, and at last they migrated out to southern Asia. At this time Europe, except the Mediterranean coast, was covered with the ice of the ice age, a condition that continued until as recently as 12,000 years ago.

When modern humans left Africa and arrived in Southeast Asia and Australia, it was 50,000 years ago, and the Southeast Asian region, similar in climate to Africa and abundant in food, was like a mother's embrace in humanity's infancy. At that time the Indonesian islands were one large peninsula (Sundaland), part of the Southeast Asian continent connected to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand. As clan society grew in Southeast Asia, the language of infancy began, intelligence grew, and as their range of activity and territory expanded, humankind grew into childhood.

The process of changing from a life of gathering wild plants, dependent on the mother's milk, to a farming life of collecting, planting, and raising seeds to eat was the process of weaning from the mother's milk and growing from infant humanity into child humanity. The climate and natural conditions of Southeast Asia were a nest well suited to the growth of the human population. Many peoples who left Southeast Asia failed to adapt to climate change and perished, but Southeast Asia kept increasing its population and supplied people so that clan societies could take root in water-rich places in every region of the world.

35,000 years ago, child humanity in Southeast Asia divided along the coastlines into southern Asia and eastern Asia, and at this time the world's humankind split into two groups and grew. There is the southern human bloodline that advanced into Thailand, Myanmar, India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, and western Europe, and the northern human bloodline that connects to Vietnam, eastern China, Korea, Japan, eastern Russia, the North American continent, and the South American continent, and connects to Mongolia and Tibet, extending as far as eastern Europe. The beginnings of Southeast Asian language divide into the Austronesian of the southern humans and the Austro-Asiatic of the northern humans. The linguist Johanna Nichols explained the historical connections among three types of language: two orderly language forms, "subject–verb–modifier" and "subject–modifier–verb," plus a disorderly, unsystematized form. She explained that the source of the world's languages lay in Southeast Asia.

Child humanity, with its vigorous energy and strong curiosity, loved to explore, and the distribution of humankind on Earth expanded most rapidly at this time. The southern and northern humans who advanced inland mixed in Central Asia. From this time, the human constitution adapted to its surroundings and began to look different. Humankind, which began with black skin in Africa, changed to red (the skin color of Native Americans) while staying in Southeast Asia; then the northern peoples who left for the north, going through the four seasons of East Asia, began to have skin that turned white and eyes and noses that grew smaller. Among the southern peoples who moved west, those who met the dry climate of Southwest Asia developed larger noses, and those who migrated to the shores of Europe's glacial continent, growing used to underground dwelling, began to have skin that turned white, hair that turned yellow, and eyes that turned blue.

Humankind, having begun farming life in Southeast Asia, increased rapidly in population, just as a child's body grows. People raised chickens, pigs, ducks, dogs, sheep, goats, and so on, eating both vegetables and meat, and began raising oxen to use their labor, changing from a life of moving about in search of food to a settled life of producing food. The concept of ownership was established, and clan society developed to secure family and kin, land, and property. Religious rites such as birthdays, weddings, and ancestral rites appeared as cultural forms in human life. Just as a child's emotions grow, human culture began first in Southeast Asia.

The climate of Africa and South Asia guaranteed humankind an easy life, but among the peoples of the temperate zone, the Korean people, who arrived along the East Asian coast at the Shandong Peninsula, the Liaodong Peninsula, and the Korean Peninsula, penetrated inland from 35,000 years ago and grew into nomads reaching Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet. Settling into farming life at the mouths of the Yangtze, the Yellow River, and the many rivers of the Korean Peninsula, they were the first of the Neolithic modern humans to adapt to the four seasons, and began a life disciplined by competition, combining herding and farming. The coastal peoples who kept migrating from Southeast Asia passed the Korean Peninsula and migrated out to the Pacific coasts of North and South America, and from the river basins around the Yellow Sea they penetrated inland along the rivers and became inland peoples.

Shandong, Liaodong, and the Korean Peninsula became the busiest crossroads of human history in the Neolithic, so the culture of earth — digging embankments to make ponds and collect water, and building hills (mounds) and tombs at which to hold rites — and the dolmen culture of dragging large stones from far away to raise shrines are more densely concentrated here than anywhere else in the world. Just as humankind in its growing childhood loved to draw, sing, and dance, it loved to run and play tirelessly, and full of curiosity, it wanted to see, touch, and know everything.

The more it did, the faster its intellect grew; there were more and more things it wanted to say and questions it wanted to ask, so conversation with neighbors grew lively, which helped human village society grow quickly into city-states. Here, competition among clans made larger clan societies that took the form of states, and competition between farming peoples and nomadic peoples resulted in the making of empires. The process of humankind growing from a young child into a teenager began from the time knowledge developed in East Asia. The building of the Great Wall as a symbol of competitive society also began here and grew inland.

World culture began in the matrilineal society of the gathering and farming life of Southeast Asia, and world civilization began in the competitive society of the farming and nomadic peoples of East Asia, accustomed to a life of metal tools. Because human instinct consists of the ability to find food and eat, and the ability of men and women to come together and bear and raise children, love became the source of culture and the struggle for survival the source of civilization. While the coastal peoples spun hemp to make cloth for clothing and then made silk clothing from silkworms, the nomads made clothing from animal hides and raised sheep, dogs, and horses. Among the underground resources of that region, coal gave them the ability to mass-produce metal, and the many metal technologies and products brought revolutionary change to the tools of daily life and to military weapons, so world civilization began here.

A life adapted to the four seasons required the regular effort and discipline of preparing necessities — food, clothing, shelter, fuel, and so on — before winter came. With metal tools people built large houses and made large ships, and wheels fitted with metal axles led to the mass production of chariots that ran fast and far. They made wagons to carry heavy loads, and all industries flourished along with the transport industry. They discovered the magnet and invented the iron-needle compass, and ocean navigation developed; they made paper, written records flourished, and the exchange of information and the linking of records transcended the limits of place and time. While a large population lived on a broad, vast continent from tens of thousands of years earlier, all the inventions and discoveries of ancient society were applied in the competitive society of East Asia.

The culture of building earth mounds and the culture of moving large stones to raise dolmens combined, and the custom and technique of building stone-mound tombs (pyramids) developed in the Yalu River basin. It leads us to surmise that the pyramid culture that appeared as a sudden mutation at the mouth of the Nile in Egypt, and the stepped pyramids built on the Pacific coast of South America, have their roots in the Neolithic culture that evolved in the Yalu River basin. East Asian culture was carried to the Indus basin and Mesopotamia, and after the most recent ten thousand years it reached the Mediterranean coast, where the Minoan culture of Greece began. As an extension of the Zhou culture of East Asia, the Buddhist culture of eastern India and the Greek culture of the Mediterranean were established, and in the aftermath of the Eastern Zhou and the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, the state of Rome was founded, and the nations of Europe grew along with the Han and Tang of East Asia.

The primitive nature religion of Southeast Asia laid a foundation of thousands of years through the yin-yang thought of East Asia and Taoism, a celestial religion; the Confucian learning of ancestor worship; and the Hinduism of eastern India. Imperial religion was formed in eastern India and passed to western India, and the Greek kings of the Mediterranean came to the Buddhist temples of India and East Asia, trained as Buddhist monks, and learned the philosophy and culture of Asia (Buddhist records of India and China). Christianity was born 600 years later, so early Christianity — Catholicism — and Buddhism have much in common. Judaism is the religion of the Old Testament, and that 600 years later again Islam began from the Old Testament also shows that the roots of world religion lie in the basins of the Yellow River and the Ganges.

As the Huns of East Asia invaded Central Asia, the Gupta Empire of India, and Rome in Europe, Europe sank into the Dark Ages of the medieval period, while East Asia kept growing through the cultures of the Sui and Song. As Southwest Asia grew from Persia to Byzantium, and Southeast Asia grew with the Khmer Empire in Cambodia, the world's humankind came to possess the intellect and emotions of teenage boys and girls. Then in the twelfth century, as the northern nomads of East Asia reenacted the world invasion their Hun ancestors had achieved, humankind entered adolescence.

The Mongol Empire's unification of the world showed the process of change into the adolescence of teenage boys and girls in humanity's growth. The character of that period was like a boy and a girl feeling attraction to the opposite sex they are seeing for the first time: it was a time when Asia looked upon the populated regions of other continents such as Europe and Africa and felt their attraction, and Europe looked upon Asia for the first time and was attracted. The changes of adolescence are the period of the most violent change, both physically and emotionally. Mongol history shows that part and character of world history.

Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, took power, and over 34 years he further expanded his territory in Southwest Asia and Europe, made all the invaded countries pay tribute, and named his state the Yuan dynasty. He moved the capital to Dadu (Beijing), enlarged the Forbidden City, re-established the capital of the world that Chang'an (Xi'an) had enjoyed in the Tang, and once again made the Beijing region the center of world culture and civilization. The nations of Europe paid tribute, and merchants came and went from every continent. Among them, Marco Polo and his father, who came bearing a letter from the Pope, worked as servants of Kublai Khan and, traveling back and forth to their homeland, introduced the culture and civilization of East Asia to western Europe.

In East Asia, people wore cloth woven from cotton, silkworm thread, and wool, and paper and woodblock printing were developed for exchanging knowledge and information. Maritime industry flourished; they explored the geography of the world, developed sea routes, and received tribute from continents and island nations, and Marco Polo visited Sri Lanka and brought back the Mongols' taxes. Later, in the Ming dynasty, world navigation charts were drawn up, which, together with the compass, resulted in East Asian navigational technology spreading to Europe and spurred the maritime industry of western Europe.

Mongol soldiers developed cannons using gunpowder explosions, which were passed on to Europe and brought a revolution in the history of warfare. Woodblock printing, and later the metal movable-type printing developed in Korea, were for a long time the means by which East Asia developed its culture and civilization. The printing technology passed to western Europe at this time resulted in bringing the Renaissance to Europe. It led on to the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution, and humanist thought drove out imperialism, so that democratic society, the capitalist economy, and the socialist economy began. Led by western Europe, the Reformation broke away from the Catholicism of eastern Europe, and a social religion, Protestantism, began.

Meanwhile, the Han Chinese of Central Asia, who had suffered the Mongol invasion, recovered and founded the Ming dynasty. The Ming inherited Yuan culture and reorganized all the decayed government policies and facilities. The British naval explorer Gavin Menzies explains in his book 1421 that the ships of the world expedition used by the Ming admiral Zheng He at the command of the Yongle Emperor were great vessels 151 m long and 61 m wide, and that, leading some 200 escort ships and some 27,000 attendants, he left Taicang in Jiangsu Province in 1405, passed through India and Africa, and arrived in the Americas in 1421. It is said that even after returning home he continued, completing his seventh expedition in 1433, and made navigation charts. In 1525 the Ming shut down all maritime industry and adopted an isolationist policy. This navigational information spread to Europe, and at this point East Asia handed world hegemony over to Europe, and the modern history of East Asia's decline began.
In 1493, the Portuguese navigator Columbus crossed the Atlantic and reached the North American continent, and in 1598 Vasco da Gama passed Africa and arrived in India, and Europe opened its eyes to the world. The competitive society among nations in East Asia now passed to Europe, and fierce civil wars and reforms in politics, society, and economy continued in Europe. In a competitive society, urban populations grow, specialized fields develop, education, industry, trade, and finance grow rapidly, and nations advance overseas. By 1650, expeditions and trading ships from Spain, Britain, Holland, France, Portugal, and other countries were traveling back and forth to North America, Central America, South America, Africa, India, China, and the many island nations of Southeast Asia. Asian silk, porcelain, fur clothing, and various precious metals were imported into Europe, and the plow that farmers drove with oxen to dig the soil in the fields, along with seeds of vegetables, fruits, and grains, came in, and the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution arose in Europe.

The world's knowledge was concentrated in Europe; science and invention flourished; industries such as textiles, transport, and military weapons developed; the east coast of North America was divided into the thirteen colonial territories; and Britain, France, Spain, and Russia divided the continent and bought and sold ownership of it. At last the Europeans who had immigrated to America established the American government, and in 1775 George Washington was chosen as the first president. Britain colonized India, Australia, and New Zealand and grew into a world empire. Russia expanded its territory to possess all of Siberia, and the shape of Europe and the world map changed greatly. With the expansion of agricultural land, the business of kidnapping Africans and selling them as slaves to regions that needed labor flourished.

The natives who had lived there for tens of thousands of years were mercilessly slaughtered, driven out of their living areas, and confined to restricted areas — the greatest tragedy in human history, sacrificed to the land expansion of white Europeans. This phenomenon was the violent change that humankind goes through in the adolescence of its growth, and the rapid growth of world population from the seventeenth century on was a phenomenon showing the physical growth of adolescence. The Civil War in North America was a clash between desire and conscience. The North won, and slavery ended. Edison discovered electricity, and electrical communication and electric machine power, together with the railway connections of steam locomotives, brought the world to the point of showing the form of a fully grown human adult.

The growth of adolescent humankind continued, and there were also phenomena such as the violence of the First and Second World Wars. Ford invented the automobile, and automobiles that ran by burning oil crossed the continent on highways. Mass production linking supply and demand brought a gap between rich and poor in the capitalist economy, and in contrast to it communism and socialism appeared. Europe's consciousness of territorial expansion began within Europe with World War I from Italy, and was stopped by the sanctions of the United States and France. In 1939 the Second World War began again. Japan had modernized 60 years ahead while Korea and China pursued isolationist policies, and succeeded in occupying and colonizing Korea and China's Manchuria. Intending to expand into Southeast Asia, Japan joined Germany's Second World War, attacked Hawaii, and challenged the United States.

Nurhaci, born at Baekdusan on the upper Yalu River, founded the Qing dynasty in the Manchurian region and invaded the Ming in 1644; what the Xiongnu and Mongols of the north had once done in seizing leadership from the Han Chinese, this time the Dongyi, a Manchurian-Korean-Peninsula people, repeated. On the Korean Peninsula, when Silla was invaded by Goryeo, the Jin dynasty, which Silla's royal family founded in the old territory of Goguryeo, destroyed the Northern Song. Later, Genghis Khan of the Mongols first of all joined the Jin to the Mongol Empire. After the Qing unified China, rebellions around the borders and within the country continued again, and the Japanese Wa people launched the Imjin War on the Korean Peninsula and kept harassing the coastal regions of the Qing. The isolationist policy established in the Ming continued in the Qing, and East Asia's long history of connection to the world ended here.

The Modern World and the World of the Future

Living is given to every living thing in this wide world and has endured on this earth for the longest time; feeling is given only to a limited number of higher animals and has existed only in the recent history of the Earth. Thinking is given only to a very limited species, humans, and has existed only in the shortest part of modern humanity's history.

If we divide human history broadly, the period of religious life lasted longest, the period of artistic culture lasted next, and scientific civilization, in the shortest period, is bringing about the greatest change. Let us think about where humankind, having become the lord of all creation, came from, how we ought to live, and how we ought to shape our future for the sake of our descendants.

We have lived with religion, art, and science. On this earth, formed over 3,500 million years,
the providence of life lies before us, but in the shortsightedness of our materialistic way of life, the destruction of nature over the past two hundred years seems to have been enormous.

What we must do is understand the truth of the natural environment that nature created and follow the natural order. It is only right that, just as our own lives are precious, we should hold the lives of our descendants precious and take great interest in the living environment of future humankind.

Managing our lives so that all living things in the natural environment can live healthily along with humankind is for the sake of future humankind. It is a duty that the governments of all the nations of the world must set as their most important goal and carry out while keeping the peace. Just as the other primitive humans of this world disappeared after modern humans appeared in Africa 100,000 years ago, when space people are born on this earth, modern humankind will gradually vanish. Until then, the best course for modern humankind is to strive to live healthily.

Let us re-establish the peaceful spiritual culture of the East, which led world history until the fourteenth century, restore the balance among living, feeling, and thinking, and build a healthy world again. We must prove that Asians were originally the protagonists of human culture and civilization, and correct the materialism created by Europeans. From now on, the world is watching closely the new role Asians will play in human culture for the sake of the world's environment.

The Second World War, in which Germany and Japan tried to expand, came to an end in 1945, and the mature adolescence of humankind shows a new face. The British Empire came to an end, and the United States emerged as a great power based on the capitalist free-market economy, while the Soviet Union, putting the socialist Communist Party at the fore, attempted an imperial system including many nations of eastern Europe, but failed. On the basis of the resources of its broad lands, it continues to stand against the United States. The aviation technology begun by the two Wright brothers in Dayton, Ohio, developed rapidly during the world wars. Computer technology, begun at a calculating-machine company in the same city of Dayton to break German and Japanese wartime codes, was transferred to the IBM company and brought a revolution in the worldwide storage and distribution of information. The imperial Communist Party economy of the Soviet Union collapsed, but China's Communist Party system opened to capitalism and, following Japan and Korea, joined the world's free-market economy. The defeated nations of Germany and Japan joined the American economic system and rose as economic powers, and while American military and economic power was overwhelming, the United Nations was established within the United States, in the international city of New York. The United States, putting Protestantism at the fore, evangelized the world; possessing the most automobiles, and importing from Islamic countries the heavy oil and diesel needed for heavy and light industry, it came to face the resistance of Islamic countries grown wealthy.

The character of humanity's mature adolescence shows itself in many ways. Ever since humankind was born on Earth, it has depended on God and clung to religion as to its parents, but lately it has come out crying "God is dead," showing the face of one rebelling against its parents. Yet because human life has the spirituality received from a mother's love, religion will go with human life to the very end. The sound life of modern people is achieved when spirit, feeling, and intellect are combined. That people now confuse science and religion and bring about worldwide turmoil is because they are not educated about spirit, feeling, and intellect from elementary school on. Future humankind will have the ability to separate religion and science. For example, the folly of confusing the two will disappear, as people acknowledge religious creationism and also accept scientific evolution.

Medicine has advanced and life has been prolonged; space flight has advanced and astronauts have reached the moon; and the human sphere of life has come to occupy most of the Earth. The possibility, as blood research and in vitro fertilization technology advance, of conceiving and bringing forth new space people as modified humans shows the reproductive capacity of mature adolescence. Launching satellites and sending humans into the space of the universe can be likened to a man ejaculating sperm from his genitals.

Europe and America, having seemed to lead the world on their own, are now dealing with Southeast Asia, which gives the feeling of a man and a woman dating. Time is moving ever faster, and the period of adolescence — as we enter the twenty-first century, human life is advancing rapidly.

Humankind will enter a family life of bearing and raising space people, and this will bring the happiest period of human life on Earth. In the world of the near future, with the development of information and communications, there will be less commuting to children's schools and young people's workplaces, and as the elderly live longer the elderly population will swell. It will be a society in which the productivity of the elderly increases, and with advances in transportation, one will be able to reach anywhere in the world within two hours.

Conclusion

We come to understand that the number 7, which appears some 400 times in the Bible, was, in the celestial religion of Neolithic East Asia, which believed in the Heavenly Palace that honors the North Star, a number beginning with the Big Dipper and combining yin-yang and the Five Elements — the number by which heaven and earth were completed as sun, moon, fire, water, wood, metal, and earth. It is the common sense of modern people to understand that before the stone architecture of the Mediterranean there were wooden architecture and cave sculpture, and that before stone pyramids were raised there were pyramids built of earth (mounds) and dolmen temples made by dragging stones. When we see that the beginnings of wooden architecture and cave sculpture and their relics are in Southeast Asia, and that earthen pyramids and dolmen temples are in East Asia around the Korean Peninsula, it becomes clear that they originated in Asia and were passed on to the Mediterranean. That Greek kings came to China and India, shaved their heads, became monks, and learned Asian religion and culture, whereupon Mediterranean religion and culture flourished — when we see this in the historical records of China and India, we come to understand that the Mediterranean culture of Southwest Asia is a descendant of Southeast Asia. Just like the political manipulation that tries to hide the fact that Japan's culture was transferred from the Korean Peninsula, such distortions must now stop.

The Liao River civilization of East Asia is the earliest-developed culture and civilization in the world, which China's Yellow River civilization followed. Just as the First Emperor of Qin founded the world's first empire and the Roman Empire of Europe followed, so the pyramid culture also began here, and the pyramids of Africa and Central and South America followed. In the past, humankind lived dependent on nature and God, as an infant grows drinking its mother's milk, and in childhood it grew up running over the steppes and playing at piracy like the Huns, the Mongols, and the Vikings. Today's adolescent humankind is growing rapidly in population, as the body develops in adolescence. It is in the process of striving to keep maturing mentally until it can stand on its own.

The modern history of modern humankind began when Genghis Khan of East Asia conquered Europe and passed East Asian culture on to Europe. Modern human history saw Europeans with guns seize the lands of Asians who shot arrows, and went through two world wars. America, a new nation founded by Europeans on a continent of Asians, has led in political and economic influence. Yet humankind still lacks the ability: it could not prevent the slaughter of six million Jews, and even now it cannot save 20 million North Korean people from the dictatorship of the Kim family.

Confusing creationism and evolution, people commit the slaughter of believers of other religions for the sake of their own. The confusion of knowledge we modern people are going through is a sign of humanity's immaturity, and worldwide conflicts arising from religion continue. Now we cannot separate reason, feeling, and spirit and confuse them, but if we mature a little more, separate the languages of science, art, and religion, and divide our ways of thinking into three as well, the wretched religious wars of today will disappear. Evolution and creationism, too, will coexist.

The future of humankind is now approaching: a happy season of family life led by East Asia. Yin and yang will come into balance, the Five Elements will keep their proper times, order will take hold in life, and humankind will become one family. Today's test-tube babies will become future humankind, and space people will be born who have the ability to survive long journeys through the universe. Future humankind will enter humanity's young adulthood, raising its space-people children.

Much of what I have said in this book remains to be confirmed through continued research and excavation. On the basis of East Asia's economic development, scholarly activity will flourish, and humanity's understanding of history will unfold in a more factual and truthful way. We will come to understand that Atlantis, of which the Greek Plato spoke and which Europeans are still searching for, lies in East Asia, around the Korean Peninsula.

[Four Waves of Change Sweeping the World Economy]

① About half of global GDP will come from 440 cities in emerging economies
② Technological change is accelerating: Facebook users grew 233-fold in nine years
③ Population aging spreading to China and South America… growing pressure on the working population and shrinking government tax revenue
④ Cross-border movement up fivefold in 100 years… the world's interconnectedness is growing
[The author appends here a Korean newspaper article, based on McKinsey research, on these four trends. In summary: it opens with famously mistaken intuitive forecasts (Margaret Thatcher in 1973 saying Britain would not see a woman prime minister in her lifetime; IBM's Thomas J. Watson in 1943 putting the world computer market at about five machines; Harry Warner of Warner Bros. in 1927 asking who would want to hear actors talk). It then describes the four shifts: the center of economic activity moving to cities in emerging markets, with China expected to host more Fortune Global 500 headquarters than the United States or Europe by 2025, and Tianjin's GDP possibly matching all of Sweden's; the accelerating spread of digital and mobile technology, which empowers startups and billions of people but threatens workers displaced by automation; aging populations and falling birth rates, with 60% of humanity below replacement fertility as of 2013; and growing flows of goods, capital, people, and information across borders, with over a billion people crossing borders in 2009, five times the 1908 figure. It warns that companies relying on past experience rather than future opportunity will fall behind, while agile firms using satellite offices, online stores, and food trucks will thrive. It closes on an optimistic note: inequality between nations has fallen sharply, nearly a billion people escaped extreme poverty between 1990 and 2010, some three billion will join the middle class within twenty years, and Keynes, who in 1930 predicted a four- to eightfold rise in living standards within a century, was proved right — indeed too cautious — because he understood the forces that transform economies.]