Chapter 10: Comparing Human History to the Life of One Person

10. Comparing Human History to the Life of One Person

Humankind survived on Earth in the form of living organisms until at last, two million years ago, Homo erectus appeared in Africa: an upright (standing) higher organism, a mammal (one that drinks its mother's milk), the forerunner of Paleolithic humans. Their 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 in 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, and so the Earth possessed the physiology of a mother. Astonishingly, these Paleolithic people used wood and stone as tools of daily life, lit fires to warm their caves, and cooked 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 its mother's arms, humans began to settle by seeking out places with a comfortable natural environment, where the natural food produced on the earth was abundant and the climate mild. The population increased toward the south and west of the African continent, and at last people migrated out to southern Asia. At this time Europe, except for the Mediterranean coast, was covered with the ice of the Ice Age, and that condition lasted until just 12,000 years ago.

It was 60,000 years ago when modern humans left Africa and arrived in Southeast Asia and Australia, and the region of Southeast Asia, with a climate similar to Africa and abundant 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 mainland connected with Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand. As clan society grew in Southeast Asia, infant language began, intelligence grew, and as the scope and area of activity expanded, humanity 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 growing seeds to eat was the process of being weaned 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 increase of the human population. Many peoples who left Southeast Asia could not adapt to climate change and perished, but Southeast Asia kept increasing its population and supplied people so that clan societies were established in well-watered places in every region of the world.

35,000 years ago, child humanity in Southeast Asia split along the coastlines toward southern Asia and eastern Asia, and at this time the world's humanity divided into two branches and grew. There is the southern human lineage that advanced into Thailand, Myanmar, India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, and Western Europe, and there is the northern human lineage connected to Vietnam, eastern China, Korea, Japan, eastern Russia, the North American continent, and the South American continent, and also connected through Mongolia and Tibet and extending as far as Eastern Europe. The beginnings of Southeast Asian languages divide into the Austronesian of southern humanity and the Austroasiatic of northern humanity. The linguist Johanna Nichols explained the historical relationships of three language types: the two ordered language forms "subject–verb–modifier" and "subject–modifier–verb," plus a disordered, unsystematic language form. She explained that the root 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 across the Earth expanded fastest at this time. The southern and northern peoples who advanced into the interior mixed in Central Asia. From this time the human constitution adapted to the surrounding environment, and people began to look different. Humanity, which began with black skin in Africa, changed to a red color (the skin color of the Native Americans) while staying in Southeast Asia, and the northern peoples who left for the north, going through the four seasons of East Asia, began to have their skin turn white and their eyes and noses become 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, accustomed to life among the glaciers, began to have their skin turn white, their hair yellow, and their eyes blue.

Modern humans who reached East Asia, experiencing freezing to death when they met the winter of the four seasons, began for the first time the effort to challenge nature. They began the effort to leave their mother's embrace and stand on their own. They began a farming life, raising chickens, pigs, ducks, dogs, sheep, goats, and so on at home, and began agriculture: sowing seed in spring, growing it in summer, harvesting in autumn, and preparing for winter. They stored dried food and developed fermented foods kept in jars in the ground. They built cave dwellings in earthen walls and stored wood, charcoal, and coal for fuel; the culture and civilization of humanity getting through the winter began here.

They began raising cattle and using their labor, and changed from a life of moving in search of food to a settled life of producing food. The concept of ownership was established, and clan society developed, securing family and kin population, land, and property. Religious rites such as birthdays, weddings, and ancestral rites appeared. The emotions of humanity's childhood had begun to grow in Southeast Asia. As people grew accustomed to inland life after maritime life, they grew into the nomads of the Manchurian region, raised dogs and horses at home, and metal culture began.

The language, writing, and science of East Asia were the capacity of child humanity's growing intelligence. We can surmise that from 60,000 to 30,000 years ago people lived in the form of clan societies, gathering food along the coasts, and that between 30,000 and 20,000 years ago, as the population of tribal societies settled by farming expanded, they migrated inland along the rivers and along the coastlines to the American continent and the coasts of Europe.

The climates of Africa and South Asia guaranteed humanity an easy life, but among the northern peoples, the Korean people (대한민족) 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. They settled into farming life at the mouths of the Yangtze, the Yellow River, and the many rivers of the Korean Peninsula, and, first among Neolithic modern humans to adapt to the four seasons, they divided into maritime peoples and nomadic peoples and began a disciplined life of competition.

The maritime 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. As for beginning to write the meanings of language in pictorial characters, on bamboo, on animal bones, on turtle shells, on bark cloth, on silk, on clay vessels, on stone slabs, on metal, and at last on paper, the oldest and most numerous records are accumulated in East Asia. The forms evolving from pictures into 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 surmised that writing was used from before the thaw. The records the Sumerians left baked in clay are also interpreted as descriptions of the East Asian dragon.

In the childhood of its growth, humanity 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; it had more and more to say and many questions to ask, so conversation with neighbors became lively, which helped humanity's village societies grow quickly into city-states. Here competition among clans created larger clan societies that took the form of city-states, and competition between farming peoples and nomadic peoples resulted in the making of empires. The process by which humanity grew from a young child into a teenager began from the time knowledge developed in East Asia. The building of the Great Wall as the symbol of competitive society also began here and grew inland.

World culture began in the matriarchal society of Southeast Asia's gathering and farming life, and world civilization began in the competitive society of East Asia's farming and nomadic peoples, who had grown accustomed to life with metal tools. Human instinct consists of the ability to find and eat food and the ability of men and women to come together and bear and raise children, so love became the root of culture and the struggle for survival became the root of civilization. While the coastal peoples of Southeast Asia spun hemp into cloth to wear, and then made silk clothing from silkworm cocoons, the nomads of inner East Asia made clothes from animal hides. 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, and so world civilization begins here.

Life adapted to the four seasons of East Asia instilled regular effort and discipline in preparing necessities such as food, clothing, shelter, and fuel before winter came. With metal tools they built wooden houses and wooden boats, mass-produced chariots (車馬) with wheels fitted with metal axles that ran fast and far, and made wagons to carry heavy loads, and along with the transport industry every industry flourished. Together with wheel culture, grid city planning began in East Asia.

They discovered the magnet and invented the iron-needle compass, and ocean navigation developed; they made paper and written records flourished, so that the exchange of information and the linking of records transcended the limits of place and time. Because a large population lived on a wide, vast continent from tens of thousands of years earlier, all the inventions and discoveries of ancient society began in East Asia and were applied in its competitive society.

The East Asian historical records Hwandan Gogi and Gyuwon Sahwa record that Chiu Cheonwang was the 14th king of the Baedal nation (reigned 109 years, 2707–2599 BC), and record how the Yellow Emperor and Chiu came to struggle for supremacy, the kinds of weapons Chiu is said to have made and his methods of battle, and that they fought 73 times in ten years. It is surmised that among the empires that appeared in East Asia, even before the Xia dynasty there were states with the conditions of empire during the time of evolution from the dolmen age to the pyramids.

It is surmised that before Baekje of our Three Kingdoms period there was a state ruling the island nations of Southeast Asia, and that before Gojoseon there were nations on the Manchurian plain. This is because the roots of East Asian culture and civilization, on the Korean Peninsula and the Yellow Sea coastal region, uniquely preserve in this area the evolutionary process through its historical stages: from the Neolithic, digging embankment ponds to collect the water needed for farming and piling up the earth to make mounds, then erecting dolmens, as a religion-centered social organization formed, and building stone-mound tombs (pyramids) in the Yalu River basin.

In the records of the excavations at Ur, religious artifacts bearing the features of East Asian people were unearthed from the oldest layer. After that, the Sumerians appeared in the Mesopotamian region with Southeast Asian language and writing, the Code of Hammurabi was introduced in Babylonia, peoples worshiping birds and bulls appeared in the Mediterranean, and soon after, metal culture appeared. These cultures are not sudden mutant inventions or discoveries but appeared through an evolutionary process of more than 10,000 years, so I think they were possible only in East Asia, with its larger population and longer history.

The culture of the Yangtze and Yellow River, where the Xia and Shang dynasties were located, was passed on to the cultures of Mesopotamia and the Nile, and the cultures of the Minoans, Mycenaeans, Jews, Palestinians, and Phoenicians who appeared in the Mediterranean are also the stem of culture and civilization passed 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 nations, including the Shang; and the ability of Alexander the Great of Greece to conquer Southwest Asia was part of the civilization passed to the Mediterranean from the ability of East Asian nomadic states, including the Zhou, which already ruled the present territory of Russia and China stretching from East Asia to Eastern Europe. In the architectural style of the East Asian nomadic states, there was the practice of setting up sculptures of Sapsal dogs in front of palaces, and later it appeared in the form of Alexander the Great's lion sculptures set before gates as guardian spirits.

China's Toehaechaek is a book explaining man-made mountains and man-made embankment ponds. The East Asian custom of digging embankment ponds to collect water and piling up that earth to build mounds is shown in Neolithic remains from the East Indies along the Yellow Sea coast, through the Korean Peninsula and Japan, to the Great Lakes region and the Mississippi River basin of the North American continent. In Europe, small remains passed on during the Ice Age are left on the coasts of Denmark and England. These farming cultures are a phenomenon passed on to other continents over thousands or tens of thousands of years.

The pyramid culture that appeared like a sudden mutation at the mouth of the Nile in Egypt, as well as the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon in Central America and the stepped pyramids built on the Pacific coast of the South American continent, lead us to surmise that their roots lie in the Neolithic culture that evolved in the Yalu River basin and the Xi'an region. East Asian culture was passed on to the Indus River basin and Mesopotamia, and within the last 10,000 years to the Mediterranean coast, where the Minoan culture of Greece began. As an extension of the culture of the Zhou dynasty of East Asia, the Buddhist culture of East India and the Greek culture of the Mediterranean were established, and in the aftermath of the founding of the first empire by Qin Shi Huang, the Roman state was founded, and the Mediterranean region grew together with the Han and Tang dynasties of East Asia.

India traded with the Tang dynasty of China and with Rome in Europe, reaching the height of Buddhist culture in India, and the history of unified empire began in Indian history. East Asian metal tools revived the sculptural art of India, and Indian sculptural art was passed to Greece by the Phoenicians, and Greek sculptural art developed. In the era of India's Kushan Empire, Buddhist art reached its peak, and through the routes developed by the Roman state, the Buddhist sculpture of the Kushan state extended to cave sculpture in Africa and along the Red Sea coast. India's Kushan Empire, founded by East Asian people, became the occasion for connecting the Mediterranean and East Asia, and the peak of the culture of humanity's childhood begins.

The Scythians to Greece, the Celts to Rome, the Gauls and Germans to central Europe, the Saxons of northern Europe to the island nation of Britain, the Phoenicians from the southern coast of Asia to the whole Mediterranean coast: countless nations and peoples migrated into Europe, bringing the culture and civilization of Asia. Of these, the greatest shock was the invasion of the Mongol Huns led by General Attila, which ended the history of Rome, then just 100 years old.

The phenomenon of Central Asian nomads migrating into all of northern India through the Ganges River basin in the east of India and the Indus River basin in the west, conquering the native Dravidians, assimilating with them, and driving them south, began more than 4,000 years ago. It is 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 River basin of Africa, too, East Asians moved in and occupied the Arabs and Black people. At this time in East Asia, too, while the inland nomads invaded the coastal farming states, these maritime states dispersed to the coastal regions of many continents of the world, and East Asian culture and civilization were distributed worldwide. The metal civilization that came into East India from East Asia developed into a culture of cave sculpture. East Asian metal culture, the religion of the dragon, Indian sculptural culture, and so on later gave rise to Persian culture in Southwest Asia.

While city-states and feudal states in East Asia formed social organizations, organized religious rites took shape. As people recognized the mystery and might of nature, nature religion appeared, and Taoism began. Sun-worshiping religion 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 a monistic way of thinking to a dualistic way of thinking. The rites of burial or cremation performed when parting from family in death became an ethic of offering ancestral rites at the graves of ancestors and establishing order in clan society, which became the foundation of Confucianism. The beginning of philosophy on the foundation of Taoism and Confucianism, and the development of Confucian learning, was a transitional period of human growth in which civilization evolved from culture along with the establishment of writing, reaching the height of a renaissance within the competitive society of East Asia's Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods.

2,600 years ago, around the time the social organization of East Asian empire was passed to India through East India, the Taoism and Confucianism that began in clan society appeared on the Ganges River, between China and India, as Buddhism, an imperial religion suited to imperial society. Together with Indian sculptural art it spread along the east coast of China, and Buddhist culture blossomed in East Asia with the Yungang Grottoes of the Northern Wei. Around the time Qin Shi Huang succeeded the Zhou and founded a unified empire, the Yuezhi, one of the nomadic states of the Liaodong region, migrated to the Ganges River basin, founded the Kushan state, and expanded, building the great Kushan Empire that secured territory covering most of northern India and reaching as far as the Caspian Sea in Eastern Europe. The Gupta state in the Indus River basin to the west of India became a Buddhist nation, 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 primitive nature religion of Southeast Asia built up a religious foundation over thousands of years through the yin-yang thought of East Asia and the celestial religion of Taoism, the Confucian learning of ancestor worship, and the Hinduism of East India. Following East Asian Taoism, the imperialist religion Buddhism took shape in East India, and while it was being propagated in western India and Southwest Asia, the Buddhist records of India and China explained that kings and nobles of the Greek city-states came and learned Asian philosophy and culture.

Christianity was born about 600 years after Buddhism appeared, so early Christianity and Buddhism have much in common. Judaism is the religion of the Old Testament, and 600 years later again, Islam began from the Old Testament. The world's religions began with Taoism in East Asia and reached Protestantism in Western Europe; over 2,000 years the waves of East Asian culture reached Western Europe. Through the history of religion, too, we see the process by which world culture and civilization began in East Asia, crossed the Eurasian continent, and were passed on to Western Europe.

The Huns of East Asia invaded Central Asia, India's Gupta Empire, and Rome in Europe, and Europe fell asleep in the medieval Dark Ages while East Asia kept growing with the cultures of the Sui and Song dynasties. In Southwest Asia, Persia gave way to Byzantium, and in Southeast Asia the Khmer Empire grew in Cambodia. The Xiongnu Empire, formed by the Huns, ruled the nomadic belt and competed with the Han dynasty. Around the 7th century they built the Uyghur Empire and competed with the Tang dynasty.

On the Korean Peninsula, Taoist culture had deep roots in Goguryeo culture and left many remains in the Goguryeo tombs. As for Buddhist culture, Baekje occupied the Northern Wei in Shanxi Province in the reign of King Dongseong, and the Northern Wei stopped work on the Buddhist 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. The transport network connecting to the world reached the Tang dynasty of China, and a world empire was built centered on the Tang capital Chang'an (Xi'an). At this time the Buddhist culture of Unified Silla reached its peak on the Korean Peninsula, and when Baekje was being driven out by Silla, its people crossed to Japan and gave rise to Japan's Asuka culture.

The Mongol Huns who fled from the power of the Tang occupied 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 passed on to Eastern Europe, and some of them migrated to northern Europe and became Viking pirates. They raided the coasts of England and Europe for 300 years and settled in England, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.

Genghis Khan of Mongolia, born in AD 1167, first of all joined into the Mongol Empire the Jin dynasty that Silla's royal family had founded in the old territory of Goguryeo. After destroying the Northern Song of China, he again united the nomads and founded the empire that unified the Eurasian continent, the greatest in human history. Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, took power and over thirty-four years further expanded his territory into 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 world capital once enjoyed at Chang'an (Xi'an) in the Tang dynasty, and made it once again the center of world culture and civilization. European countries paid tribute, and merchants from every continent came and went. Among them, Marco Polo and his father, who came bearing a letter from the Pope, worked as subjects of Kublai Khan and, traveling back and forth to their homeland, introduced the culture and civilization of East Asia to Western Europe. From this time humanity entered its teenage years.

In East Asia people wove clothing from cotton, silk thread, and wool, and paper and woodblock printing were well developed for exchanging knowledge and information. The maritime industry flourished; the Mongols explored the world's geography, developed sea routes, and received tribute from continents and island nations, and Marco Polo visited Sri Lanka and brought back Mongol taxes. Later, in the Ming dynasty, a world navigation chart was drawn up, and together with the compass, East Asian navigation technology spread to Europe, which spurred maritime industry in Western Europe.

Mongol soldiers developed cannons using gunpowder explosions and passed them on to Europe, bringing change to the history of warfare. Woodblock printing, and later metal movable-type printing developed in Korea, were long 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. This led on to the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution, and humanist thought drove out imperialism, and democratic society, capitalist economics, and socialist economics began. Led by Western Europe, a social religion, Protestantism, began, breaking away from the Catholic Church of Eastern Europe.

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, in his book 1421, explained that the flagship of the world expedition used by the Ming admiral Zheng He, under orders from the Ming Yongle Emperor, was a huge vessel 151 m long and 61 m wide, and that with some 200 accompanying ships and some 27,000 men he left Taicang in Jiangsu Province in 1405, followed the sea route linking East Asia and Africa, and arrived on the American continent in 1421. After returning home, he continued, finishing his seventh expedition in 1433 and making the world navigation chart even more accurate, it is said. In 1525 the Ming closed down all maritime industry and established an isolationist policy. This navigational information spread to Europe, and at this time East Asia handed world hegemony over to Europe, and the modern history of East Asia's decline began.

The world's humanity came to possess the intellect and emotions of teenage boys and girls. Then in the 12th century, as the Mongols of East Asia reenacted the world conquest their Hun ancestors, the northern nomads of East Asia, had achieved, humanity entered adolescence. The character of that period was like a boy and a girl feeling attraction to the opposite sex seen for the first time: it was a time when Asia saw the populated regions of other continents, including Europe and Africa, and felt drawn to them, and Europe saw Asia for the first time and was drawn to it. The changes of adolescence are the most violent changes of life, both physically and emotionally. From the Mongol invasions on, world history shows that part and character of adolescence.

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 grew, specialized fields developed, and education, industry, trade, and finance grew rapidly, leading to expansion overseas. By 1650, expeditions and trading ships from countries such as Spain, England, Holland, France, and Portugal traveled to North America, Central America, South America, Africa, India, China, and many island nations of Southeast Asia. Asian silk, porcelain, fur garments, and many precious metals were imported into Europe, and the plow with which a farmer drives an ox to turn the soil in the field, along with vegetable, fruit, and grain seeds, came in, bringing about the agricultural and industrial revolutions in Europe.

The world's knowledge concentrated in Europe, science and invention flourished, and industries such as textiles, transportation, and military weapons developed; the east coast of North America was divided into the Thirteen Colonies, and England, France, Spain, and Russia divided up the continents and bought and sold ownership. At last the Europeans who had immigrated to America established the American government, were freed from England in 1775, and George Washington was chosen as the first president. England 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 the map of Europe and the world changed greatly. With the expansion of farmland, in regions needing labor, the business of kidnapping Africans and selling them as slaves flourished.

Nurhaci, born at Baekdusan on the upper reaches of the Yalu River, founded the Qing dynasty in Manchuria and invaded the Ming in 1644; what the Xiongnu and Mongols of the north had done in seizing leadership from the Han Chinese, this time the Dongyi, the Manchurian and Korean Peninsula peoples, repeated. After the Qing unified China, rebellions around its borders and within the country continued again, and the Japanese Wa people, while starting the Imjin War on the Korean Peninsula, went on harassing the Qing coast. The isolationist policy set up in the Ming continued in the Qing, and East Asia's long history of connection to the world ended here.

On the American continent, the native peoples who had lived there for tens of thousands of years were mercilessly slaughtered, driven out of their living areas, and confined to restricted areas; this greatest tragedy of human history made them victims of the white Europeans' land expansion. This phenomenon was the violent emotional change humanity went through in the adolescence of its growth, and the rapid growth of world population from the 17th century on was a phenomenon showing the physical growth of adolescence. The Civil War on the North American continent was a clash between desire and conscience. The North won, and slavery was ended.

Edison discovered electricity, and electric communications and electric machine power came together with the rail connections of steam locomotives; Ford invented the automobile, and cars running on burned 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 also appeared. The modern world came to show the appearance of a fully grown adolescent adult of humanity.

There was also the phenomenon of the violence of humanity's adolescence. Europe's drive for territorial expansion appeared in Germany and Italy as the First World War within Europe, and it failed through the intervention of the United States, England, France, and the surrounding countries; then in 1939 the Second World War began again. In East Asia, Japan took up Europe's expansionism, modernized sixty years ahead of Korea and China while they maintained isolationist policies, and succeeded in occupying and colonizing Korea and China's Manchuria. Intending to expand into Southeast Asia, Japan joined Germany in the Second World War and attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.

The Second World War, in which Germany and Japan attempted to expand, ended in 1945 with America's victory, and humanity's mature adolescence showed a new face. The British Empire came to an end, the United States emerged as a great power based on a capitalist free-market economy, and the Soviet Union, putting the socialist Communist Party at the forefront, faced the United States with an imperialist system including many countries of Eastern Europe. Aviation technology, begun by the two Wright brothers in Dayton, Ohio, developed rapidly during the world wars, and computer technology, begun at a calculating-machine company in the same city to decode the wartime communication codes of Germany and Japan, was transferred to the IBM company and brought a revolution in the world's information storage and connection. Medicine developed and life was extended; space flight developed and astronauts reached the moon; and the human sphere of life came to occupy most of the Earth.

The Soviet Union's imperialist Communist economy collapsed, and China's Communist system opened up in a capitalist way and, along with Japan and Korea, joined the world free-market economy. The defeated nations of Germany and Japan joined the American economic system and rose to become economic powers, and while American military and economic might was overwhelming, the United Nations was established in the international city of New York within the United States. Putting Protestantism at the forefront and evangelizing the world, owning 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.

The personality of humanity at the age of mature adolescence appears in many ways. Since humanity was born on Earth, it has relied on God and clung to religion as to its parents, but around this time it came out shouting "God is dead," showing the look of rebelling against its parents. The possibility of conceiving and bringing forth new space people as modified humans, through the development of blood research and in-vitro fertilization technology, shows the reproductive capacity of mature adolescence. The phenomenon of launching artificial satellites and sending humans into the space of the universe is compared to a man ejaculating sperm from his sexual organ. The phenomenon of Europe and America seeming to lead the world on their own and then engaging with East Asia gives the feeling of a man and a woman dating. Time is moving ever faster, and in the 21st century humanity's life will enter a human family life of bearing and raising space people, and it will bring the happiest period of human life on Earth.

10.1 Humanity's Past Hidden in the Mother's Womb

The habit of children singing and dancing before they can speak shows how human culture looked in the past before there was language. The process of a child growing in its mother's womb before it is born reenacts the path by which humans evolved into human form from the time they first existed on Earth in the form of an amoeba.

When the father's single-celled sperm, a throng of hundreds of millions, arrive in the mother's body, they begin to compete for their lives. Against the rough current, like a mullet swimming up a waterfall, they swim with the strength of a single tail. The strongest and fastest single-celled sperm is welcomed by the waiting egg and, qualified as the chosen winner, begins the process of growing into a multicellular being. The hundreds of millions of sperm that competed alongside it are cast away, bearing the sorrow of the losers. This selection of the most capable life became the capacity by which humans won the struggle for survival among all animals and became the lords of creation.

Just as a tadpole changes into a frog, it grows into a form with four limbs, and while growing from the form of a lizard into the form of a higher animal that drinks milk, it grows swimming in seawater. Around the time the face of the moon has changed ten times, at last, in human form, it comes out of the mother's womb, the umbilical cord is cut, and it is separated from the mother's body. For the first time it breathes with its lungs and cries out. Drinking its mother's milk and receiving its mother's love, it begins practicing moving by crawling on its body. After crawling on four limbs, once it begins to stand on two feet, it soon walks and runs about.

This is precisely a reenactment of the past in which humanity grew into human beings on Earth. Because a baby comes into the world as a piece of its mother's body, it first learns the ability to share love with its mother (spirituality). As it grows, it gains the senses held in common by higher animals, taste, smell, sight, hearing, touch, and so on, and gains the capacity for the joy of finding food and finding a mate (sensibility). Going further, as the brain develops, it learns language, and this is the picture of humanity evolving and growing into people equipped with the ability for logical thought (reason).

Because of humans' three capacities, spirituality, sensibility, and reason, humanity obtained religion, art, and science, and came to stand in the most superior position among all living things on Earth. So humans are also known as the youngest, the life-form born last among the siblings. But although with these capacities humans seem to rule over all living things on Earth, they cannot stop the proliferation of microorganisms that follows rapid climate change on Earth, and the danger of humanity's destruction by microorganisms following climate change always exists. If there is no such loss of health and sudden death, humanity, like the life of one person, will grow, mature, reproduce, and then go through the process of aging. Comparing human history to the life of one person and observing where humanity's age has now come to is the content of this book.

10.2 The Appearance of the Universe and of Life

All human activity can be divided into the fields of religion, art, and science. I will try to explain, by way of looking at history, from when and where these began on Earth and how they grew. All living things on Earth live by possessing life. If we call that capacity living, then higher organisms also have feeling, and humans have thinking. Because humans possess all three of these capacities, they are called the lords of creation.

Astronomers and geologists explain that our solar system, in which we live, began about 13.7 billion years ago as energy transformed into matter in the form of a great explosion, forming the sun and the matter around it; about 4,600 million years ago the Earth, along with the other stars revolving around the sun, took the present shape of the solar system; and after that, about 3,500 million years ago, living things appeared on Earth.

The first life-forms to appear began as the simplest single-celled life in an environment created from organic matter by heat, air, water, and so on, and as environmental conditions changed they appeared as many different single-celled life-forms. From this time, living things have existed on Earth. Plant cells spread green like moss, and animal cells multiplied, moving about like bacteria; as they evolved and grew further, the surface of the Earth became thick with forests, and reptiles and primitive plants flourished. But the surface of the Earth was covered with water and heated by fire many times, and as it repeated the process of regeneration from a state of annihilation, evolution and growth continued.

About 155 million years ago, as giant animals and plants began to inhabit the Earth, animals came to live in groups as family units. From that time, the living things and the feeling things came to live on this land together, competing to survive. From about 65 million years ago, among the higher mammals, apes that walked upright began to live in groups of families and clans and to communicate with sounds from the mouth and body gestures; then about 25 million years ago, ape-like people, accustomed to communicating by sound and action and with matured intelligence, reigned and lived in the eastern part of the African continent. Then about 2 million years ago, the form of primitive humans resembling the humanity surviving on Earth today appeared, as anthropologists and archaeologists explain.

Geneticists, whose field has recently been developing rapidly, are uncovering humanity's past in more detail by studying the genome in the blood. The ancestors of the modern humans now living on Earth appeared on the African continent 100,000 years ago, and in the meantime the other primitive humans disappeared from this land. Modern humans are said to have reached Southeast Asia and Australia 60,000 years ago. When they reached Southeast Asia and social language developed, the human capacity to think, that is, intellect, came to exist on this land. Now let us observe each of these three capacities, living, feeling, and thinking, and what they have accomplished in the life of humanity on this land.

10.3 The World of Things That Have Life

When the solar system was formed, the environment for living things was first created on Earth, and afterward life appeared, and that life was protected by the environment. Just as a child is born in the process of a man and a woman loving each other, yin energy and yang energy in the universe created an environment that protects life, and things that have life were prepared. That environment is love, and life is born within love. Trying to explain the birth of the universe and of life is the instinct of the intellect, but life is metaphysical and cannot be explained by physical processes, so the greater the intellect grows, the deeper the mystery of life becomes, and the vaster the capacity of the intellect, the more remote the mystery of life only becomes.

When the single-celled sperm is carried from the male's body into the female's body and received into the egg, managing the energy brought by the sperm, an environment protecting life is formed in the female body, and the female's love for her young begins. That one cell grows into many cells in the female's body, passes through the forms of higher organisms, and a young one is born; this is a miniature historical record of the past of the living things on this land, and a model of evolution kept by the female body.

The young one with lungs grows in the water within the body, is born, is exposed to air and begins to breathe, and as an animal grows up protected within the natural environment and the female's love. That humans, too, reenact the past process of evolution, from the form moving about when they had no legs, to the form when they lived crawling on four limbs, to at last the form of a human standing on two feet, shows our distant past days reduced into one.

Relying on the mother's love in the course of growing up shows that humanity's past relied on the natural environment. Just as a baby's heart grows leaning on its mother's heart, people leaned their hearts on all things in nature, and the world of the spirit, that is, religion, began. The loving heart, in the forms of celestial and nature religion or ancestral religion, began religious rites in family and village events.

Among the nature religions, the sun and moon, and the constellations in the sky that appear to change with the seasons, were the most enduring mysteries in the hearts of the ancients throughout their lives. In the forms of the stars in the sky they came to see how villages and hamlets where people live together gather to become a nation, and nations gather to establish an empire. In that process, as language flourished and writing came into use in East Asia, religious scriptures began to be published. On the basis of the Dongyi people's yin-yang and the Five Elements (陰陽五行), in the Liao River culture and the Xia, Yin, and Zhou dynasties, the Taoist I Ching (Book of Changes) set the standard as a religious book for imperial society. In the order of Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, from Southeast Asia through Southwest Asia to Europe, at intervals of several hundred years, new religions came to occupy a large part of human life, and religion continues down to the present.

10.4 The World of Things That Have Feeling

After things living as single cells appeared on this land, 35 billion years passed as they grew into multicellular organisms and lower animals evolved into higher animals. Around this time things with feeling appeared, and higher organisms lived together. The things that feel began in common from two emotions.

One is the feeling of finding and eating food, and the other is the feeling of seeking and consorting with the opposite sex. The feeling of eating, which manages the body's own energy, takes in organic matter as a means of obtaining energy to preserve life. Preparing the next life before one's own lifespan ends is the basic capacity by which a species continues to exist in this world. All higher animals that feel were given the joy of eating and the joy of mating, creating the capacity to protect and sustain the species so that it survives in this world.

They must eat plants or other animals, and in order to produce the young with the strongest survival ability, males compete to sort out winners and losers, and the winner functions to leave better seed with more females. Because humans too receive these two emotions from their parents at birth, they have the sinful nature to kill in order to eat and to compete to become strong, while on the other hand this brings the good result of competing and becoming a winner. To look good to the opposite sex they display beauty, and beauty appears as art. Feeling comes from the six senses given to higher organisms and humans.

The peripheral nerves that see, hear, smell, taste, and touch connect through the central nervous system to the brain and are remembered, so by mobilizing them they came to have the ability to find food, to associate with family, relatives, and friends, and to compete with enemies and become winners in the struggle for survival.

The societies of higher organisms and humans that maintain group life have a happiness that comes from being healthy in body and mind and finding satisfaction in the feeling of living together. Art, through which happiness is felt, became the foundation of human culture, and artistic culture is a beautiful part of human history.

10.5 The World of Things That Think

After higher animals appeared, which value their own lives, love their young, find and eat food, consort with the opposite sex, and produce good offspring, forty million years passed, the function of the brain developed further, and humans with creativity and logic appeared as the youngest of all higher animals. Because they do with their hands what other animals do with their mouths, the mouth became free and the ability to speak developed. Standing and walking on two feet, the hands took on more roles and the mouth gained more time to speak, so manual skill and language ability developed even faster. The brain's memory gave rise to imagination, and imagination gave rise to creativity.

When modern humans left Africa and reached Southeast Asia, they found a good environment to live in, and settled social life began. They farmed and herded, and village society began to develop. The rapid increase of Southeast Asia's population carried the culture and civilization of Southeast Asia into the interior of the Asian continent, to Africa, and to the North and South American continents. Linguists say that the roots of the world's languages lie in Southeast Asia.

In East Asia, as agriculture that prepared for winter following the four seasons developed, industry developed, and as language and writing exchanged information, the human world of intellect grew ever faster, gaining acceleration as time went on. Science developed and learning developed. Science and learning, which had been growing since 50,000 years ago, and since the Mongols of East Asia conquered Europe in the 11th century and began globalization, modern human society has brought rapid change to this land over the past 1,000 years.

Humanity, with the capacity to think, placed itself in the winning position in the struggle for survival, and with the help of computers its capacity for living has been moved to a new stage facing the future. Capitalist competition expanded as a means of conquering resources. The modern global environment changed suddenly, and changes centered on human life left no space for other living things to live, with the result that the surface of the Earth began to fall ill with the destruction of nature.

10.6 The World Seen with New Eyes

From 1945 on, in American historical scholarship a tendency appeared to change the theory of Asian cultural origins, which the European scholarship of Germany and France had previously explained, into a theory of Mesopotamian and European cultural origins. Recently, with the development of genetic lineage studies, the theory of humanity's African origin has further encouraged this tendency. The theories of material proof from archaeological excavations in Europe and Southwest Asia, and political theories of history for the justification of colonialism, further reinforced the current academic tendency. Asia, lacking scholarly activity because of war and poverty, had no ability to explain its own history.

The descendants of Lucy, who began to stand up and walk on two feet two million years ago, are said to have been called Homo sapiens. The Paleolithic culture of China began in a period much earlier, by far more than a million years, than the time when Peking Man lived. Yuanmou Man, excavated in Yuanmou County, Yunnan Province, has been confirmed to have lived as early as 1.7 million years ago, and Lantian Man, excavated at Lantian in Shaanxi Province, was active about 600,000 years ago.

Peking Man of East Asia, from 500,000 years ago, excited the academic world because, unlike Java Man of the same stage, he was excavated in an almost complete state, but the remains vanished amid the Second World War and have remained a worldwide mystery. In the same stratum as Peking Man were found burned bones, large quantities of the bones of animals such as deer, rhinoceros, tigers, and hyenas, and man-made stone tools. They lived in a climate much warmer than today, using tools they made themselves and hunting much larger beasts. They were using fire in cave homes made by nature, and the use of fire was the first step in human growth and, along with the use of tools, a very important advance in the history of human development.

They were terribly afraid of lightning and natural fire, but gradually came to be able to use it actively in their lives. Fire kept out the fierce beasts that threatened survival during sleep at night and protected humans from the cold that crept upon them, and once they began cooking their food, the human body grew sturdier and the brain began to develop further. While modern humanity, which began in East Africa, grew up in Africa, warm as a mother's embrace, eating the food nature supplied as a baby drinks its mother's milk, it ventured out along the waterways to other continents, but like Peking Man, those who went could not adapt to climate change for long and their bloodlines did not continue.

Modern humans appeared a mere 100,000 years ago. Still without language, communicating by sounds, facial expressions, and gestures, they began to move along the sea routes toward the east where the sun rises. Seeking places where food was abundant and they could sleep safely at night, they kept moving along the waterways. Around 50,000 years ago they reached Southeast Asia and settled in places with a mild living environment and abundant resources, clan societies and villages formed, and language began to develop. When they reached East Asia, they met for the first time winter, the season of death.

The experience of maritime peoples challenging nature's winter season and humanity overcoming nature took place in East Asia. The peoples of the Korean Peninsula, Manchuria, and Mongolia became the first pioneers of modern humanity accustomed to the training of alternating summers and winters. Having lived an animal-like life dependent on the nature of Southeast Asia, upon reaching East Asia they began the artificial life of modern humans overcoming nature. They developed from gathering and cultivation to productive agriculture. Even now, the pioneering activities of human culture and civilization begin in the temperate zones that have four seasons. The culture and civilization of East Asia were passed to the Mediterranean region and Eastern Europe as the Ice Age thawed, and were passed to the culture and civilization of the native peoples of the North and South American continents, who are East Asia's blood kin.

Seeing that the west coast of the Korean Peninsula, from the Neolithic onward, had a high population density and possessed a fine religious culture and metal civilization, and seeing the possibility that through ocean voyages they were connected to the South American continent and Africa, we come to see world history with new eyes. The new view of world history I now wish to explain in a little more detail is not an academic paper. Based on an architect's common sense, on the foundation of comprehensive facts, supplementing unconfirmed parts as much as possible, I unfold the thoughts and imagination seen through an architect's eyes and write it down like an essay.

If we compare human history to the life of one person, it shows the process by which a single cell evolves into a higher organism in the mother's womb. When a baby is born, it begins to crawl on four limbs, runs about on two feet, sings aloud and dances, and then begins to speak. From that age, I want to talk together about to what age humanity has grown, what age it is now, and what kind of life the rest of its future life will lead.

Until now, world history has been taught to the world's children and young people with content researched and published from the ideology of white supremacy that followed the European nations' invasion of Asia, Australia, and the North and South American continents. The scholars who went along with it have feared departing from their conservative position, so whenever someone raised the original common knowledge that human culture began in Southeast Asia, they tended to disparage that person as an old-fashioned Orientalist. But if we look at world history before Genghis Khan, we can clearly see that East Asia led human civilization and culture.

Scholars who respect common sense still surmise, based on comprehensive academic material, that the culture and civilization of ancient times began in China and India and later came to Southwest Asia and the Mediterranean. Looking at the origins of India's religious culture, we see that Hinduism and Buddhism originated on the Ganges River in the east. The Indo-Aryans who ruled northern India for thousands of years BC were very likely Central Asians from China. It is only reasonable that the population explosion from Southeast Asia's farming life moved population westward. The culture of the Sumerian people of Mesopotamia also has much in common that connects it with East Asia, and that the culture of the Nile River basin in Africa also connects with East Asian culture and shares commonalities is the same phenomenon as the Pacific coastal culture of South America connecting with East Asia and sharing commonalities. Human history has been passed on from end to end, big waves and small waves mixed together, rising and falling. When small waves arising locally gathered to form a big wave, the big wave was carried far, far away. The flow of human civilization and culture is the result of maintaining continuity, not something that appears through small local mutations alone. Human civilization and culture are not small waves appearing locally, but the result of big waves carried from afar.

Some scholars deny the connectedness of history and claim independent mutation. Such exceptions can arise from partial, minor creations, but the flow of history is the result that appears through long evolution like the life of living things; just as there can be no such thing as mutant life, every event in human history is linked by the connectedness of cause and effect.

10.7 East Asia's Place in Genetic Lineage

Now it is time to move beyond explaining history by depending on records, and to start from the history of genetic lineage, then observe archaeological history, and then look at recorded history, for a more comprehensive and rational explanation. The most recently published history of the distribution of the world's humanity through genetics (Evolution's Genetic Footprints) was published by the DNA research team of Cavalli-Sforza. Paul Salopek, who serialized its content in the Chicago Tribune in 1998, received the Pulitzer Prize. The article on Prehistoric Migrations published in Scientific American in July 2008 announced that "new genetic evidence reveals clues to the first human journeys," and National Geographic publicized it extensively. But because of the doubtful reaction of conservative historians in America and Europe, it suddenly hid its tail and went quiet. Still, its content was enough to give an opportunity to begin again the rational imagining that had long been accepted.

East Asia passed through the Paleolithic period that followed the sun god of the Korean Peninsula, and from 8,000 years ago the remains of ancestral religion and celestial religion appear. By the latter part of the Neolithic, it experienced the great change of reaching the Iron Age already more than 3,000 years ago. In the Neolithic generation, a life using plain (undecorated) pottery and using bronze tools began. Pottery culture reached its peak in the late ancient period, and around the 10th century Goryeo celadon was mass-produced.

If we observe the world's religions, Homo sapiens of Africa, migrating east at every dawn in search of the sun's home, watched the moon and stars in the sky and formed the early beginnings of celestial and nature religion, and upon reaching Southeast Asia, forming clan societies and village societies, formed the early beginnings of ancestral religion. Just as the roots of the world's languages are gathered in Southeast Asia, the language of modern humanity began in Southeast Asia around 60,000 years ago and reached East Asia around 50,000 years ago. It seems that from the sounds of beasts fighting, singing, and dancing it came to take the form of social language. It seems that from 30,000 years ago the forms of primitive religion, such as nature religion, celestial religion, and ancestral religion, took shape.

Village societies grew into the form of feudal states or city-states, and as empires were established in East Asia, Confucian scriptures such as the Analects and the I Ching of East Asia were published. Seeing that India's Hinduism and East Asia's nature religion have much in common, it seems that East Asia's religious forms were passed to South Asia at some point. It is said that the native Dravidian language of India and Korean are similar to Sanskrit, the root of the Indo-European languages. This is because the culture and civilization of the tropics follow the trends after they begin in the temperate zones. The religion and philosophy of feudal states that began in East Asia were passed on to East India, and around 600 BC the imperial religion, that is, Buddhism, was born on the Ganges River in East India. It is said that when Shakyamuni was preaching in East India, his disciple Manjushri Bodhisattva was preaching at Mount Wutai in China. It continues on into Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in Southwest Asia, and into Catholicism in Eastern Europe.

The Magi from the East who came when Jesus was born hint at the origin of Christianity coming from the east, and Christian missions always grew toward the west. That many Buddhist forms can be seen in Catholic worship procedures supports this connection. While the imperialist religion took shape in East India and was passed to western India through King Ashoka's policy of unified Buddhism, Greek kings of the Mediterranean came to the Buddhist temples of India and China and trained as Buddhist monks. The records that they learned Asian philosophy and culture at that time are stated clearly in the Buddhist records of India and China, but European scholars simply turn away.

The world's religions began with Taoism in East Asia and reached Protestantism in Western Europe; over 2,000 years the waves of East Asian culture reached Western Europe. Through the history of religion, too, we see the process by which world culture and civilization began in East Asia, crossed the continents of Asia and Europe, and were passed on to Western Europe. On the Korean Peninsula, Taoist culture had deep roots in Goguryeo culture and left many remains in the Goguryeo tombs. As for Buddhist culture, Baekje occupied the Northern Wei in Shanxi Province in the reign of King Dongseong, and the Northern Wei stopped work on the Buddhist 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.

Through its long history, Japan is a people of the Korean Peninsula, a political and cultural sphere of the Korean Peninsula founded when political forces of the Korean Peninsula migrated there. When Genghis Khan occupied the Korean Peninsula and brought in continental culture, Japan was isolated from continental influence with the help of the divine wind (kamikaze), so it has preserved the old culture of the Korean Peninsula well to this day. The Japanese language has the same sentence structure as the Korean language; only the pronunciation of words differs a little. Japanese names unchangingly keep the four-syllable names of the Three Kingdoms period of the Korean Peninsula. Japanese writing, too, preserves well the form of Korea's ancient writing, which used Chinese characters.

Scholars say that humanity's modern civilization dates from the time in the 12th century when Genghis Khan of East Asia unified Asia and Europe. As seen in Marco Polo's records, Europe then came to know East Asia and opened its eyes to the world. Learning from the pajuk (bamboo filled with gunpowder and exploded) used by Genghis Khan, Europe came to invent the gun. Seeing Genghis Khan's cannons, European nations also made cannons. Learning the Chinese compass and seeing the Ming dynasty's maritime charts, their maritime technology developed. Just as Genghis Khan conquered Europe, European nations invaded Asia. Armies that fired guns invaded countries that carried bows and arrows on their shoulders and spears in their hands, seized their land, and made the present world map.

Europeans bought and sold Africans as slaves. The invasion of white people who despised the languages and native cultures of the regions they conquered has dominated the world. How miserably the Native Americans were expelled from their living sphere, and the suffering endured by Black people sold as slaves and by native peoples robbed of their living areas, will be remembered forever as wounds of human history.

Through the First and Second World Wars, the nations of the world grew closer and the Earth grew ever smaller. Humanity's tyranny has taken away the living sphere of wild animals, and the Earth's pollution is racing down the road to humanity's self-destruction. At such a moment, seeing human history with new eyes and thinking about humanity's future is an effort to find the inevitable road. That method is to think of human history by comparing it to the life of one person.

The secret of human birth kept within the mother's womb is the answer to understanding humanity's past on Earth. A single egg receives the sperm that first arrives after defeating hundreds of millions of competitors, becomes a multicellular being, and goes from the form of a microorganism to the shape of a small worm. It takes the shape of a fish, the shape of a reptile with a tail and four legs, and then the shape of a baby, swimming immersed in bodily fluid, then comes out of the mother's body, breathes air for the first time, and cries out. It moves by twisting its body. It crawls on four limbs and at last stands on two feet and walks. This was the evolutionary process of humanity in the past. This is the theory of evolution, it is science, and it is the common sense of modern people.

Yet modern humanity still clings to past religions, loses its reason, and is bound up in spirituality and is not wise, so religious wars continue. Christianity, following the Bible, tries to deny the theory of evolution, but if people are modern, they can separate the languages of science, art, and religion and divide their ways of thinking into three, and so stop the miserable and immature religious wars of today.

The human religious way of thinking began from the time people received their mother's love and lived relying on their mother. After that, in humanity's babyhood, they gained the emotions of higher animals, and there followed a time when, not yet knowing how to speak, they sang and danced and lived by artistic sense. Only when they were exposed to the social life of family and neighbors, learned language, and acquired the capacity for logical, rational thought did they come to know science; this is the process of humanity's growth. Modern people should as soon as possible reach a clear-minded state of understanding reason, sensibility, and spirituality separately and not confusing them.

The place in the world where the largest population lives together, which has the oldest history, and where the most languages are gathered is Southeast Asia; Southeast Asia is the birthplace of religion arising from life (생성) and the birthplace of culture arising from sensibility, and the birthplace of civilization arising from reason is East Asia. The influence of human activity, including agriculture, that began in East Asia was passed through Southwest Asia to Africa and Europe, and through East Asia to the American continent.

The European nations conquered the world's continents and, steeped in the ideology of white superiority, have fallen into the illusion that the Mediterranean culture of Egypt and Greece is the beginning of the world's culture. But the region that erected dolmens and began metal culture in the Neolithic is East Asia, the root of Egypt's culture is East Asia, and seeing the fact that when Greece was making and using earthenware East Asia had already gone ahead into bronze metal culture makes us study world history anew.

10.8 Modern Humanity Is at the Age of Adolescence

On the Earth, many kinds of humans walking on two feet lived and disappeared, and modern humanity remains living as the youngest. Born in Africa, the coziest place on Earth, before it could speak it cried out loud, sang, and danced, and as it began to walk it looked all around and the world seemed wondrous. Building homes of tree branches and living together, it began to speak, and a stable life of gathering, planting, and harvesting seeds was achieved. The youngest, who had walked and run, now reached the age of speaking. It got through the winter burning wood, charcoal, and coal. During spring, summer, and autumn it stored food, and with food warmed over fire and warm caves built for winter, it began to train itself in the habits of a life that overcomes nature with human ability. After living in caves it built earthen houses, made clay vessels baked in fire, and dug ponds to collect water and began to farm. It gathered the earth left from digging the ponds and built earth mounds, where it held ancestral rites (worship).

Farming according to the four seasons, the family built thatched huts with straw harvested in autumn, made straw boats, boarded them, and sailed the sea routes. The sea route extended as far as the coasts of Spain and France in Europe, and pictures of animals were painted in caves. The passage linking East Asia and the Mediterranean, already opened before the Ice Age, grew busy from this time. Hauling boulders from afar and erecting dolmens, a religion began that served the spirits of the ancestors facing the sky. Dolmen culture reached as far as Europe through India and Southwest Asia, from before the Ice Age thawed 20,000 years ago. The coal fires of the dolmen age melted metal out of earth and stone powder. The metal age of modern humanity began here.

Making metal weapons and metal tools, they squared the boulders of the dolmens and began to build stone-mound tombs (pyramids). They carved wood to make furniture and built and lived in wooden houses. The wooden plow pulled by oxen changed to an iron plow, and the wooden wheels of carts changed to iron wheels. The cart pulled by people changed into the chariot (車馬) pulled by horses. In East Asia, where farming peoples and nomadic peoples mixed, the population increased rapidly, and Genghis Khan of the Mongols founded a world empire in the 11th century. He awakened Europe, asleep in the Middle Ages. At this time modern humanity was at the age of fourteen and a half, half grown up, and the influence of East Asia, which had led world history until then, began to wither.

If we call the time up to the birth of modern humanity in Africa 100,000 years ago humanity's gestation, then upon reaching Southeast Asia it passed through early childhood, and upon reaching East Asia it passed through boyhood and girlhood, achieving the period of growth of civilization and culture in the world; and from the time the Mongol Empire founded an empire unifying the world, it reached adolescence and created today's modern world. Adolescent modern humanity, combining test-tube babies, genetic manipulation, and robot technology with artificial intelligence, is now acquiring the reproductive capacity to prepare humanity's new next generation.

The center of civilization, which began in the dolmen culture of East Asia, passed through India to Southwest Asia, through Eastern Europe to Western Europe, through the British Empire to America, and is now crossing the Pacific and coming back again to East Asia. The youngest has passed through childhood and has now entered adolescence, the teenage years.

Recently modern humanity is meeting the age of living to 100. But over long ages the human lifespan was much shorter. When a woman entered her teens she began to menstruate and made ready to have children. Because it was a time when the number of healthy family members was considered wealth, people hurried to find a mate, marry, and celebrate the birth of children. When the children grew up and reached their teens, the next grandsons and granddaughters would arrive. Becoming a grandfather or grandmother around the age of thirty, still at a robust age, they had much to do, but if they survived without dying from war and labor, it was usual to grow feeble in their forties, fall ill, and end their lives. That is why, in the constitution of modern people, health problems begin in the forties, and psychologically they go through a midlife crisis in their forties.

Looking back on human history, religious culture, which values the lives of family and marvels at the mysteries of nature, appeared first of all. Artistic culture followed it: humanity's songs and dances, and the Korean Peninsula's chang and sijo, and writing poems and making metaphors. Scientific culture began last, from the time people used tools of wood, earth, and stone, drew pictures, invented writing, and used metal tools. Now is the time when the surface of the Earth is changing rapidly as a new information culture is formed through the power of computers. If modern intellectuals can distinguish the language of spirituality, the language of sensibility, and the language of reason and do away with misunderstandings and illusions about one another, the world will regain peace.

As black people, white people, and people of ordinary color live mixed together, the regional concept of living divided by bloodline until now is disappearing. Now we are all becoming kin of mixed blood. Connected by the internet, as a new computer language appears, isn't the world becoming one household living under one roof and eating rice from one pot? Enjoying peacefully all the benefits of science, art, and religion in our equal and true forms, and leaving a clean natural environment and peace for our descendants: is this not the right road for today's intellectuals to live a truly human life?

10.9 The Three Languages and Character of Modern People

The first footstep of Eastern thought began with the discovery of oneself as having two hands, in the distinction of yin and yang, and then with recognizing the five fingers on one hand, discovering and understanding the Five Elements. As the intellect and logical thought that see night and day developed, a triadic philosophy developed, thinking of heaven, earth, and humanity separately. Looking at human life, I myself am made from the meeting of a body born of the earth and a mind come down from heaven. Because there is faith (love), there is feeling, and there is thought, human life is carried on. Modern people are still immature and cannot separate these three categories; they confuse them, and so life is hard.

Just as black people, white people, and people of ordinary color live together in the world, within the words we use there are three different kinds of words: words spoken out of love, words spoken out of feeling, and words spoken out of thought. Words of love begin between mother and baby; as it grows, the words and sounds of emotion appear next, such as the sound of crying aloud, the sound of laughing in joy, the sound of singing in merriment, and as human reason develops, words of thought arise. The world's linguists say that as humanity began settled life in Southeast Asia around 50,000 years ago, clan villages grew and social language developed.

Praying and receiving comfort, regaining love, gaining hope, and escaping from misfortune: this is the language of spirituality absolutely necessary to our lives. Dance, song, art, and so on are the language of sensibility, which shares emotion within our lives and gives us richer experience. Science, which understands all things between earth and heaven and lets us judge rightly the events that happen around us, is the language of reason.

There is an old saying that thought gives birth to words and actions, words and actions become habits, and habits decide destiny. Because people cannot distinguish these three languages, their actions run into difficulty, and they even commit terrible deeds. The foremost of these is religious war. The 9/11 terror attack, which took thousands of lives in an instant, is a clear example. It was a tragedy that arose from mistaking the language of spirituality in the Koran scripture for the language of reason.

Are not North Korea's religion that deifies its leader, the Catholicism of Hitler that took the lives of six million Jews, and the war still going on between Islamic nations and Christian nations tormenting the world? It seems to be the misfortune of a humanity that cannot distinguish the languages and thoughts of spirituality and reason. The theory of evolution is common sense explained scientifically and is the knowledge of modern people. Arguing back and forth because it differs from the Bible is the confused self-contradiction of spirituality and reason. Even if the Bible says the creation of humanity and the Earth took place 6,000 years ago, that is the language of spirituality, so there should be no need to explain it in the language of reason. For modern humanity to learn, understand, and act on the distinction among spirituality, sensibility, and reason is to acquire the qualifications of parents who can raise humanity's next generation rightly.

10.10 The Place of the Korean Peninsula in East Asia

Koreans were the first maritime people in the world to arrive in the temperate zone of the Earth with its four seasons. Because a way of life that changes with the seasons was more progressive and had more potential for development than the way of life of the tropics, this people developed agriculture and industry and formed social organizations early on. Because the Korean Peninsula was located at the gateway through which maritime peoples penetrated the plains of Northeast Asia, the Neolithic sites that remain on the Korean Peninsula, the dolmens, embankment ponds, and earth mounds, and even the stone-mound tombs excavated in the old land of Goguryeo, are truly important materials for world history.

The religious custom of the Korean Peninsula of quarrying great stones from afar, moving them, and erecting dolmens developed further, and now great stone tombs flourished between the Korean Peninsula and Manchuria. Joined with the celestial religion of yin-yang and the Five Elements, it came to the point of erecting primitive pyramids. The earth-mound culture that built with earth developed into a pyramid culture that built with stone. The thousands of pyramid remains scattered in the Jilin Province region of Manchuria show that a long evolutionary process took place here before the Tomb of the General (Janggunchong) or the Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang. Historically, that the culture of Egypt is also a branch extending from East Asia is a subject for future research that is deep and far-reaching.

Observing the relationship between the location of the Korean Peninsula and the history of China's founding, we are led to see that the culture of Gojoseon formed the foundation of China's founding history, and to regard the Japanese archipelago as a part of the Korean Peninsula. The culture and civilization of East Asia began from the Neolithic in the living area of the Dongyi people centered on the Korean Peninsula. In the Manchurian region there is still a large Korean population and many people who speak Korean. A recently published historical report says that even the Han dynasty was founded by people of Liao. The Samguk Yusa was recorded in the Goryeo period by the Buddhist monk Iryeon, long after China's Shiji, but in its founding myth it explains that Dangun Wanggeom was a descendant of Hwanung and Hwanung was a descendant of the bear, and we can see this is connected to the Dongyi part of China's founding myths.

Among the underground resources of this region, coal supplied the high heat needed for ironmaking, so bronze and iron production began here earlier than anywhere else in the world. Iron tools of daily life and military weapons, which began at the same time as the bronze culture of the Shang dynasty, brought revolutionary change to human history and were the tools by which the East Asian nomads, the Huns and the Mongols, could rule the world. The fact alone that the Neolithic people of the Korean Peninsula grew into nomads in the Manchurian region, became a horse-riding people, developed iron weapons, unified the Chinese continent in the Xia, Shang, Zhou, and Qin dynasties, invaded the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese archipelago, and conquered Rome in Europe is sufficient evidence.

Let us observe the history of world religion that begins in East Asia. The folk religion of primitive times grew into nature religion, and the custom of burying family members' bodies grew into ancestral religion. People made round earthen graves, then built great earth mounds, covered the graves with flat rocks, and then erected dolmens. They built stone-mound tombs of natural stone, then began to carve rock with metal tools and build pyramids. Metal tools made wheels; iron wheels drawn by horses began here, and cities appeared in grid form. Iron wheels and pyramids were passed as far as Egypt along the coastal road already open since tens of thousands of years before.

The nature religion of East Asia, including celestial thought, developed Confucian-Taoist learning in the Taoist form of yin-yang and Five Elements rites preserved in the Goguryeo tombs, and India's Hinduism is also a kind of nature religion. The ancestral religion of East Asia, together with the growth of clan society and the state system, developed into Confucianism, which establishes the morals of family and society. As city-states and feudal states were integrated and grew into the imperial system, around the time imperial religions began, Buddhism began 2,600 years ago in the Ganges River basin of East India.

For 600 years after that, kings of the Greek city-states in Europe came to China and India, became Buddhist monks, and learned and took back the religion, learning, arts, and so on of Southeast Asia, and from then the Persian culture of Southwest Asia and the Greek culture of Europe began. When the Magi from the East, bringing East Asian philosophy and Indian Buddhism, followed the stars and arrived in Jerusalem, at last Jesus was born.

After that, over another 600 years, Catholicism, formed by combining with the Old Testament of Judaism, spread through Eastern Europe, and Islam, based on the Old Testament, began. Then, over another 600 years, Catholicism in Eastern Europe stagnated, and Genghis Khan of the Mongols of East Asia occupied Europe and woke the Europeans from their sleep in the medieval Dark Ages. Western Europeans learned East Asian culture and civilization, printing technology developed, and they gained knowledge, the Renaissance took place, and in the 16th century, as humanism rebelled against imperialism, Protestantism began with Martin Luther's Reformation.

The navigators of Western Europe learned from the Ming dynasty's navigation charts, explored the oceans, and Western Europe's worldwide invasion began. From Britain, called the British Empire on which the sun never sets, Protestant churches such as John Wesley's Methodism and John Calvin's Presbyterianism were passed on to America. Pushing out the East Asian native peoples who had lived there for more than 20,000 years, Western Europeans founded Canada, the United States, and Mexico. The United States, which stood out in the First World War and won victory in the Second World War, with its overwhelming economic and political power, inherited the Christianity of Western Europe and deployed democracy and capitalism across the world.

Today's reality is that it has collided with Islamic empires that propagate Islam as national policy. The dragon, the symbol of water and life that began with Taoism in East Asia, appeared with its might and fearsome face in all the world's religions until Protestantism, and the fact that it can be seen even in ancient religious buildings in Africa and on the Central American continent proves that East Asian culture of 60,000 years of history was distributed to every continent of the world. The form and face of the dragon, the symbolic creature of the east shown in the Four Guardian Deities murals (사신도) of Goguryeo, can be seen anywhere in ancient culture, and it is said that the oldest record left by the Sumerians, the oldest of the cultural peoples of Southwest Asia, is also a record about the dragon.

The navigation technology of the East Asians who settled at river mouths was advanced for 10,000 years, so they ruled the world until AD 1400. They invented the iron compass and crossed the Pacific. They used the wind directions that change with the seasons and the currents of the sea, and because the ancients had the ability to fast and hibernate in winter, they could make ocean voyages beyond our imagination. In the Quanzhou museum in Fujian Province a wooden boat made of planks from the Xia dynasty 4,000 years ago is preserved. Dugout boats like the one Egypt's Tutankhamun rode 3,300 years ago have been excavated at several places near Hangzhou in Zhejiang Province, at the mouth of the Yangtze, showing they were used 7,000 years ago. When the maritime Shang state was conquered by the nomadic Zhou state 3,050 years ago, 250,000 nobles and seafaring people went into exile to many countries across the Pacific. Among them, survivors crossed the Pacific and arrived in South America, and the Olmec culture began, so the Aztec and Maya cultures have much in common with Shang culture. 2,210 years ago Qin Shi Huang sent three thousand pharmacists and navigators to sea to bring back the herb of immortality. The Shang people and Qin Shi Huang's pharmacists must also have settled in our country.

2,024 years ago, ships carrying Chinese silk traveled along India's sea routes to Greece in the Mediterranean. That such activities took place among the maritime states of the Korean Peninsula even before Baekje and Wa existed on the Korean Peninsula is shown by the fact that our country's oracle-bone numerals are almost identical to those of the Maya culture of the American continent. The Dongyi people of the Korean Peninsula occupied and ruled the whole of China's east coast (the Yellow Sea), founding many Chinese states, and that tradition continued until the time of Baekje.

In the reign of King Dongseong of Baekje, Baekje pushed the Northern Wei, founded by fellow Dongyi people, out of the present Datong area and made it move across the Yellow River to Luoyang. The Yungang Grottoes at Datong have much in common with Baekje culture, and the Longmen Grottoes at Luoyang were completed from the Northern Wei through the Sui and Tang dynasties, so they have much in common with the culture of our Unified Silla. The activities of Jang Bogo in the Silla period and the exploits of Yi Sun-sin, governor of Jeolla in the Joseon dynasty, can also be seen as the tradition of Baekje maritime culture. The Buddhist culture of the Ganges River basin in East India was connected to the Korean Peninsula and the Yellow River basin along the coastal sea routes, and Heo Hwang-ok, who grew up in Ayodhya in the Ganges basin, reached the Korean Peninsula by sea, met King Kim Suro of the Garak kingdom, and became his queen. Before the states of Baekje, Wa, Silla, and Goguryeo were founded on the Korean Peninsula, there were maritime states we do not know, and there was a history of tens of thousands of years; the work of researching and confirming this remains.

As the economic standing of East Asian nations rises in the 21st century, it is only right that world history, too, give weight to Eastern history and establish a fair worldview. The effort begins now to confirm that Goguryeo culture is the history of our people, to correct the illusion that the root of world learning began with the Greek philosophers, to correct the Western view of history that puts forward the Indo-Aryans, and to prove that world history began in East Asia. This is a book whose content hopes and wishes that it will be revealed, as the providence of the Earth's history and as truth, that East Asia, the most advanced region in the distribution of the world's humanity, the place where maritime and inland activity fused, the point where farming and nomadic peoples contended, is where the Neolithic people of the Korean Peninsula, on a geographic foundation including Manchuria and the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers, were the protagonists of human culture and civilization and the founding people.

11. The Future of Humanity