A quick intro to the purpose of this text
As my attempt was to take as many true historical elements as possible and weave them into a coherent story, I will attempt to cite sources as well as possible throughout this explanation. I would also like to point out that there is not necessarily a central thesis to this work - rather I was inspired by the setting as described by Harari to create a mythologized take on the colonization.
This is the original passage which put the idea in my mind:
"The journey of the first humans to Australia is one of the most
important events in history, at least as important as Columbus’
journey to America or the Apollo 11 expedition to the moon. It was
the first time any human had managed to leave the Afro-Asian
ecological system – indeed, the first time any large terrestrial mammal
had managed to cross from Afro-Asia to Australia. Of even greater
importance was what the human pioneers did in this new world. The
moment the first hunter-gatherer set foot on an Australian beach was
the moment that Homo sapiens climbed to the top rung in the food
chain on a particular landmass and thereafter became the deadliest
species in the annals of planet Earth."
A song by song contextualization
1. Hunger in the Moonlight
The story begins with a baby crying in the ocean. His mother, fleeing a flooding island near modern day Timor, had given birth to him in the sea. At the end of an ice-age, sea levels were rising and people were being forced further and further south. She is unable to survive the ordeal, though the young baby washes up on the shore of an island. He is rescued by a tribe of hunter-gatherers and taken in as their own. He is given the name Seaborn.-Though this is one proposed view of why people were moving southward, I later learned that it is in fact more likely that these societies were capable seafarers traveling at times of relatively low sea levels.
A flash-forward sees Seaborn, now a grown man in a hunter-gatherer society, hunting a boar in the forest, killing it, and bringing it back to his tribe. He has an animist understanding of the world; animism being the belief that plants, inanimate objects, and natural phenomena have living souls. This was the major system of human thought for most people for most of history (prior to the rise of polytheism). He speaks of his fear and hatred of these spirits - what he is really saying is that he is frightened of the world, but will fight back if he must to protect himself and others. This is meant to counteract the image of the "noble savage", with ancient man as being in harmony with nature. However, in direct opposition to this fear, we find a very capable and intelligent orator. This is based on the idea that hunter-gatherers were likely happier and more capable people than even today:
Crash Course (watch until 3:10):
kurzgesagt:
"To maximise the efficiency of their daily search for food, they required information about the growth patterns of each plant and the habits of each animal. They needed to know which foods were nourishing, which made you sick, and how to use others as cures. They needed to know the progress of the seasons and what warning signs preceded a thunderstorm or a dry spell. They studied every stream, every walnut tree, every bear cave, and every flint-stone deposit in their vicinity. Each individual had to understand how to make a stone knife, how to mend a torn cloak, how to lay a rabbit trap, and how to face avalanches, snakebites or hungry lions. Mastery of each of these many skills required years of apprenticeship and practice. The average ancient forager could turn a flint stone into a spear point within minutes. When we try to imitate this feat, we usually fail miserably. Most of us lack expert knowledge of the flaking properties of flint and basalt and the fine motor skills needed to work them precisely. In other words, the average forager had wider, deeper and more varied knowledge of her immediate surroundings than most of her modern descendants." Harari
Seaborn also speaks about his fears and desire to protect his son, with whom he feels particular kinship:
"His mother had passed away. I found him in the bush, as the others found me on the shore. I took him and gave him warmth; a name too: Settler".
His son is of paramount importance to him - he wishes to protect him, teach him, and together fight against the spirits. This is his purpose for giving him the name Settler - he has a vision in his mind that he and his son will be able to take conquest of the land. The final scene finds Seaborn asking his song to climb into a raft with him in order to follow seafaring birds over the horizon in an attempt to find food. This is conjecture on my part, though I think it could be considered reasonable conjecture. A friend of mine, who will be finishing his bachelors in anthropology soon, had had the same idea when I pitched this to him.
2. The Wind is Getting Louder
One proposed hypothesis for how humans made their way to the shores of Australia was that a monsoon blew them there. The following link has more in-depth analysis:
http://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/how-get-australia-aboriginal-0010107
"chokin' sputterin' gaspin' fightin'... it's all because of me"
For several days, Seaborn fights the torrential monsoon. He survives the ordeal, and washing up on a strange shore, lays down on the sand, exhausted and distraught.
3. The Beasts Lurking in the Forest
As Seaborn lies on the shore, he hears monstrous sounds coming from the trees. Frightened of what these monsters are, he determines his immediate needs - water, fire, and shelter. Internally, he reasons that these monstrous spirits have called him to this strange land, that it is they who have killed his mother and son. He is now determined to get his revenge.
These monsters are a mytholigized take on megafauna - the giant creatures which inhabited many continents around the planet prior to human arrival. (More on this later).
However, this passage from Sapiens paints an interesting picture:
"The first human footprint on a sandy Australian beach was
immediately washed away by the waves. Yet when the invaders
advanced inland, they left behind a different footprint, one that would
never be expunged. As they pushed on, they encountered a strange
universe of unknown creatures that included a 200-kilogram, twometre
kangaroo, and a marsupial lion, as massive as a modern tiger,
that was the continent’s largest predator. Koalas far too big to be
cuddly and cute rustled in the trees and flightless birds twice the size
of ostriches sprinted on the plains. Dragon-like lizards and snakes five
metres long slithered through the undergrowth. The giant diprotodon,
a two-and-a-half-ton wombat, roamed the forests. Except for the birds
and reptiles, all these animals were marsupials – like kangaroos, they
gave birth to tiny, helpless, fetus-like young which they then nurtured
with milk in abdominal pouches. Marsupial mammals were almost
unknown in Africa and Asia, but in Australia they reigned supreme." Harari
4. Leviathan rises from the Sea, Singing of Land
From the sea behind him, the largest of all the monsters rises up. Seaborn determines that this spirit is the leader of the monsters. As the Leviathan rises up, it begins to fly over the land, singing a song about the land it flies over as it does. Seaborn memorizes this song - it is ever-present in his mind.
This element of the story is based on Aboriginal songlines, something still used by modern-day aboriginal hunter-gatherers:
".....songlines, a fascinating, complex method of navigation. “In Aboriginal mythology, a songline is a myth based around localised ‘creator-beings’ during the Dreaming, the indigenous Australian embodiment of the creation of the Earth. Each songline explains the route followed by the creator-being during the course of the myth. The path of each creator-being is marked in sung lyrics. One navigates across the land by repeating the words of the song or re-enacting the story through dance, which in the course of telling the story also describe the location of various landmarks on the landscape (e.g. rock formations, watering holes, rivers, trees) . . . . By singing a song cycle in the appropriate order, an explorer could navigate vast distances, often travelling through the deserts of Australia’s interior (a fact which amazed early anthropologists who were stunned by Aborigines that frequently walked across hundreds of kilometres of desert picking out tiny features along the way without error).”
https://blog.education.nationalgeographic.org/2016/04/08/aboriginal-songlines-helped-draw-the-map-in-australia/
I have bolded the words "the dreaming" because it is another concept at play here - I do not claim to have a very good understanding of what the dreaming actually is, as it is a different idea for different tribes. As well it is my understanding that our understanding of 'the dreaming' tends to be quite flawed. I have done my best to understand this element and incorporate it, with the beginning and end of the piece principally representing the Dreaming. The idea is explained here from wikipedia, the most valid of all sources:
"The Dreaming is used to represent Aboriginal concepts of "time out of time," or "everywhen," during which the land was inhabited by ancestral figures, often of heroic proportions or with supernatural abilities. These figures were often distinct from "gods" as they did not control the material world and were not worshipped, but only revered....... Creation is believed to be the work of culture heroes who traveled across a formless land, creating sacred sites and significant places of interest in their travels. In this way, "songlines" were established, some of which could travel right across Australia.... The dreaming and travelling trails of the Spirit Beings are the songlines...."
The name Leviathan comes from Thomas Hobbes "Leviathan" - though the creature is originally a biblical sea monster, Hobbes uses it as an allegory to argue that a strong central government is a necessary means to combat the natural order of the world - brutish, violent, and short. This is called the "State of Nature". The audience may be aware that this idea is in direct opposition to another philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau - the essential debate being: was man naturally brutish or benevolent before the introduction of governments? A related question is whether it was better for us to have given up our hunter-gatherer lifestyle of not. Plus the name Leviathan is a sea monster, so I was like... yeah let's use that name. There isn't much symbolism to the name past mentioning this debate and these questions being at play. And also Seaborn is fighting a giant sea monster.
5. Kill the Megafauna
Seaborn learns to hunt and kill the megafauna, and as he does he continues to hear the song of Leviathan calling to him. There are some aspects as to how he does this:
1) He is able to kill the Diprotodon,with relative ease: "I see a Diprotodon - kill the pacifist!"
.... diprotodons and Australia’s other giants
probably wouldn’t have been that hard to hunt because they would
have been taken totally by surprise by their two-legged assailants.....The big beasts of
Africa and Asia learned to avoid humans, so when the new megapredator
– Homo sapiens – appeared on the Afro-Asian scene, the large
animals already knew to keep their distance from creatures that
looked like it. In contrast, the Australian giants had no time to learn
to run away. Humans don’t come across as particularly dangerous.
They don’t have long, sharp teeth or muscular, lithe bodies. So when a
diprotodon, the largest marsupial ever to walk the earth, set eyes for
the first time on this frail-looking ape, he gave it one glance and then
went back to chewing leaves. These animals had to evolve a fear of
humankind, but before they could do so they were gone.
Hence the lyric "kill the pacifist".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OHjMIsfIzg
2) He uses fire hunting / fire farming to kill Megalania: "With fire I set swathes of forest ablaze"
by the time Sapiens reached Australia, they had already mastered fire agriculture. Faced with an alien and threatening environment, they deliberately burned vast areas of impassable thickets and dense forests to create open grasslands, which attracted more easily hunted game, and were better suited to their needs. They thereby completely changed the ecology of large parts of Australia within a few short millennia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaSu2etO--0
Years pass and Seaborn masters the art of killing the megafauna, coming closer every day to song which he hears singing across the land.
"One day from the top of a cliff set eyes on the mighty leviathan on an island's peak."
An earlier version of the story had Leviathan resting on what is known as the Sahul Shelf, a now underwater shelf that was originally part of the australian landmass, but a friend of mine explained the anthropological reasons why this wouldn't make sense - and also that fundamentalist christians sometimes use the Sahul Shelf as an apologist argument to try to historically justify Noah's Ark. So instead Leviathan is on an island across the way - Seaborn must swim across the channel and climb to the peak of this island to destroy Leviathan. This is the deadliest ascent.
6. The Deadliest Ascent / A Vision
As Seaborn begins to climb up the island, Leviathan is folding the island back in on itself, using its tentacles to pull the island down back into the sea, piece by piece. This is representative of rising sea levels at the end of the ice age - as addressed at the beginning of this explanation, it is not actually true that the sea levels were rising at the time of colonization. However, after humans had settled Australia, the sea levels did rise, essentially isolating Australia into its own human world, a theme which played out through most of human history:
"Consider Tasmania, a medium-sized island south of Australia. It was
cut off from the Australian mainland in about 10,000 BC as the end of
the Ice Age caused the sea level to rise. A few thousand huntergatherers
were left on the island...For 12,000 years, nobody else knew the Tasmanians were there, and
they didn’t know that there was anyone else in the world. They had
their wars, political struggles, social oscillations and cultural
developments. Yet as far as the emperors of China or the rulers of
Mesopotamia were concerned, Tasmania could just as well have been
located on one of Jupiter’s moons. The Tasmanians lived in a world of
their own.... There was absolutely no connection between
the defeat of Rome and the rise of Teotihuacan. Rome might just as
well have been located on Mars, and Teotihuacan on Venus." Harari
As Seaborn raises his stone dagger, moving to thrust it into Leviathan, Leviathan reaches out, touches his chest and gives him a vision:
Seaborn sees himself in different positions in human history - firstly undergoing the agricultural revolution in different parts of the world, then later seeing himself undergoing the industrial and scientific revolutions -
"I am digging a hole, I am planting a seed..... In the Indus Valley, in the Americas.... I am pressing a book... in a fluorescent room... piloting a spacecraft"
-an element which I failed to add to this part of the vision (in the lyrics) is that Seaborn also sees himself killing Megafauna in different places throughout human history, as this dynamic did in fact play out across the globe (Harari here is also arguing that although climate change may have contributed to the death of the megafauna, we were still the deciding factor):
"mass extinctions akin to the archetypal Australian
decimation occurred again and again in the ensuing millennia –
whenever people settled another part of the Outer World. In these
cases Sapiens guilt is irrefutable. For example, the megafauna of New
Zealand – which had weathered the alleged ‘climate change’ of
c.45,000 years ago without a scratch – suffered devastating blows
immediately after the first humans set foot on the islands. The Maoris,
New Zealand’s first Sapiens colonisers, reached the islands about 800
years ago. Within a couple of centuries, the majority of the local
megafauna was extinct, along with 60 per cent of all bird species.
A similar fate befell the mammoth population of Wrangel Island in
the Arctic Ocean (200 kilometres north of the Siberian coast).
Mammoths had flourished for millions of years over most of the
northern hemisphere, but as Homo sapiens spread – first over Eurasia
and then over North America – the mammoths retreated. By 10,000
years ago there was not a single mammoth to be found in the world,
except on a few remote Arctic islands, most conspicuously Wrangel.
The mammoths of Wrangel continued to prosper for a few more
millennia, then suddenly disappeared about 4,000 years ago, just
when the first humans reached the island.
Were the Australian extinction an isolated event, we could grant
humans the benefit of the doubt. But the historical record makes
Homo sapiens look like an ecological serial killer." Harari
The vision continues and Seaborn sees himself piloting a spacecraft which is approaching an alien planet. Nuclear bombs are going off all over the planet, killing the natives there. This is a parallel to fire-hunting. After the nuclear bombs have finished being set off, he comes down onto the planet's surface. The giant alien creatures are also marsupial. One of these aliens resembling a marsupial lion, he looks into its pouch. The dead kittens bear the face of his mother and son, and in this moment ambivalence strikes him - he is torn between the pain he has caused the megafauna and his own need for self-preservation.
Though the entire narration is spoken from Seaborns perspective, the following line is meant to be ambiguous as to who is speaking - Seaborn to Leviathan, Leviathan to Seaborn, or both to each other?
"You may kill me if you must, but if you do, I'll have to kill you."
7. Hunger in the Moonlight (reprise)
Seaborn, now feeling this strong sense of ambivalence, reflects on his fear and hatred of the spirits, asking himself "is there anything more to my life than fear and hatred of the spirits? (essentially, he is asking himself if Hobbes is right in his assertion that the state of nature is nothing but bloody and violent)
8. As the Final Footing Folds
The vision has ended and Seaborn finds himself back on the island, his dagger poised to stab Leviathan in its heart (or whatever its got). With internal turmoil, his need for revenge overcomes his desire to live in harmony with Leviathan. As his stone dagger meets Leviathan's fleshy folds, Leviathan uses his tentacles to fold the final piece of land in on itself -
Waves crash around Seaborn as water pulls him further and further downward
He hears a baby crying in the distance and finds himself crying back.
Pulled further and further into the sea, he returns to the Dreaming.
The story ends with a baby crying in the ocean.
Final thoughts
As stated above, I did not set out to write this in order to make any particular point about the state of the world. Rather, I found the setting to be fascinating and wanted to carve out a story from there. However, I believe the narration does ask some interesting questions, such as:
1) Would it have been better for us never to have undergone the agricultural revolution?
2) Can we justifiably view ancient hunter gathers pejoratively? If not, then on what basis? What does this mean for our current relationship to nature?
3) To what extent is violence to achieve revenge justifiable? Self-defense?
4) Is evolution predictable (i.e. given that we travel to stars and come into contact with intelligent creatures, will similar events like fire farming repeat themselves?)
I do not think that I have sufficient answers to these questions- instead I think they are interesting questions which arise from the narration. Rather than give you my answer to these questions, I'd prefer you to think about them yourself. If you have there are any questions or comments which you see in the narration, feel free to comment and ask the question.
Special Thanks
Yuval Noah Harari - thanks for writing your book (Who'd think the world from the perspective of wheat could be so interesting)
Zach Winchester- thanks for giving Leviathan a purpose
Zach Furrow - thanks for fact checking and keeping me from being a Noah's Ark defender
Martin Sandom - thanks for saving me hours on the mix
Debbie Marinello - thanks for suggesting that Settler also have lost his mother
Mark Marinello - thanks for the instruments and the beer
Rhyan McLaury - thanks for nothing. Literally I'm publicly shaming you for never getting back to me on this thing lol
And to anyone else who listened to me as I spoke about it, I appreciate your interest in the story. Having people to tell the story to helped me flesh it out much more succinctly.
And finally thank you to anyone who has stumbled upon this and has found it to be interesting / has read it through this far. Please consider supporting this project if you feel you've gotten some personal benefit from it:
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