THE science fiction writer Robert Heinlein once came up with a great one-liner about how civilisation had happened. “Progress,” he suggested, “is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.”

Ian Morris, a Stanford University archaeologist and professor of history, fleshes it out a bit. “Change is caused by lazy, greedy, frightened people looking for easier, more profitable and safer ways to do things,” he writes.

And there you have it: the human race in a nutshell. In one sense that’s all you really need to say about the great sweep of human history.

But Morris, in the course of almost 650 glorious pages, has a great deal more to say too.

Why The West Rules is simply stunning. In scope, in breadth, in the sheer joy and zest of the writing, this is the best book I’ve read all year. Scrap that, it’s probably the best book I’ve read in the past ten years.

Morris draws on archaeology, history, geography and biology to try to explain how we, the human species, got to where we are today – and where we might go in the future.

His ambition is huge: he starts with the earliest men, and traces the development of humanity through the Neanderthals to the coming of modern man, the invention of farming, the growth of civilisation, and the ‘race’ between the great civilisations of the East (China) and West (Europe and the US) for control of the planet.

His conclusion? Something along the lines of it’s not us that controls the planet, it’s the planet that controls and shapes us.

It sounds daunting. It is anything but. Morris is a wonderful writer: joyous, exuberant, funny and self-deprecating by turn. He quotes Ambrose Bierce’s comic definition of history: “History, n. An account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.” There are plenty of fools and knaves, as well as geniuses, tyrants, idiots, romantics and thieves in his story, he observes wryly.

Throughout it all, Morris makes the perfect narrator. How many historians could produce a sentence as beautifully crafted and succinct as this definition of what makes people different from animals?

“Like all the more intelligent animals, we are curious creatures,” he writes. “We are constantly tinkering, wondering whether things are edible, whether we can have fun with them, whether we can improve them. We are just much better at tinkering than other animals, because we have big, fast brains with lots of folds to think things through, endlessly supple vocal chords to talk things through, and opposable thumbs to work things through.”

Wonderful. If you ever want to know where you came from, read this book. It puts everything in to perspective