In his book
Secrets of the Ice Age
(1980), dealing with the world of the Cro-Magnon cave artists, Evan Hadingham writes:
The excitement of recent discoveries in East Africa tends to obscure one important fact: the earliest human record is not one of rapid innovation and ingenuity but of almost inconceivable stagnation and conservatism. Certain features of the early hominid skulls, notably the form of the teeth and jaws, remained essentially unchanged for millions of years. It is particularly striking that brain capacity seems to have stayed fairly constant at around 600 to 800 cubic centimetres (a little over half the average modern capacity), for a period approaching two million years in length.
It needs to be explained that brain capacity is not necessarily a measure of intelligence. Although the average for modern humans is 1400 cc, a person can be highly intelligent with far less than this—Anatole France’s brain was only 1000 cc. And, of course, Neanderthal man had a brain of 2000 cc. So a human ancestor with an 800 cc brain would not necessarily be obviously more stupid than a modern man.
Another story from Hadingham’s book might be taken as a cautionary tale. Near Lake Mungo, in Australia, a grave containing a ‘modern man’ was found, dating to about 30,000 years ago; it had been buried in red ochre, a substance used in cave paintings, but also extensively used by Neanderthals. But at a place called Kow Swamp, remains of a far more primitive people—physically speaking—were found. They dated from 10,000 BC—20 thousand years
later
than the Lake Mungo people. These two types, modern and primitive, co-existed. So Cremo is arguing, Australopithecines and a more modern type of man could have co-existed more than two million years ago. The evidence exists—in the Reck skeleton, the Kanam jaw, the Laetoli footprints, as well as in the Ribeiro finds, the Castenodolo skeletons, and the many finds described by J. D. Whitney from the Tuolumne Table Mountain in California—but is discounted by modern palaeoanthropologists.
Cremo is not arguing that there is some kind of scientific conspiracy to suppress the evidence that
Homo sapiens
may be far older than 100,000 years. He is arguing that modern anthropology has created a simple and scientifically consistent ‘story of mankind’, and is unwilling to consider any changes in a conveniently uncomplicated script.
Let me summarise this ‘script’, as it would be accepted by most historians.
In Africa, about twelve million years ago, the lush forests of the Miocene began to disappear as less and less rain fell; by the Pliocene, seven million years later, forests had given way to grasslands. It was at this point that our human ancestors—some
Ramapithecus
-type of ape—decided to descend from the trees and take their chance on the savannahs. Three million years later, the ape had developed into
Australopithecus afarensis
. Lucy and her kind in turn became the two types of
Australopithecus
, the meat-eating Dartians and the vegetarian A.
robustus
.
Two million years ago, the rains came back and the Pleistocene era began with an ice age that lasted 65,000 years. And for the rest of the Pleistocene, there were a series of ‘interglacials’—warm periods that produced deserts—followed by ice ages, four of each. During this time,
Australopithecus
learned to use his wits and his weapons, and began the swift evolutionary ascent that turned him into man—
Homo habilis
, then
Homo erectus
, whose brain was twice as big as
Australopithecus
.
Then, about half a million years ago, there occurred another mysterious event for which science has been unable to account—the ‘brain explosion’. Between half a million years ago and modern times, the human brain expanded by another third, and most of that growth has been in the cerebrum, the top part of the brain, with which we think. In
African Genesis,
Robert Ardrey has an interesting theory to explain why this came about.
Around 700,000 years ago, we know that a gigantic meteorite, or perhaps even a small asteroid, exploded over the Indian Ocean, scattering tiny fragments—known as tektites—over an area of twenty million square miles. The earth’s Poles also reversed, so North became South, and vice-versa. (No one knows quite why this happened, or why it has happened a number of times in the earth’s history.) During this period, the earth would be without a magnetic field, and this could have led to a bombardment by cosmic rays and high-speed particles which may have caused genetic mutations. For whatever reason, man evolved more in half a million years than in the previous three million.
The ‘brain explosion’ raised the curtain on the age of True Man. The Neanderthals were a failed evolutionary experiment which ran from about 150,000 years ago (or possibly more than twice that long), and which collapsed because these ape-men were unable to compete with Cro-Magnon man, who destroyed the Neanderthal about 30,000 years ago. Then finally the stage was set for modern man.
And suddenly, history moves much faster.
In Egypt, around 18,000 years ago, during the Ice Age, someone noticed that seeds dropped into cracks in the mud at the edge of streams turned into crops that could be harvested with stone sickles. A thousand years later, hunters who had learned to make rope and tallow lamps were painting animals in the caves at Lascaux, in France—not, as we have seen, for artistic reasons, but as part of a magical ritual to lure them into traps.
Fourteen thousand years ago, when the ice began to melt, hunters from Asia crossed the land bridge over what is now the Bering Strait, and began to populate America. Others learned to make boats and fishing gear—like harpoons and fish-hooks—and made their living from the seas. In Japan, the first ceramic pots were made. Twelve thousand years ago, wolves were domesticated into dogs, and sheep and goats followed during the next millennium.
Ten thousand six hundred years ago, the first walled town sprang up in the Jordan valley, the place we now call Jericho, and the local residents harvested a wild grass called wheat. Then, during the next thousand years, a genetic accident crossed wheat with goat grass, creating a heavier and plumper variety called emmer. A further genetic accident crossed emmer with another goat grass, creating bread wheat, whose grains are so heavy and tightly packed that they will not scatter on the wind. It was man who learned to cultivate this new grain, and who thus ceased to be a hunter-gatherer and became a farmer. He added cattle to his list of domestic animals, discovered how to weave sheep and goat wool into cloth, and learned to irrigate his fields.
In some mysterious way, the farming revolution spread all over the world; in Africa and China, millet was cultivated; in America, beans and maize, in New Guinea, sugar cane, in Indochina, rice. Eight thousand years ago, civilisation as we know it had spread to the corners of the earth. Bread was baked in ovens; so was pottery. Copper—found in lumps lying on the surface—was beaten into blades. But one day, someone noticed that a gold-coloured liquid was flowing from a lump of green malachite that had fallen into a hot fire, and that when this liquid solidified, it was pure copper. The next step was to place the green malachite into a bread oven, and collect the copper that flowed from it; this could be made into axe and arrowheads.
The trouble was that copper would not take an edge, but this was solved around 6000 years ago when it was discovered that arsenic had the power to harden copper into an alloy. So had tin, and the result, a metal that was hard enough to make swords, was called bronze. Together with the newly domesticated animal called the horse (about the size of a modern pony), the sword enabled a new warrior caste to terrorise their neighbours, so that an increasing number of towns had to be built with walls.
Also about 6000 years ago, someone decided that hoeing the soil was hard work, and that it could be lightened if an ox could be tethered to the hoe. And when the invention of the harness solved that problem, the farmer was able to use a much heavier hoe—the plough—to break up the fine, dry soil of the Middle East. A few centuries later, these Middle Eastern plough farmers moved north, hacked down the European forests, and cultivated land that had been too heavy for the hoe. They were the ancestors of the present Europeans.
Trade between the towns meant that some kind of token was needed to represent such objects as sheep, goats and measures of grain. In fact, the very first farmers—around ten thousand years ago—had modified the ‘notation bones’ of Stone Age man into clay tablets of various shapes—cones, cylinders, spheres and so on—to stand for objects that could be traded. Five thousand six hundred years ago, in Sumer, Mesopotamia, the king’s accountants sent out similar tokens—in clay containers—as tax demands. The next step was obvious—to press the various shapes on to soft pieces of clay, and so save the trouble of making cones and spheres and cylinders. But now someone had thought of using soft clay, it was obviously common sense to scratch symbols on them—symbols representing an animal or a man. So writing was first practised, and it has a claim to be the most important of all man’s inventions. Now at last he could communicate with other men at a distance without having to rely on the messenger’s memory; now he could store his own knowledge, as Stone Age man had stored the phases of the moon on pieces of bone.
And now—at this very late stage in the development of civilisation—came the invention that we moderns are inclined to regard as the greatest of all: the wheel. No one is certain how this came about, but the likeliest possibility is that it was the invention of the Mediterranean potter, who learned around 6000 years ago that if the wet clay could be spun on a turntable, it could be more easily shaped with the hands. But how could a turntable be made to spin? The obvious solution was to place it on an axle which was kept upright in a hole in the ground. Now if another wooden wheel was placed on the axle slightly above ground level, the potter could spin this with his feet. The heavier the wheel, the more it turned at a constant speed.
The science of transportation had so far managed without the wheel, although our ancestors certainly knew that heavy objects could be moved on rollers laid side by side. In snowy climes, the answer was the sledge. But the notion of two wheels on an axle suggested new possibilities. For example, if attached to a plough, they made it easier to pull. And four of them placed underneath a cart would enable it to carry a heavy load.
The simplest way of making a wheel was to chop a slice off a log. But this had drawbacks. The lines that radiate out across the tree-rings are lines of weakness, and a wheel made in this way soon splits. A band of metal around the edge will hold it together, but it is still fatally weak. The answer was to join a number of planks until they formed a square, then to hack it into a circle. And now a band of metal hammered around the edge made a highly durable wheel.
But if two wheels were
fixed
at either end of an axle, how could they turn? One of the earliest solutions was to make the axle itself turn, by attaching it to the underside of the cart (or plough) with leather straps or metal bands. Technology soon solved that problem by leaving a small gap between the axle and the centre of the wheel. This gap could even be plugged with short, cylindrical pegs which reduced the friction—the first ball bearings.
And so, approximately 5,500 years ago, Mediterranean man produced his two most important contributions to history: writing and the wheel. The writing was made up of crude ‘pictographs’, and the wheel was made up of crude segments; but they served their purpose admirably. And if civilisation had been as peaceful and stable as in the early days of farming, they might have remained unchanged for another four thousand years. But a new factor was about to enter human history which accelerated the pace of change: warfare.
The domestication of the horse and the discovery of bronze had already created a new type of human being: the warrior. But the early warriors confined themselves to defending their own territory and occasionally stealing other people’s. Now, as towns turned into cities, and the cities grew more prosperous, so their rulers grew more powerful. Inevitably, these rulers began to think of expansion—which meant conquest, which in turn meant taxes. Within two or three centuries of the invention of the wheel, the Age of Warrior Kings began in the Middle East. But warfare demanded fast chariots, and fast chariots could only be achieved with light wheels. The result was the invention of the spoked wheel. And when knife-blades were fastened to these wheels, they became formidable in battle. Akkad, the northern part of Babylon, became the world’s first empire, and by 4,400 years ago, its king was already calling himself ‘emperor of all the lands of the earth’.
‘Empires’ required communication between their most distant parts, and the old crude picture-writing was no longer flexible enough. Around 4,400 years ago, some scribe in Mesopotamia had one of the most inspired ideas in human history: developing a form of writing that was based upon
human language
rather than on pictures of objects. In other words, a particular symbol would stand for a
syllable
. Two thousand years later, the Chinese would develop a form of writing based on the old pictographs—with the result that Chinese has about eighty thousand symbols. The genius who thought up ‘syllable-writing’ in the Land of the Two Rivers had taken one of the most important imaginative leaps in the history of mankind.
At about the same time, horsemen from the steppes of Russia swept southward into what is now Turkey. These ‘charioteers’ were pale-skinned compared to Mediterranean man, and as they stormed into China and India, they brought the language and culture that came to be called Indo-European.
Meanwhile, across the Mediterranean in Egypt, tribes of nomads had been united under a single king—the legendary Menes—by 5,200 years ago, and the Egyptians soon contributed to the history of human invention by discovering mummification, around 4,600 years ago; and by developing the royal tombs—called mastabas—into pyramids built of massive stone blocks. In a few hundred years, the Egyptians had developed an amazingly sophisticated science, mathematics, astronomy and medicine...