A Criminal History of Mankind (19 page)

This hypothesis may prove to be as unnecessary as the ‘big bang’ theory of the brain. To begin with, Neanderthal man seems to have been far less ape-like than we used to assume. He buried his dead with some form of ritual. The seeds of brightly coloured flowers have been discovered in Neanderthal graves - they were probably woven into some sort of screen to cover the body. Chunks of manganese dioxide - a colouring material later used by Cro-Magnon man - have been found in his caves, some of them worn down on one side as if used as crayons. Smaller quantities of other colouring materials - like red ochre - have also been found. So it seems conceivable that he used them for colouring animal skins. Neanderthal woman may have been a slut - the caves seem to be knee deep in animal bones - but that is no reason why she may not have enjoyed wearing brightly coloured clothes. Another puzzling feature of Neanderthal man is that he manufactured stone spheres, as did his ancestors a million years earlier. A large white disc of flint, twenty centimetres wide, was discovered in a cave at La Quina, in France. Every student of mythology knows that such discs usually represent the sun; these stone spheres may also be sun or moon images. All this strongly suggests that Neanderthal man, in spite of his bestial appearance, had some form of religion. And religion is undoubtedly the outcome of man’s thinking - and feeling - about the universe. It sounds very much as if Neanderthal man was already an individual before he invented the bow and arrow.

The real objection to most of these theories - from Maerth’s brain-eating to Ardrey’s bow and arrow - is that they all seem to assume that man is a basically passive creature who needed to stumble upon the discoveries that accidentally triggered his evolution. Ardrey and Lorenz suggest that man’s discovery of weapons led to a better co-ordination of hand and eye, and so developed the brain. Ardrey suggests that long-distance weapons created ‘individuality’. Speaking about the mystery of the enlarged brain, he says that it is rather as if someone had invented the Rolls-Royce before the discovery of petrol. And that in itself suggests that he may simply be holding his facts upside down. Suppose it happened the other way round, and man made his discoveries as a result of seeking the answers to problems?

Let us look carefully at this alternative view. We can begin with the known fact that at some remote point in prehistory, between twenty-five and fifteen million years ago, our remote simian ancestors descended from the trees because they found it more profitable to live on the ground. They dug for roots (as modern apes do), and ate small animals (again, as modern apes do). At times, they came upon larger animals - like deer - that had been trapped in thickets or swamps, and a point came when it struck them that big-game hunting made more sense than catching rodents and monkeys.

The upright posture may have developed because these hunters had to carry their game back to their living sites. An animal drags its prey in its teeth; these three-foot man-apes were too small for that. They learned the trick of carrying their prey on their shoulders as they tottered forwards on their unsteady legs.

The upright posture brought another advantage: they could see farther, an immense advantage for a hunter. Besides, there is something rather satisfying about seeing into the distance. Why do we all enjoy panoramic views, and feel stifled if we have to spend too long in a small room? Distant prospects are what animal ethologists call a ‘releaser’; they arouse in us a definite response, like food or sex. The reason may be that for millions of years our ancestors experienced a surge of interest and anticipation when they climbed a tree and looked over a distant plain; now we still feel the same when we look down from a mountain top, even though we are no longer looking for game. We call it the sense of beauty but its origin may lie in the stomach.

And now we come to the heart of the mystery. The first men hunted in packs, like wolves - Ardrey even refers to Australopithecus as a ‘wolf-ape’. Then why has man evolved to become the ‘lord of the earth’ when the wolf has remained more-or-less unchanged? (The ancestor of wolves and dogs, Tomarchus, was on earth at the same time as Ramapithecus.) Moreover, both men and apes descended from the same tiny creature, a kind of tree shrew. So why have our cousins remained much as they were fifteen million years ago? In fact, precisely
why
did we evolve? For evolution is not ‘normal’. The shark has not changed in a hundred and fifty million years; it is such an efficient predator that it has never needed to change its methods. Evolution takes place only when creatures have to adapt, and therefore to strive. The Pliocene and the Pleistocene were certainly difficult periods, but they were equally difficult for all creatures. So why did man outstrip all the others?

Oddly enough, most evolutionists seem to have overlooked the most obvious possibility: sex. Desmond Morris devotes some interesting pages to the development of female anatomy, and Elaine Morgan suggests that woman’s breasts may have enlarged to make them more accessible to the baby (which no longer had hair to cling to during the feeding periods). But neither seems to have recognised that woman’s sexual transformation could have been the single most important factor in human evolution.

The female ape is receptive to the male for only one week in the month. At some point in her history, the human female ceased to be seasonal and became receptive to the male at all times. The likeliest explanation is surely that when the males of the tribe were away hunting for days or weeks at a time, they expected to receive their sexual reward whether the female was in season or not. So in due course, the women who had no strong objection to all-the-year-round lovemaking bred more of their kind, while the others were gradually eliminated by natural selection. Since Leakey’s discovery that Ramapithecus was already a hunter, it is conceivable that the change took place at a very early point in the history of our species.

In the lives of most animals, sex is an occasional indulgence; what really interests them is food. But once woman became permanently receptive, and began to develop characteristics that males found exciting - large breasts, full lips, rounded buttocks - then the males in turn had a strong motive for trying to show off their bravery and skill. The presence of unattached females in the group must have introduced an element of competition and excitement found in no other animal pack. Suddenly there was a reason for trying to become a mighty hunter. The psychology of the
Morte d’Arthur
and the
Chanson de Roland
may have emerged in our ancestors long before they developed other human characteristics. In which case, Goethe put his finger on the central truth about human evolution when he wrote that ‘the eternal womanly draws us upward and on’.

And why should this kind of ‘romantic’ sexual selection have produced a larger brain? Because the great hunter requires intelligence as well as bravery. This is why the brain increased in size - at first very slowly, so that it took ten million years for the brain of Ramapithecus to enlarge from 400 cc to the 600 cc of Australopithecus; then with increasing tempo, so that the brain of
homo erectus
had increased to 1,000 cc in less than two million years. (Robert Ardrey mentions that the brain of Anatole France was only 1,000 cc, demonstrating that Peking Man was already potentially the intellectual equal of a college professor.) Then came the ‘brain explosion’, when the average human brain enlarged by another third in a mere half million years.

Now if the ‘romantic’ theory of evolution is correct, we no longer need to ask why the human brain developed at such a speed. It developed because sex had provided man with a motivation for using his intelligence. It is true that this theory arouses immediate misgivings in anyone who thinks in terms of twentieth-century sexuality; when the male sex symbol is the pop singer wearing a leather jacket and thrusting out his pelvis in time to the music, intelligence seems superfluous. But the pop singer can survive without intelligence, and the hunter cannot. We acknowledge this when we say that someone’s hand ‘has not lost its cunning’, recognising cunning as one of the basic attributes of the man who pits his intelligence against the animal’s instinct for survival: the trapper, the patient watcher, the stalker of game.

And what, asks Robert Ardrey, did man
do
with his increased brain? It may or may not be a coincidence, but the ‘brain explosion’ began at about the same time as the last great ice age, half a million years ago. From then until about ten thousand years ago, the ice periodically advanced and retreated. In an ice age, hunting becomes more difficult, and the need for intelligence and skill therefore increases. On the other hand, such increased skill would not be obviously reflected in man’s artifacts; his chief weapon, the spear, would remain unchanged. As far as
homo erectus
was concerned, the greatest of his discoveries was the hand axe, which first appears about a million and a half years ago. And there are no remarkable changes in this simple tool for well over a million years. Why should there be? Its purpose was the skinning of animals and the trimming of branches - and possibly the opening of skulls to extract the brain - and these also remained unchanged.

There is, though, one curious piece of evidence that man had learned a new skill. It dates from about 200,000 years ago and was found at Pech de 1’Aźe, in the Dordogne in France; it is the rib bone of an ox, and it contains the world’s earliest engraving. It is not particularly exciting: three arc-like patterns that overlap, and a few lines and V-shaped marks that could be natural damage. What is exciting about this bone is that it must have been engraved by
homo erectus
. And the next engraved bones date from a period about 175,000 years later; they were manufactured by our direct ancestor, Cro-Magnon man, the world’s ‘first artist’.

The discovery of Cro-Magnon art dates from 1865, when Edouard Lartet, a French lawyer, discovered bones engraved with reindeer and other animals near the town of Les Eyzies in the Dordogne. These went on show at the Paris exhibition of 1878, and were seen by a Spanish nobleman named Don Marcelino de Sautola. On his estate near Torrelavega, at a place now called Altamira, there was an underground cave that had been found accidentally when a hunting dog fell down a crack in the ground. Don Marcelino had already discovered the bones of bison and wild horses there; now he explored it thoroughly and found that the walls and ceilings were covered with vivid paintings of bison, deer, wild boar and wild horses. The discovery brought him little but bitterness, for a congress of scholars declared the paintings to be faked; when he died in 1888, Altamira was already forgotten. Then more paintings were found in caves in France. Belatedly, the importance of Altamira was recognised. When paintings in a Dordogne cave were found to be partly covered by layers of chalk and stalagmites, the last doubts about their antiquity vanished.

It was natural that the late Victorians should assume that the paintings were simply primitive works of art - representing the leisure hours of Cro-Magnon man. The first to cast doubt on this view was Salomon Reinach, a member of the French Institute, who suggested as early as 1903 that the paintings were part of a magic ritual to lure the bison and boar into the traps of the hunters. One of the best known Palaeolithic drawings - from the Caverne de Trois Fréres in the Dordogne - looks like a bison with human legs performing a kind of dance. It is obviously supposed to be a man wearing the skin of a bison; another one shows a man wearing a deer’s antlers. We know that modern primitives perform ‘magic’ rituals that involve images of animals: Congo Pygmies draw the hunted animal in the sand and fire an arrow into its throat: Tungus carve the animal they intend to hunt; Yeniseis make a wooden fish. Books such as Carleton S. Coon’s
The Hunting Peoples
and Joseph Campbell’s
Masks of God
contain literally dozens of similar examples. So, in spite of the scepticism of some modern scholars, there seems no reasonable doubt that the animal paintings of Cro-Magnon man were intended purely for ritual purposes, as part of a ceremony to ensure successful hunting. Some of the animals are drawn several times, one on top of the other, which clearly suggests that they had to be sketched as part of some ritual. (A puzzling drawing from La Marche seems to show a praying female figure intertwined with the dancing shaman, suggesting that a ‘sorcerer’ may have used his arts to try and lure a desirable female.)

In the early 1960s, a scientific journalist named Alexander Marshack was studying some of the more puzzling finds from the Dordogne caves. These consisted of pieces of reindeer antler or bone incised with small marks - in some cases dots, in others, parallel lines. Marshack was writing a book on space exploration and wanted to write a section on the beginnings of science and mathematics. He was worried by what he calls ‘a series of suddenlies’ - Greek science started ‘suddenly’, astronomy started ‘suddenly’ in Mesopotamia, writing appeared ‘suddenly’, agriculture began ‘suddenly’, and so on. It all seemed absurdly unlikely. After all, Cro-Magnon man had a brain as large as that of modern man, and he was on earth forty thousand years ago. So was it not more likely that these discoveries actually had a long history extending back into the last ice age? Examining one of the ‘dotted’ bones through a microscope, Marshack observed that the dots had been made at different times by different instruments. This implied that they contained some kind of message. The dots were in a ‘snakey’ path, and Marshack concluded that their purpose was to make a note of the times of the rising of the moon over a period of months. Marshack studied dozens of bones, some dating back to 34,000 B.C., and concluded that all the marks could be interpreted as references to the moon and the seasons. In other words, they were primitive calendars. And why should stone age man be concerned with the times of the rising moon? Presumably because he wanted to know when to anticipate the seasonal movements of animals - the migration of bison and reindeer, the spawning season of salmon. These conclusions were set out in a remarkable book,
The Roots of Civilisation
, whose central thesis is that our Cro-Magnon ancestors were far less ‘primitive’ than anyone had ever realised. They had, in effect, invented a simple form of writing.