THE ASCENT OF MAN

 JACOB BROWNOWSKI

MACDONALD FUTURA PUBLISHERS                        1973

PART II

 

Chapter 1: Lower Than The Angels (Cont.)

• The changes in Home erectus that have led to us are substantial over a million years, but they seem gradual by comparison with those that went before.
• The successor that we know best was first found in Germany in the last century: another classic fossil skull, he is Neanderthal man. He already has a three-pound brain, as large as modern man.
• Somewhere in that last million years or so, man made a change in the quality of his tools – which presumably points to some biological refinement in the hand during this period, and especially in the brain centers that control the hand. He made tools which require much finer manipulation in the making and, of course, in the use.
• The real content of evolution (biological as well as cultural) is the elaboration of new behaviour. It is only because behaviour leaves no fossils that we are forced to search for it in bones and teeth.
• Any animal, and man especially, is a highly integrated structure, all the parts of which must change together as his behaviour changes.
• The evolution of the brain, of the hand, of the eyes, of the feet, the teeth, the whole human frame, made a mosaic of special gifts – and in a sense these chapters are each an essay on some special gift of man.
• They have made him what he is, faster in evolution, and richer and more flexible in behaviour, than any other animal. Man is the most majestic of all creatures. Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created.
• Change in diet is important in a changing species over a time as long as 50 million years. Australopithecus broke the ancient primate habit of vegetarianism.
• The change from a vegetarian to an omnivorous diet, once made, persisted in Homo erectus, Neanderthal man and Homo sapiens.
• Meat is a more concentrated protein than plant, cutting down bulk and time spent eating by two-thirds. The consequences for the evolution of man were far reaching.
• He had more time free and could spend it in more indirect ways, to get food from sources (such as large animals) which could not be tackled by hungry brute force.
• Evidently that helped to promote (by natural selection) the tendency of all primates to interpose an internal delay in the brain between stimulus and response, until it developed into the full human ability to postpone the gratification of desire.
• But the most marked effect of an indirect strategy to enhance the food supply is, of course social action and communication.
• Hunting requires conscious planning and organization by means of language, as well as special weapons. Hunting cannot support a growing population in one place. The limit for the Savannah was no more than two people to the square mile – a world population of about 20 millions. The choice for the hunters was brutal: starve or move.
• They moved over prodigious distances. By a million years ago, they were in North Africa. By 700,000 years ago, or even earlier, they were in Java. By 400,000 years ago, or even earlier, they had fanned out and marched north, to China in the east and Europe in the west. 
• These incredible spreading migrations made man a widely dispersed species, even though his total numbers were about one million.
• What is even more forbidding is that man moved north just after the climate there was turning to ice. The northern climate had been temperate for several hundred million years. Yet before Homo erectus settled in China and northern Europe, a sequence of three separate Ice Ages began. It is no surprise to find fire used in those caves for the first time.
• The ice moved south and retreated three times, and the land changed each time. The ice-caps at their largest contained so much of the earth’s water that the level of the sea fell 400 feet.
• After the second Ice Age, over 200,000 years ago, Neanderthal man, with his big brain appears, and he became important in the last Ice Age.
• The cultures of man that we recognize best began to form in the most recent Ice Age, within the last 100,000 or even 50,000 years. Inventions may be rare but they spread fast through a culture.
• Man survived the fierce test of the Ice Ages because he had the flexibility of mind to recognize inventions and to turn them into community property. The rigours of hunting on the edge of the ice changed the strategy of hunting. The better method was to follow herds and not to lose them – to learn to anticipate and in the end to adopt their habits, including their wandering migrations.
• The Lapps are the only people who still live this way. They are not herdsmen; they do not control the reindeer, they have not domesticated it. They simply move where the herds move.
• The Lapps are entirely dependent on the reindeer – they eat the meat, a pound a head each every day. They use the sinews and fur and hides and bones; they drink the milk; they even use the antlers.
• And yet the Lapps are freer than the reindeer, because their mode of life is a cultural adaptation and not a biological one. It is a choice that they can change; it is not irreversible, as biological mutations are.
• A biological adaptation is an inborn form of behaviour; but a culture is a learned form of behavior – a communally preferred form, which (like other inventions) has been adopted by a whole society.
• The Lapps have not lived by biological adaptation but by invention: by the imaginative use of the reindeer’s habits and all its products, by turning it into a draught animal, by artifacts and the sledge. They survived by the master invention of all – fire.
• Fire is the symbol of the hearth, and from the time Homo sapiens began to leave the mark of his hand 30,000 years ago, the hearth was his cave. For at least a million years man, in some recognizable form, lived as a forager and a hunter.
• Only at the end of that time, on the edge of the European ice-sheet, we find in caves like Altimira (and elsewhere in Spain and southern France) the record of what dominated the mind of man the hunter.
• And yet when we reflect, what is remarkable is not that there are so few monuments, but that there are any at all.
• Man is a puny, slow, awkward, unarmed animal – he had to invent a pebble, a flint, a knife, a spear. But why to these scientific inventions, which were essential to his survival, did he from an early time add those arts that now astonish us: decorations with animal shapes?
• Why, above all, did he come to caves like this, live in them, and then make paintings of animals not where he lived but in places that were dark, secret, remote, hidden, inaccessible? We still want to know what the power was that the hunters believed they got from the paintings.
• Here I can only give you my personal view. I think that the power that we see expressed here for the first time is the power of anticipation: the forward-looking imagination. In these paintings the hunter was made familiar with dangers which he knew he had to face but to which he had not yet come.
• For us, the cave paintings re-create the hunter’s way of life as a glimpse of history; we look through them into the past. But for the hunter, I suggest, they were a peep-hole into the future; he looked ahead.
• Art and science are both uniquely human actions, outside the range of anything that an animal can do. They derive from the same human faculty: the ability to visualize the future, to foresee what may happen and plan to anticipate it, and to represent it to ourselves in images that we project and move about inside our head, or in a square of light on the dark wall of a cave or a television screen.
• The men who made the weapons and the paintings were anticipating a future as only man can do, inferring what is to come from what is here.
• There are many gifts that are unique in man; but at the center of them all, the root from which all knowledge grows, lies the ability to draw conclusions from what we see to what we do not see, to move our minds through space and time, and to recognize ourselves in the past on the steps to the present.
• All over these caves the print of the hand says: ‘This is my mark. This is man.’

 

Chapter 2: The Harvest Of The Seasons

• The history of man is divided very unequally into biological evolution covering millions of years and cultural evolution that separates us from the hunting tribes of Africa or the food gatherers of Australia, crowded into a few thousand years.
• I shall only be talking now about those last 12,000 years which contain almost the whole of the ascent of man as we think of him now. This is how long it has taken for Homo sapiens to become the creatures that you and I aspire to be: artists and scientists, city builders and planners for the future, readers and travelers, eager explorers of natural fact and human emotion, immensely richer in experience and bolder in imagination than any of our ancestors.
• That is the pace of cultural evolution; once it takes off, it goes as the ratio of those two numbers goes, at least a hundred times faster than biological evolution.
• Once it takes off: that is the crucial phrase. Why did the cultural changes that have made man the master of the earth begin so recently?
• There must have been an extraordinary explosion about 10,000 BC – and there was. It was the end of the last Ice Age.
• Man who had come through incredible hardships, had wandered up from Africa over the last million years, had battled through the Ice Ages, suddenly found the ground flowering and the animals surrounding him, and moved into a different life. It is usually called the agricultural revolution.
• This creature that had roamed and marched for a million years had to make a crucial decision: whether he would cease to be a nomad and become a villager. Civilization can never grow up on the move.
• The role of women in nomad tribes is to produce men-children, and prepare food and clothing. Everything has to be light enough to be carried, and quickly packed and unpacked each day. It is not possible in the nomad life to make things that will not be needed for several weeks.
• Every night is the end of a day like the last, and every morning will be the beginning of a journey like the day before. When the old cannot cross the next river, they stay behind and die.
• The largest single step in the ascent of man is the change from nomad to village agriculture. In the burst of new vegetation at the end of the Ice Age, a hybrid wheat appeared in the Middle East, with large, full heads of seeds.
• For such a hybrid to be fertile is rare and it was followed by a second genetic accident. Emmer crossed with natural goat grass to produce bread wheat. Bread wheat would not have been fertile but for a specific genetic mutation on one chromosome.
• In the ancient city of Jericho wheat and water came together and man began civilization, becoming the envy of their neighbors. Excavation reveals layer upon layer of past civilization: the early pre-pottery men, the next pre-pottery men, the coming of pottery 7,000 years ago; early copper, early bronze, middle bronze.
• Each of these civilizations came, conquered Jericho, buried it, and built itself up. Jericho is a microcosm of history.
• When I was a young man, we all thought that mastery came from man’s domination of his physical environment. Now we know that real mastery comes from understanding and moulding the living environment.
• That is how man began in the Fertile Crescent when he put his hand on plant and animal and, in learning to live with them, changed the world to his needs.
• By 6000 BC Jericho was a large agricultural settlement, containing 3000 people, covering eight to ten acres within the walls.
• The Red Sea and the Dead Sea lie along a continuation of the Great Rift Valley of east Africa. Here two of the plates that carry the continents as they float on the denser mantle of the earth ride side by side.
• Earthquakes have always erupted along the axis on which the Dead Sea lies. And in my view that is why the Bible is full of memories of natural miracles: some ancient flood, some running dry of the Red Sea, the Jordan running dry, and the walls of Jericho falling down.
• Farming and husbandry seem simple pursuits, but the Natufian sickle is a signal to show us that they do not stand still. Every stage in the domestication of plant and animal life requires inventions, which begin as technical devices and from which flow scientific principles. Settled agriculture creates a technology from which all physics, all science takes off.
• At first glance the sickle of 10,000 years ago of the gatherer and the sickle of 9,000 years ago when wheat was cultivated look very much alike. But look more closely. The cultivated wheat is sawed with a serrated edge: because if you hit the wheat, then the grains will fall to the ground; but if you gently saw it, the grains will be held in the ear of the corn.
• The most powerful invention in all agriculture is the plough, one of the first applications of the principle of the lever. It is a lever which lifts the soil.
• When, long afterwards, Archimedes explained the theory of the lever to the Greeks, he said that with a fulcrum for the lever he could move the earth. But thousands of years before that the ploughmen of the Middle East had been saying ‘Give me a lever and I will feed the earth.
• The wheel is found for the first time before 3000 BC in what is now southern Russia. From then on the wheel becomes the double root from which invention grows.
• Mechanical engineers turned the wheel into a pulley to draw water, allowing large-scale irrigation systems. This led to laws governing water rights, land tenure and other social relations.
• A machine is a device for tapping the power in nature. A machine increases the surplus that man has won from nature. How is it that the machine in its modern form now seems to us a threat? The conflict in the scale of power goes back all the way to that formative time in human history.
• Around 2000 BC men discovered how to ride a horse. The rider is more than a man: he is head-high above others, and he moves with bewildering power so that he bestrides the living world.
• We cannot hope to recapture today the terror that the mounted horse struck into the Middle East and Eastern Europe when it first appeared. That is because there is a difference of scale that I can only compare with the arrival of tanks in Poland in 1939, sweeping all before them.
• Genghis Khan was a nomad and the inventor of a powerful war machine, bringing a thieving way of life into our own millennium. From AD 1200 to 1300 they made almost the last attempt to establish the supremacy of the robber who produces nothing and who, in his feckless way, takes the peasant surplus that agriculture accumulates.
• When they conquered the Muslims, they became Muslims. They became settlers because theft, war, is not a permanent state that can be sustained.
• The 5^th of the heirs in succession to Genghis Khan was the sultan Oljeitu who attempted to establish a world court, gathering from the four corners of the world the cultures, mixed them together, and sent them out again to fertilize the earth.
• Agriculture and the settled way of life were established steps now in the ascent of man, and had set a new level for a form of human harmony which was to bear fruit into the far future: the organization of the city.

 

Chapter 3: The Grain in the Stone