The Ascent of Man Part 1

Book Review

THE ASCENT OF MAN

 JACOB BROWNOWSKI

MACDONALD FUTURA PUBLISHERS                        1973

PART I

 

Dr Bronowski’s magnificent thirteen-part BBC television series The Ascent of Man traced our rise – both as a species and as moulders of our environment and future. The book of the programmes covers the history of science, but of science in the broadest terms. Invention from the flint tool to geometry, from the arch to the theory of relativity, are shown to be the expression of man’s specific ability to understand nature, to control it, not to be controlled by it. Dr Bronowski’s rare grasp not only of science, but also of its historical and social context, gave him great advantages as an historian of ideas. The book gives us a new perspective not just on science, but on civilization.

 

Foreword by J.B. August 1973

• The first outline of The Ascent of Man was written in July 1969 and the last foot of film was shot in December 1972. There has been a deep change in the temper of science in the last 20 years: the focus of attention has shifted from the physical to the life sciences. As a result, science is drawn more and more to the study of individuality.
• The interested spectator is hardly aware yet how far-reaching the effect is in changing the image of man that science moulds. As a mathematician trained in physics, I too would have been unaware, had not a series of lucky chances taken me into the life sciences in middle age.
• I owe a debt for the good fortune that carried me into two seminal fields of science in one lifetime; and though I do not know to whom the debt is due, I conceived The Ascent of Man in gratitude to repay it.
• The BBC invited me to present the development of science in a series of television programmes to match those of Lord Clark on Civilization.
• The content of these essays is wider than the field of science, and I should not have called them The Ascent of Man had I not had in mind other steps in our cultural evolution too.
• My ambition here has been to create a philosophy for the 20^th century which shall be all of one piece. This series presents a philosophy rather than a history, and a philosophy of nature rather than of science. Its subject is a contemporary version of what used to be called Natural Philosophy.
• In my view, we are in a better frame of mind today to conceive a natural philosophy than at any time in the last 300 years. This is because the recent findings in human biology have given a new direction to scientific thought, a shift from the general to the individual, for the first time since the Renaissance opened the door into the natural world.
• There cannot be a philosophy, there cannot even be a decent science, without humanity. I hope that sense of affirmation is manifest in this book. For me, the understanding of nature has as its goal the understanding of human nature, and of the human condition within nature.

 

Chapter 1: Lower Than The Angels

• Man has a set of gifts which make him unique among the animals; he is a shaper of the landscape. In body and mind he is the explorer of nature, the ubiquitous animal, who did not find but has made his home in every continent.
• Every landscape in the world is full of exact and beautiful adaptations, by which an animal fits into its environment like one cog-wheel into another. But nature – that is biological evolution – has not fitted man to any specific environment.
• Man has a rather crude survival kit; and yet – this is the paradox of the human condition – one that fits him to all environments. Man is the only one who is not locked into his environment.
• His imagination, his reason, his emotional subtlety and toughness, make it possible for him, not to accept the environment but to change it.
• That series of inventions, by which man from age to age has remade his environment, is a cultural revolution. I call that brilliant sequence of cultural peaks The Ascent of Man.
• I use the word ascent with a precise meaning. Man is distinguished from other animals by his imaginative gifts. He makes plans, inventions, and discoveries by putting different talents together. Great discoveries of different ages and different cultures, in technique, in science, in the arts, express in their progression a richer and more intricate conjunction of human faculties, an ascending trellis of his gifts.
• We have cause to be proud of some modern work; think of the unraveling of the code of heredity in the DNA spiral.
• Yet to admire only our own successes, would make a caricature of knowledge. The sophisticated arithmetic that the Mayan astronomers invented; the stonework of Machu Picchu; and the geometry of Alhambra in Moorish Spain were as arresting and important for their peoples as the architecture of DNA is for us.
• In every age there is a turning-point, a new way of seeing and asserting the coherence of the world. Each culture tries to fix its visionary moment, when it is transformed by a new conception either of nature or of man.
• Splitting and fusing the atom both derive, conceptually, from a discovery made in prehistory: that stone and all matter has a structure along which it can be split and put together again in new arrangements. And man-made biological inventions such as the domestication of wheat and taming and then riding the horse, almost as early.
• In following the turning-points and the continuities of culture, what interests me is the history of man’s mind as an unfolding of his different talents. These essays are a journey through intellectual history to the high points of man’s achievement.
• Man ascends by discovering the fullness of his own gifts, talents and faculties and what he creates on the way are monuments to the stages in his understanding of nature and of self.
• Charles Darwin pointed the way with The Origin of Species in 1859, and then in his book of 1871, The Descent of Man.
• The East African Rift Valley is the birthplace of man where 4 million years of history reveal the remains of early man and of the animals that lived at the same time.
• Animals have changed but little, but the ancestor of man 2 million years ago would not recognize the hunter today as his own descendant.
• Human evolution began when the African climate changed to drought. The environment exacts a price for the survival of the fittest; it captures them. Animals well adapted to the dry savannah stayed where they were, much as they were.
• When man put his foot on the ground and walked upright he made a commitment to a new integration of life and therefore limbs. Of all human organs the head has undergone the most far-reaching and formative changes.
• For me, the little Australopithecus baby has a personal history. In 1950 I was asked to do a piece of mathematics; could I combine a measure of the size of the Taung child’s teeth with their shape, so as to discriminate them from the teeth of apes?
• I had never held a fossil skull in my hands, and I was by no means an expert on teeth. But it worked pretty well; and it transmitted to me a sense of excitement which I remember at this instant.
• I, at over 40, having spent a lifetime in doing abstract mathematics about the shapes of things, suddenly saw my knowledge reach back 2 million years and shine a searchlight into the history of man.
• From that moment I was totally committed to thinking about what makes man what he is: in the scientific work that I have done since then, the literature that I have written, and in these programmes.
• How did the hominids come to be the kind of man that I honour: dexterous, observant, thoughtful, passionate, able to manipulate in the mind the symbols of language and mathematics, the visions of art and geometry and poetry and science?
• How did the ascent of man take him from those animal beginnings to that rising enquiry into the workings of nature, that rage for knowledge, of which these essays are one expression?
• I do not know how the Taung baby began life, but to me it still remains the primordial infant from which the whole adventure of man began.
• The human baby, the human being, is a mosaic of animal and angel. Every human action goes back in some part to our animal origins. But what are the physical gifts that man must share with the animals, and what are the gifts that make him different?
• The head is more than a symbolic image of man; it is the seat of foresight and the spring that drives the cultural revolution. Therefore if I am to take the ascent of man back to its beginnings in the animal, it is the evolution of the head and the skull that has to be traced.
• Unhappily, over the fifty million years to be talked about, there are only six or seven essentially distinct skulls which we can identify as stages in man’s evolution. We must conjecture what happened by interpolating between the known skulls.
• The best way to calculate these geometrical transitions from skull to skull is on a computer; so that, in order to trace the continuity, I present them on a computer with a visual display which will lead from one to the next.
• The fossil lemur has some essential marks of the primates, that is, the family of monkey, ape and man. It has in the skull two features that really mark the way to the beginning of man.
• The snout is short; the eyes are large and widely spaced. That means that there has been a selection against the sense of smell and in favour of the sense of vision.
• The eye-sockets are still rather sideways in the skull, on either side of the snout; but compared with the eyes of earlier insect eaters, the lemur’s have begun to move to the front and to give some stereoscopic vision.
• There are small signs of an evolutionary development towards the sophisticated structure of the human face; and yet, from that, man begins.
• That was 50 million years ago in very round figures. The next creature on the main line, 30 million years ago, was the fossil skull named Aegyptopithecus. He has a shorter snout than the lemur, his teeth are ape-like, and he is larger – yet still lives in the trees. But from now on the ancestors of the apes and man spent part of their time on the ground.
• Another 10 million years on takes us to 20 million years ago, when there were what we should now call anthropoid apes in East Africa, Europe and Asia. A classical find made by Louis Leakey goes by the dignified name of Proconsul and there was at least one other widespread genus, Dryopithecus.
• The brain is markedly larger, the eyes are now fully forward in stereoscopic vision. These developments tell us how the main ape-and-man line was moving.
• It is the change in the teeth that signals the separation of the line that leads to man, when it comes. The first harbinger that we have is Ramapithecus, found in Kenya and in India.
• This creature is 14 million years old, and we only have pieces of the jaw. But it is clear that the teeth are level and more human. Some anthropologists would boldly put Ramapithecus among the homonids.
• Then there is a blank in the fossil record of five to ten million years, hiding the most intriguing part of the story, when the hominid line to man is firmly separated from the line to the modern apes.
• But we have found no unequivocal record of that, yet. Then, perhaps five million years ago, we come certainly to the relatives of man.
• A cousin of man, not in the direct line to us, is a heavily-built Australopithecus who is a vegetarian.  Australopithecus robustus is man-like and his line does not lead elsewhere; it has simply become extinct. The evidence that he lived on plants is again in his teeth, and it is quite direct: the teeth that survive are pitted by the fine grit that he picked up with the roots that he ate.
• His cousin on the line to man is lighter – visibly so in the jaw – and is probably a meat-eater. He is the nearest thing we have to what used to be called the ‘missing link’: Australopithecus africanus, one of a family of fossil skulls found at Sterkfontein in the Transvaal and elsewhere in Africa, a fully grown female.
• The Taung child, with which I began, would have grown up to be like her; fully erect, walking, and with a largish brain weighing between a pound and a pound and a half. That is the size of the brain of a big ape now; but of course this was a small creature standing only four feet high.
• With that larger brain the ancestors of man made two major inventions: rudimentary stone tools, releasing the brake which the environment imposes on all other creatures. The other invention is social, and we infer it by more subtle arithmetic.
• Skulls and skeletons of Australopithecus show that most of them died before the age of 20, meaning that there must have been many orphans as all the primates have long childhoods. Therefore there must have been a social organization in which children were looked after, adopted, made part of the community and educated. That is a great step towards cultural evolution.
• Two million years ago we were not yet men. One million years ago we were, because by one million years ago a creature appears who can be called Homo – Homo erectus.
• He spreads far beyond Africa. The classical find of Homo erectus was made in China. He is Peking man, about 400,000 years old, and he is the first creature that certainly used fire.