t .

ALSO BY RONALD WRIGHT

A SHORT HISTORY
FICTION OF PROGRESS
Henderson's Spear
A Scientific Romance ~ RONALD WRIGHT

HISTORY

Stolen Continents: Conquest and Resistance

in the Americas

TRAVEL AND ARCHAEOLOGY

Time Among the Maya

On Fiji Islands
eilt Stones and Crossroads: A JOllrney in Peru

ESSAYS

Home and Away

,.

ANAN~I

lbb'f
 t .

GAUGUIN'S QUESTIONS

THE FRENCH PAINTER and writer Paul Gauguin - by

most accoWltsmad, bad, and dangerous to know - suf-
fered acutely from cosmological vertigo induced by the
work of Darwin and other Victorian scientists.
In the 1890S, Gauguin ran away from Paris, family,
and stockbroking career to paint (and bed) native girls in
the tropics. Like many a troubled soul, he could not
escape so easily from himself, despite great efforts to do
so with the help of drink and opium. At the bottom of his
disquiet lay a longing to find what he called the "savage"
- primordial man (and woman), humanity in the raw,
the elusive essence of our kind. This quest eventually
drew him to Tahiti and other South Sea islands, where
traces of a pre-contact world - an unfallen world, in his
eyes -lingered beneath the cross and tricolore.
In 1897,a mail steamer docked at Tahiti bringing terri-
ble news. Gauguin's favourite child, Aline, had died
2 A SHORT HISTORY OF PROGRESS Gallguin's Questions 3

suddenly from pneumonia. After months of illness, t .Our civilization, which subsumes most of its prede-
poverty, and suicidal despair, the artist harnessed his cessors, is a great ship steaming at speed into the future. It
grief to produce a vast painting - more a mural in con- travels faster, further, and more laden than any before. We
ception than a canvas I - in which, like the Victorian age may not be able to foresee every reef and hazard, but by
itself, he demanded new answers to the riddle of exis- reading her compass bearing and headway, by under-
tence. He wrote the title boldly on the image: three standing her design, her safety record, and the abilities of
childlike questions, simple yet profound. "D'Où Venons her crew, we can, I think, plot a wise course between the
Nous? Que Sommes Nous? Où Allons Nous?" Where do we narrows and bergs looming ahead.
come from? What are we? Where are we going? And I believe we must do this without delay, because
The work is a sprawling panorama of enigmatic fig- there are too many shipwrecks behind us. The vessel we
ures amid scenery that might be the groves of heathen are now aboard is not merely the biggest of all time; it is
Tahiti or an unruly Garden of Eden: worshippers or also the only one left. The future of everything we have
gods; cats, birds, a resting goat; a great idol with a serene accomplished since our intelligence evolved will depend
expression and uplifted hands seeming to point at on the wisdom of our actions over the next few years.
the beyond; a central figure plucking fruit; an Eve, the Like aU creatures, humans have made their way in the
mother of mankind, who is not a voluptuous innocent world so far by trial and error; unlike other creatures, we
like other women in Gauguin's work but a withered hag have a presence so colossal that error is a luxury we can
with a piercing eye inspired by a Peruvian mummy. no longer afford. The world has grown too small to for-
Another figure turns in amazement to a young human give us any big mistakes.
pair who, as the artist wrote, "dare to consider their
destiny."2 Despite certain events of the twentieth century, most peo-
Gauguin's third question - Where are we going? - is ple in the Western cultural tradition still believe in the
what I want to address in this book. It may seem unan- Victorian ideal of progress, a belief succinctly defined by
swerable. Who can foretell the human course through the historian Sidney Pollard in 1968 as "the assumption
time? But I think we can answer it, in broad strokes, by that a pattern of change exists in the history of mankind
answering the other two questions first. If we see clearly ... that it consists of irreversible changes in one direction
what we are and what we have done, we can recognize only, and that this direction is towards improvement."3
human behaviour that persists through many times and The very appearance on earth of creatures who can frame
cultures. Knowing this can teUus what we are likely to do, such a thought suggests that progress is a law of nature:
where we are likely to go from here. the mammal is swifter than the reptile, the ape subtler

I
le
 A SHORT HISTORY OF PROGRESS Gauguin's Questions .5
4

than the ox, and man the cleverest of all. Our technologi- r The myth of progress has sometimes served us well-
cal culture measures human progress by technology: the those of us seated at the best tables, anyway - and may
club is better than the fist, the arrow better than the dub, continue to do so. But I shall argue in this book that it has
the bullet better than the arrow. We came to this belief for also become· dangerous. Progress has an intemal logic
empirical reasons: because it delivered. that can lead beyond reason to catastrophe. A seductive
Pollard notes that the idea of material progress is a trail of successes may end in a trap.
very recent one - "significant only in the past three Take weapons, for example. Ever since the Chinese
hundred years or 50"4 - coinciding closely with the rise invented gunpowder, there has been great progress in the
of science and industry and the corresponding decline of making of bangs: from the firecracker to the cannon, from
traditional beliefs.s We no longer give much thought to the petard to the high explosive shell. And just when high
moral progress - a prime concern of earlier times - explosives were reaching a state of perfection, progress
except to assume that it goes hand in hand with the mate- found the infinitely bigger bang in the atom. But when
rial. Civilized people, we tend to think, not only smell the bang we can make can blow up our world, we have
better but behave better than barbarians or savages. This made rather too much progress.
notion has trouble standing up in the court of history, and Several of the scientists who created the atomic bomb
I shall return to it in the next chapter when considering recognized this in the 19405, telling politicians and others
what is meant by "civilization." that the new weapons had to be destroyed. "The
Our practical faith in progress has ramified and unleashed power of the atom has changed everything
hardened into an ideology - a secular religion which, save our modes of thinking," Albert Einstein wrote, "and
like the religions that progress has challenged, is blind we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophes." And a
to certain flaws in its credentials. Progress, therefore, has few years later, President Kennedy said, "If mankind
become "myth" in the anthropological sense. By this I does not put an end to war, war will put an end to
do not mean a belief that is flimsy or untrue. Successful mankind."
myths are powerful and often partly true. As I've writ- When I was a boy, in the 19505, the shadow of too
ten elsewhere: "Myth is an arrangement of the past, much progress in weaponry- of Hiroshima, Nagasaki,
whether real or imagined, in patterns that reinforce a and vaporized Pacific islands - had already fallen over
culture's deepest values and aspirations: ... Myths are the world. It has now darkened our lives for about sixty
so fraught with meaning that we live and die by them. years, and so much has been said on the subject that I
They are the maps by which cultures navigate through needn't add more.' My point here is that weapons tech-
time."6 nology was merely the first area of human progress to
6 A SHORT HISTORY OF PROGRESS Gauguin's Questions 7

reach an impasse by threatening to destroy the planet on tespect, and in the self-interest it obscures, the current
which il developed. ideology of progress resembles the missionary projects of
At the time, this progress trap was seen as an aberra- past empires, whether seventh-eentury Islam, sixteenth·
tion. In all other fields, including those of nuclear power century Spain, or nineteenth-century Britain.
and chemical pesticides, the general faith in progress was
largely unshaken. Advertisements of the 1950Sshowed a Since the Cold War ended, we have held the nuclear genie
smiling "Mrs. 1970," who, having bought the right brand at bay but have not begun to stuff it back in its bottle. Yet
of vacuum cleaner, was enjoying the future in advance. we are busy unleashing other powerful forces - cyber-
Each year's motor car looked different from the previous netics, biotechnology, nanotechnology - that we hope
year's (especially if it wasn't). "Bigger! Wider! Longer!" will be good tools~ but whose consequences we cannot
sang the girls in a jingle, automakers being keen, then as foresee.
now, to sell bigger as better. And peasants were freed The most immediate threat, howcver, may be nothing
from vermin with generous dustings of DDT in what more glamorOl,lsthan our own waste. Like most problems
became known as the Third World - that unravelling with technology, pollution is a problem of scale. The bio-
tapestry of non-Western cultures seen as a relic of "back- sphere might have been able to tolerate our dirty old
wardness" tom between the superpowers. In both its friends coal and oil if we'd burned them gradually. But
capitalist and communist versions, the great promise of how long can it withstand a blaze of consumption so fren-
modernity was progress without limit and without end. zied that the dark side of this planet glows like a fanned
The collapse of the Soviet Union led many to conclude ember in the night of space?
that there was really only one way of progress aftcr all. In Alexander Pope said, rather snobbishly, that a little
1992 Francis Fukuyama, a former U.S. State Department learning is a dangerous thing; Thomas Huxley later
official, declared that capitalism and democracy were the asked, "Where is the man who has so much as to be out of
"end" of history - not only its destination but its goal.8 danger?"9 Technology is addictive. Material progress cre-
Doubters pointed out that capitalism and democracy are ates problems that are - or seem to be - soluble only by
not necessarily bedfellows, citing Nazi Germany, modem further progress. Again, thc devil here is in the scale: a
China, and the worldwide archipelago of sweatshop good bang can be useful; a better bang can end the world.
tyrannies. Yet Fukuyama's naive triumphalism strength- So far I have spoken of such problems as if they were
ened a belief, mainly on the political right, that those who purely modem, arising from industrial technologies. But
have not chosen the true way forward should be made to while progress strong enough to destroy the world is
do so for their own good - by force, if necessary. In this indeed modem, the devil of scalewho transforms benefits
8 A SHORT HISTORY OF PROGRESS Gaugui,¡'s Questions 9

into traps has plagued us since the Stone Age. This devil t Like Gauguin, we often prefer to think of the deep
lives within us and gets out whenever we steal a march on past as innocent and Wlspoiled, a time of ease and simple
nature, tipping the balance between cleverness and reck- plenty before a fall from paradise. The words "Eden" and
lessness, between need and greed. "Paradise" feature prominently in the titles of popular
Palaeolithic hunters who learnt how to kill two mam- books on anthropology and history. For some, Eden was
moths instead of one had made progress. Those who the pre-agricultural world, the age of hunting and gather-
learnt how to kill 200 - by driving a whole herd over a ing; for others, it was the pre-Columbian world, the
cliff - had made too much. They lived high for a while, Americas before the white man; and for many, it was
then starved. the pre-industrial world, the long stillness before the
Many of the great ruins that grace the deserts and machine. Certainly there have been good and bad times
jungles of the earth are monuments to progress traps, to be alive. But the truth is that human beings drove
the headstones of civilizations which fell victim to their themselves out of Eden, and they have done it again and
own success. In the fates of such societies - once again by fouling their own nests. liwe want to live in an
mighty, complex, and brilliant -lie the most instructive earthly paradise, it is up to us to shape it, share it, and
lessons for our own. Their ruins are shipwrecks that look after it.
mark the shoals of progress. Or - to use a more modem
analogy - they are fallen airliners whose black boxes In pondering his first question - Where do we come from?
can tell us what went wrong. In this book, 1want to read - Gauguin might have agreed with G. K. Chesterton,
some of these boxes in the hope that we can avoid who remarked, "Man is an exception, whatever else he is.
repeating past mistakes, of flight plan, crew selection, ... If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can
and design. Of course, our civilization's particulars dif- only say that one of the animals went entirely off its
fer from those of previous ones. But not as much as we head."lo We now know much more about that 5-million-
like to think. All cultures, past and present, are dynamic. year process of an ape going off its head, so it is hard,
Even the most slow-moving were, in the long run, today, to recapture the shock felt around the world when
works in progress. While the facts of each case differ, the the implications of evolutionary theory first became clear.
patterns through time are alarmingly - and encour- Writing in 1600, Shakespeare had Hamlet exclaim,
agingly - similar. We should be alarmed by the I "What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason!
predictability of our mistakes but encouraged that this how infinite in faculty! ... in action how like an angel! in
very fact makes them useful for understanding what I apprehension how like a god!"11His audience would have
we face today. shared Hamlet's mix of wonder, scorn, and irony at
10 A SHORT HISTORY OF PROGRESS Gauguin's Questions 11

human nature. But very few, if any, would have doubted Westerners continued to think they knew what they were
that they were made as the Bible told: "And God said, Let for another 200 years. The rot of rational doubt on the
us make man in our image, after our likeness." matter of our beginnings did not set in until the nine-
They were prepared to overlook theological rough teenth century, when geologists realized that the
spots posed by sex, race, and colour. Was God black or chronology in the Bible could not account for the antiq-
blond? Did he have a navel? And what about the rest of uity they read in rocks, fossils, and sediments. Some
his physical equipment? Such things didn't bear thinking civilizations, notably the Maya and the Hindu, assumed
about too closely. Our kinship with apes, which seems so that time was vast or infinite, but ours always had a petty
obvious now, was unsuspected; apes were seen (if seen, notion of its scale. "The poor world is almost six thou-
which was rarely in Europe in those days) as parodies of sand years old," sighs Rosalind in As YOll Like It,12 a typical
man, not cousins or possible forebears. estimate derived from the patriarchal lifetimes, ''begats,''
If they thought about it at all, most people of 1600 and other clues in the Old Testament. Half a century after
believed that what we now call scientific method would Rosalind's sigh, Archbishop Ussher of Armagh and his
simply open and illuminate the great clockwork set in contemporary John Lightfoot took it upon themselves to
place by Providence, as God saw fit to let humans share pinpoint the very moment of Creation. "Man was created
in admiration of his handiwork. Galileo's troubling by the Trinity," Lightfoot declared, lion October 23, 4004
thoughts about the structure of the heavens were an unex- Re., at nine o'clock in the moming."u
ploded bomb, unproven and unassimilated. (Hamlet still Such precision was new, but the idea of a young earth
subscribes to a pre-Copernican universe, a"brave o'er- had always been essential to the Judaeo-Christian view of
hanging firmament.") The inevitable collision between time as teleological- a short one-way trip from Creation
scriptural faith and empirical evidence was barely to Judgment, from Adam to Doom. Newton and other
guessed at. Most of the really big surprises - the age of thinkers began to voice doubts about this on theoretical
the earth, the origin of animals and man, the shape· and groun'ds, but they had no real evidence or means of test-
scale of the heavens - still lay ahead. Most people of 1600 ing their ideas. Then, in the 1830s, while the young
were far more alarmed by priests and witches than by nat- Charles Darwin was sailing round the world aboard the
ural philosophers, though the lines between these three Beagle, Charles Lyell published his Principles of Geology,
were often unclear. arguing that the earth transformed itself gradually, by
From the biblical definition of man, and the common- processes still at work, and might therefore be as old as
sense principle that it takes one to know one, Hamlet Newton had proposed - some ten times older than the
thinks he knows what a human being is, and most Bible allowed.14
12 A SHORT HISTORY OF PROGRESS Gauguin's Questions 13

Under Queen Victoria, the earth aged quickly - by \thales, gave up walking and went swimming). "Man,"
many millions of years in decades - enough to make wrote H. G. Wells, "is a mere upstart."18
room for Darwin's evolutionary mechanism and the What was extraordinary about human development
growing collection of giant lizards and lowbrowed fossil - the one big thing that set us apart from other creatures
humans being dug up around the world and put on show - was that we "leveraged" natural evolution by devel-
in South Kensington and the Crystal Palace.IS oping cultures transmissible through speech from one
In 1863, Lyell brought out a book called Geological generation to the next. "The human word," Northrop
Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, and in 1871 (twelve Frye wrote in another context, "is the power that orders
years after his Origin of Species), Darwin published Tile our chaos. "19 The effect of this power was unprecedented,
Descent of Man. Their ideas were spread by enthusiastic allowing complex tools, weapons, and elaborate planned
popularizers, above all Thomas Huxley, famous for say- behaviours. Even very simple technology had enormous
ing, in a debate on evolution with Bishop Wilberforce, consequences. Basic clothing and built shelter, for exam-
that he would rather acknowledge an ape for his grand- ple, opened up every climate from the tropics to the
father than be a clergyman careless with the truth.16 tundra. We moved beyond the environments that had
Hamlet's exclamation therefore became a question: made us, and began to make ourselves.
What exactly is a man? Like children who reach an age Though we became experimental creatures of our own
when they're no longer satisfied that a stork brought devising, it's important to bear in mind that we had no
them into the world, a newly educated public began to inkling' of this process, let alone its consequences, until
doubt the old mythology. only the last six or seven of our 100,000 generations. We
By the time Gauguin was painting his masterpiece at have done it all sleepwalking. Nature let a few apes into
the end of the century, the first two of his questions were the lab of evolution, switched on the lights, and left us
getting concrete answers. His compatriot Madame Curie there to mess about with an ever-growing supply of
and others working on radioactivity were uncovering ingredients and processes. The effect on us and the world
nature's timekeepers: elements in rock that break down at has accumulated ever since. Let's list a few steps between
a measurable rate. By 1907, the physicists Boltwood and the earliest times and this: sharp stones, animal skins,
Rutherford could show that the earth's age is reckoned useful bits of bone and wood, wild fire, tame fire, seeds
not in millions of years but in billions.17 Archaeology for eating, seeds for planting, houses, villages, pottery,
showed that the genus Homo was a latecomer, even cities, metals, wheels, explosives. What strikes one most
among mammals, taking shape long after early pigs, cats, ¡
forcefully is the acceleration, the runaway progression of
and elephants began walking the earth (or, in the case of change - or to put it another way, the collapsing of time.

1
14 A SHORT HISTORY OF PROGRESS Gauguin's Questions 15

From the first chipped stone to the first smelted iron took ~ythoJogy, one vocabulary, one set of stories; things were
nearly 3 million years; from the first iron to the hydrogen just the way they were.
bomb took only 3,000. It is possible to imagine exceptions to what I have just
said. The generation that saw the first use of fire, for
The Old Stone Age, or Palaeolithic era, lasted from the instance, was perhaps aware that its world had changed.
appearance of toolmaking hominids, nearly 3 million But we can't be sure how quickly even that Promethean
years ago, until the melting of the last ice age, about discovery took hold. Most likely, fire was used, when
12,000 years ago. It spans more than 99.5 per cent avaiiable from wildfires and volcanoes, for a long time
of human existence. During most of that time, the pace of before it was kept. And then it was kept for a very long
change was so slow that entire cultural traditions time before anyone Jearnt it could be made. Some may
(revealed mainly by their stone tool kits) replicated remember the 1981 film Quest for Fire, in which the lithe
themselves, generation after generation, almost identi- figure of Rae Dawn Chong scampers about in nothing but
cally over staggering periods of time. It might take a thin layer of mud and ashes. The film was based on a
100,000 years for a new style or technique to be devel- novel published in 1911 by the Belgian writer J. H.
oped; then, as culture began to ramify and feed on itself, Rosny.20Rosny's original title was La Guerre du Feu - The
only 10,000; then mere thousands and centuries. Cultural War for Fire - and the book, more than the film, explores
change begat physical change and vice versa in a feed- deadly competition between various human groups to
back loop. monopolize fire in much the same way that modern
Nowadays we have reached such a pass that the skills nations try to monopolize nuclear weapons. Throughout
and mores we learn in childhood are outdated by the time the hundreds of centuries when our ancestors tended a
we're thirty, and few people past fifty can keep up with flame but could not make one, putting out their rivals'
their culture - whether in idiom, attitudes, taste, or tech- campfire in an Ice Age winter would have been a deed of
nology - even if they try. But I am getting ahead in the mass murder.
story. Most people living in the Old Stone Age would not The first taming of fire is hard to date. All we know is
have noticed any cultural change at all. The human world that people were using fire by at least half a million years
that individuals entered at birth was the same as the one ago, possibly twice that.~JThis was the time of Homo erec-
they left at death. There was variation in events, of course tus, the "upright man," who was much like us from the
- feasts, famines, local triumphs and disasters - but the neck down, but whose braincase had only about two-
patterns within each society must have seemed thirds the modern capacity. Anthropologists are still
immutable. There was just one way to do things, one debating when Homo erectus first appeared and when he

,
~
 i. Gauguin's Questions
16 A SHORT HISTORY OF PROGRESS

and she were superseded, which is largely a matter of the reliable food supply. Burning of undergrowth
defining that evolutionary stage. Scholars are even more extended grazing lands for game. It is now recognized
divided on how well erectus could think and speak. that many supposedly wild landscapes inhabited
Modem apes, whose brains are much smaller than down to historic times by hunter-gatherers - the North
those of erectus, use simple tools, have wide ~owledge of American prairies and the Australian outback, for
medicinal plants, and can recognize themselves in a mir- instance - were shaped by deliberate fire-setting.22
ror. Studies using non-verbal language (computer "Man," wrote the great anthropologist and writer Loren
symbols, sign language, etc.) show that apes can employ a Eiseley, "is himself a flame. He has burned through the
vocabulary of several hundred "words," though there is animal world and appropriated its vast stores of protein
disagreement on what this ability says about apecommu- for his own."23
nication in the wild. It is clear that different groups of the About the last big thing the experts agree on is that
same species - for example, chimps in separate parts of Homo erectus originated in Africa, the home of all early
Africa - have different habits and traditions, passed on to hom in ids, and by a million years ago was living in
the young just as in human groups. Inshort, apes have the several temperate and tropical zones of the "Old World,"
beginnings of culture. So do other intelligent creatures, the contiguous Eurasian landmass. This is not to say the
such as whales, elephants, and certain birds, but no Upright Man was thick on the ground, even after
species except humankind has reached the point at which he tamed fire. Perhaps fewer than 100,000 people, scat-
culture becomes the main driver of an evolutionary surge, tered in family bands, were all that stood between
outrunning environmental and physical constraints. evolutionary failure and the 6 billion of us here today.24
The blbodlines of man and ape split about 5 million After Homo erectus the evolutionary path gets muddy,
years ago, and as I mentioned, hominids making crude trodden into a mire by rival tribes of anthropologists. One
stone tools appeared some 2 million years later. It would camp, that of the "multiregional" hypothesis, sees Homo
therefore be foolish to underestimate the skills of Homo erectus evolving by fits and starts into modem humanity
erectus, who, by the time he was toasting his callused feet wherever he happened to be through gene diffusion, oth-
at a campfire half a million years ago, was nine-tenths erwise known as mating with strangers. This view seems
of the way along the road from an ancestral ape to us. to fit well with many of the fossil finds but less well with
With the taming of fire came the first spike on the graph some interpretations of DNA. Another camp - the "Out
of human numbers. Fire would have made life much eas- of Africa" school- sees most evolutionary change taking
ier in many environments. Pire kept caves warm and big place on that continent, then erupting over the rest of the
2S
predators away. Cooking and smoking greatly increased world. In this second view, successive waves of new and
18 A SHORT HISTORY OF PROGRESS Gauguin's Questions

improved humans kill off, or, at any rate, outcompete, dragging breed. H. G. Wellscalled them the "Grisly Folk"
their forerunners wherever they find them, until all the and made an unflattering guess at how they might have
lowbrows are gone. This theory implies that each new looked: "an extreme hairiness, an ugliness ... a repulsive
wave of African man was a separate species, unable to strangeness in his ... low forehead, his beetle brows, his
breed with other descendants of the previous kind - ape neck, and his inferior stature."27Many have claimed
which may be plausible if different types evolved. without that Neanderthals were cannibals, which could be true,
contact for long periods but is less likely over shorter for so are we - later humans have a long record of canni-
spans of time.26 balism, right down to modern times.2S
The first Neanderthal skeleton was unearthed in 1856
The debate over the path of human progress gets most from a cave in a valley near Düsseldorf, Germany. The
heated when we reach our controversial cousins, the place had been named after the composer Joachim
Neanderthals. These li.ved mainly in Europe and north- Neumann, who had rather affectedly rendered his sur-
west Asia in quite recent times - well within the last name into Greek as "Neander." Englished, Neanderthal is
one-twentieth of the human journey. A Neanderthal simply "Newmandale." Fitting enough: a new man had
Gauguin, thawed out from a receding glacier today, indeed come to light in the dale, a new man at least 30,000
might wake up and ask, "Who were we? Where did we years old. Not that Neanderthal Man's seniority was rec-
come from? Where did we go?" The answers would ognized immediately. The French, noting the skull's
depend on whom he approached. Experts cannot even thickness, were inclined to think it had belonged to a
agree on his scientific mune. German. The Germans said it was most likely from a Slav,
In round figures, Neanderthals appear about 130,000 a Cossack mercenary who had crawled into the cave and
years ago and disappear about 100,000 years later. Their .died.29 But just three years later, in 1859, two things hap-
"arrival" date is less certain than their departure, but it pened: Darwin published On the Origin of Species and
seems they evolved at about the same time as early exam- Charles Lyell, visiting the gravels of the River Somme (to
ples of what is thought to be our modem kind - often become infamous, not sixty years later, as a human
called Cro-Magnon, after a rockshelter in the lovely slaughterhouse), recognized chipped flints as weapons
Dordogne region of southern France, where the human from the Ice Age.
fossil record is the richest in the world. Once the scientists of the day had acknowledged that
Ever since they were first identified, Neanderthals the Neanderthalcr wasn't a Cossack, they cast him in the
have been the butt of what I call "palaeo-racism," newly minted role of the "missing link" - that elusive
lampooned as cartoon cavemen, a subhuman, knuckle- creature loping halfway across the evolutionary page
20 A SHORT HISTORY OF PROGRESS Gauguin's Questions 21

between an ape and us. The New Man became the right especially cold spells in the Ice Age and Cro-Magnons
man at the right time, the one who, "in his glowering moving north from Africa whenever the climate warmed.
silence and myste~ would show ... the unthinkable: that What is most intecesting is that the material culture of the
humans were animals."JI)It was assumed that he had little two groups, as shown by their artefacts, was identical
or no power of speech, ran like a baboon, and walked on over a span of moce than 50,000 years. Archaeologists
the outsides of his feet. But as morè bones were unearthed find it difficult to say whether any given cave was occu-
and analysed, this view did not stand up. The most "ap~ pied by Neanderthals or Cro-Magnons unless human
like" skeletons were found to be sufferers from bone is found with the tools. I take this as strong evidence
osteoarthritis, severely crippled individuals who had evi- that the two groups had very similar mental and lin-
dently been supported for years by their community. guistic capabilities, that neither was more primitive or
Evidence also came to light that the "grisly folk" had not "less evolved."
only cared for their sick but also buried their dead with No Neanderthal flesh, skin, or hair has yet come to
religious rites - with flowers and ochre and animal light, so we can't say whether these people were brown or
horns - the first people on earth known to do so. And blond, hairy as Esau or smooth as Jacob. Nor do we know
last but not least~the Neanderthal brain turned out to be much about the Cro-Magnons' superficial appearance,
bigger than our own. Perhaps Homo neanderthalensis was though genetic studies suggest that most modern
really not so brutish after all. Perhaps he deserved to be Europeans may be descended from them.32 Weknow these
promoted to a subspecies of modern man: Homo sapiens populations only by their bones. Both were roughly the
neanderthalensis. And if that were so, the two variants same height, between five and six feet tall with the usual
could, by definition, have interbred.3\ variation between sexes. But one was built for strength
Before the two began to compete in Europe, the Cro- and the other for speed. The Neanderthal was heavy-
Magnons lived south of the Mediterranean and the set and brawny, like a professional weightlifter or wrestler.
Neanderthals north. Then as now, the Middle East was a The Cro-Magnon was slighter and more gracile, a track
crossroads. Dwelling sites in that turbulent region show athlete rather than a bodybuilder. It is hard to know how
occupation by both Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons far these differences were innate, and how much they
beginning about 100,000 years ago. We can't tell whether reflected habitat and lifestyle. In 1939, the anthropologist
they ever lived there at exactly the same times, let alone Carleton Coon drew an amusing reconstruction of a
whether they shared the Holy Land harmoniously. Most Neanderthal cleaned up, shaved, and dcessed in a fedora,
likely their arrangement was a kind of time-share, jacket, and tie. Such a man, Coon remarked, might pass
with Neanderthals moving south out of Europe during unnoticed on the New Yorksubway.
 I
22 A SHORT HISTORY OF PROGRESS I Gauguin's Questions
I
As such analogies suggest, the variation between thousand years of living with intense cold, beside the
Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon skeletons does not fall far I 100,000 during which Europe's Neanderthals made their
outside the range of modern humans. Put side by side, living on the front lines of the Ice Age.
the bony remains of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Woody Things seem to have gone well enough for them until
Allen might exlúbit a similar contrast. The skull, however, Cro-Magnons began moving north and west from the
is another matter. The so-called classic Neanderthal Middle East, about 40,000 years ago. Until then, the cold
(which is a rather misleading term because it is self- had been the Neanderthals' great ally, always turning
fulfilling, based on the more pronounced examples) had invaders back sooner or later, like the Russian winter. But
a long, low skull with strong brow ridges in front and a this time the Cro-Magnons came to stay. The invasion
bony ledge across the nape of the neckí the Neanderthal seems to have coincided with climatic instability linked
"bun" or "chignon." The jaw was robust, with strong to sudden reversals of ocean currents that caused freezing
teeth and a rounded chin; the nose was broad and pre- and thawing of the North Atlantic in upsets as short as a
sumably squat. At first glance the design looks archaic, decade.J4 Such sharp changes - severe as the worst pre-
much the same architecture as that of Homo erectlls. But- dictions we now have for global warming - would have
as noted - the Neanderthal brain was bigger on average devastated animal and plant communities on which the
than the Cro-Magnon. Coon's subway rider had a thick Neanderthals depended. We know that they ate a lot of
skull but not necessarily a thick head. big game, which they hunted by ambush - breaks in
What this adds up to, I think, is that the supposedly their bones are similar to those sustained by rodeo cow-
archaic characteristics of the Neanderthal were in fact an boys, showing they went in close for the kill. And we
overlay of cold-climate adaptations on an essentially know that they were not usually nomadic, occupying the
modem human frame. J3 The high foreheads of modern same caves and valleys year-round. Humans in general
people can get so chilled that the brain is damaged, and have been called a "weed species," thriving in disrupted
icy air can freeze the lungs. The Neanderthal brain was environments, butof these two groups, the Neanderthals
sheltered by the massive brows and the low, yet roomy, were the more rooted. The Cro-Magnons were the inva-
vault. Air entering Neanderthal lungs was ~armed by sive briars. Climate change would have made life difficult
the broad nose, and the whole face had a better blood for everyone, of course, but unstable conditions could
supply. Thickset, brawny people do not lose body heat as have given the edge to the less physically specialized,
quickly as slender people. Signs of similar adaptation (in weaker at close quarters but quicker on their feet.
body shape, at least) can be seen among modem Inuit, I remember seeing a cartoon when I was a schoolboy
Andeans, and Himalayans - and this after only a few - I think it may have been in Punch - showing three or
 A SHORT HISTORY OF PROGRESS Gauguin's Questions

four bratty Neanderthal children standing on a cliff, tabout ancient people but about ourselves. If it turns out
badgering their father: "Daddy, Daddy! Can we go and that the Neanderthals disappeared because they were an
throw rocks at the Cro-Magnons today?" For about ten evolutionary dead end, we can merely shrug and blame
millennia, from 40,000 to 30,000 years ago, the late natural selection for their fate. But if they were in fact a
Neanderthals and the early Cro-Magnons probably did variant or race of modem man, then we must admit to
throw rocks at each other, not to mention dousing camp- ourselves that their death may have been the first geno-
fires, stealing game, and perhaps seizing women and cide. Or, worse, not the first -:- merely the first of which
children. At the end of that unimaginably long struggle, evidence survives. It may follow from this that we are
Europe and the whole world belonged to our kind, and descended from a million years of ruthless victories,
the "classic" Neanderthal was gone forever. But what genetically predisposed by the sins of our fathers to do
really happened? Did the Neanderthal line die out, or likewise again and again. As the anthropologist Milford
was it to some degree assimilated? Wolpoff has written on this period: "You can't imagine
The lo,ooo-year struggle was so gradual that it may one human population replacing another except through
have been scarcely perceptible - a fitful, inconclusive violence."36 No, you can't - especially on the blood-
war with land lost and won at the rate of a few miles in a stained earth of Europe, amid Stone Age forebodings of
lifetime. Yet, like all wars, it sparked innovation. New the final solution and the slaughter of the Somme.
tools and weapons appeared, new clothing and rituals, In the aftermath of the Second World War, William
the beginnings of cave painting (an art form that would Golding explored ancient genocide in his extraordinary
reach its height during the last great fling of the Ice Age, novel The Inheritors. With wonderful assurance, Golding
after the classic Neanderthals had gone). We also know takes the reader inside the minds of an wmamed group of
that cultural contact went both ways. Late Neanderthal early humans. The book's epigraph, from Wells, invokes
sites in France show change and adaptation at a pace Neanderthals, though the anthropological specifics fit bet-
never seen before. Bythen, near the end, the war's impli-
lS
ter with much earlier stages of mankind. Golding's folk
cations must have become dreadfully clear. It seems that are gentle, naive, chimp-like woodland dwellers. They eat
the last Neanderthal bands held out in the mountains of no meat except the leavings ofbig predators; they are poor
Spain and Yugoslavia, driven like Apaches into rougher speakers, using telepathy as much as language; they have
and rougher terrain. fire but few weapons, and have never suspected there is
If the warfare picture I have sketched has any truth to anyone else in the world except themselves.
it, then we face unpalatable conclusions. This is what Yet Golding's' anachronisms don't matter: his people
makes the Neanderthal debate so emotional: it is not only may not fit any particular set of bones from the real past,
 A SHORT HISTORY OF PROGRESS Gauguin's Questions

but they stand for many.·In the course of a few spring days, ~espite the many details of our ancestry still to be
the forest dwellers are invaded for the first time by people worked out, the twentieth century has broadly answered
like us, who with their boats, bonfires, arrows, raucous the first two of Gauguin's questions. There is no room for
voices, wholesale tree-felling, and drunken orgies baffle rational doubt that we are apes, and that, regardless of
and fascinate the "forest devils" even as they kill them one our exact route through time, we come ultimately from
by one. At the end, only a mewling baby remains, kept by Africa. But unlike other apes, we tamper, and are tamper-
a woman who has lost her own child to drain the milk from ing more than ever, with our destiny. For a long time now,
her breasts. The invaders then move on through the new there has been no such thing as that Enlightenment wild
land, their leader plotting further murders - murders goose which Gauguin sought, the Natural Man. Like
now amongst themselves - as he sharpens a weapon, "a those arthritic Neanderthals who were cared for by their
point against the darkness of the world." , families, we cannot live without our cultures. We have
Golding had no doubt that the ruthless were the win- met the maker of Hamlet's "piece of work" - and it is us.
ners of prehistory, but another question he raised is still
unsettled: Does any Neanderthal blood flow in modem
humans? How likely is it that during 10,000 years of inter-
action, there was no sex, unconsensual though it may
have been? And if there was sex, were there children?
DNA studies on Neanderthal remains have been inconclu-
sive so far.37 But the skeleton of a child found recently in
Portugal strongly suggests interbreeding, as do bones
from Croatia and elsewhere in the Balkans.J8
I also have personal evidence that Neanderthal genes
may still be with us. A few modem people have telltale
ridges on their heads.59 I happen to have one - a bony
shelf across the back of the skull that looks and feels like
the Neanderthal bun. So until new findings come along
to settle the matter, I choose to believe that Neanderthal
blood still flows, however faint, in the Cro-Magnon
tide. co
132 A SHORT HISTORY OF PROGRESS

those past societies. We can see how and why they went t
wrong. Homo sapiens has the information to know itself
for what it is: an Ice Age hunter only half-evolved
towards intelligence; clever but seldom wise.
We are now at the stage when the EasterIslanders
could still have halted the senseless cutting and carv- NOTES
ing, could have gathered the last trees' seeds to plant out
of reach of the rats. We have the tools and the means to
share resources, clean up pollution, dispense basic health
care and birth control, set economic limits in line with
natural ones. If we don't do these things now, while we
prosper, we wiU never be able to do them when times get
hard. Our fate will twist out of our hands. And this new
century will not grow very old before we enter an age of I: Gauguin's Questions
chaos and collapse that will dwarf all the dark ages in 1. Unable to afford real canvas, Gauguin painted his master-
our past. piece on a length of jute sacking.
Now is our last chance to get the future right. 2. Quqted in Gavan Daws, A Dream of Islands (Honolulu:
Mutual Publishing, 1980).
). Sidney Pollard, Tile Idea of Progress: History and Society
(London: C. A. Watts, 1968),p. 9ff.
4. Ibid.
5· Not only religious ones. Victorian archaeology defined
technical advance in terms of metals, but the Classical
world had drawn the opposite conclusion, seeing only a
slide into cheapness and corruptibility - from an age of
gold lo one of bronze and lastly iron.
6. Ronald Wright, Stolen Continents: Conquest and Resistance
In tile Americas (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), p. 5,
7· American Cold Warriors of the last century used to
threaten to "bomb the Soviets back into the Stone Age."
Whether the Russians uttered the same threat, I don't
134 A SHORT HISTORY OF PROGRESS Notes
135

know. But it was certainly a credible one. Even if a nuclear t Doubleday, 1929), pp. 422-23. His co-author Julian Huxley
"exchange" (as the euphemism went) failed to extinguish was a grandson of Darwin's champion, Thomas Huxley.
all higher forms of life, it would have ended civilization 19· Northrop Frye, "Humanities in a New World" in Three
worldwide. No crops worth eating would grow in a Lectures (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1958), p. 23.
nuclear winter. Some experts see speech as quite a recent phenomenon,
8. See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and tite LAst Man but I think it much more likely to have had a very long
(New York: Free Press, 1992). development, gaining complexity in step with the brain.
9. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, 1711j Thomas Many of the differences between ape and human brains
Henry Huxley, On Elementary Instruction in Pltysiology, are in regions that govern aspects of speech. See chapter 2,
1877. note 11, below.
10. Quoted in Rob~rt J. Wenke, Patterns in Prellisfory (Oxford: 20. Rosny was born in Brussels in 1856, worked as journalist
Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 79· in England, and moved in 1886 to Paris, where he became
11. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 2, scene 2. president of the Académie Goncourt.
12. Ibid., As You Like It,act 4, scene 1. 21. A 400,ooo-year-old beach hut at Terra Amata, in southern
IJ. Quoted in Glyn Daniel, The Idea of Prehistory France, seems to have a hearth, while there are "hints of
(Harmondsworth, UK: Pelican, 1962), p. 19· fire use" in Africa from a million years before that. Ian
14. Newton, basing his calculations on the speed at which a Tattersall, The Last Neanderthal: The Rise, Success, and
mass of iron cools down, had already suspected that the Mysterious Extinction of Our Closest Human Relatives (New
earth was at least 50,000 years old, and the eighteenth- York:Westview Press, 1999), p. 72•
century French thinkers Benoit de Maillet and George- 22.See, for example, Loren Eiseley's 1954 essay "Man the
Louis Leclerc de Buffon opted for far greater estimates, Firemaker" in The Star Thrower (New York:Harcourt Brace
but their calculations gained little acceptance. See Martin Jovanovich, 1978), pp. 45-52.
Gorst, Measuring Eternity: Tite Search for the Beginning of 23· Ibid., p. 49.
Time (New York: Broadway Books, 2001), pp. 93-121. 24· Genetic data suggest that at one point, "our species
15. The physicist Lord Kelvin fought a rearguard action on became as endangered as the mountain gorilla is today ...
the grounds that the sun could not be old enough for reduced to only about 10,000 adults." Christopher
Darwin's time scale, but this was widely doubted and Stringer and Robin McKie, African Exodus: The Origins of
eventually disproved. Modern Humanity (New York: Henry Holt/John Macrae,
16. His words were not transcribed at the time. Accounts of 1997), p. 11. At the start of the Upper Palaeolithic, about
what was said differ somewhat but agree on the gist. 35,000 years ago, Stringer estimates that Homosapiens had
17. Gorst, Measuring Eternity, p. 204· "a breeding population of at least 300,000." Ibid., p. 163.
18. H. G. Wells et aI., The Scieuce of Life, vol. 2 (New York: 25· For the Out of Africa hypothesis, see Stringer and McKie,
136 A SHORT HISTORY OF PROGRESS Notes
137

African Exodus. For opposing views, see recent works by r Neanderthal problem, see General Anthropology 7, no. 2
M. Wolroff, G. A. Clark, J. Relethford, and F. H. Smith. For
(Spring 2001), a newsletter published by the American
a balanced overview, see Richard Leakey and Roger Anthropological Association.
Lewin, Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us
JI. Those who take this view use the classification Homo sapiens
HUmJln (New York:Doubleday, 1992). lleanderthalensis for Neanderthals and that of Homo sapiens
26. Animal species as different from one another as horses,
sapiens for Cro-Magnons and other modem humans.
zebras, and donkeys can interbreed, as can lions and
32. Omena Semino and other geneticists conclude that more
tigers, even though the crosses are seldom fertile. The evo-
than 80 per cent of the modem European gene pool has
lutionary gap in such cases is almost certainly wider than
Upper Palaeolithic ancestry, while 20 per cent comes from
between many so-called species of early humans.
Neolithic farmers who arrived much later from the
27. From H. G. Wells, The Outline of History, taken by William
Middle East. See Science, November 10, 2000.
Golding as the epigraph of The Inheritors, 1955. 33· An indicator of this is that early Neanderthal skulls are
28. The case made by W. Arens in The Man-Eating Myth:
generally less robust than later ones. Tattersall, Last
Anthropology and Anthropophagy (New York: Oxford Neanderthal, p. 147.
University Press, 1979)that there are no well-documented
34· Christopher Stringer, "The Evolution of Modem Humans:
cases of cannibalism (except survival cannibalism) does
Where Are We Now?" General Anthropology 7, no. 2
not stand up. While many accusations of the practice (Spring 2001).
were, as he claims, unfounded propaganda from rival eth-
J5· This cultural phase, called the Chatelperronian, is fully
nic groups, there is also abundant hard evidence -
apparent by 36,000 years ago, at Saint-eésaire in western
butchered bone, special utensils, sound ethnographic and
France. Tattersall, Last Neanderthal, p. 145. See also Francis
historical data - for both ritual and gourmet cannibalism,
B. Harold, "The Case Study of the Chatelperronian,"
especially in the Pacific. There are also numerous docu-
General Anthropology 7, no. 2 (Spring 2001). From analysing
mented cases of atrocity cannibalism from European wars
living £Ioors and site structure, Donald Henry and his co-
in Reformation times and African wars between 1960 and
authors conclude that "putative linkages between
the present. [Neanderthal) biology and behaviour ... can be dis-
29. Tattersall, Last Neanderthal, p. 77. A useful book, though
missed" (Donald Henry et al., "Human B'ehavioral
Tattersall holds the view that Neanderthals were a sepa-
Organization in the Middle Paleolithic: Were Neanderthals
rate species with no modem descendants.
Different?" American Anthropologist lOO, no. 1 (March 2004):
30. Erik Trinkaus and Pat Shipman, The NeandertlU11s:Changing
29); they find no reason to think that Neanderthal and Cro-
the Image of Mankind (New York: Knopf( 1993),p. 6. These Magnon groups differed in cognitive ability.
authors give a good summary of the conflicting evidence.
36. Quoted in Leakey and Lewin, Origins Reconsidered, p. 280ff
For a more recent discussion of human origins and the (caption to plate 4).
 A SHORT HISTORY OF PROGRESS Notes
139

37. The studies were based on partial sequences from poorly .t out the Ice Age, yet people got there by island-hopping
preserved material. See John H. Relethford, "New Views 40,000 to 60,000 years ago.
on Neanderthal DNA," General Anthropology 7, no. 2 2. This event, which happened 65 million years ago, was
(Spring 2001). probably the fifth of ils kind. Since complex life appeared,
38. The Portuguese sile is Lagar Velho and the bones are the earth seems to have averaged one cosmic bombshell
about 24,000 years old. every hundred million years. Many scientists regard the
39. Trinkaus and Shipman (Neanderthals, p. 415) write that in human impact on the biosphere as the beginning of a
central Europe, "there is abundant evidence of continuous "sixth extinction." See, for example, Rees, Our Filial
evolution, genetic admixture and interbreeding between Century, p. loof£.
resident Neanderthals and the early modem humans who 3· The double sapiens is used by those who believe that
were filtering in slowly from the Levant." See a curiously Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons were variants within the
moving memoir by Loren Eiseley (Star Thrower, same species - see chapter 1. If 30 to 35 billion is the total
pp. 13~152) for his eloquent conviction that Neanderthals of humans and hominids who have ever lived, at least
are still among us. Tattersall, who holds the view that 20-25 billion of these lived in civilized societies during the
Neanderthals were an entirely separate species, writes past three millennia. In other words, two-thirds of us (or
that the Neanderthal bun (the occipital torus) and its asso- more) have lived during the last one thousandth of the
ciated valley (the suprainiac depression) are features human career, and about a fifth or sixth of aU are living
"unique to Neanderthals" (Tattersall, Last Neanderthal, now.
p. 118). But I have one all the same. 4· A few exceptions to the farming definition can be argued
40. In a similar way, many descendants of American Indians, for regions where wild food resources were unusually
Australian Aboriginals, Africans, and other displaced plentiful and predictable. The best historic example of a
people are submerged in "white" populations largely nascent civilization without agriculture is the Northwest
unaware of their mixed ancestry. coast of North America, bul such cases may have been
more numerous in the distant pasl. Scholars used lo insist
Il: The Great E.xperiment on specific criteria, such as writing, when defining the state
1. Evidence is growing that people reached the Americas of civilization. Modern definitions are more flexible, and
(the last continent to be settled) earlier than the estab- look at the overall scale and complexity of a culture. See
lished estimate of 15,000 years ago. It is likely that Bruce Trigger, Early Civilizations: Ancient Eg¡JPtin Context
watercraft were involved - for island-hopping and mov- (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1993),p. 7.
ing down coastlines - in addition to the land routes 5· George Gilmer, governor of Georgia, said in the 1830s:
across the Bering causeway during glaciations. Greater "Treaties were expedients by which ... savage people were
Australia (including New Guinea) was an island through- induced ... to yield up what civilized people had the right