The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

Ten million or so years later came Australopithecus; he looked like an ape, was about four feet tall, and had a brain weighing about a pound (500 grams or 600 cc), one-third of that of modern man. This was not a very notable advance on the Ramapithecus’s 400 cc. (Even a chimpanzee has a brain about 400 cc.) But this was the creature who first discovered the use of deadly weapons. Not long after this, there emerged another form of man with a still larger brain – about 700 cc – and who used primitive flint tools. He has been labelled homo habilis. And he, like Australopithecus, was active during an epoch of unprecedentedly bad weather – droughts, floods, ice ages – called the Pleistocene, which began about two million years ago. No one knows quite what caused the Pleistocene. The most popular theory is that polar ice reached such proportions that it began to split apart under its own pressure and giant icebergs floated towards the equator. But from man’s point of view, the ice and floods of the Pleistocene were infinitely preferable to the long drought – in Africa, almost twelve million years long – of the Pliocene. This was the period when man suddenly put on an evolutionary spurt and began to outdistance every other animal on the face of the earth, including his cousin the ape. And during the next million years there emerged the creature who murdered his prisoners in the caves at Chou-kou-tien: homo erectus. His brain was about twice as big as that of Australopithecus – which makes it about two-thirds the size of that of modern man. We know that he used fire, although he did not know how to make it; and this itself argues a highly evolved social life. It implies that when hunters came upon a tree that had been set on fire by lightning, they carefully carried away burning branches and then appointed guardians to keep it permanently alight. Man was learning to think ahead, and had therefore outpaced every other living animal. From the fact that only skulls were found in the Chou-kou-tien caves, we may speculate that homo erectus was a head hunter, and that therefore his capacity for violence was already well developed.

And still the human brain went on expanding. In the half million years between Peking man and ourselves, it grew by another third, and most of that growth was in its top layer, the cerebrum – the part with which we think. No one knows quite why it expanded so fast. Ardrey even suggests the fascinating notion that it may have been connected with a huge meteor – or perhaps a small asteroid – that exploded over the Indian Ocean about 700,000 years ago. Its fragments – known as tektites – can still be found scattered over more than twenty million square miles. At the same time, the earth’s poles reversed, so that south became north and vice versa. No geologist can yet explain why this happened – or why it has happened on a number of previous occasions in the earth’s history. At all events, Ardrey suggests that the explosion, or the reversal of the earth’s polarity, or both, somehow triggered the ‘brain explosion’. During the reversal period, the planet would be temporarily without a magnetic field, and the result could be that earth experienced a sudden heavy bombardment of cosmic rays and other high-speed particles of the kind that are at present diverted by the Van Allen belts around us. There would also be a sudden rise in the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere. Both these factors could cause genetic mutations which might be responsible for the ‘brain explosion’. On the other hand, this ‘catastrophe theory’ may be unnecessary. If man’s brain had already doubled in size between Australopithecus and the first homo erectus about a million years later, then there is nothing very startling in a further increase of about a third in another half million years.

There is, however, one outstanding mystery. Peking man already had a brain that was far bigger than that of Australopithecus; in fact, some of the larger-brained Peking men had brains as big as some smaller-brained modern men. What did he do with it? He certainly learned to build himself crude shelters made of branches, and developed more elaborate hunting techniques – he had even learned to kill elephants. Yet his tools made practically no advance. A mere 300,000 years ago, homo erectus was still using the crude flint choppers that homo habilis had been using two million years ago. And so things continued down to the time of Neanderthal man, who appeared on the scene only about a hundred thousand years ago. He was still a thoroughly ape-like creature with a receding chin and receding forehead, and his cave-dwellings indicate that he was also a cannibal. And he vanished from the face of the earth between thirty and twenty-five thousand years ago, when Cro-Magnon man – direct ancestor of modern man – appeared on the scene. Ardrey has no doubt whatever that Neanderthal was exterminated by Cro-Magnon man, and it seems a reasonable hypothesis even though most experts prefer to leave the question open. And Cro-Magnon man was the first creature to make obvious use of the enlarged brain. He made paintings on the walls of his caves; he even invented some crude form of notation on reindeer bones, probably to indicate the phases of the moon. In due course, he invented agriculture and built cities. He advanced more in twenty-five thousand years than his ancestors had in two million.

As usual, Ardrey has a striking theory to explain what happened. He points out that the ‘tanged’ arrowhead – a head that could be fastened to a shaft – was invented by a species of Neanderthal man – Aterian – who lived in the Sahara (in the days when it was a green paradise) about forty thousand years ago. That argues that they also invented the bow. And the bow and arrow, Ardrey believes, were as crucial to the ancient world as the atomic bomb is to the modern. It was the first ‘long distance’ weapon. It meant that a hunter was no longer tied to his tribe; he could go off on his own and stalk small game. And once man had become used to hunting alone – to being an individual – he probably began to develop the habit of thinking for himself. It is an exciting theory, and open to the single objection that, for some odd reason, the bow and arrow failed to spread beyond the Sahara culture that invented it. But then, as Ardrey points out, Cro-Magnon man knew about the sling, another long-distance weapon…

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?