Man’s earliest mammalian ancestor was a rodent — a tiny tree shrew with a long tail and a flexible spine. Over ten million years or so ago, they developed a flexible thumb opposite their fingers to aid them in climbing trees. The shrew developed into a monkey. Ten million more years, and the monkey had become an ape. And a mere five million years ago the chimpanzee developed into two new types of ape: the gorilla and the ape-man. And the ape-man arrived on earth in time for a twelve-million-year drought known as the Pliocene era. As the vegetation decreased, the ape-man came down from his trees to spend an increasing amount of time on the ground, digging for roots and worms. He began to develop his earliest and most interesting talent — walking upright on his hind limbs. And since he could no longer rely on the forest to provide him with food, he had to learn to generalise — to scratch some kind of a living from any environment — desert, woodland, mountains, frozen tundra. And in order to cope with these new problems, he developed the largest brain of any living creature.
When, about three million years ago, the weather changed, the ape-man had become the world’s most adaptable animal. Suddenly there were lakes and rivers and vast plains of grass; and on these plains were herds of grass-eating animals. The ape-man had always been capable of cooperation with others of his kind, but there had been little opportunity for it in the drought of the Pliocene. Now cooperation became a necessity. A single man stood no chance against the mammoth, the cave bear, the woolly rhinoceros, the giant red deer and the sabre-toothed tiger; but a group of hunters, lying in ambush with spears and bone clubs, were a match for most animals. The upright posture gave man an immense advantage. And the skill required in hunting developed his brain at an incredible rate. The early ape Ramapithecus had a brain that weighed about four hundred grams. The brain of the hunter was half as big again. And in a mere two million years, homo erectus had a thousand-gram brain. Then, only half a million years ago, it increased its size yet again by fifty per cent. This remains the average brain size of modern man.
Homo erectus invented the hand axe for skinning animals, but in a million years he made no attempt to develop this simple tool — for example, to provide it with a handle and use it as a weapon. About three-quarters of a million years ago, a group of homo erectus arrived in Europe from Africa and Asia and evolved into homo sapiens, the species to which modern man belongs. This new type of man did not know how to make fire, but when lightning set the forests alight, he carefully preserved the fire and kept it burning year after year. He used it to set fire to the undergrowth and drive animals into traps or over cliff tops; he also used it for cooking. The great ice ages came and he used the fire to keep warm in his caves. It may have been fire that produced the “brain explosion” of half a million years ago, for it obliged man to live in integrated societies and forced him to learn the disciplines of a social animal. A small tribe of twenty or thirty human beings can live as simply as a herd of cattle. But a group of a hundred or two hundred has to learn to organise itself. Laws and customs become necessary. Above all, he has to learn good manners. The primitive grunts that had once served to communicate had to evolve into a more sophisticated language.
There were two main sub-species of human beings about a hundred and twenty thousand years ago. One looked like modern man and was found mainly in Africa. The other, Neanderthal man, was more primitive and ape-like, yet in many ways, just as intelligent. He invented the bow and arrow, which meant that hunters could kill their prey from a distance. His women decorated themselves with red ochre. Moreover, he worshipped the sun and believed in an afterlife — or at least, we can make this assumption from the fact that he manufactured stone spheres and discs and buried his dead with some form of ritual involving flowers. For more than fifty thousand years, Neanderthal man was the dominant human species. And then, suddenly, he disappeared. And his disappearance corresponds with the sudden rise of his more “human” brother, Cro-Magnon man. It seems probable that our ancestors wiped out their Neanderthal rivals between thirty and forty thousand years ago and took over the continent of Europe for themselves.
Compared to Neanderthal men, Cro-Magnon men were supermen. They learned to communicate by speaking in sentences instead of grunts. Their priests — or shamans — used a kind of magic to aid the hunters, drawing pictures of their prey on the walls of caves and performing certain rituals to induce them to walk into the hunter’s ambush. They even developed the first form of writing, scratching marks on bone to enable them to predict the phases of the moon and the march of the seasons. They learned to make boats to cross rivers, and were soon using them to cross the seas. Now they could speak, men who lived hundreds of miles apart could trade with one another, exchanging flints, pottery and animal skins. They learned to domesticate animals — the wolf (which became the dog), the horse, the goat, and to breed cattle and sheep. About ten thousand years ago, they began to develop agriculture, learning to grow wheat and barley. And it was not long after this that they built the first walled cities, and man embarked on a new stage of his evolution.
“So you see, these early farmers had reached roughly the same stage as the men of today. The spiders have put back the clock of human evolution by ten thousand years.”
Niall opened his eyes, unsure of whether it was Steeg who had spoken; but the old man was nowhere to be seen.
It was like waking from a very deep sleep; the room in which he was lying looked totally strange. Then he noticed that the sun was shining through the windows on the other side of the gallery; it was already late afternoon. He calculated that he had been lying there for eight hours. The sense of deep relaxation was the effect of the peace machine; by removing all the physical tensions that normally accumulate during prolonged mental activity, it enabled his mind to remain focused on the dream-like panorama that passed before his inner vision.
At the suggestion of some inner prompting, he made his way back to the food machine and ate a bowl of soup and an apple — noticing only as he swallowed the last mouthful that the apple had no core. He was uninterested in the food; all his being was directed to trying to absorb all he had learned and to grasp its implications.
Half an hour later, still damp from a shower — he had coped with the complexities of the bathroom with the mechanical certainty of a sleepwalker — he returned to the peace machine and lay down under its canopy, closing his eyes.
Without any transition, he found himself standing in a landscape that seemed vaguely familiar. This time, he was actually present, with no sense of his body lying on its couch. He was standing on the seashore looking towards a range of hills in the distance. There were many shrubs and palm trees, and the dry soil had a covering of marram grass. Half a mile away was a walled city. Its buildings were of baked mud, and the wall that surrounded it was a mixture of baked mud and stone. As he stared at the line of hills, he suddenly recognised the place. This was the great salt lake of Dira, and the city stood on the site of the ruined city where Niall had killed the spider.
The voice said: “Why do you suppose the city has a wall?”
“For protection against wild animals?”
“No. For protection against other men. These men who created civilisation had also learned that it is easier to steal your neighbour’s corn and cattle than to raise your own. That is why they needed walls. Crime and civilisation were born at the same time.”
The comment troubled Niall; it seemed somehow illogical. Civilisation seemed momentous and significant, man’s greatest single step towards control over his own life. By comparison crime seemed trivial and insignificant. Why was the voice speaking about them as if they were equally important?
“Because crime is far more important than you realise — not in itself, but as a symptom of mankind’s greatest problem. Think of what it meant for men to live in cities. It was no longer necessary for every man to be a hunter or a farmer, and for every woman to be a mother and a housekeeper. Because there were so many people living together, each one could perform a different task. There were builders and farmers and weavers and toolmakers and priests. Each one had to narrow down his sights to a single specialised job. You have spent your life in the desert, struggling to find food and drink. Therefore you regarded Kazak’s city as a kind of paradise. But what about the people who had been living there all their lives? Did they regard it as a paradise?”