Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

What was now the four-age system served as the basis for organising the great archaeological exhibition at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1867, where visitors could promenade room by room through the pre-history of Europe. Scientific archaeology had replaced the antiquarian tradition. ‘One could now envisage a cultural history independent of the written record, reaching back to Palaeolithic times by way of the iron-age cemeteries of France and Britain, the Bronze-Age lake dwellings of Switzerland, and the Neolithic kitchen middens of Denmark . . .’²⁰ When Charles Lyell finally came round to the new view, in his Geological Evidences for the Antiquity of Man (1863), his book sold 4,000 copies in the first weeks and two new editions appeared in the same year.

Since then, as we shall see in Chapter 1, ancient stone tools have been found all over the world, and their distribution and variation enable us to recreate a great deal about our distant past and the first ideas and thoughts of ancient humankind. In the century and a half since Prestwich and Evans confirmed de Perthes’ discoveries, the dating of the original manufacture of stone tools has been pushed back further and further, to the point where this book properly starts: the Gona river in Ethiopia 2.7 million years ago.

PART ONE

LUCY TO GILGAMESH

The Evolution of Imagination

1

Ideas Before Language

George Schaller, director of the Wildlife Conservation Division of the New York Zoological Society, is known to his fellow biologists as a meticulous observer of wild animals. In a long and distinguished career he has made many systematic studies of lions, tigers, cheetahs, leopards, wild dogs, mountain gorillas and hyenas. His book, The Last Panda, published in 1993, recorded many new and striking facts about the animal the Chinese call the ‘bear-cat’. He found that on one occasion a sick panda had gone freely to a human family in the Wolong area, where it was fed sugar and rice porridge for three days, until it recovered and returned to the forest.¹

In the late 1960s Schaller and a colleague spent a few days on the Serengeti plain in Tanzania, East Africa, where they made a simple observation which had escaped everyone else. In the course of those few days, they stumbled across quite a lot of dead meat ‘just lying around’. They found dead buffalo, the butchered remains of lion kills, and they also came across a few incapacitated animals that would have been easy prey for carnivores. Smaller deer (like Thompson’s gazelles) remained uneaten for barely a day but larger animals, such as adult buffalo, ‘persisted as significant food resources’ for about four days.² Schaller concluded from this that early humans could have survived quite easily on the Serengeti simply by scavenging, that there was enough ‘ruin’ in the bush for them to live on without going hunting. Other colleagues subsequently pointed out that even today the Hadza, a hunter-gathering tribe who live in northern Tanzania, sometimes scavenge by creeping up on lions who have made a kill and then creating a loud din. The lions are frightened away.

This outline of man’s earliest lifestyle is conjectural.³ And to dignify the practice as an ‘idea’ is surely an exaggeration: this was instinct at work. But scavenging, unromantic as it sounds, may not be such a bad starting-point. It may even be that the open African savannah was the type of environment which favoured animals who were generalists, as much as specialists, like a hippopotamus, for example, or a giraffe, and it is this which stimulated mankind’s intelligence in the first place. The scavenging hypothesis has, however, found recent support from a study of the marks made on bones excavated at palaeontological sites: animals killed by carnivores do show tool marks but fewer than those butchered by humans. It is important to stress that meat-eating in early humans does not, in and of itself, imply hunting.⁴