Podsnap’s Own, or The Bull in the Biplane

Crowded amongst the junk on my shelves are two books that are virtually worthless but difficult to throw out. One is a printout from the online Project Gutenberg edition of Madame Bovary, cleverly formatted (by me) to fill each page with nearly a thousand words. The other is Richard Leakey’s The Origins of Mankind, a cheaply printed paperback, now five years old and quite foxed. I picked it up one day when I felt I should learn more about anthropology (I think I was going through my Bruce Chatwin phase then). The first book’s unreadability is entirely due to my poor formatting, since as everyone knows, anything by Flaubert is a real page-turner. The second book on the other hand is just a lousy, fuzzy-minded survey of recent anthropological theories, and teaches you nothing. Now I’m not one to fault a book for failing to satisfy my thirst for knowledge. I once bought The Oxford History of the French Revolution because I felt I did not know enough about the French Revolution; and although I finished this massive tome feeling as baffled as when I started it, I’d learned lots of names and other trivia (such as the months of the Revolutionary calendar, which I can still recite); and I was massively entertained. The Leakey book not only failed to entertain, it failed to give me the tiniest bit of useful information about the origins of mankind.

The alert reader will have guessed that I am going to wing off into some clever tie-in between the Leakey book and the Flaubert. And here it is. Leakey’s book confirms what I have always darkly suspected about paleo-anthopology: nobody really knows anything. Apparently there were lots of monkeys a half-million years ago, but there is not a shred of real evidence to connect any of their jawbones and other leavings with the yoomin beings of today. (I leave aside DNA groupings, since these prove nothing: we share 99% of our genes with Mr. J. Fred Muggs.) Let me ask you, Mr. or Ms. Educated Person, and please try to answer this question without resort to your college textbooks or internet search engines: how far back did written language first appear? Fifty thousand years ago? Fifteen? Five? And how far back, so far as we know, is there any evidence of organized religion or anything that we would now consider “art” or “science”? Again: Fifty thousand years ago? Fifteen thousand years ago? Five thousand years ago?

The answer in both cases is c), five thousand years ago. Check it out if you don’t believe me.

So far there is scant evidence that anything we would regard as human (as opposed to merely primate) walked the earth prior to about 3,000 years B.C. Note I say “scant evidence,” not no evidence. There is the odd artifact and cave painting, but even these go back no further than the middle of the last Ice Age, or about 15,000 years ago.

In other words, absolutely nothing happened worth talking about (or putting in your diary, or blog, or postcard to Aunt Fiona) until about sixty generations before the Trojan War. And then—bingo! Suddenly we had enormously complex cultures, inflected languages, art forms, belief systems, philosophy, commerce, Linear B, the Pyramids, massive armies, theories of statecraft. It all virtually happened overnight. You don’t have to be a Bible-thumper (and I am not one—but what if I were?) to see that the author of Genesis was scarcely exaggerating.

Now, unless you subscribe to the extraterrestrial theory of the origins of human civilization, you have to wonder why it all happened in so short a time. Was the earliest writing (carving runes into clay pots and slabs) such a technological leap that it riveted the best minds of the next generations, leading quickly to such offshoots as mathematics, astronomy, and lyric poetry? My guess is yes. Writing and record-keeping changed human society head-to-toe. After a few dozen years the average person, even if he couldn’t read or write himself, couldn’t even begin to conceive of the preliterate society of his grandparents.

We don’t know who invented writing, but it seems likely that it was the product of just one Prometheus-type—or perhaps Prometheus and his Mister Watson. No more than a few people, anyway, all working around the same time. We can make up an alternative explanation—that it evolved for many centuries, perhaps out of primitive pictograms—but this is difficult to imagine, let alone find any scientific support for. A written language that evolved over millennia would leave traces of its evolution behind: beginning with a few pictowords here and there; then gradually, painfully, becoming sophisticated enough to provide tombstone inscriptions; and then, some centuries after that, we might find cunieform bills of lading and doctors’ prescriptions. But the archaeological evidence shows nothing like this. Writing did not come about through gradual evolution or through slow historical necessity. Somebody created it—like Madame Bovary. And that’s where it came from.

It’s easy to see why our Nineteenth-Century betters loved the Great Man Theory of History. Individual innovation was an undeniable fact, whether in statecraft or in technics. If anyone asked them who invented the wheel, they’d quickly surmise it was probably Og the Caveman, tinkering in his lapidary lab.

In recent decades this model has come to be seen as corny and preposterous, the stuff of Ayn Rand novels. The Marxist model of history swept good sense aside, reconstruing all achievements of the last five thousand years as byproducts of mass movements and historical necessity—grey, faceless, mumbling hordes without a single independent thought among them. Thus, the wheel was not invented by an individual Mr. Og: rather it came about because the mass community collectively understood, pretty much all at once, the enormous economic advantage of rolling things along. Rationalistic theories of religion’s origins follow a similar pattern: God-notions did not originate through isolated revelations or individual intuitions, but rather just grew like Topsy in the collective brain of the pullulating masses. Ask the average person where the notion of God came from, and you’ll likely get an answer like this: “Primitive peoples looked at the moon and wondered where it came from, and made up stories to explain it and other natural phenomena; and over many millennia this evolved into organized religion as it is today.” But there is no evidence at all for the first part of the proposition. It is itself precisely the sort of fairytale that it is hypothecating. “Humans of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries looked at religion and wondered where it came from; so they made up stories to explain its origin.”

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 5th, 2005 at 11:55 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.