Human Traces

by Sebastian Faulks

  ‘Are you satisfied?’ said Thomas.

  ‘Yes. I feel it was worth the long trek. I doubt whether we have shed light on the origins of mankind, but we have perhaps gained a better sense of ourselves.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Thomas. ‘By seeing who went before. By offering our respects.’

  ‘Indeed – though it would be a fine thing if we could deduce something of more scientific value. I fear we lack as yet the tools to date such fossils accurately, but my suspicion is that one day these prints will show that man’s predecessor walked upright earlier than had been thought.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Thomas, ‘which would be of interest, though surely it would not change our scheme of things. It would be a detail.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ said Hannes. ‘Most people believe that the size of our brain preceded our ability to walk upright. Evidence to the contrary would be radical.’

  ‘Well,’ said Thomas, ‘my strong feeling from the anatomy of these beings is that they were early men – Homo, if not yet Homo sapiens. I suppose you remember that lovely verbal picture in Darwin when he compares living things to a tree. The green and budding twigs represent the existing species, but of all the original buds, only two or three, grown into great boughs, have survived, and from them depend the groups and families. But the tree shows the history of all the twigs that tried to overcome the others in the fight for life, and failed.’

  ‘I do not quite follow you, Doctor.’

  ‘I mean that there were several kinds of man or “protohuman” along the way to Homo sapiens – to us, the green buds. They lived side by side. They may have interbred, but probably, alas, we killed the others – the Neanderthals, the Java men. There was not a single, smooth development from the moment we split from the line of the apes; there were many kinds of pre-human species before Homo sapiens triumphed.’

  ‘And his triumph, according to Mr Darwin, came at the moment when he walked upright and freed his hands for making tools and weapons.’

  ‘That was Darwin’s suggestion, though he had no way of knowing if it was right. I expect that was a stage or step, though I do not really see why it should involve the creation of an actual species.’

  ‘Pass the whisky, Thomas. Your good health.’

  ‘And yours. Listen. My own understanding of Mr Darwin’s books is that a separate species can develop quite rapidly. It will then live alongside its predecessors, as the fossils show us. Eventually, the earlier species fails because it is less well adapted than the new in the competition for resources – or it is simply killed by the newcomer. But in my view the mutation that created Homo sapiens is less likely to have been in the gaining of an upright walk than in the chemistry of the brain. This is where Alfred RusselWallace could not agree with Darwin’s theory of blind variation – because mankind was in his brain and consciousness far more perfect than, from the point of view of survival, he had any need to be. Wallace therefore believed that there was a purpose, a sense of direction, involved – that Homo sapiens was the model of perfectibility which some outside force was, at various points in his otherwise blind evolution, continuing to shape. He believed that we were not an ape but an apex!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hannes, ‘but if we can show that today we are still in the process of evolving, then that argument must fail.’

  ‘Indeed. Though it is hard to prove these things in the short space of a man’s life . . . But, Hannes, what today has made me more than ever sure of, is that the mutation in man that made him human was in his brain. I cannot prove it, but I feel it. And I have always thought that whatever the change was, it involved a connected vulnerability. Psychosis is a human condition, as human as the straight toe or the arched foot we saw in the volcanic dust. No other species has it. Dogs do not hear voices. Cows do not imagine themselves pursued.’

  Hannes said nothing for a little, but watched Thomas sympathetically. In the African night, there was the sound of a large animal groaning, many miles away, its voice carried by the faint breeze over the long empty plain.

  ‘What you must understand, Hannes, is that one day, one very specific day, the first human was born, the first being with the entire collection of inherited material with which we have been dealing ever since.’

  ‘There was an Adam.’

  ‘Indeed there was. And I think he must have been a very lonely, frightened creature. Somewhere not far from here, somewhere perhaps just beyond those volcanoes, allthe pieces came together, for the very first time, in the brain of one being. And I see him hiding among reeds by water, I see him walking alone, apart from the group in which he lives. Perhaps he is shunned, outcast or put away.’

  Hannes got up and put another piece of wood on the fire.

  ‘So,’ said Thomas, ‘what really differentiates you and me from our volcanic little family of three?’

  ‘Intelligence, I suppose,’ said Hannes.

  ‘Not if you measure it by brain size, because the Neanderthals appear to have had larger brains than we do. No, it is an awareness of ourselves. You know you are a man. The creature who left those tracks did not know he was a “humanoid”, or whatever he was – any more than that mule over there knows he is a mule. It was the acquisition of the ability to introspect that made a leap in our species, and that faculty depended on our development of language.’

  ‘So this capacity of self-awareness was not in itself the result of a mutation?’

  ‘No, I think not. It was a cultural development that was passed on and learned afresh in each generation. It depended on our having language. It may well be that that was the defining change in our species: the ability to talk. Let me try to explain. One day, long ago, perhaps there was a protohuman in whose brain, somewhere near Broca’sor Wernicke’s area, a mutation caused an extra neural connection that made his grunts more like words attached to things. And we can see what advantages that would give him, both through the number of descendants his superior ability would enable him to leave and through positive sexual selection by his mates. He – if it was a man – must have been attractively different; and his or her heirs like Casanovas or Cleopatras, honey-pots to the other sex. Quite soon the faculty would spread – though soon in this instance means thousands of years, I suppose. And with language came control. You give orders. People hear your voice. A society that lived by heard instruction could form larger groups. The success of all other mammals was restricted by their need to keep their group sizes small enough for eye-or sound-contact with the leader.’

  ‘But without writing,’ Hannes said, ‘the same restrictions must have applied to your early men. They must have been for ever shouting.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ said Thomas. ‘Once you have given someone a name, you can carry the idea of them in your head, even when they are not there. That was a huge advance in language. Then the evidence of the Bible and of Homer and of such archaeological remains as we have, is that these men – not yet conscious as you or I are conscious – were able to hear the voices of their leaders even when they were out of earshot. A report by my countryman Henry Sidgwick a few years ago found that nearly eight per cent of people today hear voices. My belief is that the true figure is much higher than that because people today are ashamed to admit it, and that in early man the hearing of voices was almost universal. In fact, it is the only conceivable way in which early farming societies, in which herdsmen, fishermen and planters were dispatched long distances, can have held themselves together. I think we are all agreed that the major leap in civilisation came when mankind stopped hunting and feeding ad hoc, and organised itself into farming groups. But how could men without consciousness – a modern sense of time, and cause and other people – have done this? Picture your shepherd far away in the hills with no sense that he is a man, no idea of time in which he can visualise himself and his situation . . . How does he know he must keep tending his sheep? Why does he not forget what he is meant to do – as an ape would forget? Because under the anxiety of solitude, under the pressure of f
ear, he releases chemicals in the brain that cause not sweating palms, or racing heart, though perhaps those as well – but the voiced instructions of his king. He hallucinates a voice that tells him what to do. He uses the uniquely human gift of language to his own advantage. No other creature could do this.’

  ‘It sounds unlikely,’ said Hannes. ‘Such a pathological condition, so widespread.’

  ‘But it was not pathological. It caused no suffering; on the contrary, it was helpful and conferred huge advantages. But the difficulty with sound is that it is hard to shut off. You cannot block your inner ear in the way that you can close your eyes or hold your nose. It was therefore a delicate mechanism, which, like all the nervous reflexes, depends on a fine balance of glands and chemicals in the endocrine system and the brain. It would have been unstable, prone to break down; it might not come when you needed it, or it might come too much – so that you heard voices even when you were not under pressure of survival to do so. The prophet Amos was clearly afflicted by a barrage of voices. And it could be self-contradictory. Think of poorAbraham. A voice tells him to kill his son. Then, at the last minute, the voice contradicts itself. But it was overwhelmingly useful. And evolution, working blind, produces improbabilities – think of the peacock’s tail, the camel’s hump, the giraffe’s neck. The point is, Hannes, that between our forefather in the volcanic ash and the first fully conscious human man we know of – say someone at the time of Aristotle – there must have been stages of development.’

  ‘Well, I suppose so,’ said Hannes. ‘But why must there have been this particular stage, the voice-hearing one?’

  ‘It is the only one supported by literature. In the Iliad, the characters take instruction from the voices of the gods. Achilles is not a conscious man. He is a human at an intermediate stage. Achilles did not know he was a Greek. In all that poem there are no words of introspection; there is nothing to suggest that its heroes understand the idea of decision or free will. I am no classical scholar, Hannes, but I do recall that by the time of the Odyssey there is the idea of deceit – you might say that the poem is really a story about disguise and trickery, and that at once implies a modern consciousness, like ours, because you cannot falsify unless you can tell stories, picture yourself as a being and develop different versions of that story. Odysseus even tricks Athene. Unthinkable for Achilles, sulking in his tent, hoping to hallucinate the instructive voice.’

  ‘Yes, but what has caused the change?’ Hannes did not sound convinced.

  ‘Writing. Early forms of writing, like cuneiform, are pictures of things. Many depict instructions from the god-kings; when an early man looked at the marks, he may even have heard the voice. Later, you have letters that represent not the thing itself – the pot, the wheat – but the sounds of language. What an astonishing transformation that is! From that moment, the voice of the gods is not inescapable, in your inner ear, but controllable and portable. You are free – but you are also bereft. Then follows the terrible period of migrations, and famines and disasters. It is the story of a people crying in the wilderness – and what they are crying for is their lost gods. They lift up their eyes to the hills, from where their help once came. From page after page of the Old Testament comes this terrible, heart-rending cry. It is the lamentation of a people who have been literally abandoned by their gods.’

  Hannes laughed richly, his rosy face illuminated by the fire. ‘I want to tell you something that I have often thought on my travels, Thomas. You know that I am an amateur of archaeology. I have read a great deal about ancient civilisations. I have visited Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Holy Land. I have a particular interest in burial sites. One of the things that has been drawn to my attention is the way that kings, pharaohs and so on were so often buried upright. I had assumed it was because the people did not understand that death was a termination. They thought it was just the breakdown of whatever faculty had proved fatal. So they continued to feed the dead king or god. They housed him in a temple, which they built tall so that workers in the distant fields could see its high point. Now from what you have been telling me, I suppose these buildings could also have inspired the workers to hear the king’s voice.’

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ said Thomas. ‘Ziggurats, pyramids, temples . . . These could all have been aids to hallucination for the worker toiling in silence.’

  ‘One still sees the pattern in Europe,’ said Hannes. ‘Even in Carinthia, the barley sugar spire with the onion dome – home of the absent god, from which the streets and houses radiate.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Thomas, ‘but then, you see, with writing, men acquired new ways of thinking – independent of these voices. The size of the cities made it hard for the people to be controlled. The great wars and migrations – the Dorian invasions and so forth – drove people to scatter, and further reduced the impact of the voices. And then, as they travelled, they met other peoples. Tentatively, they began to exchange goods, to trade. Perhaps what they saw in other people made them think about themselves. By observing that the stranger had some unpredictable mind area inside him they may have inferred that they too had such a space.’

  Hannes laughed again. ‘So a man may first have deduced the existence of his own consciousness by imagining it in another!’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘And has our story reached the time of the Bible yet?’

  ‘Yes. I think one sure sign that the instructive voices have gone is when people start to cast lots, draw entrail, throw dice to try to guess the will of the absent gods. And since the notion of chance does not exist for these pre-conscious people, then the short straw or the chicken’s twisted gizzard can only have divine meaning.’

  ‘But in the Old Testament, their god still often seems to be with them.’

  ‘Sometimes. The prophets are the chosen ones, because they can still hear the voice, but increasingly it is hard for them to do. Moses and Jeremiah are driven mad by the inconsistency of their instructions, and then it all begins to fade. The old prophet Eli latches on to the infant Samuel, who still has the gift. And poor Elijah, who sits through whirlwind and fire until at last he is able to hallucinate the still small voice of calm.’

  ‘You sound so sad. My dear Thomas.’

  ‘It is more than sad. There is the whole of humanity crying for what it has lost. The gods who tended us are gone; they are absent and offended. No longer is there that happy, day-to-day communication – like a farmer with his steward giving matter-of-fact instructions about tilling and harvesting. Now the gods are angry and absent; now we must get down on our knees and worship them. Now we must beg them to come back. When the gods were there, no one ever thought of “worshipping” them; we just did as we were told by a friend.’

  ‘And Jesus?’ said Hannes. ‘Was he a prophet too?’

  ‘I suppose he could hear voices. Perhaps he and St Paul were the last prophets to do so, but he was more conscious in our sense than any man before him. What he did was take the pre-conscious religion of Judaism and refashion it in a way that fitted it for modern human beings.’

  ‘So the Bible is not so sad in the end?’

  ‘Yes, it is the saddest book in the world. We are asked to believe that God has played an infantile trick on us: he has made himself unobservable, as an eternal test of “faith”. What I read, though, is the story of a species cursed by gifts and delusions that it cannot understand. I read of exile, abandonment and the terrible grief of beings who have lost something real – not of a people being put to a childish test, but of those who have lost their guide and parent, friend and only governing instructor and are left to wander in the silent darkness for all eternity. Imagine. And that is why all religion is about absence. Because once, the gods were there. And that is why all poetry and music strike us with this awful longing for what once was ours – because it begins in regions of the brain where once the gods made themselves heard.’

  Hannes stood up and stretched. ‘What about our man in the ash this afternoon? He heard
no voices, he had no gods, I presume.’

  ‘No. Because he had no language. My guess is that the order of events was this: first, a mutation that enabled the brain to develop language. Then the hearing of voices. Then, with writing, the loss of those voices and the slow development of modern self-awareness, the unique human quality.’

  ‘But surely that must mean that for many thousands of years you had beings who were by Darwin’s definitions Homo sapiens yet who lacked consciousness as we know it.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Thomas, ‘I think so. Most of the things that humans do can be done without any consciousness at all. When you play the piano, your ten fingers perform intricate separate movements according to signals relayed to them by your nervous system, reacting to signs read from the sheet music and relayed via the optic nerve to your brain. And in all that complexity, there is no awareness at all. Indeed, it might be fatal for your playing if there were. Your conscious mind – in so far as it is active – is thinking of the vision of beauty the music produces, a waterfall perhaps, or whether it will impress the attractive young woman in the audience, or what is for dinner. You can be skilful to the highest human degree without being conscious at all.’

  ‘Are you saying our volcanic walker could have played the piano?’

  ‘I am saying that we could have existed as humans and acted efficiently for a geological eternity without the faculty of consciousness – without knowing what we were. Think of the Garden of Eden. What happens, quite simply, is that Adam and Eve acquire self-awareness: “Eureka,” they cry, as they are endowed with this gift – and with all that it entails, beginning, alas, with shame. I am suggesting that this is something that truly happened – but not until very recently in our history. Wallace was right in talking of these important leaps in human evolution, even if he was wrong to ascribe them to the sudden interference of the Creator’s hand.’