by Colin Wilson
But if the whole aim of this argument was merely to place the origin of civilisation back a few thousand years, it would hardly be worth the effort. Neither would there be any point in trying to suggest that man may have been in existence for a million or so years longer. It would make no real difference to Hapgood’s seafaring civilisation whether man is two million years old or ten.
It is the implications of the ‘alternative history’ that are so important.
What Cremo is suggesting is that there is evidence for beings anatomically similar to modern man existing as long ago as the Miocene, or even longer.
If these hypothetical beings were anatomically similar, then they walked upright, which freed their hands—which in turn suggests that they used tools, if only crude stone implements, eoliths. The use of tools not only demands a certain level of intelligence; it also tends to develop intelligence. Confronted with some problem that might be solved by tools, the tool-user considers the various possibilities and exercises his mind.
Then why did Homo sapiens not develop much sooner? Because we tend to live mechanically. Provided we can eat and drink and satisfy our basic needs, we feel no need to innovate. Modern experiments have shown that apes can be taught to communicate in sign language and paint pictures. They possess the necessary intelligence. Then why have they not developed these abilities in the course of their evolution? Because they had no one to teach them. There is all the difference in the world between intelligence and making optimum use of that intelligence—a point that emerges clearly in Wynn’s remark that Piaget’s intelligence tests revealed that the tool makers of 330,000 years ago were as intelligent as modern men. Then why did man of half a million years ago begin to evolve so rapidly? Ardrey could be right; perhaps some external event, like the great explosion that covered the earth with tektites, caused some genetic mutation. Yet that in itself would not provide the whole answer We have seen that Neanderthals had a far bigger brain than modern man, yet still failed to develop into Homo sapiens sapiens.
If man had suddenly developed the ability to use tools, this would provide the obvious explanation. But Johanson’s ‘First Family’ was already using crude tools three million years earlier. And it cannot be explained by some climatic change that acted as a challenge, for the bad weather of the Pleistocene had already lasted for one and a half million years.
Another plausible suggestion is that man began to develop language half a million years ago—that is, a more sophisticated language than grunts. But this is open to an obvious objection: what did he want to say? A primitive hunting community has no more need for language than a pack of wolves. Language develops in response to a certain complexity in society—for example, every new technology requires new words. But primitive society had no new technology. So the language theory falls prey to the same objection as the tool theory.
The Hungarian anthropologist Oscar Maerth even made the interesting suggestion that the answer may lie in cannibalism. In 1929, a palaeontologist named Pie Wen-Chung had discovered in caves near Chou-kou-tien the petrified skull of one of man’s earliest ancestors. It looked more like a chimpanzee than a human being, and his associate Teilhard de Chardin thought the teeth were those of a beast of prey. It had a sloping forehead, enormous brow ridges, and a receding chin. But the brain was twice as big as that of a chimpanzee—800 cc as compared to 400. And as more limbs, skulls and teeth were discovered, it became clear that this beast of prey walked upright. It looked at first as if this was the long-sought Missing Link, but the evidence soon disproved it. ‘Peking Man’ (as he was labelled) knew the use of fire—his favourite meal had been venison. This creature, who had lived half a million years ago, was a true human being.
He was also a cannibal. All the 40 skulls discovered at Chou-kou-tien were mutilated at the base, creating a gap through which a hand could be inserted to scoop out the brains. Franz Weidenreich, the scientist in charge of the investigation, had no doubt that the creatures had been slaughtered in a body, dragged into the caves, and roasted and eaten. By whom? Presumably other Peking Men. In other caves in the area, evidence of Cro-Magnon man was found, and here also was evidence of cannibalism.
There is, as we know, evidence to suggest that Neanderthal man indulged in cannibalism. Maerth himself claims that a day after eating raw ape brains in an Asian restaurant, he experienced a feeling of warmth in the brain and a sense of heightened vitality, including a powerful sexual impulse. Ritual cannibalism—which Maerth studied in Borneo, Sumatra and New Guinea—is based on the belief that the strength of the dead enemy passes into the person who eats him, and this could well be based on the experience of heightened vitality described by Maerth, who believes that ‘intelligence can be eaten’.
There is an obvious problem with Maerth’s theory. If eating human brains produced intelligence, then the few south-east Asian tribes that still indulge in it ought to be far more intelligent than Westerners whose ancestors gave it up thousands of years ago; this does not appear to be so. Moreover, in order to explain the rate at which man evolved after about 500,000 years ago, we would need far more evidence of widespread cannibalism, and this is simply lacking. So, reluctantly, the cannibal theory must be regarded as unproven.
The problem with the ‘conventional history’ outlined above is that it implies that man is essentially passive. He drops seeds into a crack in the ground, and realises that they turn into crops. He moves a heavy load on rollers, and realises that a slice off a roller becomes a wheel. It all sounds so accidental, rather like Darwin’s natural selection.
Now it is true that man is a passive creature who is at his best when he has a challenge to respond to. But what is so important about him is precisely that amazing ability to respond to challenges. What distinguishes him from all other animals is the determination and willpower and imagination that he brings to challenges. This is the real secret of his evolution.
Palaeoanthropologists have overlooked one obvious explanation for the evolutionary surge: sex. Sexually speaking, the major difference between human beings and animals is that human females are sexually receptive all the year round. The female ape is receptive to the male only one week in the month.
At some point in history, the human female ceased to go ‘on heat’ for a few days a month, and became receptive to the male at any time. The likeliest explanation is that when the hunters were away from the tribe for weeks—or perhaps whole summers2—at a time, they expected their sexual reward when they returned, whether the female was receptive or not. The females who had no objection bred more of their kind, while the females who objected gradually died out by natural selection.
At some point in their evolution, human females began to develop more pronounced sexual characteristics: full lips, large breasts, rounded buttocks and thighs. The genitals of the female chimpanzee swell up and become bright pink when she is in season; it may be that these characteristics were transferred to the female mouth. Robert Ardrey remarked, ‘Sex is a sideshow in the world of animals’, but in the human world, it began to play an increasingly important role when women became permanently receptive, and developed more pronounced sexual characteristics. Thinner fur, and face-to-face contact during mating, made sex altogether more sensuous.
At this point in evolution, the males would have had a strong motive for being competitive. The presence of unattached females introduced a new excitement. While the hunters were away, skinny girls suddenly blossomed into nubile adolescents. In earlier tribal groups, the sole purpose of the hunter was to kill game. Now the mightiest hunter could take his pick of the most attractive females. So there was suddenly a powerful motivation for becoming a great hunter—the rewards of sex.
There is, of course, no proof whatever that the ‘brain explosion’ was connected to the sexual changes that took place in woman. Yet in the absence of any other convincing hypothesis, it seems highly plausible. We only have to think of the enormous part that sexual romanticism has played in the history of civilisation t
o realise that it has always been one of the most powerful of human motivations—Antony and Cleopatra, Dante and Beatrice, Abélard and Héloïse, Lancelot and Guinevere, Romeo and Juliet, Faust and Gretchen, all exercise the same fascination for us that they did for our great-great-grandfathers. Psychologically speaking, sexual romanticism is still the most single powerful force in the lives of human beings. Goethe may have been speaking sound biological sense when he wrote, ‘Eternal Woman draws us upward’.
Again, the obvious question is: what difference does it make—whether man became more ‘human’ through sex, or language, on through some genetic accident associated with tektites?
And this time the answer must be: a great deal. It reminds us that a man driven by a desire to possess a certain female is a highly purposive individual. We have already noted that evolution tends to mark time when individuals have no reason to evolve. The same applies to individuals; they may be talented and intelligent, and yet waste their lives because they somehow lack the motivation to make use of these faculties. The best piece of luck that can befall any individual is to have a strong sense of purpose.
It may or may not be true that Homo sapiens evolved out of a kind of sexual romanticism. But the possibility serves to draw our attention to a notion of central importance: that since the evolution of Homo sapiens has been a mental evolution (as the word sapiens implies), perhaps we should be seeking the reason for that evolution in the realm of motivation and purpose rather than the realm of natural selection and accident. Perhaps we should be asking: what sense of purpose could have transformed Homo sapiens into Homo sapiens sapiens?
8 More Forbidden Archaeology
There is another force that distinguishes human beings from animals: religion.
For some odd reason that no one has been able to explain, man has always been a religious animal. The sceptics of the eighteenth century tried to explain it away as mere superstition: man was afraid of natural forces, so he personalised the thunder and lightning as gods, and prayed to them. But this fails to explain why our ancestors during the Riss Ice Age, over 200,000 years ago, wanted to make perfectly round spheres, when there was no obvious practical use for them. The only obvious explanation seems to be that they are religious objects, some kind of sun disc. And Homo erectus—or whoever made them—certainly had no need to be afraid of the sun.
Again, certain flint tools dating from the Riss Ice Age have been created with an elaborate craftsmanship that raises them to the level of works of art—certainly far beyond any practical demands. At Boxgrove, in the Cotswolds, similar tools date back half a million years. This suggests either that the toolmakers took an artistic pride in their craft—and found in it a means of what the psychologist Abraham Maslow calls ‘self-actualisation’—or that the tools were ritual objects, associated with religious sacrifice, and possibly ritual cannibalism. In either case, we again have clear evidence that man had developed far beyond the ape stage, even when he continued to look much like an ape.
Now the religious impulse is based upon the feeling that there is hidden meaning in the world. Dumb animals take the universe for granted; but intelligence involves a sense of mystery, and seeks answers where stupidity cannot even perceive questions. Mountains or giant trees become gods; so do thunder and lightning; so do the sun and the moon and the stars.
But why did man develop this sense of mystery, of hidden significances? We have seen that the rationalist explanation—that it is based on fear—is inadequate. When an animal looks at a magnificent dawn or sunset, it perceives it merely as a natural phenomenon. When a man looks at a magnificent dawn or sunset, he perceives it as beautiful; it arouses a certain response in him, like the smell of cooking. But the response to cooking is due to physical hunger. What kind of hunger is aroused by a sunset? If we could answer that question, we would have answered the question of why man is a religious animal.
But at least we can make a beginning. When Émile Cartailhac saw engravings in the Laugerie-Basse cave at Les Eyzies, he recognised immediately that ‘here is something other than a proof of a marvellous artistic disposition; there are unknown motives and aims at work...’ He discounted the notion that Cro-Magnon man made paintings because he had leisure, pointing out that the South Sea Islanders have plenty of leisure but hardly ever made rock paintings. On the other hand, Bushmen scraping a mere subsistence produced an abundance of rock art.
It was the Aborigines of Australia and the American Indians who finally provided the answer: the drawings served magical purposes. They were intended to establish a connection between the hunter and his prey. The anthropologist Ivar Lissner explains it in Man, God and Magic: ‘An animal is put under a spell through the medium of its effigy, and the soul of the living beast suffers the same fate as the soul of its second self... A hunter can also portray the death of his game in ceremonial fashion by killing it in effigy, using certain very ancient rituals...’
So we have one more proof that ancient man was a superstitious animal. But how is it that he was such a stupid animal that he failed to noticed that his magic did not work— that when the tribal shaman had performed some elaborate ceremony to lure bison or reindeer into the hunters’ ambush, the animals simply failed to put in an appearance?
In other words, if the magic was ineffective, why was it not dropped within a few generations?
Sceptics will reply that prayer is probably ineffective, yet people go on praying. But this is an entirely different case. Prayers seem to be answered often enough to encourage more prayer; sceptics claim it is coincidence or wishful thinking, and there is no obvious way to decide who is right. But a tribal shaman—like those depicted in so many caves in the Dordogne—performs a long and elaborate ritual the night before the hunt, and its aim is to draw animals to a particular spot. If it failed to work again and again, the hunters would soon realise it was a waste of time.
In fact, there is interesting evidence that, for some odd reason, it does seem to work.
It is a striking fact that shamans all over the world, in totally unconnected cultures, have the same basic beliefs and the same basic methods.
Joseph Campbell remarks in the Primitive Mythology volume of his The Masks of God, published in 1959, of the Ona tribe of Tierra del Fuego and the Nagajnek Indians of Alaska: ‘Drawn ... from the two most primitive hunting communities on earth, at opposite poles of the world, out of touch, certainly for millenniums, with any common point of traditional origin... the two groups have nevertheless the same notion of the role and character of the shaman...’
He cites an example of shamanic magic—observed by a western anthropologist, E. Lucas Bridges—which at first sounds disappointingly like a conjuring trick. In the snow, in bright moonlight, the Ona shaman Houshken chants for a quarter of an hour before he puts his hands to his mouth and brings out a strip of guanaca hide, about the size of a leather bootlace. Then he slowly draws his hands apart until it is four feet long. Then an end is handed to his brother, who steps back until the four feet has become eight feet. Then Houshken takes it back, puts his hand to his mouth, and swallows it. ‘Even an ostrich could not have swallowed those eight feet of hide with one gulp without visible effort.’ Houshken has not flicked the hide up his sleeve for he is naked. After this, he brings from his mouth a quantity of something that looks like semi-transparent dough which is apparently alive, and revolving at great speed. Then, as he draws his hands further apart, the ‘dough’ simply disappears. Again, it sounds like sleight of hand until we recall that the shaman is naked.
A book called Wizard of the Upper Amazon is perhaps the clearest and most detailed account in the literature of anthropology of the training and development of a shaman. In this work, which has become a classic in its field, the explorer F. Bruce Lamb acts as amanuensis for a Peruvian youth named Manuel Cordova, who was kidnapped by the Amahuaca Indians of Brazil in 1902. Cordova spent seven years among the Indians, and records their way of life in detail.
And since Cordova eventua
lly became chief of the tribe, it also enables us to begin to understand what must have been involved in being a palaeolithic shaman-chieftain. In order to grasp it fully, it is necessary to read the whole book, which conveys the remarkable sense of unity that exists in a primitive tribe, in which every member is, in a sense, a part of an organism. But the following brief account will at least make it clear why ‘magic’ seems to play an inevitable part in the lives of hunters who live in close contact with nature.
One of the most remarkable chapters of Wizard of the Upper Amazon describes how the old chief, Xumu, prepared Cordova for ten days with a special diet, which included drinks that produced vomiting, diarrhoea and accelerated heartbeat. Then, with other members of the tribe, he was given a 'vision extract’, which had the effect of flooding him with strange sensations, colours, and visions of animals and other natural forms. It took many of these sessions before he could control the chaos released by the drug—which was the aim. Finally, the Indians went one night into the depth of the forest, and spent hours gathering vines and leaves. These were pounded and mashed, then placed with elaborate ritual (involving chants) into the earthenware cooking pot. The preparation continued for three days, and then the green extract was poured into small pots.
A hunter who was having bad luck came to the tribal chief and described a series of mishaps that had led to his family being half starved. The chief told him to return the following night for the ‘vision extract’ (honi xuma) ceremony.
This took place in a large group. Soon after drinking the extract, coloured visions began, which were shared by all. The ‘boa chant’ brought a giant boa constrictor, which glided through the clearing, followed by other snakes, then by a long parade of birds, including a giant eagle, which spread its wings in front of them, flashed its yellow eyes, and snapped its beak. After that came many animals—Cordova explains that he can no longer recall much about it, ‘since the knowledge did not originate in my consciousness or experience’. This continued all night.