The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries

by Colin Wilson

  Homo erectus came into being about two or three million years ago and coexisted with Dartian man. But while Dartian man had a brain size of about 500 cc, the brain of Homo erectus slowly developed until it reached 1,000 cc around 400,000 years ago. There it stopped, and Homo erectus gradually faded out.

  But about half a million years ago a new species, Homo sapiens, came on the scene – no one quite knows how. (One scientist, Allan Wilson, has even suggested that Homo sapiens developed from Homo erectus in Australia.) What we do know is that his brain developed from Homo erectus’s 1,000 cc to modern man’s 1,800 cc in such a short period (in evolutionary terms) that scientists speak of “the brain explosion”.

  What caused this brain explosion? We now know enough about evolution to know that things do not just “happen”. Evolution is not “natural”; the shark has remained unchanged for 150 million years. Kurtén has nothing much to suggest, except to point out the obvious – that our evolutionary capacities are drawn out of us by changes in the environment (like the bad weather of the Pleistocene). But as far as we know, there have been no such changes in the past half million years, except a succession of ice ages. It is possible, of course, that these “pressured” man into developing his brain; but it seems more likely that they would favour the development of fur or hair. Ardrey even suggests the possibility that the brain explosion may have been connected with a huge meteor that exploded over the Indian Ocean about seventy thousand years ago (its remains, called tektites, can still be found scattered over twenty million square miles) and caused a reversal in the earth’s magnetic field. He suggests that if the earth had no magnetic field for a brief intervening period, a rain of cosmic rays may have caused genetic changes in human beings.

  Another anthropologist, Otto Kiss Maerth, devoted a book entitled The Beginning Was the End (1971) to the theory that human evolution was due to cannibalism – discoveries near Peking in 1929 seemed to show that the ape-men of six hundred thousand years ago ate the brains of their enemies. Maerth suggests that eating brains stimulates both the intelligence and the sexual instinct and that this explains the brain explosion. The objection to this theory is that there is not enough widespread evidence for cannibalism and the eating of brains to account for human evolution.

  Ardrey has a more plausible basic hypothesis, which he calls “the hunting hypothesis” – the notion that men had to learn social cooperation because they had to learn to hunt together. But Ardrey had originally suggested that Dartian man became a carnivore during the Pleistocene era (in the past million years), when droughts made vegetation scarce. When Louis Leakey discovered evidence at Fort Ternan, in Kenya, that Ramapithecus was a meat eater nearly fifteen million years ago, that view was undermined; yet it only increased Ardrey’s conviction that the “hunting hypothesis” explains human evolution. What he failed to explain was why wolves and other animals who hunt in packs have not evolved to the human level.

  In fact, this problem has almost certainly been solved by an experimental psychologist named Nicholas Humphrey, who studied the brains of mountain gorillas in Rwanda, in central Africa, and wondered why they had such large brains when their lives are so crudely simple – eating, sleeping, and moving on to new feeding grounds. The answer came as he observed the gorillas closely and noticed their incredible sensitivity to one another’s feelings. The most important thing in a gorilla’s life is its relation to other gorillas. A gorilla’s family life is the equivalent of a university education; it learns to react delicately to the moods, feelings, and reactions of other gorillas. If Humphrey is correct, then the size of the brain has something to do with the complexity of social relations.

  The “Humphrey theory” of evolution, then, would run like this: As man became increasingly successful because of his prowess as a hunter, his numbers increased, and social intercourse with other groups became increasingly important. As sensitivity and cooperation became survival factors, the brain flourished.

  Yet the “hunting hypothesis” may pave the way to the next step in the argument. If Kurtén is correct in his belief that Dartian man ceased to be a wanderer in the Pliocene era and began to leave the women and children behind while he went hunting, then this would apply even more so to Homo sapiens during the great droughts and ice ages of the Pleistocene. Most anthropologists seem to recognize that sex played a basic part in human evolution – from Kurtén and Morris to Maerth, with his brain-eating theory. As Ardrey points out, sex is a sideshow in the world of nature. Wild animals only become interested in it when the female experiences her periodic cycle. But at some point in his evolution, human sexual desire became independent of that cycle, and man began to have sex at all times except when the female was menstruating. It seems logical to explain this in terms of the hunting hypothesis. If a hunter had been away from home for weeks, then he would expect to make love to his mate when he returned, whether she was “in heat” or not. Some females would naturally object to this; but they would have fewer offspring than the females who had no such objection – or swallowed their dislike – and eventually, the objectors would die out.

  What no one seems to have recognized so far is the importance of sex as an “internal” factor in evolution. When an animal has nothing else to do, it lies down and yawns. When a man has nothing else to do, his thoughts turn as often as not to sex. If there is a pretty girl in the vicinity, he may begin to brood on seduction – even if he happens to have a wife already. If he is too shy or otherwise inhibited, then he may simply daydream about sex. From being a “sideshow”, sex has become one of the central interests of human existence.

  Now if we imagine Stone Age hunters in a period of scarcity, we can see that they may have had to have spent longer and longer periods away from the women and children of the tribe; a hunting expedition might have lasted a month or longer. Back at home, women were now permanently receptive and were consequently beginning to develop the sexual characteristics males found exciting – larger breasts, full lips, rounded buttocks. When the males came back from a long expedition, some skinny adolescent girls had suddenly begun to change into desirable women. The presence of these unattached females must have introduced an element of competition and excitement. Young men now had good reason for wanting to become successful hunters and fighters – it gave them the pick of the girls.

  We note another interesting thing about human beings: that from babyhood onward they have a tendency to idealize possible mates. Little boys fall in love with the prettiest girl in the class and daydream of being cowboys who rescue her from a band of marauding Indians. We do not know, of course, whether dogs and cats experience these emotions, but it seems unlikely. As far as we can see, it seems to have been sex that taught human beings to use the imagination.

  This means that, to a large extent, sex provides us with goals and objectives, even when there are no other stimuli. It is an “internal” factor in evolution, a psychological drive that operates most of the time. It could be the factor that explains why man became an “evolutionary animal”, an animal who went on striving even when he had a full belly.

  Kurtén seems to skirt these ideas when he remarks: “Another semi-solution [to the problem of evolution] was the idea of an inner force of evolution, the élan vital, which would automatically carry us forward to new heights of nobility and spirituality. Unfortunately there is no evidence whatever for the existence of such a force”. But sex is precisely such a force, as Goethe recognized when he wrote: “The eternal feminine draws us upwards and on”.

  In the previous paragraph Kurtén had dismissed another possibility: that by improving themselves, human beings produce better offspring. This is known as “the inheritance of acquired characteristics” and is a theory of evolution that was suggested by Darwin’s predecessor, Lamarck. The simplest illustration of the difference between the two theories is the problem of how the giraffe came to have a long neck. According to Darwin, food shortages due to drought caused the original short-necked giraffes to become ext
inct. But the giraffes who, by chance, happened to have longer necks, were able to reach the leaves on higher branches and so survived. And eventually, all giraffes had long necks. Lamarck’s view was that when food became scarce, giraffes had to make strenuous efforts to reach higher branches, and these efforts gradually lengthened their necks.

  The discovery of the genes (by Mendel) made it look as if Darwin was right and Lamarck wrong. For genetics seemed to prove that, even if a giraffe could stretch its neck by effort, it could not transmit this long neck to its children, whose genes would ensure that they had short necks.

  In the twentieth century some biologists wondered whether perhaps genes do not mutate at random but in some way that is useful to the organism. But this theory was disproved by the study of bacteria, which showed that genes always mutate at random. At least, healthy and well-nourished bacteria mutate at random, And that is as one would expect. Why should they want to change if they are comfortable and well fed?

  But in the late 1980s Dr John Cairns of Harvard decided to study starving bacteria and concluded that some of them could deliberately mutate to utilize a new food source. His results have been confirmed by Professor Barry Hall at the University of Rochester, New York. When he deliberately starved his bacteria of an amino acid essential to their survival, some of them mutated so they could manufacture the missing acid, until whole colonies of the mutated bacteria came into existence. It seems, then, that Lamarck was probably right after all. As, incidentally, was Samuel Butler, who objected to Darwin on precisely these grounds (see chapter 23).

  But even on a more down-to-earth level, the rigidly Darwinian view is questionable. We all know that efforts made by parents can be passed on to their children – that, for example, parents who have educated themselves can pass on their love of learning to their children. The truth is – as Kurtén recognizes – that the brain has a huge dormant capacity, which can be awakened by the right stimuli. Man had developed a “modern size” brain long before he had books and music and philosophy to put in it.

  Kurtén also recognizes this when he says that our ancestors may have come down from the trees not because there was no longer enough food in the forests but because they were excited by the possibilities of the wide savannahs. Again, he is recognizing an evolutionary force, a craving for adventure, for a fuller and richer mode of existence. Not from the Apes is devoted to the thesis that man’s uniqueness may date back as far as thirty-five million years, when our lineage split off from that of our cousins the apes. In the beginning, that split may have been due to natural selection and survival of the fittest. But in the past half million years or so – perhaps far longer than that – the evolutionary urge seems to have acquired its own momentum, so that even a convinced Darwinian like Sir Julian Huxley (grandson of T. H. Huxley) can state that man has finally become “the managing director of evolution”.

  We can see, then, that the whole Missing Link controversy was based on simple misunderstanding. Darwin appeared to be saying that man is merely a more intelligent ape and that his intelligence developed by chance. That clearly implies that individual effort counts for nothing. We struggle because we have to struggle; that is part of the rat race. But our “higher aspirations” are so much nonsense. We are mere apes.

  Human evolution proves the contrary. Man has become an evolutionary animal, an animal who expects to change. Striving has become his second nature – a striving based upon his intense romanticism, the same romanticism that made the Greeks romanticize Helen of Troy, that made the troubadours romanticize their chosen “lady”, that made Malory romanticize Queen Guinevere and Isolde. And there is every reason to expect our evolution to continue. The dormant capacity that changed Dartian man into modern man lies inside our heads. The brain developed through social intercourse and cooperation, but its excess size meant dormant capacity. In other words, Homo sapiens developed a modern brain but had very little use for it.

  Brain physiologists tell us that, in spite of science, philosophy, art, and technology, modern man still only uses one-fifth of his brain capacity. When he learns to use the other four-fifths, there is every reason to believe that he will be as different from modern man as you and I are from our australopithecine ancestors.

  36

  Where is the Mona Lisa?

  The answer to the above question may seem self-evident: in the Louvre. But the matter is not quite as straightforward as it looks.

  The Mona Lisa is better known on the continent of Europe as “La Gioconda”, or the smiling woman – the word means the same as the old English “jocund”. It was painted, as everyone knows, by the great Italian artist Leonardo, who was born in the little town of Vinci, near Florence, in 1452. Mona Lisa (Mona is short for Madonna) was a young married woman who was about twenty-four when Leonardo met her. She was the wife of a man twenty years her senior, the wealthy Francesco del Giocondo, and when Leonardo started to paint her around 1500 she had just lost a child. Leonardo’s biographer Vasari says that her husband had to hire jesters and musicians to make her smile during the early sittings.

  For some reason Leonardo became obsessed with her, and went on painting her for several years, always dissatisfied with his work. This has given rise to stories that he was in love with her, and even that she became his mistress; but this seems unlikely. Leonardo was homosexual, and took a poor view of sex, writing with Swiftian disgust: “The act of coitus and the members that serve it are so hideous that, if it were not for the beauty of faces . . . the human species would lose its humanity”. Yet there was something about Madonna Lisa that made him strive to capture her expression for at least six years – possibly more. His biographer Antonia Vallentin says she fascinated him more than any other woman he met in his life. He gave the unfinished portrait to Mona Lisa’s husband when he left Florence in 1505, but still continued to work on it at intervals when he returned.

  In his Lives of the Painters, Giorgio Vasari says that Leonardo worked at the Mona Lisa for four years and left it unfinished. “This work is now in the possession of Francis, king of France, at Fontainebleau . . .” And this, we assume, is the famous portrait now in the Louvre. Yet this raises a puzzling question. Leonardo gave the portrait to the man who had commissioned it, Mona Lisa’s husband, in 1505, and a mere forty or so years later, when Vasari was writing, it is in the possession of Francis I of France. Surely the Giacondo family would not part with a masterpiece so easily? Besides, the Louvre picture is quite obviously finished . . .

  There is another interesting clue. In 1584 a historian of art, Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, published a book on painting, sculpture and architecture, in which he refers to “the Gioconda and the Mona Lisa”, as if they were two seperate paintings. The book is dedicated to Don Carlos Emanuele, the Grand Duke of Savoy, who was a great admirer of Leonardo – so it hardly seems likely that this was a slip of the pen . . .

  Two Giocondas? Then where is the other one? And, more important, who is this second Gioconda?

  The answer to the first question is, oddly enough: in the Louvre. The world-famous painting, which has been reproduced more often than any other painting in history, is almost certainly not the Mona Lisa that we have been talking about.

  Then where is the painting of the woman who so obsessed Leonardo that he could not finish her portrait? There is evidence to show that this original Mona Lisa was brought from Italy in the mid-eighteenth century, and went into the stately home of a nobleman in Somerset. Just before the First World War it was discovered by the art connoisseur Hugh Blaker in Bath, and he picked it up for a few guineas, and took it to his studio in Isleworth. Hence it became known as the Isleworth Mona Lisa. It was bigger than the Louvre painting, and – more important – was unfinished; the background has only been lightly touched in. Blaker was much impressed by it. The girl was younger and prettier than the Louvre Mona Lisa. And Blaker felt that this new Mona Lisa corresponded much more closely to Vasari’s description than the Louvre painting. Vasari rhapsodized about its
delicate realism:

  The eyes had that lustre and watery sheen which is always seen in real life, and around them were those touches of red and the lashes which cannot be represented without the greatest subtlety . . . The nose with its beautiful nostrils, rosy and tender, seemed to be alive. The opening of the mouth, united by the red of the lips to the flesh tones of the face, seemed not to be coloured, but to be living flesh.

  Sir Kenneth Clark, quoting this passage in his book on Leonardo, asks: “Who would recognise the submarine goddess of the Louvre”? To which Blaker would have replied: “Ah, precisely”. But the description does fit the Isleworth Mona Lisa.

  There is another point that seems to establish beyond all doubt that Blaker’s picture is Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. The painter Raphael saw it in Leonardo’s studio about 1504, and later made a sketch of it. This sketch shows two Grecian columns on either side – columns that can be found in the Isleworth Mona Lisa, but not in the Louvre painting.

  Blaker believes that the Isleworth Mona Lisa is a far more beautiful work, and many art experts have agreed with him. It is true that the Louvre painting has many admirers; Walter Pater wrote a celebrated “purple passage” about it in The Renaissance beginning “She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times . . .”, and W. B. Yeats thought this so beautiful that he divided it into lines of free verse and printed it as a poem in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse. On the other hand, the connoisseur Bernard Berenson wrote about it: “What I really saw in the figure of Mona Lisa was the estranging image of woman beyond the reach of my sympathy or the ken of my interest . . . watchful, sly, secure, with a smile of anticipated satisfaction and a pervading air of hostile superiority . . .” He felt the beauty of the Louvre Mona Lisa had been sacrificed to technique. No one could say this of the far more fresh and lively Isleworth Mona Lisa.