– with frequent setbacks – for 100,000 years. And then, when you have seen that, consider whether that enterprise is finished or if, as the optimist claims, it still has centuries and millennia to run. If, in fact, it might be about to accelerate to an unprecedented rate.
If prosperity is exchange and specialisation – more like the multiplication of labour than the division of labour – then when and how did that habit begin? Why is it such a peculiar attribute of the human species?
Chapter Two
The collective brain: exchange and specialisation after 200,000 years ago
He steps under the shower, a forceful cascade pumped down from the third floor. When this civilisation falls, when the Romans, whoever they are this time round, have finally left and the new dark ages begin, this will be one of the first luxuries to go. The old folk crouching by their peat fires will tell their disbelieving grandchildren of standing naked mid-winter under jet streams of hot clean water, of lozenges of scented soaps and of viscous amber and vermilion liquids they rubbed into their hair to make it glossy and more voluminous than it really was, and of thick white towels as big as togas, waiting on warming racks.
I AN M C E WAN
Saturday
One day a little less than 500,000 years ago, near what is now the village of Boxgrove in southern England, six or seven two-legged creatures sat down around the carcass of a wild horse they had just killed, probably with wooden spears. Each took up a block of flint and began to fashion it into a hand axe, skilfully using hammers of stone, bone or antler to chip off flakes until all that remained was a symmetrical, sharp-edged, teardrop-shaped object in size and thickness somewhere between an iPhone and a computer mouse. The debris they left that day is still there, leaving eerie shadows of their own legs as they sat and worked. You can tell that they were right-handed. Notice: each person made his own tools.
The hand axes they made to butcher that horse are fine examples of ‘Acheulean bifaces’. They are thin, symmetrical and razor-sharp along the edge, ideal for slicing through thick hide, severing the ligaments of joints and scraping meat from bones. The Acheulean biface is the stereotype of the Stone Age tool, the iconic flattened teardrop of the Palaeolithic. Because the species that made it has long been extinct we may never quite know how it was used. But one thing we do know. The creatures that made this thing were very content with it. By the time of the Boxgrove horse butchers, their ancestors had been making it to roughly the same design – hand-sized, sharp, double-sided, rounded – for about a million years. Their descendants would continue to make it for hundreds of thousands more years. That’s the same technology for more than a thousand millennia, ten thousand centuries, thirty thousand generations – an almost unimaginable length of time.
Not only that; they made roughly the same tools in south and north Africa and everywhere in between. They took the design with them to the Near East and to the far north-west of Europe (though not to East Asia) and still it did not change. A million years across three continents making the same one tool. During those million years their brains grew in size by about one-third. Here’s the startling thing. The bodies and brains of the creatures that made Acheulean hand axes changed faster than their tools.
To us, this is an absurd state of affairs. How could people have been so unimaginative, so slavish, as to make the same technology for so long? How could there have been so little innovation, regional variation, progress, or even regress?
Actually, this is not quite true, but the detailed truth reinforces the problem rather than resolves it. There is a single twitch of progress in biface hand-axe history: around 600,000 years ago, the design suddenly becomes a little more symmetrical. This coincides with the appearance of a new species of
If prosperity is exchange and specialisation – more like the multiplication of labour than the division of labour – then when and how did that habit begin? Why is it such a peculiar attribute of the human species?
Chapter Two
The collective brain: exchange and specialisation after 200,000 years ago
He steps under the shower, a forceful cascade pumped down from the third floor. When this civilisation falls, when the Romans, whoever they are this time round, have finally left and the new dark ages begin, this will be one of the first luxuries to go. The old folk crouching by their peat fires will tell their disbelieving grandchildren of standing naked mid-winter under jet streams of hot clean water, of lozenges of scented soaps and of viscous amber and vermilion liquids they rubbed into their hair to make it glossy and more voluminous than it really was, and of thick white towels as big as togas, waiting on warming racks.
I AN M C E WAN
Saturday
One day a little less than 500,000 years ago, near what is now the village of Boxgrove in southern England, six or seven two-legged creatures sat down around the carcass of a wild horse they had just killed, probably with wooden spears. Each took up a block of flint and began to fashion it into a hand axe, skilfully using hammers of stone, bone or antler to chip off flakes until all that remained was a symmetrical, sharp-edged, teardrop-shaped object in size and thickness somewhere between an iPhone and a computer mouse. The debris they left that day is still there, leaving eerie shadows of their own legs as they sat and worked. You can tell that they were right-handed. Notice: each person made his own tools.
The hand axes they made to butcher that horse are fine examples of ‘Acheulean bifaces’. They are thin, symmetrical and razor-sharp along the edge, ideal for slicing through thick hide, severing the ligaments of joints and scraping meat from bones. The Acheulean biface is the stereotype of the Stone Age tool, the iconic flattened teardrop of the Palaeolithic. Because the species that made it has long been extinct we may never quite know how it was used. But one thing we do know. The creatures that made this thing were very content with it. By the time of the Boxgrove horse butchers, their ancestors had been making it to roughly the same design – hand-sized, sharp, double-sided, rounded – for about a million years. Their descendants would continue to make it for hundreds of thousands more years. That’s the same technology for more than a thousand millennia, ten thousand centuries, thirty thousand generations – an almost unimaginable length of time.
Not only that; they made roughly the same tools in south and north Africa and everywhere in between. They took the design with them to the Near East and to the far north-west of Europe (though not to East Asia) and still it did not change. A million years across three continents making the same one tool. During those million years their brains grew in size by about one-third. Here’s the startling thing. The bodies and brains of the creatures that made Acheulean hand axes changed faster than their tools.
To us, this is an absurd state of affairs. How could people have been so unimaginative, so slavish, as to make the same technology for so long? How could there have been so little innovation, regional variation, progress, or even regress?
Actually, this is not quite true, but the detailed truth reinforces the problem rather than resolves it. There is a single twitch of progress in biface hand-axe history: around 600,000 years ago, the design suddenly becomes a little more symmetrical. This coincides with the appearance of a new species of
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