A Short History Of Progress. Ronald Wright
for the first time by people like us, who with their boats, bonfires, arrows, raucous voices, wholesale tree-felling, and drunken orgies baffle and fascinate the “forest devils” even as they kill them one by one. At the end, only a mewling baby remains, kept by a woman who has lost her own child to drain the milk from her breasts. The invaders then move on through the new land, their leader plotting further murders — murders now amongst themselves — as he sharpens a weapon, “a point against the darkness of the world.”
Golding had no doubt that the ruthless were the winners of prehistory, but another question he raised is still unsettled: Does any Neanderthal blood flow in modern humans? How likely is it that during 10,000 years of interaction, there was no sex, unconsensual though it may have been? And if there was sex, were there children? DNA studies on Neanderthal remains have been inconclusive so far.37 But the skeleton of a child found recently in Portugal strongly suggests interbreeding, as do bones from Croatia and elsewhere in the Balkans.38
I also have personal evidence that Neanderthal genes may still be with us. A few modern people have telltale ridges on their heads.39 I happen to have one — a bony shelf across the back of the skull that looks and feels like the Neanderthal bun. So until new findings come along to settle the matter, I choose to believe that Neanderthal blood still flows, however faint, in the Cro-Magnon tide.40
Despite the many details of our ancestry still to be worked out, the twentieth century has broadly answered the first two of Gauguin’s questions. There is no room for rational doubt that we are apes, and that, regardless of our exact route through time, we come ultimately from Africa. But unlike other apes, we tamper, and are tampering more than ever, with our destiny. For a long time now, there has been no such thing as that Enlightenment wild goose which Gauguin sought, the Natural Man. Like those arthritic Neanderthals who were cared for by their families, we cannot live without our cultures. We have met the maker of Hamlet’s “piece of work” — and it is us.
Notes - I: Gauguin’s Questions
1. Unable to afford real canvas, Gauguin painted his masterpiece on a length of jute sacking.
2. Quoted in Gavan Daws, A Dream of Islands (Honolulu: Mutual Publishing, 1980).
3. Sidney Pollard, The Idea of Progress: History and Society (London: C. A. Watts, 1968), p. 9ff.
4. Ibid.
5. Not only religious ones. Victorian archaeology defined technical advance in terms of metals, but the Classical world had drawn the opposite conclusion, seeing only a slide into cheapness and corruptibility — from an age of gold to one of bronze and lastly iron.
6. Ronald Wright, Stolen Continents: Conquest and Resistance In the Americas (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), p. 5.
7. American Cold Warriors of the last century used to threaten to “bomb the Soviets back into the Stone Age.” Whether the Russians uttered the same threat, I don’t know. But it was certainly a credible one. Even if a nuclear “exchange” (as the euphemism went) failed to extinguish all higher forms of life, it would have ended civilization worldwide. No crops worth eating would grow in a nuclear winter.
8. See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).
9. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, 1711; Thomas Henry Huxley, On Elementary Instruction in Physiology, 1877.
10. Quoted in Robert J. Wenke, Patterns in Prehistory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 79.
11. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 2, scene 2.
12. Ibid., As You Like It, act 4, scene 1.
13. Quoted in Glyn Daniel, The Idea of Prehistory (Harmondsworth, UK: Pelican, 1962), p. 19.
14. Newton, basing his calculations on the speed at which a mass of iron cools down, had already suspected that the earth was at least 50,000 years old, and the eighteenth-century French thinkers Benoit de Maillet and George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon opted for far greater estimates, but their calculations gained little acceptance. See Martin Gorst, Measuring Eternity: The Search for the Beginning of Time (New York: Broadway Books, 2001), pp. 93–121.
15. The physicist Lord Kelvin fought a rearguard action on the grounds that the sun could not be old enough for Darwin’s time scale, but this was widely doubted and eventually disproved.
16. His words were not transcribed at the time. Accounts of what was said differ somewhat but agree on the gist.
17. Gorst, Measuring Eternity, p. 204.
18. H. G. Wells et al., The Science of Life, vol. 2 (New York: Doubleday, 1929), pp. 422–23. His co-author Julian Huxley was a grandson of Darwin’s champion, Thomas Huxley.
19. Northrop Frye, “Humanities in a New World” in Three Lectures (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1958), p. 23. Some experts see speech as quite a recent phenomenon, but I think it much more likely to have had a very long development, gaining complexity in step with the brain. Many of the differences between ape and human brains are in regions that govern aspects of speech. See chapter 2, note 11, below.
20. Rosny was born in Brussels in 1856, worked as journalist in England, and moved in 1886 to Paris, where he became president of the Académie Goncourt.
21. A 400,000-year-old beach hut at Terra Amata, in southern France, seems to have a hearth, while there are “hints of fire use” in Africa from a million years before that. Ian Tattersall, The Last Neanderthal: The Rise, Success, and Mysterious Extinction of Our Closest Human Relatives (New York: Westview Press, 1999), p. 72.
22. See, for example, Loren Eiseley’s 1954 essay “Man the Firemaker” in The Star Thrower (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), pp. 45–52.