A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

And he vanished from the face of the earth between thirty and twenty-five thousand years ago,
when Cro-Magnon man - direct ancestor of modern man - appeared on the scene. Ardrey has no
doubt whatever that Neanderthal was exterminated by Cro-Magnon man, and it seems a reasonable
hypothesis even though most experts prefer to leave the question open. And Cro-Magnon man was
the first creature to make obvious use of the enlarged brain. He made paintings on the walls of his
caves; he even invented some crude form of notation on reindeer bones, probably to indicate the
phases of the moon. In due course, he invented agriculture and built cities. He advanced more in
twenty-five thousand years than his ancestors had in two million.
As usual, Ardrey has a striking theory to explain what happened. He points out that the ‘tanged’
arrowhead - a head that could be fastened to a shaft - was invented by a species of Neanderthal man
- Aterian - who lived in the Sahara (in the days when it was a green paradise) about forty thousand
years ago. That argues that they also invented the bow. And the bow and arrow, Ardrey believes,
were as crucial to the ancient world as the atomic bomb is to the modern. It was the first ‘long
distance’ weapon. It meant that a hunter was no longer tied to his tribe; he could go off on his own
and stalk small game. And once man had become used to hunting alone - to being an individual - he
probably began to develop the habit of thinking for himself. It is an exciting theory, and open to the
single objection that, for some odd reason, the bow and arrow failed to spread beyond the Sahara
culture that invented it. But then, as Ardrey points out, Cro-Magnon man knew about the sling,
another long-distance weapon...
This hypothesis may prove to be as unnecessary as the ‘big bang’ theory of the brain. To begin
with, Neanderthal man seems to have been far less ape-like than we used to assume. He buried his
dead with some form of ritual. The seeds of brightly coloured flowers have been discovered in
Neanderthal graves - they were probably woven into some sort of screen to cover the body. Chunks
of manganese dioxide - a colouring material later used by Cro-Magnon man - have been found in
his caves, some of them worn down on one side as if used as crayons. Smaller quantities of other
colouring materials - like red ochre - have also been found. So it seems conceivable that he used
them for colouring animal skins. Neanderthal woman may have been a slut - the caves seem to be
knee deep in animal bones - but that is no reason why she may not have enjoyed wearing brightly
coloured clothes. Another puzzling feature of Neanderthal man is that he manufactured stone
spheres, as did his ancestors a million years earlier. A large white disc of flint, twenty centimetres
wide, was discovered in a cave at La Quina, in France. Every student of mythology knows that such
discs usually represent the sun; these stone spheres may also be sun or moon images. All this
strongly suggests that Neanderthal man, in spite of his bestial appearance, had some form of
religion. And religion is undoubtedly the outcome of man’s thinking - and feeling - about the
universe. It sounds very much as if Neanderthal man was already an individual before he invented
the bow and arrow.
The real objection to most of these theories - from Maerth’s brain-eating to Ardrey’s bow and
arrow - is that they all seem to assume that man is a basically passive creature who needed to
stumble upon the discoveries that accidentally triggered his evolution. Ardrey and Lorenz suggest
that man’s discovery of weapons led to a better co-ordination of hand and eye, and so developed
the brain. Ardrey suggests that long-distance weapons created ‘individuality’. Speaking about the
mystery of the enlarged brain, he says that it is rather as if someone had invented the Rolls-Royce
before the discovery of petrol. And that in itself suggests that he may simply be holding his facts
upside down. Suppose it happened the other way round, and man made his discoveries as a result of
seeking the answers to problems?