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By Root 514 0

and that he developed a big brain for that purpose. Given the increasing sophistication of man’s tools throughout his history, and the sudden leaps of technical skill that seemed to accompany each change in skull size – from habilis to erectus, from erectus to sapiens, from Neanderthal to modern – this made some sense. But there were two problems with it. First, during the 1960s the ability of animals, especially chimpanzees, to make and use tools was discovered, which rather took the shine off Homo habilis’ somewhat basic toolkit. Second, there was a suspicious bias about the argument. Archaeologists study stone tools because that is what they find preserved. An archaeologist of a million years in the future would call ours the concrete age, with some justice, but he might never even know about books, newspapers, television broadcasts, the clothes industry, the oil business, even the car industry – all trace of which would have rusted away. He might assume that our civilization was characterized by hand-to-hand combat by naked people over concrete citadels. Perhaps, in like fashion, the Neolithic age was distinguished from the Palaeolithic, not by its toolkit but by the invention of language, or marriage, or nepotism or some such unfossilizable signature. Wood probably loomed larger than stone in people’s lives, yet no wooden tools survive.17

Besides, the evidence from the tools, far from suggesting continuous human ingenuity, speaks of monumental and tedious conservatism. The first stone tools, the Oldowan technology of Homo habilis, which appeared about two and a half million years ago in Ethiopia, were very simple indeed: roughly chipped rocks. They barely improved at all over the next million years, and far from experimenting, they became gradually more standardized. They were then replaced by the Acheulian technology of Homo erectus, which consisted of hand axes and tear-drop shaped stone devices. Again, nothing happened for a million years and more, until about two hundred thousand years ago when there was sudden and dramatic expansion in the variety and virtuosity of tools at about the time that Homo sapiens himself appeared. From then on there was no looking back: tools grew ever more varied and accomplished until the invention of metal. But it comes too late to explain big heads: heads had been swelling ever since three million years ago.18

Making the tools that erectus used is not especially hard. Everybody could do it, presumably, which is why it was done all over Africa. There was no inventiveness or creativity going on. For a million years these people made the same dull hand axes. Yet their brains were already grossly large by ape standards. Plainly, the instincts of manual dexterity, perception of shape and reverse engineering from function to form were useful to these people, but it is highly implausible to account for the enlargement of the brain as driven entirely by an enlargement of these instincts.

The first rival to the toolmaking theory was ‘man-the-hunter’. In the 1960s, starting with the work of Raymond Dart, there was much interest in the notion that man was the only ape to have taken up a meat diet and hunting as a way of life. Hunting, went the logic, required forethought, cunning, coordination and the ability to learn skills such as where to find game and how to get close to it. All true, all utterly banal. Anybody who has ever seen a film of lions hunting zebra on the Serengeti will know how skilful lions are at each of the tasks mentioned above. They stalk, ambush, cooperate and deceive their prey as carefully as any group of men ever could. Lions do not need vast brains, so why should we? The fashion for man-the-hunter gave way to woman-the-gatherer but similar arguments applied. It is simply unnecessary to be capable of philosophy and language to be able to dig tubers from the ground. Baboons do it just as well as women.19

None the less, one of the most startling things to come out of the great studies of the !Kung San people of the Namib desert in the 1960s was the enormous accumulation