INSIDE THE NEOLITHIC MIND: Consciousness, Cosmos and the Realm of the Gods
by David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce
Thames & Hudson £18.95 pp320

Many books about our origins are peppered with vague statements about “stone age life on the savannah”, rather than studies of the evidence. So when archeologists take the trouble to analyse and reflect on what we are and how we got here, and, as with these two books, do it well, it’s worth paying attention.

The Singing Neanderthals, as praiseworthy as Steven Mithen’s previous titles, The Prehistory of the Mind and After the Ice, is more about song than neanderthals: it covers not just the famed creatures that dominated Europe for 400,000 years, but also their and our ancestors, back to 4.5m years ago. His theme is language, and he proposes that our separate speaking and musical skills evolved from a common ability to express not words, but rhythm and melody.

This is not a new idea; Darwin himself suggested that “our half-human ancestors” courted each other with musical tones and rhythm. Most academics, however, now argue for a slow progression to our present loquacity from fewer words and less grammar. Instead, Mithen follows the linguist Steven Brown (not “Stephen”, as Mithen has it) and his “musilanguage”, adds body movements and gestures, and explores fossil evidence and inferred ancient social worlds.

His conclusion is that talking as we know it appeared in Africa before 170,000 years ago. Earlier hominids (creatures on our side that succeeded our common ancestor with the chimpanzees) did not talk, but sang and danced. While Steven Pinker characterised music as “useless . . . plinking noises”, for Mithen, an archeologist at Reading University, it is fundamental to our humanity. Abstract gestures and calls allowed the first Homo species, 2m years ago, to express sophisticated emotions such as guilt and embarrassment. This ability facilitated the larger group sizes and more complex social relations that our ancestors needed to survive in open landscapes.

While we were emerging in Africa, however, neanderthals were more than happy in the ice-age north, with their uniquely developed skills of musically emoting and communicating. Anatomically, neanderthals could have talked, but, argues Mithen, the absence of any symbolic artefacts, the fact that stone tool designs remained unchanged for hundreds of millennia, and the evidence that neanderthals lived localised lives and hence had nothing to gossip about add up to a case for no speech. With brains as big as or bigger than ours, neanderthals succeeded in the most challenging environments by humming to each other, their cries wafting across the ice like whale song through the oceans.

Who would wish to argue with that? This is a beguiling book, with enough documentation to satisfy the cynical linguist. Even if you are unconvinced by the argument, you will enjoy an up-to-date and original survey of human origins from one of archeology’s leading writers.

David Lewis-Williams’s previous book, The Mind in the Cave, picked up almost exactly where Mithen leaves us, as modern humans arrived in Europe, chattering and painting, to outcompete neanderthals. This time, with Witwatersrand colleague David Pearce, he visits some of the old world’s first farmers, in the near east and in western Europe.

The authors’ mission is to find a “method that will help us to access knowledge about the universal foundations of diversity”. If that sounds a little esoteric, it is also unconvincing. The “universal foundations” are sought in brain functions. In certain situations — during extreme hunger, rhythmic dancing or the taking of mind- altering drugs — these functions generate standard visions of bright geometric patterns, a dark tunnel leading to light and a sense of flying. All modern humans, it is assumed, would have experienced the same visions, but interpreted them according to their own cultures. If you can spot the signs, you have a “neurological viaduct” to the past.

The foundations for this argument were laid by Gerardo (not Geraldo, as spelled here) Reichel-Dolmatoff, working in Colombia, and Jeremy Dronfield, studying Irish neolithic tombs. The trouble is these researches make their mark only at the end of the book. Before this, “universal foundations” are often assumed. Could a common ritual flying imagery have as much to do with universal birds as with universal brain functions? The question is not asked.

Small matter, as the book takes the reader through some spectacular archeology, including ceremonial art and structures recently excavated in eastern Turkey, and the decorated megalithic tombs of Ireland, Wales and Brittany. The authors are good guides. At their best, as when touring the Boyne valley tombs, they carry the day, and any inadequacies in their thesis are forgotten. If at times it feels a bit of a ragbag, as the reader is taken from one archeological dig to another with ideas and assertions scattered between, the book is informative and stimulating. It deals with matters still significant today: what is religion and how much does it define us?

The authors claim to recognise the supernatural as the product of the human brain, and say there is no turning back: “no matter how fiercely reactionary some believers may be”, science cannot be stopped. As Richard Dawkins might say, belief in supernatural beings loses all credibility. Religion, however suitably defined, need not do so. We can never leave behind the fantastical if it comes from the unconscious brain. It’s what we do with it that counts.

These books are about people not molecules, and minds not brain synapses — surely the true routes to understanding ourselves. They discuss fossils, artefacts and ancient deposits, modern cultural variety and, in Mithen’s case, our closest living relatives, the great apes. All have much still to tell us (recently, gorillas have been reported using tools, crushing nuts with stones and testing a swamp with a pole), and all are disappearing fast. Our own story is one of the most exciting, and challenging, scientific quests: it is also one of the most urgent.

Available at the Books First prices of £18 (Mithen) and £17.06 on 0870 165 8585

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