If they thought about it at all, most people of 1600 believed that what we now call scientific method would simply open and illuminate the great clockwork set in place by Providence, as God saw fit to let humans share in admiration of his handiwork. Galileo’s troubling thoughts about the structure of the heavens were an unexploded bomb, unproven and unassimilated. (Hamlet still subscribes to a pre-Copernican universe, a “brave o’er-hanging firmament.”) The inevitable collision between scriptural faith and empirical evidence was barely guessed at. Most of the really big surprises — the age of the earth, the origin of animals and man, the shape and scale of the heavens — still lay ahead. Most people of 1600 were far more alarmed by priests and witches than by natural philosophers, though the lines between these three were often unclear.
From the biblical definition of man, and the commonsense principle that it takes one to know one, Hamlet thinks he knows what a human being is, and most Westerners continued to think they knew what they were for another 200 years. The rot of rational doubt on the matter of our beginnings did not set in until the nineteenth century, when geologists realized that the chronology in the Bible could not account for the antiquity they read in rocks, fossils, and sediments. Some civilizations, notably the Maya and the Hindu, assumed that time was vast or infinite, but ours always had a petty notion of its scale. “The poor world is almost six thousand years old,” sighs Rosalind in As You Like It,12 a typical estimate derived from the patriarchal lifetimes, “begats,” and other clues in the Old Testament. Half a century after Rosalind’s sigh, Archbishop Ussher of Armagh and his contemporary John Lightfoot took it upon themselves to pinpoint the very moment of Creation. “Man was created by the Trinity,” Lightfoot declared, “on October 23, 4004 B.C., at nine o’clock in the morning.”13
Such precision was new, but the idea of a young earth had always been essential to the Judaeo-Christian view of time as teleological — a short one-way trip from Creation to Judgment, from Adam to Doom. Newton and other thinkers began to voice doubts about this on theoretical grounds, but they had no real evidence or means of testing their ideas. Then, in the 1830s, while the young Charles Darwin was sailing round the world aboard the Beagle, Charles Lyell published his Principles of Geology, arguing that the earth transformed itself gradually, by processes still at work, and might therefore be as old as Newton had proposed — some ten times older than the Bible allowed.14
Under Queen Victoria, the earth aged quickly — by many millions of years in decades — enough to make room for Darwin’s evolutionary mechanism and the growing collection of giant lizards and lowbrowed fossil humans being dug up around the world and put on show in South Kensington and the Crystal Palace.15
In 1863, Lyell brought out a book called Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, and in 1871 (twelve years after his Origin of Species), Darwin published The Descent of Man. Their ideas were spread by enthusiastic popularizers, above all Thomas Huxley, famous for saying, in a debate on evolution with Bishop Wilberforce, that he would rather acknowledge an ape for his grandfather than be a clergyman careless with the truth.16 Hamlet’s exclamation therefore became a question: What exactly is a man? Like children who reach an age when they’re no longer satisfied that a stork brought them into the world, a newly educated public began to doubt the old mythology.
By the time Gauguin was painting his masterpiece at the end of the century, the first two of his questions were getting concrete answers. His compatriot Madame Curie and others working on radioactivity were uncovering nature’s timekeepers: elements in rock that break down at a measurable rate. By 1907, the physicists Boltwood and Rutherford could show that the earth’s age is reckoned not in millions of years but in billions.17 Archaeology showed that the genus Homo was a latecomer, even among mammals, taking shape long after early pigs, cats, and elephants began walking the earth (or, in the case of whales, gave up walking and went swimming). “Man,” wrote H. G. Wells, “is a mere upstart.”18
What was extraordinary about human development — the one big thing that set us apart from other creatures — was that we “leveraged” natural evolution by developing cultures transmissible through speech from one generation to the next. “The human word,” Northrop Frye wrote in another context, “is the power that orders our chaos.”19 The effect of this power was unprecedented, allowing complex tools, weapons, and elaborate planned behaviours. Even very simple technology had enormous consequences. Basic clothing and built shelter, for example, opened up every climate from the tropics to the tundra. We moved beyond the environments that had made us, and began to make ourselves.
Though we became experimental creatures of our own devising, it’s important to bear in mind that we had no inkling of this process, let alone its consequences, until only the last six or seven of our 100,000 generations. We have done it all sleepwalking. Nature let a few apes into the lab of evolution, switched on the lights, and left us there to mess about with an ever-growing supply of ingredients and processes. The effect on us and the world has accumulated ever since. Let’s list a few steps between the earliest times and this: sharp stones, animal skins, useful bits of bone and wood, wild fire, tame fire, seeds for eating, seeds for planting, houses, villages, pottery, cities, metals, wheels, explosives. What strikes one most forcefully is the acceleration, the runaway progression of change — or to put it another way, the collapsing of time. From the first chipped stone to the first smelted iron took nearly 3 million years; from the first iron to the hydrogen bomb took only 3,000.
The Old Stone Age, or Palaeolithic era, lasted from the appearance of toolmaking hominids, nearly 3 million years ago, until the melting of the last ice age, about 12,000 years ago. It spans more than 99.5 per cent of human existence. During most of that time, the pace of change was so slow that entire cultural traditions (revealed mainly by their stone tool kits) replicated themselves, generation after generation, almost identically over staggering periods of time. It might take 100,000 years for a new style or technique to be developed; then, as culture began to ramify and feed on itself, only 10,000; then mere thousands and centuries. Cultural change begat physical change and vice versa in a feedback loop.
Nowadays we have reached such a pass that the skills and mores we learn in childhood are outdated by the time we’re thirty, and few people past fifty can keep up with their culture — whether in idiom, attitudes, taste, or technology — even if they try. But I am getting ahead in the story. Most people living in the Old Stone Age would not have noticed any cultural change at all. The human world that individuals entered at birth was the same as the one they left at death. There was variation in events, of course — feasts, famines, local triumphs and disasters — but the patterns within each society must have seemed immutable. There was just one way to do things, one mythology, one vocabulary, one set of stories; things were just the way they were.
It is possible to imagine exceptions to what I have just said. The generation that saw the first use of fire, for instance, was perhaps aware that its world had changed. But we can’t be sure how quickly even that Promethean discovery took hold. Most likely, fire was used, when available from wildfires and volcanoes, for a long time before it was kept. And then it was kept for a very long time before anyone learnt it could be made. Some may remember the 1981 film Quest for Fire, in which the lithe figure of Rae Dawn Chong scampers about in nothing but a thin