Modern Mind

Combined with the findings of anthropologists, this made all cultures equally potent and equally original, and therefore the ‘classical’ world was no longer the ultimate source.
    At a deeper level, as Renfrew specifically pointed out, the discoveries of the new archaeology showed the dangers of succumbing too easily to Darwinian thinking. 51 The old diffusionist theory was a form of evolution, but a form of evolution so general as to be almost meaningless. It suggested that civilisationsdeveloped in an unbroken, single sequence. The new C 14 and tree-ring evidence showed that that simply wasn’t true. The new view wasn’t any less ‘evolutionary,’ but it was very different. It was, above all, a cautionary tale.

PART FOUR
THE COUNTER-CULTURE TO KOSOVO

The View from Nowhere, The View from Everywhere
     

34
GENETIC SAFARI
     
    In 1973 the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology was given to three men. Two of them had been on different sides of the Nazi divide in pre-World War II Germany. Karl von Frisch had suffered at the hands of Nazi students because he was never able to prove that he was not one-eighth Jewish. He survived only because he was a world authority on bees at a time when Germany was suffering a virus that threatened its bee population, and badly needed his help to bolster food production. Konrad Lorenz, on the other hand, had fully subscribed to the prevailing Nazi ideology about ‘degeneration’ among the German-Jewish population and willingly taken part in various highly dubious experiments, particularly in Poland. He was captured as a Russian prisoner toward the end of the war and not released until 1948. Subsequently he apologised for his prewar and wartime activities, apologies that were accepted by colleagues, the most important of whom was the third in the trio to share the Nobel Prize in 1973. This was Nikolaas Tinbergen, a Dutchman, who spent the war in a hostage camp in danger of being shot in reprisal for the activities of the Dutch underground. If Tinbergen accepted Lorenz’s apologies, he must have been convinced they were genuine. 1 The award of the prize was recognition for a relatively new discipline in which each man had been a founding father: ethology, the study of animal behaviour with a strong comparative element. Ethologists are interested in animal behaviour for what that might reveal about instinct, and what, if anything, separates man from all other forms of life.
    Tinbergen’s classic work, carried out since the war (and after he had moved from Leiden to Oxford), elaborated on Lorenz’s ideas of ‘fixed action patterns’ and ‘innate releasing mechanisms’ (IRMs). Experimenting with the male three-spined stickleback, Tinbergen showed the crucial importance of why at times the fish stood on its head to display its red belly to the female: this stimulated a mating response. Similarly, he showed the significance of the red spot on a herring gull’s bill: it elicited begging from a chick. 2 It was later shown that such IRMs were more complicated, but the elegance of Tinbergen’s experiments caught the imagination of scientists and public alike. John Bowlby’s research on maternal attachment drew inspiration from this ethological work, which also helped stimulate a great burst of fieldworkwith animals phylogenetically closer to man than the insects, birds, and fish examined by the three Nobel Prize winners. This fieldwork concentrated on mammals and primates.
    Since 1959, when Mary Leakey discovered Zinj, the Leakeys had made several other significant discoveries at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. The most important of these was that three hominids had existed at the same time –
Australopithecus boisei, Homo erectus
(Louis now conceded that Zinj was actually an especially large form of Peking Man), and a new find, dating from the early 1960s, which they had named
Homo habilis,
‘Handy Man,’ because he was found associated with slightly more advanced stone tools. Mary Leakey, in her scientific volume entitled
Olduvai Gorge,
analysed 37,000 Olduvai artefacts, including twenty hominid remains, 20,000 animal remains, and many stone tools. 3 All this revealed Olduvai as an early, primitive culture with
Homo erectus
giving way to
Homo habilis
with more refined but still very primitive tools, and many species of extinct animals (such as hippos).
    An American author and playwright, Robert Ardrey, drew yet more attention to Olduvai, and Africa. In a series of