The Science of Discworld II

that banana, I can come back and get it later when that big male won’t steal it from me’.
    The young of this early hominid grew up in family groups where things were happening that were unlike anything anywhere else on the planet. Sure, there were lots of other mammal nests, packs and troupes, where the young were playing at being adult or just fooling around; nests were safe, and trial-and-error was rarely lethal, so the young could learn safely. But in the human lineage, father was making stone tools, grunting at his women about the children, about the cave, about putting more wood on the fire. There would be favourite gourds for banging, perhaps for fetching water, spears for hunting, lots of stones for tools.
    Meanwhile, in Africa, another new lineage had arisen about 120,000 years ago, and spread; we call it ancient Homo sapiens , and it led to us. Its brain was even bigger, and in caves on the coast of South Africa it – we – had begun to make better tools, and to make primitive paintings on rocks and cave walls. Our population exploded, and we migrated. We reached Australia just over 60,000 years ago, and Europe about 50,000 years ago.
    In Europe there had been a moderately robust Homo , the Neanderthal Homo sapiens neanderthalensis , a subspecies. Someanthropologists consider us to be a sister subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens or, loosely speaking, ‘Seriously wise man’. Wow. The Neanderthals’ stone tools were well developed for various functions, but these particular hominids seem not to have been progressive. Their culture hardly changed over tens of thousands of years. But they seem to have had some kind of spiritual impulse, for they buried their dead with ceremony – or, at least, with flowers.
    Our more gracile ancestors, the Cro-Magnon people, lived at the same time as the last of the Neanderthals, and there are many theories about what happened when the two subspecies interacted. Basically, we survived and the Neanderthals didn’t …
    Why? Was it because we bashed them on the head more effectively than they bashed us? Did we outbreed them? In breed them? Squeeze them out into the ‘edge country’? Crush them with superior extelligence? We’ll put our own theory forward later in the book.
    We don’t subscribe to the ‘rational’ story of human evolution and development, the story that has named us so pretentiously Homo sapiens sapiens . Briefly, that story focuses on the nerve cells in our brains, and says that our brains got bigger and bigger until finally we evolved Albert Einstein. They did, and we did, and Albert was indeed pretty bright, but nonetheless the thrust of that story is nonsense, because it doesn’t discuss why, or even how, our brains got bigger. It’s like describing a cathedral by saying ‘You start with a low wall of stones and as time passes you add more stones so that it gets higher and higher’. There’s a lot more to a cathedral than that, as its builders would attest.
    What actually happened is much more interesting, and you can see it going on all around you today. Let’s look at it from the elf’s viewpoint. We don’t programme our children rationally, as we might set up a computer. Instead, we pour into their minds loads of irrational junk about sly foxes, wise owls, heroes and princes, magicians and genies, gods and demons, and bears that get stuck in rabbit-holes; we frighten them half to death with tales of terror, and they come to enjoy the fear. We beat them (not very much in the last few decades, but for thousands of years before that, for sure). We embed the teachingmessages in long sagas, in priestly injunctions, and invented histories full of dramatic lessons; in children’s stories that teach them by indirection. Stand near a children’s playground, and watch (these days, check with the local police station first, and in any case be sure to wear protective clothing). Peter and Iona Opie did just that, many years ago, and collected children’s songs and games, some of them thousands of years old.
    Culture passes through the whirlpool that is the child community without needing adults for its transmission: you will all remember Eeny-Meeny-Miny-Mo, or some other counting-out ritual. There is a children’s subculture that propagates itself without adult intervention, censorship, or indeed knowledge.
    The Opies later collected, and began to explain to