Neuropolis

The Myth of the Stone Age Brain has become a staple of modern thought, the central dogma of self-help books and landmark TV series, a touchstone of psychology, neuroscience, evolution and anthropology. It has been used to explain everything from sub-prime mortgages to childhood obesity, and from xenophobia to the global epidemic of mental illness. It’s the idea that our Stone Age brains are bewildered by the modern world. We are refugees from the Pleistocene watching a fast-forward world hurtle past us, and ‘suffering from centuries of taming’, as I believe Adam Ant put it in ‘Kings of the Wild Frontier’. One minute we’re knee-deep in a Pleistocene lake squabbling over fish-kill with Great White Pelicans, and the next thing we know we are up to our necks in online tax returns. No wonder we can’t cope.

Recent findings that the Late Pleistocene was a time of radical instability, due to a concatenation of extreme climatic events, have not been enough to get people to give up their idea of the Pleistocene Pastoral Idyll.* Instead science writers carry on dreaming of those the halcyon carefree days on the savannah. ‘Our brains are adapted to that long-vanished way of life’, sighs Steven Pinker in How The Mind Works, ‘not to brand-new agricultural and industrial civilizations’. Modern life, it seems, is a terrible wrench:

* Mark A. Maslin et al., ‘East African climate pulses and early human evolution’, Quaternary Science Reviews, 2014.

[Our brains] are not wired to cope with anonymous crowds, schooling, written language, governments, police, courts, armies, modern medicine, formal social institutions, high technology, and other newcomers to human experience.

Is ‘cope’ the right verb to describe our relationship with the written word? Is reading all too much? In what sense, for goodness’ sake, do we cope with menus and sign-posts, sheet-music and score boards? And does ‘cope’ capture our relationship with modern medicine, schooling and anonymous crowds? I mean, sure we have our problems, but these tend not to be Calpol, double P. E. and Glastonbury. Are we really so very brittle? Has cultural evolution been so frightfully onerous?

Louise Barrett, author of Beyond The Brain, questions the odd passivity in the version of humans that Steven Pinker gives us here. ‘But who invented those things?’ she asks. ‘We did. How can you invent something and then not understand it? How can you not cope with them if you made them in the first place?’

While it is possible to invent things with which you find you can’t cope – an economy based on burning fossil fuels springs to mind – human culture is not a Frankenstein’s monster with which humanity cannot cope. It is what has enabled us to cope. It is what we made of things. This seems to me a pretty uncontroversial conclusion, with which most people would agree. And yet incredibly, Steven Pinker’s mawkish, sick-note view of the human mind and human culture has swept all before it. So I think it is well worth going through each item in Pinker’s sick-note, and to examine his litany of complaints one by one.

To say that our brains can’t cope with anonymous crowds is to say that agoraphobia is the norm. But one of the things that makes agoraphobia so tormenting for its sufferers is precisely that they are unable to share in the ordinary pleasure that everyone else takes in festivals, dance halls, theatres, markets, fun runs, pilgrimages and weddings. This means they miss out on important rites of passage involving family and close friends.

Now, if someone is going to come along and claim that our brains are wired for a specific mental illness – such as agoraphobia – then you might expect them to have strong corroborating evidence. I mean, it’s a pretty large claim, after all. But we get no evidence whatsoever. We are just supposed to accept this sour view on trust. (Which presupposes that we are either very sour or trusting. One or the other as the two don’t usually go together.)

When it comes to understanding human behaviour, this mawkishness puts us on completely the wrong foot. Only a perfect stranger to humanity could fail to notice the delight we take in large gatherings.

Humans seek out other humans. Young people especially have always gone out of their way to get to know exactly the sort of people they didn’t grow up with. Sometimes this wanderlust was formalised, as in the ancient Aboriginal Australian rite of passage called ‘walkabout’, where young males follow ‘songlines’ and go on off on their own for six months, passing through other territories, and encountering other tribes along the way. All cultures recognise the fledging instinct in the young. There is no consensus among different cultures over what is to be done about the urge to fledge. In some cultures it is indulged, in others strictly forbidden, albeit at the risk of the young people running away from home to join another community. But all cultures agree that it is a force to be reckoned with, in one way or another.

So much for individual wanderlust, what about groups of people? If a person was ever exiled from one settlement and went to live in another, if raiders ever carried off captives for slaves, if a foraging party ever wandered round lost until it entered the territory of another tribe – if any of these things ever happened then adapting to anonymous crowds is nothing new, and precedes agricultural civilisation by a very long chalk. For his part Steven Pinker happens to be an advocate of the ‘Paleolithic-human-warfare-hypothesis’, the creed that fifteen per cent of prehistoric populations were slaughtered in wars. For these to have been actual wars, and not just dust-ups, not just a couple of tooled-up fellers intent on homicide, means an anonymous crowd appearing over the ridge at dawn.

So much for groups of people, what about those anonymous crowds called migrating populations? Humans as a species prefer mountain pass to mountain top, river bank to exposed plain, coast to sea. As early human populations migrated across vast territories, they discovered pathways, footprints, and each other. For our genetic traits to be shared so widely among us, then bands of nomadic foragers must routinely have bumped up against other bands of nomadic foragers. For proof of which, we need only consider the wide distribution of Upper Paleolithic Venus figurines.

About 35,000 years ago, while stuck inside waiting for the last Ice Age to end, people began carving voluptuous Venus figurines, all hips, belly, buttocks and breasts. Like most primitive art, Venus figurines possessed magical powers. Venus worked her magic from Gagarino in Ukraine to Parabita in the heel of Italy, from Hohe-Fels in Germany to Laussel in the Dordogne. We don’t know whether Venus trinkets were given as gifts to protect travellers, traded for provisions, or sold as tour merchandise at Venus gigs. They may have been ceremonial gifts exchanged in return for safe passage, or in return for being able to share the host tribe’s winter larder. These gifts ‘allowed people to navigate their way through critical negotiations’* – critical because if they didn’t come off, wandering tribes would not be allowed to overwinter in the host tribe’s warm cave complex. If negotiations fail, you starve to death in the ice. But thanks to the offering of a magical Venus, nomadic foragers were allowed to hunker down in the last Glacial among strangers.

One way or another, those who carried or copied, bought or sold, traded or stole a magical Venus must have come across crowds of people whose names they didn’t know. If the experience didn’t make them sterile with shock, if they were still able to have babies, then meeting anonymous crowds must be part of our genetic inheritance. Through our bodily comingling we shared parasites, germs, sexual fluids and acquired disease resistance. Gregarious existence selected out those unable to cope mentally with anonymous crowds. Those who suffered a panic attack and fled gibbering into the ice and snow would tend to be less successful in producing descendants who shared copies of their catatonic genes.

Even if some populations never saw a crowd of people until the dawn of agricultural civilisation, that still gave everybody a fair few millennia to get used to them. It’s not as if anonymous crowds suddenly snuck up on us. If the Neolithic marked the rise of small-scale agriculture, it was also a period of getting used to large crowds. For proof of which, we have that world-famous standing testament to the phenomenon of anonymous crowds: Stonehenge.

The sheer labour of hauling the bluestone from the Preseli Hills to Salisbury Plain would have taken a small army. What else would this vast work-party be to the settlements they rolled through but an anonymous crowd?

Stonehenge was built by and for people who came from far and wide to gather in one place. We don’t know why – maybe for the healing properties of the bluestone’s dolerite and rhyolite. Maybe they got a buzz from seeing lots of people whose names they didn’t know, or a contact high from dancing and singing in a big crowd of strangers. But surely not even the most militant trickle-down free-marketeer believes Stonehenge was built as a private residence? A stately pile for just one wealthy couple? On rainy nights, snug beneath its roof of hide, these exclusive freeholders would look out the Heel-Stone Window over the wind-hammered hovels and tumbledown benders on Salisbury Plain, and say: ‘I refuse to feel guilty. I worked bloody hard for this. If those people on the plain had spent a bit less time drinking woad and dancing round the fire pit, they could be living in a place like this themselves!’

If our brains are not wired to cope with anonymous crowds, how comes it that they do? Do we endure anonymous crowds by dint of unconscious repressions which exact from us a greater psychological toll than we realise? (‘Doctor, I feel so tired all the time.’) There is a lot of uptake for this sort of explanation. Everyone likes to pose as the outsider. But it still leaves unexplained the unmissable fact of human gregarity, our delight in anonymous crowds.

In On Going A Journey (1822) William Hazlitt describes the first time he ever set foot in France. He travels alone, speaks no French, and steps off the gang plank slap bang into an anonymous crowd:

Calais was peopled with novelty and delight. The confused busy murmur of the place was like oil and wine poured into my ears, nor did the mariners’ hymn, which was sung from the top of an old crazy vessel in the harbour as the sun went down, send an alien sound into my soul. I only breathed the air of general humanity.

How he bears up under this torment I’ll never know. It’s a testament to human fortitude if nothing else. The phrase ‘confused, busy murmur of the place’ sends shivers down the spine, but Hazlitt, strange to say, seems actually to relish the experience. Whether by dint of iron constitution or genetic mutation, he also – somehow – copes with alien sounds being sent into his soul. Freak.

Who taught the Lascaux cave painters to draw? Where are their crossings out? Why aren’t there any of those buffaloes where halfway through, you realise you’ve overdone the shoulder hump and you have to pretend that you were trying to draw a camel all along? Unless of course the Lascaux artists actually started off trying to draw a camel but halfway through, realising they’d got the hump too far forward, pretended they had been trying to draw buffaloes all along.

The idea that the rule of law – governments, police and courts – is an imposition alien to our nature has been around for a very long time. It is an idea which for Bertrand Russell shouldn’t have outlived Darwinism: ‘The theory that government was created by a contract is, of course, pre-evolutionary. Government, like measles and whooping cough must have grown up gradually.’* For Darwin, as for Russell, our social instincts lead us to create all kinds of elaborate rules and laws. Our natural inclination to live in society entails complex protocols.

For as long as there have been humans there have been dos and don’ts, no-nos and protocols, crimes and punishments. And for the same amount of time there have been those who find these irksome and dream of living like kings of the wild frontier, as wild and free as animals on the savannah. The problem is that animals in the savannah such as African hunting dogs and hyenas are also bound by all kinds of rules accompanied by sanctions and punishments. Mammals who want to live a lawless life must live alone, as Siberian tigers and golden hamsters do.

As for our brains’ inability to cope with police, The Guardian has argued that it is the other way round: the police are struggling to cope with our brains. The College of Policing in the UK, the paper reports, estimates that between 20 and 40 per cent of police time is spent dealing with the mentally ill, while The Guardian’s own research discovered a 33 per cent rise in cases linked to mental health, over the three years from 2011 to 2014.*

There is much debate over how much of this increase is due to cuts in mental health provision and how much is due to a nosedive in people’s mental health, but there is no debate – quite rightly – about whether this is due to Stone Age brains struggling with a modern world. There is an excellent reason why this is not seriously debated. It is because the 33 per cent rise in crimes isn’t since the Pleistocene but since 2011.

If our brains aren’t wired for courts, then how do juries and barristers, judges and ushers survive it every day? What happens when the brains of the legal profession at last give way to that innate law-court phobia of which is our collective genetic inheritance?

DEFENDANT: Well it is certainly a great comfort knowing that you will be by my side during the trial.

BARRISTER: Actually, I shall speaking by video link from a beach hut in Whitstable. I just can’t cope with the Old Bailey. I don’t know if it’s the smell of polished oak, the sound of swishing robes, or just knowing that there’s criminals like you literally inches away. No offence.

Human beings find injustice intolerable. Formal processes of third-party arbitration and public restitution – courts of law – are found in all cultures at all times. Sometimes these formal processes happen in a special place separate from the rest of life, such as the Lögberg (or Law Rock) of the ancient Icelandic parliamentary council the Thingvellir. These formal processes often involve ceremony, or some kind of ritual purification, the better to attune yourself to the demands of the inherited community of laws, or the better to hear the whisper of an oracular goddess. The Greeks set aside a temenos, a sacred place dedicated both to the official business of the city-state and, when humans could not agree, to prayers for divine intervention.

A special language may be spoken or special customs enacted or a special title given so as to ensure that the actors in the legal drama are aware that they are no longer solely an individual but a representative of a quorum, and duly undertake their solemn duty, free of distraction. In Navajo law, for example, the naat’aanii or peacemaker hears conflicting cases and then administers restorative justice.

None of these elaborate rituals are entirely alien impositions. All grew out of the deeply human need for the recognition of wrongs, for restitution, for justice. I’m not saying they reflect the needs and wishes of all people at all times. Property rights frequently prevail over human rights, for example, and as Bismarck said: ‘Those who love sausage or the law should not enquire too closely into how either are made.’

But if not government, police or courts, what is this thing that was supposed to have suited us so much better? The arbitrary justice of a warrior caste? It is hard to think what else served that function of the rule of law in a world without government, police or courts, than a warrior caste. And this brings us to the next item on the list.

Now here at last Pinker does have truth on his side. People really do find it difficult to cope both with being visited by an army and being in an army.

As soon as you have a warrior caste, you have a group whose ethos and interests are in important respects different from those of the host society. Nothing so unusual about that of course. It’s also true of craft guilds or religious sects. The difference, though, is that the warrior caste are so very much better at violence.

A good illustration of this is provided by philosopher Mary Midgley in her essay ‘On Trying Out One’s New Sword’. She explores the Samurai warrior’s sacred duty of tsujigiri. In tsujigiri tradition, the Samurai must test his new sword and the test material should be a random traveller. There was really no other way to know how well-tempered the steel was, or how grippy the handle than to cleave a stranger in two. Tsujigiri translates as ‘crossroads cut’ – a cut made at the crossroads. Samurai would sit at wayside inns by major intersections waiting for a chance wayfarer to become his sword test dummy. Eventually local innkeepers demanded an end to tsujigiri because it led to terrible ratings on TripAdvisor: ‘Staff friendly. Miso soup tasty. Husband’s arm lopped off during check in.’

Modern medicine may indeed be a newcomer to human experience but, as Stephen Jay Gould points out, it has given us something else entirely new as well:

[T]hanks to modern medicine, people of adequate means in the developed world will probably enjoy a privilege never vouchsafed to any human group. Our children will grow up; we will not lose half or more of our offspring in infancy or childhood.

How are we coping with that one? How are we bearing up under the strain of not burying our own children? This shows how the Romantic idea of a Stone Age brain bewildered by modern world is possible only so long as you exclude what bewildered our Paleolithic ancestors. Such as not knowing how to keep the children alive. Parents then as now were dismayed by how hazardous and uncertain life is. Bewilderment is nothing new.

How much were our brains ‘wired to cope’ with prehistoric medicine? As a headache cure, paracetamol agrees with us in a way that trepanning (the drill-hole cranial surgery of yesteryear) never really did. Paracetamol bonds with the TRPA1 protein found on the surface of neurons. Our liver might not cope, but our brain does.

Pinkerism is the mawkish belief that if something is difficult it’s difficult to the extent that it’s a latecomer alien to our evolved nature, a tissue-graft that was never going to take. But many things are difficult because they are difficult.

We won’t get anywhere by thinking that everything is bound to go contrary with us because our brains are simply not wired to cope with anything post-savannah, that we are naturally lone creatures who have been forced – pretty much against our will – into the society of others, conscripted into the modern world. We won’t get anywhere thinking like that because it simply isn’t true. New people, new things stimulate us. ‘For there is in the mind of man’, as Darwin wrote, ‘a strong love for slight changes in all things.’

Stimulated by new finds, new technologies and new places, we develop and twist them in a thousand improvised ways. As we do so, the things and places and niches we make change us in a thousand ways too. Only a perfect stranger to human experience would fail to spot how we relish the challenge of this new seed or that new nut to crack. In fact, if you want to describe the incessant probing of the world by the most insatiably curious and dazzlingly resourceful creature that ever walked the face of the earth you would be hard pushed to find a worse verb than ‘cope’.

The idea that we struggle to cope comes from a prior commitment to the wiring metaphor, which is itself a piece of bad debt inherited from the computational theory of the mind. The compound interest we pay on this bad debt is moral hazard. To say that our brains are not wired to cope with the way we live now encourages a victim culture. If modern society is rigged against you no-one can blame you for lashing out. In fact if you are coping, then you must be dead from the neck-up. Go wild or go postal – at least that means you’re still alive, untamed, real.

I’d say this story – in one form or another – has pretty thoroughly percolated its way through to just about everyone, hasn’t it? Not that most people accept it, just that we are all wearily familiar with this line of thinking, with this story outline, this pitch for Human Narrative Number One.

Its thorough percolation is because the Myth of the Stone Age Brain has less to do with East Africa than the Wild West. It is is a backdating of the Myth of Rugged Individualism, a nostalgia for an imagined American frontier, for a home on the range. Its roots are in a philosophy that sprang onto the world’s stage at the end of the nineteenth century with the closing of the American frontier.

In 1893 at the Chicago World’s Fair, the eminent historian Frederick Jackson Turner delivered a paper for the American Historical Society called ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American Life’. No paper ever enjoyed greater influence on American intellectual life.

The frontier, said Frederick Jackson Turner, forged the American character. So long as the frontier was open, rugged individualistic pioneers pitted themselves against treacherous terrain, waged war on hostile tribes, foraged for food on barren hillsides, drove wagons across white water rapids, and faced down bears and wolves. The problem was that the frontier made American manhood too well, and before you knew it the West Was Won, Native Americans were all in reservations, the United States spanned a continent and the frontier was closed. This success would, Turner warned, be the undoing of the national character. Now came the debilitation and degeneration of the bloodstock into fey, weedy, weak-chinned, limp-wristed, whey-faced frivolity. Soon every American male would dwindle to a Bostonian fop in spats and pomade. After all, the Southern-Pacific Railroad were offering tickets for ‘The Great Pleasure Route of the Pacific Coast’. The Wild West was now so tame that you could watch it go by from the viewing car of a train.

‘The Significance of the Frontier in American Life’ spawned the cult of rugged individualism, a cult which still has its adherents in intellectual life, especially in America. The reason horse-riding is not included in a list of newcomers to human experience for which our brains are not wired to cope is because they are part of the stage props for the Wild West. Pinker’s litany of things our brains are not wired to cope with is really just a list of things that cowboys can’t be doing with. For anonymous crowds read Dodge City, Santa Fe and city slickers in general. For government, police and courts read sheriff and sheriff’s deputy. Forget modern medicine, I’ll bandage the gunshot wound with my own bandana. I’ll suck out the rattlesnake’s venom my own damn self. Cowboys can cope with horses, campfires and beef jerky, but they sure can’t cope with filling in forms. In the Western Lonely Are The Brave, Kirk Douglas plays the last cowboy, unable to cope with modern bureaucracy (written language). In the film’s closing frames he and the horse he rode in on are run over by a truck-load of toilets – another newcomer to human experience! – and both die before an ambulance arrives.

If Pinker had in mind East African savannah and not Western prairie then his list wouldn’t be your standard modern bugbears. Instead it would include ALL post-Pleistocene newcomers to human experience. If ‘anonymous crowds’, then why not trousers? If ‘written language’, then why not, pottery?

Would anyone ever say that our brains are not wired to cope with trousers? Yet trousers are a very late newcomer to human experience. The earliest evidence for trousers dates from less than 4,000 years ago. If our brains aren’t wired to cope with ‘brand-new agricultural civilization’, they are definitely not wired to cope with this sartorial parvenu. So how do we explain the Great Trouser Craze which broke out about 4,000 years ago?

We explain it by way of horses. It seems the first trousers were a pair of woollen jodhpurs worn by nomadic pastoral horsebacked herders in Turfan, east Central Asia. If Turfan was Toledo, we might even call these horse-backed herders cowboys.

The link between horse-riding and trousers was established by radiocarbon-dating the pair of woollen jodhpurs found in a Central Asian tomb, in Turfan. The Turfan Trousers are the first evidence we have of trousers. The fact that they were found alongside equestrian grave goods, leads Ulricke Beck and her colleagues to conclude that: ‘the invention of bifurcated lower body garments is related to the new epoch of horseback riding, mounted warfare and greater mobility.’*

* U. Beck et al., ‘The invention of trousers and its likely affiliation with horseback riding and mobility: A case study of late 2nd millennium BC finds from Turfan in eastern Central Asia’, Quarternary International, 2014.

Horse-riding came late to us but the more we did it, the more it became us. Riding horses stimulated our creativity in hundreds of way. Not least of which was the invention of trousers at Turfan.

Some argue, however, that these are not the first bifurcated lower body garments. Instead they contend that Ötzi the Iceman’s goat-hide leggings predate the Turfan trouser.

In the late Neolithic, Ötzi the Iceman fell into the snow and ice of a Tyrolean glacier after being shot from range by an archer. For the next 5,300 years the glacier preserved his clothes until they were found, in 1991, as uncannily intact as his piercing blue eyes. But the leggings Ötzi is wearing are not, strictly speaking, trousers but thigh-high crotchless leather hold ups. This has led archaeologists to conclude that he was murdered while on his way to a fetish party. Maybe his fetish was being shot at with a bow and arrow. Maybe the thrill was in how close the arrows came, the delicate caress of the feathered flights stroking his shoulder, the low whistle in his ear as a shaft whizzed past. Maybe he strayed too far from the archer for his safe word to be heard.

Ötzi lived and died a thousand years before the Turfan horsemen, but it is they not he who wear the trousers. Unlike Ötzi’s leggings and loincloth combo, the Turfan trousers have seat, crotch, gusset, and a waistcord that ties at the hip. This makes them the first bona fide trousers. And rather stylish they are too.

Hours of intense work went into the weaving of these trousers. Dark brown in the legs, the seat is cut from a lighter mustard-coloured cloth. Mazey geometric designs decorate the knees. Zigs-zags are woven around the hem and in a horizontal band across the shin. The crotch has been patched with a woven fabric decorated with the same zig-zag motif as the hem.

What led us to trousers was the horse. One newly acquired skill – horse-riding – led to a new piece of kit – the trouser!

Dhoti and shalwar, trunk hose and drainpipes, hot pants and bell bottoms – we took the idea of trousers and ran with it. And though our brains may not be wired to cope with trousers, we seem to do pretty well. Almost always. There are exceptions of course.

One such was the late great comedian Frankie Howerd, many of whose onstage performances were marred by trousers that had uncomfortably ridden up. His brain was not wired to cope with trousers. As he grew older, the condition worsened. In live performance the ratio of actual spoken standup to dealing with acute trouser discomfort tilted calamitously to the point that he sometimes seemed to do nothing but adjust his trousers for hours on end, only managing to gasp out a few words in between. There were few more moving sensations that an audience willing Frankie Howerd to triumph over his trouser difficulties. Then there’s the Fatal Trouser Theory of Easter Island …

In 1868 the ship surgeon of HMS Topaz noted that ‘we found our trowsers … coveted’ by the Easter Islanders, who bought and bartered all the trousers that were to be had. The next English ship to put in found no islanders at all. The theory goes that an epidemic of typhus, spread by English sailors’ trousers, may have done for the Easter Islanders. If so, this is the only documented instance of a whole population felled by trousers.

The Fatal Trouser Theory, I should add, lags a very distant second to the ecocide theory, which says the Easter Islanders died out because they destroyed their natural habitat, including cutting all the trees down the better to topple the statues of rival factions. But, even in the unlikely event that the Fatal Trouser Theory should prove true, I submit that the Easter Island extinction is the fault not of trousers but of typhus.

‘The hunter-gatherer brain was as plastic as our own’, argues psychologist Norman Doidge in The Brain That Changes Itself:

and it was not ‘stuck’ in the Pleistocene at all but rather was able to reorganize its structure and functions in order to respond to changing conditions. In fact, it was that ability to modify itself that enabled us to emerge from the Pleistocene.

Doidge supports this argument with neuroscientific evidence demonstrating the brain’s superplasticity, and makes a convincing case that this evidence has short-circuited the ‘hard-wired’ metaphor. I’d like to make the same case, if it’s all the same to you, with reference not to brain-imaging but to clay pots.

About 20,000 years ago, a band of Chinese glacial foragers hunkered down in the Xianrendong caves in Jangxi province to make the first pots. Since this is 10,000 years before rice cultivation in that region, pottery counts as a hunter-gatherer innovation.

There is however, an interesting wrinkle to the story of the Xianrendong potters. Just as suddenly as they start making pots they stop. Why? Did they find the evening classes too time-consuming? Too full of people who weren’t really there to learn pottery at all but who were just lonely and always going on about their ex-husband? ‘Oh, I see you’re making a jug. If my ex-husband was to look at that jug, do you know what he’d say? He’d say what a shit jug! Yeah. That’s the sort of man he was.’

Or perhaps their pots, jugs and vases just came out wonky, and the handles kept snapping off, and the Xianrendong potters found it hard to cope with failure. If so, that may explain why they appear to have smashed their pottery into tiny pieces, and stomped them into the mud of the cave.

The next pots turn up in Torihama, Western Honshu, Japan and the Amur Basin in Russia, both about the same time as each other. It may be that people in these valleys started making pots independently, or it may be that they bought these pots as a job lot off the demoralised Xianrendongians, who sold them with dire warnings of how pottery is something our brains aren’t wired to cope with because it always goes wrong.

Early evidence of pottery shows that we were never as fixed and determined as the wiring metaphor would have us. If Stone Age behaviour was set in stone they would never have begun to experiment with clay. You cannot innovate if rigidly hard-wired.

Who in the nineteenth century would ever have believed that, out of all their contemporaries, the one whose views would be most in tune with the dominant twenty-first century take on human nature (Pinker’s) would be Mrs Gummidge?

‘I know what I am’, she sniffles in David Copperfield. ‘I know that I’m a lone, lorn creetur, and not only that everythink goes contrairy with me, but that I go contrairy with everybody. Yes, yes, I feel it more than other people do, and I show it more. It’s my misfortun’.’

All this is brought on by Mrs Gummidge being told that Daniel has been drinking in a pub called The Willing Mind. That single pub sign gets closer to the essence of how the mind works than the Myth of the Stone Age Brain ever does.

That we have spent most of our evolutionary history as hunter-gatherers is a truism. The question is what do you do with that truism? Yes, you can use it to say that governments and schools are really heavy, man, like totally oppressive, and anonymous crowds are bumming everybody out. But if we sidestep the melodrama of a stranded Stone Age Man wincing in the bright lights and bustle of the Berlin Kurfürstendamm, or covering his ears against the noise of Liverpool Lime Street, there are better uses to which we can put this fact of pre-history.

Our long backstory can be used to explain some of the things which today are squeezing our skulls. For example, our brains are definitely not wired to cope with the vast deposits of metal particles that have recently been discovered in our heads. It used to be thought that airborne pollution was more a heart and lungs problem than a brain problem. Dissolved in the blood, particulates do their damage in the body, but above the neck, they are checked by the blood-brain barrier, which prevents blood impurities from entering the brain by means of its double row of endothelial and glial cells which link arms and form a blockade. Or so it was thought. It has recently been discovered that ultrafine particles can go straight up the nose to enter the brain via axons in the olfactory bulb. They thought this might explain why, when handling freeze-dried slices of brain tissue, they heard them rattling like tin foil. In Taiwan, Jung, Lin, and Hwang investigated the link between newly-diagnosed Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and long-term exposure to pollution from nanoparticles called PM2.5, which stands for particulate matter with a diameter less than 2.5 microns (a micron is one thousandth of a millimetre). They found a 138 per cent increase in Alzheimer’s diagnoses per increase of 4.34 micrograms per cubic metre of pollution nanoparticles.* In 2016, when Barbara Maher and her team examined brain-tissue from the Manchester Brain Bank and Mexico City morgues, they found remarkably high concentrations of externally-sourced magnetite pollution particles in the brains of those who had died of dementia and cerebrovascular disease.*

* Chau-Ren Jung, Yu-Ting Lin & Bing-Fang Hwang, ‘Ozone, particulate matter, and newly diagnosed Alzheimer’s disease: a population-based cohort study in Taiwan’, Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, 2015.

* Barbara Maher et al., ‘Magnetite pollution particles in the human brain’, PNAS, 2016.

The fact that we evolved to be a species dependent on other people and the natural world helps explain some of the things that go wrong when we are separated from them. One problem that really does seem to be new is the reported rise in otherwise perfectly healthy children who struggle to make sense of facial expressions.

In 2015, psychologist and split-brain expert Iain McGilchrist said that more and more children find it difficult to understand the emotional meaning of facial expressions. He blames this new inability to read faces on children spending too much time on tablets and smartphones. Others blame the parents for not getting down on their hands and knees and spending quality face time with their children, pulling funny faces and barking like a dog. Our playgrounds are full of smartphone orphans. On the rare occasions I see dads taking their children to a playground, I am amazed how little time they spend interacting with their children, and how much time they spend looking at their phones. Didn’t they do a lot of texting while they were at the wheel of their car, and nearly ran us over at the zebra crossing? Can’t they put it away now that nothing exciting is going to happen like perpetrating a hit and run incident? I hear the heartbreaking sing-song of their children saying: ‘Daaad, push meeee, Daaad.’ I never understand why children are so patient with parents texting instead of playing. The one thing they should really throw a shit fit about is the one thing they never do. Maybe they know when they’re beaten. But the dads, when they reply, on the third or fourth time of asking, never even look up from the screen, they just mumble to their children: ‘In a minute. Daddy’s just sending this.’ When the phone finally gets tucked away, the kid gets a ten-second push, and then it’s ‘Now remember I’ve got to drop you off at your play date in five minutes. Off we go. Now don’t moan, I said this would only be a short one.’

And that is just those parents lucky enough to have the choice to spend time with their children, squander it as they may. Marilynne Robinson spotlights Welfare to Work schemes that have hustled parents of tiny children out of the home and into the workplace:

The family as we have known it in the West in the last few generations was snatched out of the fire of economics, and we, for no good reason I can see, have decided to throw it back in again… When we take the most conscientious welfare mothers out of their homes and neighbourhoods with our work programs, we put them in jobs that do not pay well enough to let them provide good care for their children. This seems to me neither wise nor economical.*

Welfare to Work flies in the face of a broad array of neuroscientific and psychological findings about the importance of child–parent face-to-face contact, especially in the early years, the critical period of ‘exuberant synaptogenesis’. Employers who benefit from denying children their synaptogenic rights should have to pay a levy for the downstream social costs in which they have invested. Overtime is creating a cognitive disaster.