The Ascent of Man Read Online Free PDF Page B

unbarbed; then they were barbed with a single row of fish hooks; and at the end of the period, when the flowering of cave art took place, they were fully barbed with a double row of hooks. The Magdalenian hunters decorated their bone tools, and they can be pinned to precise periods in time and to exact geographical locationsby the refinement of style which they carry. They are, in a true sense, fossils that recount the cultural evolution of man in an orderly progression.
    Man survived the fierce test of the Ice Ages because he had the flexibility of mind to recognise inventions and to turn them into community property. Evidently the Ice Ages worked a profound change in the way man could live. They forced him to dependless on plants and more on animals. The rigours of hunting on the edge of the ice also changed the strategy of hunting. It became less attractive to stalk single animals, however large. The better alternative was to follow herds and not to lose them – to learn to anticipate and in the end to adopt their habits, including their wandering migrations. This is a peculiar adaptation – the transhumancemode of life on the move. It has some of the earlier qualities of hunting, because it is a pursuit; the place and the pace are set by the food animal. And it has some of the later qualities of herding, because the animal is tended and, as it were, stored as a mobile reservoir of food.

Fossils that recount the cultural evolution of man in an orderly progression.
Rock painting of a reindeer hunt, Los Caballos Shelter, Valtorta Gorge, Castellon, Eastern Spain. The invention of the bow and arrow came at the end of the last Ice Age .
    The transhumance way of life is itself a cultural fossil now, and has barely survived. The only people that still live in this way are the Lapps inthe extreme north of Scandinavia, who follow the reindeer as they did during the Ice Age. The ancestors of the Lapps may have come north from the Franco-Cantabrian cave area of the Pyrenees in the wake of the reindeer as the last icecaps retreated from southern Europe twelve thousand years ago. There are thirty thousand people and three hundred thousand reindeer, and their way of life is coming toan end even now. The herds go on their own migration across the fiords from one icy pasture of lichen to another, and the Lapps go with them. But the Lapps are not herdsmen; they do not control the reindeer, they have not domesticated it. They simply move where the herds move.
    Even though the reindeer herds are in effect still wild, the Lapps have some of the traditional inventions for controllingsingle animals that other cultures also discovered: for example, they make some males manageable as draught animals by castrating them. It is a strange relationship. The Lapps are entirely dependent on the reindeer – they eat the meat, a pound a head each every day, they use the sinews and fur and hides and bones, they drink the milk, they even use the antlers. And yet the Lapps are freer thanthe reindeer, because their mode of life is a cultural adaptation and not a biological one. The adaptation that the Lapps have made, the transhumance life on the move in a landscape of ice, is a choice that they can change; it is not irreversible, as biological mutations are. For a biological adaptation is an inborn form of behaviour; but a culture is a learned form of behaviour – a communallypreferred form, which (like other inventions) has been adopted by a whole society.
    There lies the fundamental difference between a cultural adaptation and a biological one; and both can be demonstrated in the Lapps. Making a shelter from reindeer hides is an adaptation that the Lapps can change tomorrow – most of them are doing so now. By contrast the Lapps, or human lines ancestral to them,have also undergone a certain amount of biological adaptation. The biological adaptations in Homo sapiens are not large; we are a rather homogeneous species, because we spread so fast over the