BOOK REVIEW Cicero’s brain and vibrating nerves

Cicero’s brain and vibrating nerves Few pairs of books about the history of the brain could be more discordant than this one. Daniel Lord Smail, a Harvard historian, makes a strong plea for integrating the general history of mankind with the evolutionary history of the brain. No mean task, certainly not for someone whose first book, published in 1999, examined changes in spatial designation in the notarial registries of medieval Marseille. The other book, edited by Whitaker, Smith and Finger, contains a collection of essays about 18th century advances in understanding of the nervous system. Despite their disparate vantage points, the pairing serves as a reminder that the organ of neuroscience is not immutable but evolving—however slowly. The first three chapters of Smail’s book are a passionate vindication of ‘deep history’, that is, history beginning at least with the emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens in Africa, some 140 000 years ago. In his eyes, the ‘prehistoric’ era should not be left to geologists, anthropologists and archaeologists. When Palaeolithic tribes migrated to Europe and Asia, some 85 000 to 50 000 years ago, humans were still migrant hunters, with an economy ‘based on the calorie’. Probably it was by sheer necessity—prey having become scarce—that around 10 000 years ago the nomadic way of life gave way to a sedentary, agricultural society: the Neolithicum or late Stone Age. Remarkably, this transition took place at roughly the same time in different continents. Most historians, however, limit their narrative to history since the Bronze Age, 5500 years before our time, when also nation states developed. Smail chides his colleagues for their ‘myopic view’ and ‘sterile presentism’, hardly disturbed by the time revolution of the 1860s articulated in Darwin’s ‘On the origin of species’ (1859), Lyell’s ‘The geological evidences of the antiquity of man’ (1863) and Lubbock’s ‘Pre-historic times’ (1865). The habit of starting history with Mesopotamia (or with Egyptian culture, popular in the 19th century) he regards as a lame substitute for the traditional biblical signposts: the Garden of Eden, the deluge or the destruction of the Tower of Babel. Smail punctiliously and eloquently dissects the resistance of historians against inclusion of the Stone Age in regular history. Their most common argument, of course, is the lack of written records. For that reason the ‘speechless past’ is often regarded as a stagnant buffer zone, before ‘true history’ began. But other disciplines have adopted a broader definition of ‘documents’: lumps of rock, fossils, mitochondrial DNA, isotopes, behavioural patterns, potsherds, phonemes and cave paintings. Spoken language, not written language, should be the defining characteristic of mankind, one that may well have been present in earlier hominins than H. sapiens sapiens. A more complex argument for the tradition of setting ‘prehistory’ apart is the assumption that history should take account only of the period characterized by ON DEEP HISTORY AND THE BRAIN. By Daniel Lord Smail 2008. Berkeley: University of California Press Price: £12.95 ISBN: 978-0-520-25289-9