When We Were Nicer

Steven Mithen

On Deep History and the Brain by Daniel Lord Smail
California, 271 pp, £12.95, December 2007, ISBN 978 0 520 25289 9

Are you enjoying your morning coffee as you read this? Or your evening glass of wine? Did you enjoy watching the match last night? Have you read any good books lately? Oh and by the way, how is your sex life? According to Daniel Lord Smail activities like these are the true drivers of history. Forget great men with great ideas, the march of progress or the ‘seeds of change’: the essence of the historical process is the manipulation of human chemistry by the substances we consume, and the activities we engage in willingly or which are imposed on us against our will.

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Vol. 30 No. 2 · 24 January 2008 » Steven Mithen » When We Were Nicer (print version)
Pages 24-25 | 3149 words

Letters

From W.G. Runciman

I assume that it was an editorial decision rather than the reviewer’s to title Steven Mithen’s review of Daniel Lord Smail’s On Deep History and the Brain ‘When We Were Nicer’ (LRB, 24 January). There are good reasons to suppose that our hunting and foraging ancestors were ‘egalitarian’ in the sense that would-be dominant self-aggrandisers were held in check by joking, teasing, enforced sharing, vigilant monitoring, counter-dominant coalitions, and occasional assassinations. But that didn’t mean they were ‘nice’. Presumably some were and some weren’t, then as now. The difference is that sedentism and a sustainable sufficiency of food (fish will do as well as grain) made possible, as Mithen says, a return to primate-like social structures in which the nasty could get away with self-aggrandisement by means that the environment of hunting and foraging lifeways precludes.

W.G. Runciman
Trinity College, Cambridge

From Ian Blake

Steven Mithen argues, rightly in my view, that artefacts uncovered in the excavation of early Neolithic sites in the Near East are evidence of ‘fundamental and irreversible changes’ amounting to a ‘Neolithic revolution’ (LRB, 24 January). However, the rapid population growth that came with the settling of society, coupled with the effects of increasing desiccation over some eight thousand years, mean that these changes would have been anything but irreversible had it not been for the invention of pottery, and especially the firing process. Boiling and stewing enabled fuller and more economic use of food, facilitated brewing and made air-tight storage easier. As the study of DNA and other techniques is refined, it will be interesting to see whether skeletal remains indicate physical changes that can be attributed to dietary alterations resulting from the introduction of pottery in the Neolithic.

Ian Blake
Aultgrishan, Wester Ross