Why we all still think like cavemen

Ideas: A History From Fire to Freud by Peter Watson (Weidenfeld, Pounds 30) FELIPE FERNANDEZ-ARMESTO CAVEMEN really were like us: with the same minds and many of the same thoughts. There have been no known changes in human intelligence for scores of thousands of years. " Stoneage affluence" ensured abundant game, high levels of nutrition and leisure unequalled in most modern societies for observing nature and thinking about the observations.

The results are visible in the sublime achievements of paleolithic art.

Like all good jokes, The Flintstones encloses a kernel of truth. Some of the best ideas anyone ever had were the earliest.

Yet most histories of ideas start with the Greeks, or at best with Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.

Historians used to suppose that the "primitive" was mired in "pre- logical" thought, or retarded by magic, or befogged by myth. Now we know better. We can retrieve ideas that preliterate societies left, encoded in art, or inscribed in fragments of material culture, or preserved in later ages by traditional societies.

Bravely, Peter Watson has tried to take the opportunity to write a truly universal history of ideas, starting with the first apes who walked erect, about six million years ago. He strives, moreover, to include the world beyond the West. Some of his best pages are about Western cultural exchanges with Islam and India.

It is a heroic ambition, doomed to frustration. Watson's material keeps slipping out of control. He is a wonderful handler of language, but as the book winds on, infelicities multiply.

Contradictions intrude. Having insisted on the intellectual capacities of paleolithic humans, Watson assigns some of their most momentous ideas - including hereditary rank, patriarchalism, the efficacy of sacrifice, the animal origin of humankind, and the existence of the soul and the afterlife - to later periods.

At times he plays catch-up with newly discovered evidence that proves him wrong. Having lauded brain size as an index of intellectual capacity, he adds a frantic rescript on the achievements of Homo Floresiensis, whose brain was smaller than a chimpanzee's. Watson is outstandingly clearheaded and can simplify deftly but sometimes he resorts to tawdry, game-show trivialisations, assuring us that the soul is "a candidate for the third most influential idea in history" and that "Don Quixote was the first road movie".

Flashy falsehoods - arguments rather than evidence - sometimes mislead him.

His heroes are imaginers, schematisers and huge-scale theorists who tend to write books that are good but wrong.

The author's judgments show signs of hurry, backed by ill-chosen or outof-date scholarship. Sometimes the consequences are serious. You cannot make sense of the history of the world if you date the rise of the West to the Middle Ages or think that clerical abuses caused the Reformation, or that language is a uniquely human trait, or that cold climates were unsuitable for human habitation in periods when they supported vast amounts of fat-rich game. All these are excusable shortcomings in a rich, big, challenging book.

It reminds one of what Dr Johnson said about a dog walking on its hind legs: do not expect it to be well done; be amazed to see it done at all. But one flaw, deeper than all the others, does seriously vitiate Watson's enterprise.

With amazing insouciance he admits he is unsure what an idea is: he wrote the book without being sure what it was about. Ideas are purely mental events. You have to separate them from instincts, impressions, practical strategies and accidents.

Almost everything is an idea before it becomes an external reality; but once it becomes an invention, or a movementor an institution, or an action, it ceases to be part of the history of ideas.

In consequence, a lot of Watson's book is irrelevant to its title.

Scavenging is not an idea. Nor is bipedalism.

Nor is the use of fire or clothing or shelter, nor the factory, nor the piano, nor the guillotine. And as the book unfolds, it becomes more and more a random collection of often scintillating studies of intellectual milieus, innovations and great thinkers.

ALONG the way, some of the ideas one longs for are ignored. Sensory delusion, animism, mana, totemism, logic, universal order, universal morality, ritual cannibalism, the distinction between life and death, sexual and gustatory taboos, dualism and witchcraft should all have featured if Watson had really been true to his project.

Still, this is a grand book - the high that proved too high, the heroic for Earth too hard. The history of ideas deserves treatment on this scale. It could help us explain why our human record teems with change, compared with that of less thoughtful species.

New ideas are destabilising, even dangerous. They generate frustration with the way things are or suggest possibilities about how they might be different.

Every event we imagine is a potential new future. History happens first in the mind: ideas drive us.

(c)2005. Associated Newspapers Ltd.. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.