Stephen Oppenheimer
Discuss this article at First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
Stephen Oppenheimer’s article “Myths of British ancestry” in the October 2006 issue of Prospect attracted a huge online readership, and continues to generate comments and responses. Here, Oppenheimer replies to a number of them.
Q—Stephen Oppenheimer’s fascinating thesis helps to answer one of the most vexing questions of dark-age British history: why is there so little trace of Celtic culture in England and in the English language? The fact that so little remains of Celtic influence in England in terms of place names—outside Cornwall and Cumbria—and in the language points to a long process of cultural conquest by the 4th and 3rd centuries BC Belgic invaders, who were Germanic, as implied by Julius Caesar’s history of his British adventures. The cultural and linguistic origins of the English are thus pre-Roman. The Anglo-Saxon elite invasions of the 5th and 6th centuries AD reinforced, rather than created, a pre-existing difference between the proto-English and the culturally Celtic of the western fringes of the British Isles.
Mark Hudson
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Stephen Oppenheimer
Discuss this article at First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
Humans first emerged in Africa around 2.5m years ago. Over 160,000 years ago a new group-the first “anatomically modern” humans-arose in the lands of east Africa. Every human on earth today is descended from that group. Then, around 80,000 years ago, a splinter group of these new Africans journeyed out of Africa and their descendants spread out to the far reaches of the continents. This incredible journey across land, river and ocean can now be mapped and plotted in time, through a combination of archaeology, climate study and, most recently, the study of genes.
The earliest humans
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Donald Sassoon
Donald Sassoon Well, Dr Marx, you are all washed up, aren’t you? Fifteen years ago your theories ruled half the world. Now what’s left? Cuba? North Korea?
Karl Marx My “theories” – as you put it – never “ruled.” I had followers I neither chose nor sought, and for whom I have no more responsibility than Jesus had for Torquemada or Muhammad for Osama bin Laden. Self-appointed followers are the price of success. Most of my contemporaries would love to be as washed up as you think I am. I wrote that the point was not to explain the world, but to change it. And how many eminent Victorians have done so?
DS: How about John Stuart Mill?
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Steve Bradshaw
Metro Manila seems like one of the mythic cities from Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville. When I was last here, over a decade ago, Filipinos referred to it as plain Manila, but that no longer does justice to one of the world’s megacities, 11m strong. Now they often call it Metro Manila in everyday conversation, as if you’ve walked on to a science fiction film set. But while Godard’s film conjured the future from 1960s Paris, Metro Manila evokes the future, present and the past- nowhere more so than in the square outside the Basilica of the Black Nazarene, where naked street kids play below a Blade Runner-style video hoarding. Demented faces hawking global brands peer down on to the alleys by the basilica, where they are selling candles for use in black magic, cheap internet access, and rows of plaster madonnas.
We are in Manila City, one of 17 cities and municipalities that make up Metro Manila. This is the heart of the gridlocked metropolis, where distance is measured in time (a crosstown meeting maybe two hours away). I am talking to Bishop Teodoro Buhain for a BBC Panorama documentary on the Pope’s 25-year campaign for Catholic sexual values. The bishop is angrily displaying a bottle of elixir which promises women it will bring on periods. He accepts my invitation to condemn not only abortion, but other forms of sexual disorder on the Vatican hit list. These include artificial contraception-IUDs, condoms, the pill-and even masturbation. Anything that artificially divorces the “gift of self” in the sexual act from its procreative purpose is a breach of the natural law which-Cardinal Karol Wojtyla wrote before his election as John Paul II -is “written in the heart of man” and which “must not be altered.” Yes, it’s sex that seems to bear Manila City back into the past. The Pope would like to reverse the changes in sexual morality of the last three centuries-and here in Manila City he seems to be having his way.
At first glance, Manila seems as preoccupied with sex as any Asian capital. In trendy malls we’re fooled by Rio-style girl-boys, in the business district they’re selling “pretty girls” alongside fake Rolexes, and in girlie bars you’re smothered by onrushing flesh. But the bars aren’t topless, the pop group the Sex Bombs are oddly sexless, and the birthday girl in a restaurant giggling over a penis-shaped cake is just a Manila-style bohemian. Manila has a strain of sexual modesty which-for the Pope’s supporters-makes it ripe for the taking.
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Mario Vargas Llosa
She is the age of Shakespeare’s Juliet-14 years old-and, like Juliet, she has a romantic and tragic history. She is, in her extraordinary way, beautiful, particularly in profile. Her exotic face, lengthened by high cheekbones and large, slanting eyes, suggests a distant oriental ancestry. Her mouth is open, as if defying the world with the whiteness of her perfect teeth, which jut forth slightly and squeeze her top lip in a coquettish grimace. Her long black hair, collected together in bunches, frames her face like the habit of a young nun newly admitted to a convent. The hair then folds together in a plait which goes all the way down her back and curls around her waist. She is silent and perfectly still, like a figure out of Japanese theatre, in her clothes of the finest alpaca. She is called Juanita. She was born more than 500 years ago in some place in the Andes. Now she lives in a glass cabinet (which is actually a disguised computer), in a glacial atmosphere of 19 degrees centigrade below zero, to save her from human touch and from decomposition.
I hate mummies, and all those I have seen, in museums, tombs or private collections, have inspired a deep sense of repugnance in me. I have never felt any attraction to those staring skulls, with their empty holes and chalky bones, which bear witness to civilisations long since departed. They remind me of our perishability and of the awful substances we become if we choose not to be incinerated.
I did, however, agree to visit Juanita in the small museum especially constructed for her in the Catholic University of Arequipa, because my friend, the painter Fernando de Szyszlo, who has a passion for pre-Columbian remains, was so excited by the idea. I was sure that the spectacle of the ancient child skeleton would churn up my insides. But it wasn’t like that. As soon as I saw her, I was moved; taken up by the beauty of Juanita. If it were not for what people might say, I would have stolen her and installed her in my house as if she were the mistress of my life.
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Oliver Morton
In 1988, the Royal Society held a meeting on geology and evolution at Carlton House Terrace. Many eminent British palaeontologists turned up; so did a small number of illustrious Americans, only to be fallen upon, mocked and debagged in an academic catfight. The basis for the unpleasantness was a feeling that the Americans were engaged in a sort of theoretical imperialism, importing suspect ideas from other disciplines and not paying enough respect to the encrusted, perhaps even procrustean, traditions beloved of the Brits. Hence, one of the British speakers pointed to a slide of a large outcrop and said: “This, I should explain for the benefit of our American colleagues, is a rock.”
Had Richard Fortey been at that meeting-and it would have been a normal enough gathering for him to attend, as a senior palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum-I suspect that he would have been embarrassed by the tone some of his colleagues took. He might well, as others did, have apologised to the targets of the attacks, some of whose insights, his book makes clear, he accepts. But if the split reflected a real national difference in styles, then on the basis of this book Fortey comes down on the British side of the divide. Given the choice between a revealing rock and an intriguing idea, he will take the rock.
This is a great strength, because rocks are the stuff of the history of life. Where other biographers have diaries and letters, a biography of life on earth has only the rocks to go on. So it pays to have a deep regard for them. Fortey’s love of the fossils that are his only access to the past is deep; his elegant writing communicates this feeling, especially when he writes of his own beloved trilobites.
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Anthony Gottlieb
How archaeologists must sometimes long to be asked to find a needle in a haystack. Such a task is simple compared with the grind of completing jigsaws within jigsaws, in which the pieces of one puzzle cannot even be identified without solving another. Given the difficulties of reconstructing something as relatively simple as a 3,000-year-old vase, can an archaeologist reconstruct a 30,000-year-old mind? Steven Mithen does not merely claim that this is possible. He does it.
In fact he goes even further back. In the course of explaining what produced the first stabs at art and religion, roughly 30 millennia ago, he treks backwards past the emergence of homo sapiens sapiens about 100,000 years ago, to the use of the first stone tools 2.5m years before, past the time of the last known ancestor shared by man and the non-human apes 6m years ago, all the way to the first blobs of evolving life. The point of this journey, however, lies in the present. The moral of Mithen’s tale is that “if you wish to know about the mind, do not ask only psychologists and philosophers: make sure you also ask an archaeologist.” He exploits the ideas of psychologists (Howard Gardner), philosophers (Jerry Fodor) and theories from other disciplines to construct hypotheses about the mind that can be put to the archaeological test. The results are often more revealing than those obtained by the standard method of examining mentality from the questionable vantage point of the here and now.
Mithen’s method is simple. Find out what man made and did, then see what can be inferred about the mental equipment that such achievements would require. A large part of this exercise consists in noticing contrasts between different stages of evolution. The limitations of early man are often as striking as his capabilities. Why did the tool-making Neanderthals never use the eminently suitable materials of bone, antler or ivory? Why did it take early humans 1.5m years to decide to become painters?
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John Maddox
Palaeontologists, the people with hammers who look for fossils, may be the latest group to feel the hot breath of the molecular biologists on their necks. Within a few years of the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953, it was realised that the differing structure of proteins could be used to learn something about the relationship between organisms back into the mists of time. Forty years on, it seems the ambition is being realised.
Scientific journals are slowly filling up with little family trees relating different species with each other simply on the basis of the differences between proteins performing the same function in all of them.
Conceptually, it is quite simple. Protein molecules are all constructed from simple chemicals called amino acids strung together. Only 20 different units turn up in natural proteins, and the order in which they occur is genetically determined. So it is simply necessary to count the number of places along the length of a protein molecule at which the amino acids differ, and that will be a measure of their taxonomic distance from each other. The virtual identity of proteins with similar functions in human beings and the great apes is a constant reminder of our common origin.
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Matt Ridley
Halfway along wilshire Boulevard, between Beverly Hills and the Wilshire country club, there is a tiny park called Hancock park with a little pond in it. The pond looks quaint enough, until you notice the sheen on the surface and the viscous bubbles that occasionally break that sheen. It is a natural seepage of oil, known as the La Brea Tar pit. A museum stands in the park and in it are the bones of all the animals that have been dredged from the swamps that once surrounded the site. There are wild camels, wild horses, mastodons, sabre-toothed tigers, wolves, lions and many more such skeletons. The animals came year after year, attracted by the “water” and became mired in the tar.
All the creatures that died in the La Brea Tar pits are now extinct. Even if there were no Los Angeles, they would not come back. Yet once upon a time the area was as rich in big mammals as the Serengeti plain. What happened to those animals? This might seem like an innocent empirical question for objective scientists. But it is in fact an increasingly fraught question-one that has highly political overtones.
First, the facts. Archaeologists agree that there occurred-between 12,000 and 8,000 years ago-a holocaust known as the Pleistocene overkill, which killed almost all the large mammals on the two American continents. Familiar creatures-wild camels, wild horses, giant beavers, giant capybaras, several kinds of deer, antelope, bear and llama-disappeared. So did the beasts that caught our imaginations in school: sabre-toothed and scimitar-toothed tigers, short-faced bears, mammoths, giant sloths. So did things we hardly know how to pronounce, and which left not even distant relatives for us to see: glyptodonts, gomphotheres, toxodonts, litopterns. In all, about 75 per cent of all the large mammals of North and South America disappeared.
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