the ascent of man jacob bronowski

[...]... to the other, it is the invention of the pole, the concentration of the mind at the moment before leaping, which give it the stamp of humanity The head is more than a symbolic image of man; it is the seat of foresight and, in that respect, the spring which drives cultural evolution Therefore if I am to take the ascent of man back to its beginnings in the animal, it is the evolution of the head and the. .. to hope that the most original achievements of the mind are also the most recent And we do indeed have cause to be proud of some modern work Think of the unravelling of the code of heredity in the DNA spiral; or the work going forward on the special faculties of the human brain Think of the philosophic insight that saw into the Theory of Relativity or the minute behaviour of matter on the atomic scale... to the hand And it has in the skull two features that really mark the way to the beginning of man The snout is short; the eyes are large and widely spaced That means that there has been selection against the sense of smell and in favour of the sense of vision The eyesockets are still rather sideways in the skull, on either side of the snout; but compared with the eyes of earlier insect eaters, the. .. legendary herdsman of Mongol times, Bakhtyar The legend of their own origin that they tell of him begins, And the father of our people, the hill -man, Bakhtyar, came out of the fastness of the southern mountains in ancient times His seed were as numerous as the rocks on the mountains, and his people prospered The biblical echo sounds again and again as the story goes on The patriarch Jacob had two wives,... all the parts of which must change together as his behaviour changes The evolution of the brain, of the hand, of the eyes, of the feet, the teeth, the whole human frame, made a mosaic of special gifts – and in a sense these chapters are each an essay on some special gift of man They have made him what he is, faster in evolution, and richer and more flexible in behaviour, than any other animal Unlike the. .. a herdsman for seven years for each of them Compare the patriarch of the Bakhtiari: The first wife of Bakhtyar had seven sons, fathers of the seven brother lines of our people His second wife had four sons And our sons shall take for wives the daughters from their father’s brothers’ tents, lest the flocks and tents be dispersed As with the children of Israel, the flocks were all-important; they are... like crossing the Jordan; it is the baptism to manhood For the young man, life for a moment comes alive now And for the old – for the old, it dies What happens to the old when they cannot cross the last river? Nothing They stay behind to die Only the dog is puzzled to see a man abandoned The man accepts the nomad custom; he has come to the end of his journey, and there is no place at the end The largest... valley The Red Sea and the Dead Sea lie along a continuation of the Great Rift Valley of East Africa Here two of the plates that carry the continents as they float on the denser mantle of the earth ride side by side As they thrust past one another along this rift, the surface of the earth echoes to the shocks that well up from below As a result, earthquakes have always erupted along the axis on which the. .. but they spread fast through a culture For example, the Magdalenian hunters of southern Europe fifteen thousand years ago invented the harpoon In the early period of the invention, the Magdalenian harpoons were 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. .. in man; but at the centre of them all, the root from which all knowledge grows, lies the ability to draw conclusions from what we see to what we do not see, to move our minds through space and time, and to recognise ourselves in the past on the steps to the present All over these caves the print of the hand says: ‘This is my mark This is man. ’ CHAPTER TWO THE HARVEST OF THE SEASONS The history of man . is the invention of the pole, the concentration of the mind at the moment before leaping, which give it the stamp of humanity. The head is more than a symbolic image of man; it is the seat of. selection against the sense of smell and in favour of the sense of vision. The eye- sockets are still rather sideways in the skull, on either side of the snout; but compared with the eyes of earlier. spiral; or the work going forward on the special faculties of the human brain. Think of the philosophic insight that saw into the Theory of Relativity or the minute behaviour of matter on the atomic