The Ascent of Man (9 page)

The Canyon de Chelly in Arizona is a breathless,
secret valley, which has been inhabited by one Indian tribe after another almost without a break for two thousand years, since the birth of Christ; longer than any other place in North America. Sir Thomas Browne has a springing sentence: ‘The Huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia.’ At the birth of Christ, the huntsmen were settling to agriculture in the
Canyon de Chelly, and starting along the same steps in the ascent of man that had first been taken in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East.

Why did civilisation begin so much later in the New World than in the Old? Evidently because man was a latecomer to the New World. He came before boats were invented, which implies that he came dry-shod over the Bering Straits when they formed a broad
land-bridge during the last Ice Age. The glaciological evidence points to two possible times when men might have wandered from the easternmost promontories of the Old World beyond Siberia to the rocky wastes of western Alaska in the New. One period was between 28,000
BC
and 23,000
BC
, and the other between 14,000
BC
and 10,000
BC
. After that the flood of melt-water at the end of the last Ice Age
raised the sea level again by several hundred feet and thereby turned the key on the inhabitants of the New World.

That means that man came from Asia to America not later than ten thousand years ago, and not earlier than about thirty thousand years ago. And he did not necessarily come all at once. There is evidence in
archaeological finds (such as early sites and tools) that two separate streams
of culture came to America. And, most telling to me, there is subtle but persuasive biological evidence that I can only interpret to mean that he came in two small, successive migrations.

The Indian tribes of North and South America do not contain all the blood groups that are found in populations elsewhere. A fascinating glimpse into their ancestry is opened by this unexpected biological quirk.
For the blood groups are inherited in such a way that, over a whole population, they provide some genetic record of the past. The total absence of blood group A from a population implies, with virtual certainty, that there was no blood group A in its ancestry; and similarly with blood group B. And this is in fact the state of affairs in America. The tribes of Central and South America (in the
Amazon, for example, in the Andes, and in Tierra del Fuego) belong entirely to blood group O; so do some North American tribes. Others (among them the Sioux, the Chippewa, and the Pueblo Indians) consist of blood group O mixed with ten to fifteen per cent of blood group A.

In summary, the evidence is that there is no blood group B anywhere in America, as there is in most other parts of the world.

In Central and South America, all the original Indian population is blood group O. In North America, it is of blood groups O and A. I can see no sensible way of interpreting that but to believe that a first migration of a small, related kinship group (all of blood group O) came into America, multiplied, and spread right down to the south. Then a second migration, again of small groups, this time
containing either A alone or both A and O, followed them only as far as North America. The American Indians of the north, then, certainly contain some of this later migration and are, comparatively speaking, latecomers.

Agriculture in the Canyon de Chelly reflects this lateness. Although maize had long been cultivated in Central and South America, here it comes in only about the time of Christ.
People are very simple, they have no houses, they live in caves. About
AD
500 pottery is introduced. Pit houses are dug in the caves themselves, and covered with a roof moulded out of clay or adobe. And at that stage the Canyon is really fixed until about the year
AD
1000, when the great Pueblo civilisation comes in with stone masonry.

I am making a basic separation between architecture as moulding
and architecture as the assembly of parts. That seems a very simple distinction: the mud house, the stone masonry. But in fact it represents a fundamental intellectual difference, not just a technical one. And I believe it to be one of the most important steps that man has taken, wherever and whenever he did so: the distinction between the moulding action of the hand, and the splitting or analytic
action of the hand.

It seems the most natural thing in the world to take some clay and mould it into a ball, a little clay figure, a cup, a pit house. At first we feel that the shape of nature has been given us by this. But, of course, it has not. This is the man-made shape. What the pot does is to reflect the cupped hand; what the pit house does is to reflect the shaping action of man. And nothing
has been discovered about nature herself when man imposes these warm, rounded, feminine, artistic shapes on her. The only thing that you reflect is the shape of your own hand.

But there is another action of the human hand which is different and opposite. That is the splitting of wood or stone; for by that action the hand (armed with a tool) probes and explores beneath the surface, and thereby
becomes an instrument of discovery. There is a great intellectual step forward when man splits a piece of wood, or a piece of stone, and lays bare the print that nature had put there before he
split it. The Pueblo people found that step in the red sandstone cliffs that rise a thousand feet over the Arizona settlements. The tabular strata were there for the cutting; and the blocks were laid in
courses along the same bedding planes in which they had lain in the cliffs of the Canyon de Chelly.

From an early time man made tools by working the stone. Sometimes the stone had a natural grain, sometimes the toolmaker created the lines of cleavage by learning how to strike the stone. It may be that the idea comes, in the first place, from splitting wood, because wood is a material with a visible
structure which opens easily along the grain, but which is hard to shear across the grain. And from that simple beginning man prises open the nature of things and uncovers the laws that the structure dictates and reveals. Now the hand no longer imposes itself on the shape of things. Instead, it becomes an instrument of discovery and pleasure together, in which the tool transcends its immediate
use and enters into and reveals the qualities and the forms that lie hidden in the material. Like a man cutting a crystal, we find in the form within the secret laws of nature.

The notion of discovering an underlying order in matter is man’s basic concept for exploring nature. The architecture of things reveals a structure below the surface, a hidden grain which, when it is laid bare, makes it
possible to take natural formations apart and assemble them in new arrangements. For me this is the step in the ascent of man at which theoretical science begins. And it is as native to the way man conceives his own communities as it is to his conception of nature.

We human beings are joined in families, the families are joined in kinship groups, the kinship groups in clans, the clans in tribes,
the tribes in nations. And that sense of hierarchy, of a pyramid in which layer is imposed on layer, runs through all the ways that we look at nature. The fundamental particles make nuclei, the nuclei join in atoms, the atoms join in molecules, the molecules join in bases, the bases direct the assembly of amino acids, the amino acids join in proteins. We find again in nature something which seems
profoundly to correspond to the way in which our own social relations join us.

The Canyon de Chelly is a kind of microcosm of the cultures, and its high point was reached when the Pueblo people built the great structures just after
AD
1000. They represent not only an understanding of nature in the stonework, but of human relations; because the Pueblo people formed here and elsewhere a kind of
miniature city. The cliff dwellings were sometimes terraced to five or six storeys, with the top floors recessed from the lower ones. The front of the block was flat with the cliff, the back bowed back into the cliff. These large architectural complexes sometimes have a ground plan of two or three acres, and are made up of four hundred rooms or more.

Stones make a wall, walls make a house, houses
make streets, and streets make a city. A city is stones and a city is people; but it is not a heap of stones, and it is not just a jostle of people. In the step from the village to the city, a new community organisation is built, based on the division of labour and on chains of command. The way to recapture that is to walk into the streets of a city that none of us has seen, in a culture that
has vanished.

Machu Picchu is in the high Andes, eight thousand feet up in South America. It was built by the Incas at the height of their empire, round about
AD
1500 or a little earlier (almost exactly when Columbus reached the West Indies) when the planning of a city was their greatest achievement. When the Spaniards conquered and plundered Peru in 1532, they somehow overlooked Machu Picchu
and its sister cities. After that it was forgotten for four hundred years, until one winter’s day in 1911 Hiram Bingham, a young archaeologist from Yale University, stumbled on it. By then it had been abandoned for centuries and was picked bare as a bone. But in that skeleton of a city lies the structure of every city civilisation, in every age, everywhere in the world.

A city must live on a base, a hinterland, of a rich agricultural surplus; and the visible base for the Inca civilisation was the cultivation of terraces. Of course now the bare terraces grow nothing but grass, but once the potato
was cultivated here (it is a native product of Peru), and maize which was long native by then, and in the first place had come from the north. And since this was a ceremonial city of some kind, when the Inca came to visit no doubt there were grown for him tropical luxuries of this climate like the coca, which is an intoxicating herb that only the Inca aristocracy was allowed to chew, and from which
we derive cocaine.

At the heart of the terrace culture is a system of irrigation. This is what the pre-Inca empires and Inca empire made; it runs through these terraces, through canals and aqueducts, through the great ravines, down into the desert towards the Pacific and makes it flower. Exactly as in the Fertile Crescent it is the control of water that matters, so here in Peru the Inca civilisation
was built on the control of irrigation.

A large system of irrigation extending over an empire requires a strong central authority. It was so in Mesopotamia. It was so in Egypt. It was so in the empire of the Incas. And that means that this city and all the cities here rested on an invisible base of communication by which authority was able to be present and audible everywhere, directing orders
from the centre and information towards it. Three inventions sustained the network of authority: the roads, the bridges (in a wild country like this), the messages. They came to a centre here when the Inca was here, and from him they went out of here. They are the three links by which every city is held to every other and which, we suddenly realise, are different in this city.

Roads, bridges,
messages in a great empire are always advanced inventions, because if they are cut then authority is cut off and breaks down – in modern times they are typically the first target in a revolution. We know that the Inca gave them much care. Yet on the roads there were no wheels, under the bridges there were no arches, the messages were not in writing. The culture of the Incas had not made these inventions
by the year
AD
1500. That is because civilisation in America started several thousand years late, and was conquered before it had time to make all the inventions of the Old World.

It seems very strange that an architecture that moved large building stones on rollers could miss the use of the wheel; we forget that what is radical about the wheel is the fixed axle. It seems strange to make suspension
bridges and miss the arch. And it seems strangest of all to have a civilisation that kept careful records of numerical information, yet did not put them in writing – the Inca was as illiterate as his poorest citizen, or as the Spanish gangster who overthrew him.

The messages in the form of numerical data came to the Inca on pieces of string called
quipus
. The quipu only
records numbers (as knots
arranged like our decimal system) and I would dearly like to say, as a mathematician, that numbers are as informative and human a symbolism as words; but they are not. The numbers that described the life of a man in Peru were collected on a kind of punched card in reverse, a braille computer card laid out as a knotted piece of string. When he married, the piece of string was moved to another place
in the kinship bundle. Everything that was stored in the Inca’s armies, granaries and warehouses was noted on these quipus. The fact is that Peru was already the dreaded metropolis of the future, the memory store in which an empire lists the acts of every citizen, sustains him, assigns him his labours, and puts it all down impersonally as numbers.