Human hair is, after all, bizarre. The hair on our head, if left to its own
devices, will grow up to a metre long while the hair over the rest of our body
hardly grows at all. Neither adaptation seems very sensible. Untamed hair will
snag on trees, provide predators with a claw hold and incubate parasites, while
body nakedness leaves our comparatively thin skin exposed to sunshine and the
elements. So what’s it all about?

Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, found
nakedness too difficult to explain, and in the end he attributed it to an act of
God. Charles Darwin, more rigorously, attributed it to sexual selection: men
found hairlessness in women attractive, and, in turn, they went on to inherit a
lesser version of the trait.

Timothy Taylor, an archaeologist and author of The Prehistory of Sex
, argues that the initial trigger for nakedness was the evolution of an upright
position, which hid the highly coloured oestrus skin. According to Taylor,
hairlessness might have originated on the female buttocks to compensate for the
loss of this earlier form of sexual signalling. But, says Taylor, we didn’t stay
butt-naked for long: our ancestors responded by decorating their bodies with
paint, tattoos, and clothes.

Perhaps this decoration was the real prime mover in the evolution of human
nudity, however. Consider head hair. A metre of matted greasy hair can only have
been a physical liability. But what if the evolution of our head hair only
really got going after we had acquired the intelligence to make cutting tools?
Hair that grows quickly provides a wonderful raw material for the minx or Don
Juan who want to cut it into ever more novel shapes. Maybe our ancestors never
allowed it to grow into a physical handicap.

And perhaps body nakedness is mainly a response to language. Primates groom
each other’s hairy bodies to bond socially as well as to remove parasites, but
the evolution of language may have rendered grooming (and hence the body hair)
less important for our ancestors. “I love you” makes a better job of bonding
than grubbing through someone’s fur. Moreover, during our ceaseless quest for
sexual advantage, once we had learnt to decorate our bodies, those skills would
have demanded a smoother canvass on which to work. And nudity, once evolved,
would yield a more honest picture of health and fecundity than would a hairy
body.

I have emphasised different first causes from Darwin and Taylor, if only
because I find it more exciting to view bodily adaptation to intelligence rather
than to sex per se. But I agree with them over fundamentals. To be overly
concerned with one’s hair or appearance may seem trivial to an austere lab
worker. But, in fact, to bemoan the human obsession with cosmetics and hair
style may be as futile as to bemoan our obsessions with sex or, indeed, need for
love. You might as well begrudge the peacock its big and showy tail. After all,
they all come from the same evolutionary stable.

It wasn’t meant to be that way. Twenty years ago, people worried about the
upcoming leisure revolution. Books such as Christopher Evans’s Mighty
Micro, which appeared in 1979, warned that, as computers replaced people,
we faced an epidemic of underemployment. Instead, technology has chained us to
our desks, to struggle with information overload and repetitive strain injury.
We wage slaves are more enslaved than ever.

By contrast, medieval peasants did almost no work. In rural France, for
example, the family took to its bed for winter because nothing useful could be
done in the fields and no one could afford heating. Even the warmer months were
punctuated by their share of the 150 annual holy days, or holidays, when labour
was suspended for worship. And regardless of the season, no medieval peasant
worked after dark.

But as the agricultural and industrial revolutions accelerated, things
changed. Artificial light enabled people to spin or weave after dark or during
the winter. Coal and other novel sources of heat encouraged folk to rise from
their beds—and work. Even plentiful food, once so scarce, proved a mixed
blessing, for the better-fed are capable of more sustained labour. As the
opportunities for work accelerated, so we embraced them. Not only have we lost
most of the 150 holidays but even Sunday has gone the way of the secular
six.

We do not have to work every available hour—we choose to. In his
Mighty Micro Evans supposed that people could be satisfied through wealth,
but people never are. They always want more. Cars, dishwashers, home computers
and, for the seriously rich, private jets ought to free up time for more
leisure. Instead, we end up working harder than ever to buy bigger and better
versions of these technologies. We joke about Imelda Marcos and her pathological
acquisition of shoes, but inside all of us there’s a little Imelda who doesn’t
know when to stop.

In an era of pedestrian jobs and mechanical typewriters, we could only do so
much, and leisure was forced upon us. But in an age of e-mail, the Internet and
globalised markets, there are no limits to work. A brave few will downsize, but
they will abandon money and the status it bestows. The dominant human
imperative, in all cultures and at all times, has been the drive for status, and
today’s technologies have only freed us to be truly ourselves.

And what are we? Obsessive competitors, driven by our genes to acquire status
to compete for the best mates, yet now working so hard that we sacrifice the
very social and sexual goals for which we are supposed to be working. For our
DNA the pursuit of status was only ever meant to be a means to an end. Somewhere
along the line it became the end.

WHAT do you look for in a book? Aside from brilliant contents, first
impressions do matter, and here Robert Adams’s Paths of Fire does not
disappoint. It has a good title, it is elegantly printed on attractive paper,
its front jacket carries an exciting illustration by William Blake, and its back
jacket carries praise from the Nobel economics laureate Robert Fogel, and the
great sociologist of science Robert Merton, among other luminaries. Princeton
University Press has done a good job.

But the proof, after all, is in the reading, and here we face
disillusionment. Adams’s very first sentence reads: “Modernity, while it
envelops and defines us, has as its conceptual essence only an evolving ambience
and many loosely related states of mind.” While pretty bad, that is one of the
clearest sentences in the book. Adams quickly sinks into contemporary American
academic jargon, and I found the rest of the book impenetrable unless I expended
great effort in understanding it.

The author’s writing style may be unfortunate, but what is he saying? Are his
analysis and conclusions dazzling enough to deflect attention from the ponderous
wording?

Paths of Fire is a largely Anglocentric account of the development
of technology from the earliest times to the present day. One chapter takes us
from Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium BC to England in the 18th century AD.
Two chapters describe the English Industrial Revolution, two describe that of
the US, and the remaining three provide overviews of technology in society.

The first disappointment with Adams’s argument comes with the survey of
Mesopotamia’s five and a half millennia of technological development. This
should have inspired a lively discussion: in one of the most extraordinary
setbacks of human history, the arrest of technology during the Bronze Age.
Progress in technology actually stopped during that period, and was not revived
until the so-called Dark Ages.

During the Old Stone (Palaeolithic) Age, from about 3 million to 12 000 years
BC, humanity learned to control fire and to make artefacts such as knives,
spears, bows and arrows and canoes. During the Mesolithic (about 12 000 to 3000
BC) and Neolithic (4000 to 2400 BC) periods, humans went on to develop the
wheel, pottery, spinning and weaving, agriculture, animal husbandry and sails.
This explosion of invention reached its height with the discovery of metal
smelting during the Bronze Age, which began around 4500 BC and was centred
initially on Mesopotamia. Then progress halted.

The Bronze Age cultures of Babylon and Egypt were fabulous, but
technologically dead. Having been created on the back of new technology, they
prevented the introduction of any more. The Roman Empire was as remarkable as
its predecessors, and as technologically sterile. Only with the Dark
Ages—from the fifth century to 1000 AD—does technology take off
again.

These paradoxical events throw up all sorts of questions. What qualities
distinguish a technologically fertile society from a sterile one? Why was
invention abandoned during the Bronze Age? And where better to address these
questions than in a book subtitled “An Anthropologist’s Inquiry into Western
°Ő±đł¦łó˛Ô´Ç±ô´Ç˛µ˛â”?

But for Adams, anthropology is an excuse for avoiding any such analysis.
“Anthropologists,” he says, “tend to maintain a consistently integrative,
contextual emphasis [that] directs us towards an inductive, broadly eclectic
approach that takes few hierarchies of structure or importance for granted.
Causal relationships . . . are rarely viewed as fully determinative and more
often as merely predisposing, probabilistic, or facultative.”

Adams, therefore, describes events, but does not try to explain them. Adams
refuses “to draw lines around sets of social features that are linked to
technology”, and so he misses an important anthropological opportunity.

Let me explain. As far as we can determine, the Stone Age tribal societies
that created new technology were diverse and pluralistic. Although they were not
free market economies, their struggles for survival were competitive, and
improvements to pre-existing technology were rewarded.

Freed by new technology from subsistence, the Bronze Age societies that
followed threw up a caste of political and religious leaders who imposed
monolithic cultures. Their empires were command economies where slaves laboured
at predetermined tasks to maintain the elite in comfort. As the elite did not
need innovation, it crushed it as heretical threats to the existing order.

In ancient times, therefore, new technology was generated only by small,
marginal trading societies—not only the Stone Age groups, but also the
Philistines who created the Iron Age, and their near contemporaries, the
Canaanites (non-hieroglyphic script). And it was only after the Mediterranean
had finally thrown off the restrictions of the Roman Empire and embraced the
chaos and creativity of those centuries in the first millennium AD that
innovation returned to the region.

Tempestuous times may be the mother of invention, but the odd thing about
those rigid Bronze Age empires was that they might not have been bad places to
inhabit. Certainly, they met important human needs. A penetrating
sociobiological book such as Matt Ridley’s The Origins of Virtue shows
how our “selfish” genes drive men to polygamy, women to seek high-status male
sexual partners, and vulnerable people to seek a “fair” social order. Bronze Age
societies delivered the goods.

Viewed from that perspective, technological development emerges as a
substitute for the good life. The Stone Age people in their hunger, the
Philistines and Canaanites in their envy of Egypt, and the people of the Dark
Ages in their nostalgia for Imperial Rome, can be seen as unfortunates
compensating, through innovation, for their exclusion from the civilised
pursuits of gossip and aristocratic coition. But innovating civilisations share
other attributes: they are reasonably monogamous, reasonably individualistic and
reasonably competitive, like today’s technologically innovative cultures.
Why?

This is a key question, and it would be fascinating to have an
anthropological perspective on it, but Adams gives us a literature search in its
stead. There is, in the US today, an academic community that feeds exclusively
off the research of others, teaching courses with titles like “Science in
Society”. Adams has collated the publications of that community to produce its
consensus view on the development of technology. So there is little that is
original or challenging in this book. Every prominent academic working in these
fields gets his two or three pages of precis and then we move on, uncritically,
to the thoughts of the next scholar. And here, oddly, lies the seeds of this
book’s greatness, for it is a perfect snapshot.

The book’s faults are also consensual. Nobody, apparently, is currently very
interested in medieval (yes, medieval) Europe’s remarkable control of fertility,
so its consequences go unaddressed (I believe it partly accounts for the West’s
contemporary dominance). And academics often resent capitalists, so we read here
of how the English Industrial Revolution initiated a “deterioration in the
material conditions of life”. Of course, there were blips on the graph of rising
gross domestic product per capita and, of course, the new cities initially
failed to prevent infectious diseases, but the underlying technological and
economic trends pushed 19th-century England into higher, not lower, standards of
living. They also promoted greater economic equality.