Lessons from prehistory

If you're the smug type you'll probably enjoy reading books by people who know less than you. Recently I've been entertained by the 1933 edition of the Wonder Encyclopaedia for Children, written by people who had 74 years less knowledge than us but vastly more international real estate (Great Britain Is The Greatest Teutonic Nation On Earth).

The chapter on the history of mankind, for example, is on shaky ground, having been written before it was discovered that Piltdown Man, the alleged Missing Link fossil found in Sussex in 1908, was a total fraud. There's even a helpful reconstruction of what Piltdown Man looked like. He looked like Gordon Brown, our sub-prime minister.

Nonetheless, there's stuff I didn’t know. For example: Early Man Hid From Wild Beasts Until His Cunning Developed.

This sheds completely new light on human evolution. You can imagine our noble ancestors, hunkered down (behind rocks, according to the pictures), wondering how cunning they’d need to be. From time to time someone would say: Well, are we smart enough yet? And for millennia we must have looked out at the Wild Beasts and thought: Holy shit, have you seen the claws on that thing?

They must have gone through an experimental phase of shoving the smartest folk out into the open where, of course their potential contribution to the gene pool would be nipped in the bud (and everywhere else). After a short period of this everyone would be faking stupidity 24/7 and they’d have realised they were fairly cunning already, so they’ll have started to calibrate: Right, what have got so far then?

Well, we've got kind of oblong stones for scraping things with, flat stones for cutting things with, big stones for bashing things with and sharp, triangular pointed stones on the ends of sticks for, er, what are these for again?

Despite it all we were on our way, and sooner or later: There's a bloke behind that rock over there with a Wheel.

Surely that's enough cunning, they'll have thought, and sprung out.

There's no real indication of what Early Woman was doing all this time. The pictures simply show her dressed as Amy Winehouse and cowering alongside Early Man, in a trend-setting non-division of non-labour.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, we eventually got so cunning that it was November 2007, and yet somehow nothing much had moved on. By and large here in the UK we're simply hiding from the Labour government until our cunning develops.

Let them eat carrots

As Alex Levine pointed out, only Irish coffee provides in a single glass all four essential food groups – alcohol, caffeine, sugar and fat. You might have thought that the health food debate could have usefully stopped right there, but no.

According to the World Cancer Research Fund it’s possible to commit suicide by eating bacon sandwiches, something I have done so often that it would have been economically sensible for me to go into pig farming at an early age.

However, no-one apart from the media is listening to these warnings any more. Health fascists and researchers in need of funds tell us what we can’t eat, while the food industry tries to sell us goji berries, which look like rabbit droppings from a bad acid trip.

Not long ago we were told that eating carrots on a daily basis helps to prevent cancer. We saw this coming of course since generations of children here have been forced to eat carrots on the grounds that they help you to see in the dark, and World War 2 fighter pilot heroes were invoked in this propaganda battle.

Those who go on to become fighter pilots of course must wonder from time to time if it was the carrots that got them in.

Since the invention of fire however, we haven’t really had that much use for seeing in the dark around here (except when we’re sea trout fishing or dealing with power cuts) so it would have been nice if our ancestors and government experts could have concentrated on locating some other, more valuable, power. Common sense would have been useful, or second sight, or perhaps the ability to breathe under water.

Even this is a bit unambitious though. In the old days our alchemists spent their time either trying to make gold out of scrap metal or concocting an elixir to confer immortality. Of course they can’t have come anywhere near either of these goals – what was their best result in the transmutation of lead into gold? Lead, obviously. And how many of them are still alive to profit from their elixirs?

At least there’s less scope for serious measurement with the elixir of life, which is why we have ginseng, royal jelly, cod liver oil, broccoli and all the rest of the health food industry. But we only believe in this slop the way we believe in astrology.

So, while sucking on a piece of damp wood first thing in the morning might be good for me, I’ll take the full English breakfast with extra black pudding please. Health food marketers beware – we’re going to die, and there’s nothing you can do to stop us.