Coleridge was supposed to have been the last person ever to have read everything, and that was in 1834. So Peter Watson, a Cam- bridge archaeology don, is up against it when he tries to squeeze the history of all the clever things that mankind has ever thought into 822 pages.
He makes a pretty good fist of it, though, even if he has to rattle through it at 1066 and All That speed. In the space of one page, he jumps from man getting up from all-fours — about 6,000,000 BC — to man making stone tools (2,500,000 BC).
Still, as he whips along, Watson gives attractive thumbnail sketches of developing ancient man. As we stood up on our hind legs, not only were our arms then free for tool-making, but our larynxes started to slip, leaving them in a better position to form vowels and consonants.
We also began to breathe better and, because we could kill more animals with our stone tools, we developed a richer diet, enabling further brain growth.
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