ABSTRACT
Let me begin with a rather facetious question. Why did Cro-Magnon Man not ride a bicycle? I shall first elaborate on the answer that will surely seem obvious: it is not that he lacked the basic anatomical prerequisites to perform such a feat, but simply that he lived in an era long before anything as ingenious and complex as a bicycle had been developed. And even if it had, given the nature of the terrain and the prevailing mode of subsistence, a bicycle would probably have been of little use to him. In other words, although biologically prepared to take to the saddle, the cultural conditions that would make cycling a practicable option were not yet in place. I intend to show, however, that this answer is seriously flawed, and that the search for a more satisfactory alternative forces a fundamental revision of our most basic notions of evolution, of history and indeed of humanity itself. In particular, I shall argue that the idea of the ‘anatomically modern human’, the pivot around which all these other notions revolve, is an analytic fiction whose principal function is to cover up a contradiction at the heart of modern evolutionary biology.
