ology — the ‘Erfoud manuport’. Formerly
the prized possession of some homo erectus
who carried it around his or her person, this
is a cuttlefish bone that looks like a phal-
lus. In fact, in a phallus lookalike competi-
tion, any actual dick would be pushed into
second place by this cuttlefish bone, which
looks so like a phallus that it undermines
its supposed significance as a symbolic arte-
fact. Symbol? The Erfoud manuport just is
a dick.
There is, however, startling evidence from
the fossil record — the remains of homo
erectus which have been found on Flores
and Socotra, dating from about 700,000 years
ago. Both Flores and Socotra are islands, not
visible from the mainland, reachable only by
challenging seas. And to establish successful
communities, at least 50 people must have
made the crossing together.
If they could sail, they could certainly
talk, Everett reasons. Reasonably enough
— those fossils provide melodramatic proof
of homo erectus’s planning, social organisa-
tion, technology and cooperation, their indi-
vidual intelligence and collective culture.
And, surely, surely, Everett argues-cum-
pleads, their ability to communicate with
each other using some sort of language.
Their chat wouldn’t have been up to
much, Everett has to concede. Homo erectus
lacked our vocal prowess and their brains
were smaller and slower, so these were
dimwits saying dull, basic things slowly with
grunts and moans. ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane’ —
that really is the kind of thing homo erectus
must have said to each other.
Which doesn’t sound like much of an
advance on a dog’s bark, but it really is —
because even a basic language is an extraor-
dinary achievement, requiring theory of
mind, the creation of a shared attention
space, honed physical control and, most
startling of all, the collective creation of a
symbolic communication system involving
thousands of communally agreed meanings
and conventions.
That’s why no other species has man-
aged to create even the most basic sort of
language. Getting to that stage requires a
fizzingly creative and aware brain, so max-
imum respect to homo erectus for having
made that intellectual leap. Me Tarzan, you
Jane — simple and dull, but a huge break-
through.
Everett’s case isn’t new — the idea that
homo erectus invented language has been
around for a couple of decades — but his is
a new and ambitious attempt to explain it to
that fraction of the population that doesn’t
have a linguistics degree. He doesn’t quite
pull his populist schtick off — his prose is
a bit costive and repetitive and the illustra-
tive anecdotes tend to clunk. But it’s a laud-
able effort, the subject-matter is completely
enthralling. Though he may lack the Dawk-
ins touch, Everett is at the very top of his
intellectual game and field.
Demonised by history
Thomas W. Hodgkinson
Viking Britain: An Exploration
by Thomas Williams
William Collins, £25, pp. 416Some oleaginous interviewer once sug-
gested to Winston Churchill that he was the
greatest Briton who ever lived. The grand
old man considered the matter gravely. ‘No,’
he replied at length. ‘That was Alfred the
Great.’
In his hefty, hard-to-pick-up History of
the English-Speaking Peoples, Churchill
expatiated on King Alfred’s foremost qual-
ity: it was his ‘sublime power to rise above
the whole force of circumstances, to remain
unbiased by the extremes of victory or
defeat, to persevere in the teeth of disaster,
to greet returning fortune with a cool eye, to
have faith in men after repeated betrayals’.
Remind you of anyone? But perhaps it
isn’t surprising that Churchill should have
singled out for reverence another wartime
leader who had saved his island from a sav-
age horde. Alfred’s ultimate victory over
the Vikings remains our foundation myth,
a ninth-century fore-echo of the clash with
Nazism. And this, according to Thomas Wil-liams in his robust new book, is one among
many reasons why the Vikings have tended
to be demonised by history. The more brutal
and bristle-bearded the enemy, the greater
is Alfred’s Greatness for subduing them.
And the greater, therefore, are we.
Viking Britain — an engrossing account
of the skirmishes, wars and final symbiotic
absorption that occurred between Anglo-
Saxons and Scandinavians from the late
eighth to the early 11th century — suggests
that another motive for exaggerating the
differences between the Vikings and our-
selves is a queasy awareness of the simi-
larities. The idea is that the Anglo-Saxons
glimpsed in the enemy a garish, nightmar-
ish image of their former selves. After all,
it hadn’t been so many generations earlier
that they too had arrived by sea, calling on
a comparable pagan pantheon (they wor-
shipped Woden; the Vikings Odin) for the
courage to ride roughshod over the natives,
rape their women and ransack their wealth.
Since then, they had converted to Chris-
tianity. Which made them the good guys,
up to a point. Yet as Catherine Nixey has
detailed in a recent book, the early Chris-
tians were often as vile and violent as their
foes. She focused on the Middle East and
Maghreb. Williams describes the brutality
of Charlemagne’s wars against the Saxonsin northern Europe, how in 782 the Emper-
or had 4,500 prisoners beheaded on the
banks of the Weser, and later decreed that
anyone who refused baptism should be exe-
cuted. It may have been this, Williams sug-
gests, that persuaded the Scandinavians to
step up their raids to the West. Fearsome as
they were, they were fearful of these ruth-
less, self-righteous Christians in the South,
who worshipped a son-sacrificing God and
ritually ate his flesh. There’s an argument
that their long-shafted, two-handed, horse-
slaying axes were developed in response to
the threat from evangelical Frankish cav-
alry.
Williams’s revisionist zeal doesn’t pre-
vent him from admitting that the Vikings
were, in some ways, very different from us.
Their slave girls were occasionally forced
to immolate themselves on the funeral
pyres of their deceased masters, having
first submitted to gang rape at the hands of
their friends and relatives. And the warri-
ors had a peculiar way of celebrating vic-
tory. They would bugger the vanquished foe.
It was not, as far as we know, a practice in
which King Alfred indulged after routing
Guthrum at Edington.
This even-handedness makes Viking
Britain a better work, if not necessarily a
better read. Williams is scrupulous to avoid
the easy pub-chat message. He writes flu-
ently and with feeling. It did, though, strike
me as odd that a book with such a title
should devote only ten pages to the quar-
ter-century when Britain was ruled by the
Scandinavian king Cnut and his sons, or the
Knýtlinga, as they were collectively known.
That was the period, arguably, when the
country could most truthfully have been
described as ‘Viking Britain’.
Williams’s answer may be that by then
the Knýtlinga weren’t really Vikings, since
they were no longer marauding hoodlums,
nor pagan. But this is to restore the ste-
reotype he has already dismissed. I found
myself wondering if the author was drawn,
despite himself, to the old story, and if this
might be part of the reason for his mild air
of gloom as he traipses off, in several wryly
entertaining autobiographical vignettes,
to scrutinise a rune stone or brood upon a
tumulus. It is usually raining. One time, he
has argued with his wife.
Glance at the author photo on the dust
jacket and you’ll see that, with his mighty
beard, Williams himself resembles the pop-
ular image of the Viking. Was it this that
led him to become curator of early medi-
eval coins at the British Museum? Or did
he grow the beard later, consciously or sub-
consciously absorbing the style notes of his
specialism? It’s impossible to be sure. But I
like to imagine that in the photograph for
his next book, which will no doubt deal with
the Vikings’ adventures on the continent
and elsewhere, Williams will be wielding a
long-shafted axe.Did the Anglo-Saxons glimpse in
the Vikings a garish, nightmarish
image of their former selves?