I don’t know if this genre has an “official” name, but when I describe it you’ll know instantly what I mean: the grand sweep of history novel. Edward Rutherford covered 2,000 years of the British capital in London: The Novel. James A. Michener covered Israel’s even longer history in The Source.

But no one, really, can get a grander sweep than Stephen Baxter does in Evolution, a Novel. For he starts in the age of dinosaurs, with a little rat-like primate ancestor of ours called Purga, who witnesses the collapse of that great ecosystem to a near planet-destroying comet, 65 million years ago, watches as the human race evolves, then imagines our decline, finishing 500 million years into the future when we’re symbiotically dependent on a tree that directs our existence, the last tree it turns out, on a dying earth.

The key trick with this genre is to quickly create characters with whom the reader identifies, since we won’t have a lot of time to get to know them, and this is something at which Baxter excels. Even his more primitive creatures, anthropomorphised of course, quickly grab your sympathy.

And his imagining of the life of Homo erectus, the later hominids, and modern humans – represented by the difficult, troubled and imaginative brain of a woman 60,000 years ago in the Sahara, ancestral Australian Aborigines 52,000 years ago; the last Neanderthals 32,00 years ago in western France; the world’s first city, Catal Huyuk 9,600 years ago; the dying age of Ancient Rome; and the last humans like us, some time tens of thousands of years into the future – deep frozen survivors waking into a different world.

There’s much imagination here – there’s a sense that this is a science fiction novel (which is how Amazon classes it), and the whip-cracking intelligent dinosaurs is, to this reader, one step too far.

But it is also clearly based on a stupendous amount of research into paleontology, archaeology and anthropology, and intelligent thought about how the world might have worked in different eras. There’s also a delightful sly wit; Republican Rome is the pinnacle of our species, which is not how most people today would put it.

Generally, however, this learning is worn pretty lightly (if showing signs of the dinosaur obsessed youngster I bet Baxter once was). For this is an easy-reading, intoxicating novel – the whole history of evolution, and the theories behind it, accessible to any reader at all. You could call it an ideal intelligent airport novel.

David S Whitley is clearly a man who has moved at the centre of prehistoric archaeology for decades. In Cave Paintings and the Human Spirit he takes us into that world: roughly half of the book is an account of the archaeological debates, quarrels and missteps that have marked the exploration and attempts at explanation of the cave art of prehistoric Europe and associated genres. On that he’s entertaining, anecdotal, and so far as I can tell a faithful guide. (I’m always inclined to trust someone who immediately declares their interests and prejudices, as Whitley regularly does.)

The other half of the book is more of a presentation of a personal thesis: that religion and “modernity” was born with the brain chemistry that also brought the species what we now call bipolar disorder (it used to be called manic depression).

It is an interesting idea, although I’m not sure how it might ever be proven.
This insider view of the science of archeology makes one thing clear: anyone who believes that science is marked by the singleminded pursuit of truth, unmarred by politics or personal consideration, knows nothing about the realities. Whitley covers the incredibly petty controversy around the discovery of Chauvet Cave – which as

I’ve recorded elsewhere has been magnificently explained by Jean Clottes (with whom Whitley visited the caves).

And he goes at length into the controversy of the open-air Coa petroglyphs in Portugal, threatened by a planned dam and claimed to be Paleololithic by a new, controversial and what was at least to be partially discredited dating technique. Whitley explains the science in detail, which might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I found it fascinating – and it is essential if the reader is to grasp the cause of the controversy.

He then moves into a subject clearly close to his awn heart: shamanism, and its links to rock art. He’s earlier explained the evidence for the Paleolithic art being linked to shamanism – in short that human trance states, whether induced by Kalahari San people (“Bushmen”) by clapping and dancing, by chemical means, or perhaps the experience of the deep caves, goes through three phases:
1. Imagery is dominated by geometric light patterns generated within our optical and neural systems
2. Through more normal mental processes of visual pattern recognition, the pattern is interpreted or construed as a meaningful iconic or figurative image.
3. Full-blown iconic hallucations occur in which a sense of participation develops and an individual may imagine becoming the thing he or she hallucinates.
(This is known as the “neurophysical model”. )

Forms of image that appear to clearly correspond to each of these three stages are found in the cave art of prehistoric Europe, Whitley explains.

He then moves on to the issue of Siberian shamanism, a source of long-term fascination for the Western world. He effectively debunks, to my mind anyway, a suggestion that it is an intact relict of Paleolithic practices, saying that records of neighbouring literate people such as the Han Chinese only go back 2,000 years, while archaeological evidence pushes it back about 4,000. He argues that there is some evidence that New World shamanism had cultural influences on the Old World, but that there’s no evidence of a continuous tradition back to the Paleolithic.

Whitley then goes back to looking for the origins of human belief in the supernatural, and the development of religion. He finds the core of the latter in minimally counterintuitive concepts – which are memorable and particularly suspectible to recall, likely to be remembered and repeated. But they can’t be too far from the everyday: a talking dog is fine, a flying, talking tree is too far out. He finds the former in human’s agency detection device, a hypersensitive aspect of human existence that sees agents that aren’t really there – the dark environment of the cave being particularly effective for that.

Whitley is convinced that although they probably didn’t have organized religion, Neanderthals certainly had supernatural beliefs – it must have been built into their brains. So he arrives at an account of the of religion’s arrival: Religion – a shared social practice involving spirit belief and religiosity, but not always transcendence – developed first (insofar as we can tell) in western Europe, at least 35,000 years ago. This occurred when certain individuals with (I believe) specific emotional characteristics ‘captured’ the spirit world. By this act, they “created minimally impossible worlds that solve existential problems” – an evolutionary psychologists’ definition of religion.”

As evidence for the “emotional characteristics” claim, he combs written evidence of shamanistic societies and finds many examples of accounts that appear to match modern accounts of bipolar disorder. He also identifies a strong correlation between artistic creativity and mood disorders – with artists having rates of about 10 times higher than the general population.

And so he says, they invented “modern” human life – which he identifies with the start of religion. On that I part company with Whitley – why this, rather than art itself, or technology, or methods of social organization?
Still, it is an entertaining journey that Whitley provides, across fascinating terrain of human existence. He might not be – he says himself – a “spirit guide”, but he is an entertaining one.