JB: It seems that archeology today requires erudition in many very specialized disciplines.

RENFREW: It's a wonderful opportunity. I'm sure it's easier to be ignorant in many disciplines than to be well-informed. But it really is quite a valid license to range very widely, as you really have to. I've just been looking again at a subject I'm not a specialist in : the origins of Homo Sapiens, and discussions about the origins of mind and the origins of consciousness along with the origins of languages and these related issues. I find myself getting more and more skeptical about the approaches being followed. A lot of people, such as Richard Dawkins, feel that Darwin offers us the answer. This includes a group of evolutionary psychologists who again are using an explicitly Darwinian framework. Now I'd say nothing against Darwin, I'm not going to commit any great heresies here, and I'm not denying in any way that one needs to work within the broad evolutionary framework established by Darwin. I just question whether what we're being told in this Darwinian framework is telling us anything much that we didn't already know, at any rate in recent years.

Are we getting much further by saying that humankind had many millennia as a hunter-gatherer and that's where the adaptive influences were brought to bear, so modern behavior is to be interpreted today as a sort of adaptive behavior of hunter-gatherers? That's more or less the evolutionary psychology position, in fact rather crudely paraphrased. Where does Richard Dawkins talking about memes lead us? It's a very interesting idea, as you know you have the genes that determine the physical composition, and maybe there are conceptual units of similar kind ('memes' : effectively units of cultural information), but I just have the feeling that this is all a big metaphor, and it just may not lead anywhere. I'm not denying that you can develop such an approach; I'm just wondering if it's the appropriate approach.

I'll tell you another questionable thing that's happening: there's a sort of dogma now that there was the great human behavioural revolution which started in Africa a hundred thousand years ago, you see it very clearly in Europe 40,000 years ago, and it's assumed that the emergence of our own species, Homo Sapiens is to be associated with it and equated with the emergence of full linguistic abilities, and with a different kind of behavior and so on. It's a very reasonable assumption, and harmonizes with the fact that Homo Sapiens today in all parts of the world probably shows comparable aptitudes. And yet really the evidence for it is very limited.

In particular, what I've really been thinking about recently, is that the archaeologists tend to say, look, you've got the middle Paleolithic, the Mousterian, associated with Neanderthal man, and then you've got the big transition. In comes the upper Paleolithic, and we have new Aurignacian lithic industries and so on which are characteristically associated with the remains of Homo Sapiens. But I've never really been very much involved with these lithic industries, and as an archeologist who's not very specialized, I can't say that the lithic industries of the Aurignacian sweep me off my feet, compared with the those earlier Mousterian industries. If somebody hadn't pointed this out to me, I wouldn't have said that this is clearly the product of a different grade of hominid, that clearly the brilliant Homo Sapiens is making those Aurignacian industries, while the earlier ones are evidently the product of that Neanderthal man.

JB: What do you mean by "industries?"

RENFREW: I'm talking about the tools; the tool kits. I'm talking about the actual tools that were made. I think they're overshadowed, really, by these wonderful cave paintings - the French and Spanish cave paintings. They are just amazing, and of course they do tell us a lot about the mental abilities of the people that made them, or they could tell us a lot about them. But they are very restricted in their distribution. They may not be characteristic in general terms of early Homo Sapiens. You find them in France and Spain and a little bit further east. And although it's pointed out that hunter-gatherers the world over have different styles of rock art, which is true, these wonderful cave are in limestone caves deep into the ground, and have a remarkably vivid style of their own. Most of the world's rock art isn't quite like that. And most of it isn't as early as the upper Paleolithic anyway. So I think we're being sold a rather formulaic vision here of this great transition, which allegedly accompanies the appearance of the new species Homo Sapiens. I'm not hostile to it, I just think it's a doctrine that's come to be accepted, which doesn't carry much conviction.

JB: As you say, it's an opera. In retrospect, anyway.

RENFREW: It's a belief; this is how we choose to look at it. I rather wonder if we shouldn't be using much more concrete measures. A lot of the exciting things happened much later. If you were a being from outer space, and you saw these Homo Sapiens hunter-gatherers of 30,000 years ago and compared them with the pre-Sapiens hunter-gatherers of 50,000 or 100,000 years ago, they might or might not be very different physically. But you wouldn't say, wow, this is the clever bunch, this Homo Sapiens group, or I don't think you would, unless you studied them very closely. If you were an animal behaviorist you might say that they show certain capabilities in their hunting. But there would not be much to show for their new capabilities - no pyramids, no temples. That came much later. I'm just making a very simple point, a very obvious point, but it's a point you don't hear much.

I share the admiration for Darwin for what he established - the Origin of Species, the outlines of the Descent of Man. Those are colossal undertakings, and of course it's wonderful that molecular biology is able to use the Darwinian framework too. But when it comes to human culture, I don't think that the Darwinian perspective has given us many insights yet, that's all I'm saying.

JB: What's next?

RENFREW: I want to do some more work on the language issues we're speaking of. I've got to find some linguists who will grapple with them further. It won't tell us the answers to the questions we were speaking of a moment ago, about the emergence of consciousness and so on, but it will give us a background to understand how human diversity came about, to match up the linguistic, the genetic and the cultural history, and that is a big preliminary work. Secondly I'd like to go on and do a little more on the matters we've been talking about. I think the ultra-Darwinians are sometimes working very hard to find new themes to cast into a Darwinian framework. Some of them look very good, but some of them distort the world and turn it inside out. There has to be a way of obtaining more satisfying insights into the processes of cultural evolution than those which the Darwinists themselves have so far been able to come up with.