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A splash of colour

by
02 November 2006

RELIGION AND ART, we were solemnly informed, are the most difficult things for science to explain. But then science triumphantly did so, at least to the satisfaction of Steve Leonard, as he presented the final part of Journey of Life (BBC1, Thursday of last week).
 
The climax of this canter through evolution was Human Life, an account of why, considering that we share 99 per cent of our DNA with chimpanzees, we are so different from them.

In the five million years since we shared a common ancestor, we have made a number of crucial moves. Choosing to walk upright meant that our hands could develop a wider range and precision of use. This encouraged our brains to grow enormously.

About 200,000 years ago, our larynx dropped to its present position, making complex vocalisations possible; and speech meant that our skills and social organisation grew exponentially.

This was a direct telling of the story. No confusing alternative theories aired; no unsettling acknowledgement of the slenderness of some of the evidence.

Now I’m perfectly happy to accept that Mr Leonard’s account is the best interpretation of the information currently available to us, but I’d like it presented to me as if I were an adult capable of making up my own mind. His jaunty, inappropriately intimate style belongs to the Blue Peter school of presentation.

The computer simulations and trick photography are the devices of a director desperate to sex up his material, lest his audience’s attention span be stretched.

The birth of art and religion was far better served by Nigel Spivey in the second episode of How Art Made the World (BBC2, Monday of last week). This series shares the same shortcomings: irritating celebrity narrator, tricky photography, a conviction that its audience must be tickled and cosseted. Under all this dross lay good stuff.

The beautiful drawings of animals in prehistoric cave paintings depict the visions experienced by shamans — the creatures they encountered and became (as they thought) while in the spirit world.

About 10,000 years ago, cave painting stopped, and, in Turkey, human creativity turned to building megalithic stone monuments.

The immense concentration of labour necessary for this feat was, it is now thought, only possible because, for the first time, nomadic hunter-gatherers began to plant the new grain of wild grasses where they wanted it to grow the following year, instead of just eating it. Agriculture had arrived, and the demands of art and religion combined. This literally changed the face of the world.

The Michaelangelo Code (Channel 4, Saturday) was Waldemar Januszczak’s attempt to unravel what he sees as the mystery of the Sistine Chapel frescos.

Their iconography, he believes, illustrates the apocalyptic sermons of Giles of Viterbo, and the cosmology of Cosmas of Egypt, and is indicative of the same use — or abuse — of applying biblical prophecies to living people and contemporary events as those that led to David Koresh’s Branch Davidian sect and the Waco conflagration.

There is a valuable argument in there somewhere, but his hectoring and aggrieved tone encouraged us to disagree with him.

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