The book was the offspring of a fruitful marriage of differences, between,  on the one hand,  the perceptive and prescient mind of an aristocratic young European, le Comte Alexis-Charles-Henri Clerel de Tocqueville, and, on the other hand, the bustling, vigorous, expanding energies of Jacksonian America.

Tocqueville traveled in America for a surprisingly short time, just nine months, but in that interval he covered a lot of miles, and an even larger territory of American mind and life. Apart from the brilliance of his intellectual and observational powers he had the great advantage of an intelligent friend at his side, Gustave de Beaumont, with whom he shared every step of the journey. Between them they took copious notes and wrote dozens of perspicacious letters home. Their journey is the subject of Leo Damrosch’s “Tocqueville’s Discovery of America.”

It is 70 years since anyone has written at length about Tocqueville’s journey. Biographies naturally have to proportion the space they give those nine months in the 54 years of Tocqueville’s life, and in any case their interest tends to focus on the period, several years later, encompassing the publication of Tocqueville’s book and its reception. Damrosch has a different target. Making use of much material not available in English, which he presents here for the first time in his own translation, he is able to retrace Tocqueville’s geographical and intellectual footsteps in detail, and by so doing casts much fresh light on the formation of Tocqueville’s ideas.

And it is not only Tocqueville’s ideas that come illuminatingly into view, but the young and uncertain United States of 1831 itself, for Damrosch takes us with Tocqueville and Beaumont to New York, the Great Lakes, the frontier woods and newly cleared farms, Boston, Philadelphia, the steamboats of the Mississippi, New Orleans and Washington, and on the way we meet every kind of American from the Bostonian Brahmin to the backwoodsman, the ambitious merchant, the welcoming log-cabin hermit, the cheerful steamboat captain, the slave, the leisured slave-owner, the dispossessed Native American, and even President Jackson himself — in a White House that stood with a few other grand buildings dotted about in the otherwise scarcely tenanted wilderness of Washington as it then was.

It is essential to recognize that both Tocqueville and the democracy he was inspecting were young: He was 26 years of age when he explored America, and the democracy itself was not twice that. He was still young when his account of it was written and published. He had an old head, but as the rest of him caught up during the remaining half of his life, he was to become still less sure about democracy (he was half-unsure about it to begin with) and less convinced that liberty was its inevitable concomitant. To read of Tocqueville the elected representative, constitutionalist and government minister in his later years, or indeed to read other works he penned after visiting England, Ireland and Algeria, is to encounter a somewhat different person. But that does not diminish “Democracy in America,” as one sees all the more clearly because of Damrosch’s account of the generous, open-minded but judicious and sometimes skeptical reactions of Tocqueville while he was actually on American soil.

The genius of Tocqueville is manifest in the way he unconsciously reprises Aristotle and anticipates both Marx and Mill in different ways. There could be no better description of Aristotle’s “megalopsychos” (the man of practical wisdom, following the middle path through situations of moral dilemma) than Tocqueville’s picture of a certain American type: “His features, which are lined by the cares of life, display practical intelligence and cold, persevering energy that is immediately striking. His gait is slow and formal, his words measured, and his appearance austere.” He anticipates Marx in writing of factory laborers under the Adam Smith pin-production principle, “Nothing tends so much to materialize man and to eliminate every trace of soul from his work than the great division of labour.” Mill in “On Liberty” seems almost to paraphrase Tocqueville’s observation that one of the principles underlying American democracy is that “Each individual person … is the sole lawful judge of [his] own interest, and so long as it doesn’t harm the interest of others, no one has the right to interfere.”

One could cull others of Tocqueville’s many astute insights to illustrate the power of his mind, but the point of doing so would only be to reinforce the originality of his task: to explore — as he puts it, “The future of democracy: the sole poetic idea of our time. An immense, indefinite idea. An era of renewal, of change in the social system of humanity.” That is what America represented to Tocqueville, and he was determined to examine its nature and implications. As Damrosch shows, Tocqueville had traveled thousands of miles across the rapidly expanding United States to feel the actuality, the lived reality of its people under their democracy, and by doing so he came to recognize its virtues and its dangers with special clarity.

Once home again in France, as he contemplated the wealth of material he had gathered, he had an epiphany: He saw that equality and despotism were not opposites, that there can arise a kind of “soft despotism” accepted by the people who, welcoming its benevolent rule, still describe themselves as free.

This was one of the deepest of the insights he brought home from the journey Damrosch describes. “Above them,” Tocqueville writes of the citizens of a democracy that has mutated into a soft despotism, “rises an immense tutelary power that alone takes charge of ensuring their pleasures and watching over their fate — it is absolute, detailed, regular, far-sighted, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if its object was to prepare men for adult life, but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in permanent childhood. It likes citizens to enjoy themselves, so long as all they think about is enjoyment. It labors willingly for their happiness, but it wants to be the sole agent of their happiness. The sovereign power doesn’t break their wills, but it softens, bends, and directs them. It rarely compels action, but it constantly opposes action.”

This is pure genius. It describes quite a few contemporary Western liberal democracies, and the constitutional struggles of the Jacksonian populists over the Senate resonate with analogous constitutional tensions in a number of contemporary democracies. Today’s United States is the achievement of a post-Civil War settlement and a continuing constitutional evolution that has addressed some of the doubts Tocqueville felt about democracy as always implying the risk of majoritarian tyranny; but the point is that Tocqueville saw those possibilities with clarity, and it is implausible not to think that his insight sometimes helped America take a more suitable path.

As the foregoing shows, although Damrosch’s aim is to describe Tocqueville’s and Beaumont’s journey, inevitably that means describing the ideas they garnered as they went. This is lucidly and succinctly done. Damrosch does not sentimentalize Tocqueville’s views of America and Americans, which were sometimes uncomplimentary to a degree, nor does he over-emphasize the many positives that Tocqueville found. But in general the portrait he gives of Tocqueville is an affectionate one, consistent with the satisfaction America has always taken in Tocqueville’s account of it.

Damrosch’s closing pages give only the briefest outline of the post-journey life of Tocqueville and his book, and do not reveal how different a man Tocqueville became from the one who saw America and the implications of its constitutional arrangements so clearly. But the interested reader should look to the biographies for that. Here Damrosch’s central task — to give a kind of Tocquevillian “Anabasis,” and with it an account of the America he saw — is well and instructively done, and a highly useful addition to the Tocqueville literature.

In a review of “Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State” by William Voegeli, editor of the Claremont Review, Will endorses the outlandish claims of the Straussian school. According to Will, we must choose between “two Princetonians — James Madison, class of 1771, and Woodrow Wilson, class of 1879.” Madisonian conservatives believe that government should “protect the exercise of natural rights that pre-exist government, rights that human reason can ascertain in unchanging principles of conduct and that are essential to the pursuit of happiness.” In contrast, Wilsonian progressives believe that History with a capital “H” “rather than nature, defines government’s ever-evolving menu of rights — entitlements that serve an open-ended understanding of material and even spiritual well-being.”

If Will and Voegeli are to be believed, Franklin Roosevelt and “Lyndon Johnson, an FDR protégé,” both “repudiated the Founders’ idea that government is instituted to protect pre-existing and timeless natural rights, promising ‘the re-definition of these rights in terms of a changing and growing social order …’” The result of this repudiation of natural rights by American liberals, Voegeli writes, is a welfare state “blanketing the skies with crisscrossing dollars.” According to Voegeli, “Lacking a limiting principle, progressives cannot say how big the welfare state should be but must always say that it should be bigger than it is.”

Will and Voegeli repeat two now-familiar claims of Straussian propaganda. First, FDR, LBJ and modern liberals have rejected the idea of “pre-existing and timeless natural rights.” Second, they have favored putting as many people as possible on the dole. The historical record makes it clear that both accusations are libels.

It is true that Woodrow Wilson, like many other political scientists in the early 1900s, was influenced by German scholarship that emphasized cultural and social evolution and rejected the Lockean tradition of natural rights liberalism as outmoded and “Newtonian.” But as Derek Webb points out in an important essay titled “The Natural Rights Liberalism of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Economic Rights and the American Political Tradition” (2007): “Roosevelt, unlike many of his Progressive predecessors, self-consciously grounded his defence of economic rights in the philosophical, historical, and constitutional principles of early American liberalism.”

Was Roosevelt repudiating the American Founding when he told Democrats in Philadelphia in 1936: “This is fitting ground on which to reaffirm the faith of our fathers; to pledge ourselves to restore to the people a wider freedom; to give to 1936 as the founders gave to 1776 — an American way of life.” The goal of the New Deal, he explained, was “to preserve to the United States the political and economic freedom for which Washington and Jefferson planned and fought.” What do George Will and William Voegeli think that FDR meant by “reaffirm,” “restore” and “preserve”?

Was Hubert Humphrey at the 1948 Democratic national convention repudiating the ideals of the Declaration of Independence when he helped provoke a walk-out by Southern segregationists who opposed the party’s civil rights plank? “To those who say, my friends, to those who say, that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years too late! To those who say, this civil rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this: the time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights!” If George Will and William Voegeli do the math, they will discover that 172 years before 1948 was … 1776.

Do the Straussians believe that Martin Luther King, Jr. repudiated the ideals of the Declaration of Independence? In his “Letter From the Birmingham Jail” in 1963, he wrote: “Was not Abraham Lincoln an extremist — ‘This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.’ Was not Thomas Jefferson an extremist — ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’” At the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August of that year, King famously said: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed — we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.”

Will and Voegeli imply that when Roosevelt spoke of renegotiating the social contract to acknowledge new economic rights, he was throwing out the previous American understanding of natural rights. This is a deliberate misreading of what FDR said. Roosevelt observed: “We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.” Far from being heretical, Roosevelt’s sentiment was taken for granted by early American statesmen like Jefferson, whose goal of “economic security and independence” was promoted by encouraging the ownership of small farms and pre-industrial shops.

Roosevelt argued that small-government Jeffersonianism made sense in a society of farmers: “The happiest of economic conditions made that day long and splendid. On the Western frontier, land was substantially free. No one, who did not shirk the task of earning a living, was entirely without opportunity to do so.” Industrialization and urbanization, however, made a new “economic constitutional order” necessary, if the unchanging ideals of the American revolution were to be achieved in modern conditions.

The goal of the New Deal was, among other things, to save the relatively recent innovation of large-scale corporate capitalism, which was unknown to the Founders: “We did not think because national government had become a threat in the 18th century that therefore we should abandon the principle of national government. Nor today should we abandon the principle of strong economic units called corporations, merely because their power is susceptible of easy abuse.” This is not the language of a radical, and indeed FDR told the Democratic State Convention in Syracuse, N.Y., in 1936: “The true conservative seeks to protect the system of private property and free enterprise by correcting such injustices and inequalities as arise from it. The most serious threat to our institutions comes from those who refuse to face the need for change. Liberalism becomes the protection for the far-sighted conservative … I am that kind of conservative because I am that kind of liberal.”

The Straussian claim that American liberals since the New Deal have repudiated the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, then, is nothing more than a smear, like calling Barack Obama a socialist or fascist. What about Voegeli’s claim, seconded by George Will, that liberals have a limitless appetite for addicting Americans to welfare?

Here, too, the historical record contradicts right-wing propaganda. Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson detested what both called “the dole.” In 1935 FDR asked Congress to replace relief payments with public employment programs:

The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fibre. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of sound policy. It is in violation of the traditions of America. Work must be found for able-bodied but destitute workers. The Federal Government must and shall quit this business of relief.

I am not willing that the vitality of our people be further sapped by the giving of cash, of market baskets, of a few hours of weekly work cutting grass, raking leaves or picking up papers in the public parks. We must preserve not only the bodies of the unemployed from destitution but also their self-respect, their self-reliance and courage and determination.

Like his mentor Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, who headed the National Youth Administration work program in Texas in the 1930s, supported workfare, not welfare, for the able-bodied poor. Describing the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which promoted jobs and training for the poor, Johnson said: “This is not in any sense a cynical proposal to exploit the poor with a promise of a handout or a dole. We know — we learned long ago — that answer is no answer … We are not content to accept the endless growth of relief rolls or welfare rolls.” When the bill was being drafted, Johnson ordered one aide, Lester Thurow, to remove any cash support programs, and told another aide, Bill Moyers, “You tell [Sargent] Shriver, no doles.”

The Rooseveltian liberal preference for public jobs over cash grants for the poor was shared by the patron saint of natural rights liberalism, John Locke, who in the 1690s proposed that the deserving poor be employed at public expense. Will and Voegeli to the contrary, liberals in the Rooseveltian tradition have always favored public work programs like Roosevelt’s Works Projects Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps and Johnson’s Job Corps and Volunteers in Service to America as an alternative to welfare payments to poor people able to work. It is conservatives who have consistently opposed public work programs. When FDR’s National Resources Planning Board in 1943 proposed using a permanent public works program as an alternative to cash relief after the war, conservatives in Congress killed the agency and buried the report. In 1984, when Congress, led by Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, created the American Conservation Corps, modeled on the Depression-era CCC, President Ronald Reagan vetoed the bill.

Reagan’s veto was ironic, because in the 1930s his father, Jack Reagan, had been the head of the WPA in Dixon, Ill. Reagan remembered the WPA fondly: “Now, a lot of people remember it as a boondoggle and … raking leaves … Maybe in some places it was. Maybe in the big city machines or something. But I can take you to our town and show you things, like a river front that I used to hike through once that was swamp and is now a beautiful park-like place built by WPA.”

It is true that in his 1972 presidential campaign, George McGovern supported the idea of a guaranteed income or “demogrant,” a proposal that Johnson had rejected. But the idea of a guaranteed income or negative income tax was proposed by none other than the libertarian economist Milton Friedman in the conservative magazine National Review in 1967. After defeating McGovern, Nixon adopted the negative income tax as his own proposal. When it was rejected by Congress, a modified version of the negative income tax in the form of the Earned Income Tax Credit became the preferred welfare program of the Ford and Reagan administrations and of Bill Clinton, a center-right Democrat who broke with the New Deal tradition on this as on other subjects. Recently, Charles Murray wrote an entire book proposing to replace welfare programs with a guaranteed income.

What accounts for the infatuation of conservatives like Milton Friedman and Charles Murray with giving cash to the poor instead of providing them with public works jobs like the WPA job that rescued Reagan’s father from unemployment in the Great Depression?

Friedman and most other economists on the American right, like neoclassical economists in general, do not think about the economy as Roosevelt and Johnson did, in terms of republican citizenship and the dignity of labor. Chicago School economists are utilitarians. For them, poverty is by definition a lack of money and the simplest way to cure it is to write checks to the working poor or the non-working poor. Writing checks involves less bureaucracy than public works programs that add to our national infrastructure or increase our quality of life. The Lockean republican objection of Roosevelt to cash relief — “We must preserve not only the bodies of the unemployed from destitution but also their self-respect, their self-reliance and courage and determination” — is alien to the value system of utilitarian economics.

Of course there are reasons other than ideology why conservative elites prefer a negative income tax to public jobs programs or a higher minimum wage. The guaranteed income, like the earned income tax credit, functions as a subsidy to the employers and customers of low-wage labor. These programs obey the First Commandment of Crony Conservatism: privatize the benefits while socializing the costs. The EITC is a massive subsidy of businesses and consumers in the low-wage South by American taxpayers in other regions. That is why the EITC has been the favorite antipoverty program not only of conservatives but also of center-right Democrats from the South like Bill Clinton, Lloyd Bentsen and Russell Long.

This strategy of direct or indirect taxpayer subsidies for starvation-wage enterprises is the opposite of the one announced by FDR in 1933: “No business which depends for its existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.” While acknowledging a minor role for a limited EITC, liberals in the New Deal tradition prefer a combination of a living wage with public works programs to mop up any incidental unemployment caused by a living wage. And the case for WPA-style public works programs for the long-term unemployed in today’s near-Depression grows stronger by the day.

As long as the Straussian school consisted of a small group of uninfluential scholars who spoke mainly to one another, it could do little harm to the republic. But now that their attempt to rewrite American history in the service of contemporary conservatism is being broadcast to the world not only by demagogues like Glenn Beck but also by serious public intellectuals like George Will, the Straussians must be refuted. America does not need to choose between James Madison and Woodrow Wilson. But it does need to choose between Franklin Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover. And we know which side George Will, William Voegeli and the Straussians are on.

(Michael Lind is policy director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and author of “Up From Conservatism: Why the Right is Wrong for America.”

In the decades that followed the rout of the Commune, anarchists became demonic caricatures in the mainstream imagination. A typical specimen was pictured as a young man with bristling black beard and rumpled overcoat, possessed by obscure hatreds, flinging a lighted bomb or firing a pistol into a carriage or railway car. That image wasn’t entirely inaccurate — anarchists and their affiliates perpetrated a string of assassinations during the late 1800s, bumping off, in the most famous instances, Tsar Alexander II, President William McKinley and the queen of Hungary. But, as Butterworth painstakingly demonstrates, these terrorist acts (conceived of as “propaganda of the deed”) were committed by a subset of the anarchist movement; the ideology’s leading figures were ambivalent about such tactics and often opposed to them.

Granted, what the anarchists wanted was hopelessly idealistic: “to usher in a society of perfect beings; a heaven on earth in which harmonious coexistence was achieved without coercion or the impositions of distant authority, but rather arose out of each individual’s enlightened recognition of their mutual respect and dependency,” as Butterworth puts it. Rage over the rank exploitation and injustice they saw everywhere around them (as well as “frustration at the absence of any popular appetite for creative destruction”) drove the most rash and egotistical among them to vent their fury in counterproductive violence, a sort of occupational hazard for many insurrectionary movements. Volatile members were also egged on by agents provocateurs, undercover police and intelligence operatives who incited illegal actions to provide the authorities with an excuse to crack down on the would-be revolutionaries.

“The World That Never Was” is largely an account of these subterranean intrigues, with Rachkovsky playing the role of puppetmaster, expertly manipulating the radicals, local authorities, his own bosses and the public. The anarchists’ rare moments of triumph — for the most part achieved by hitching themselves to a popular protest over food shortages or working conditions — were perpetually thwarted by military force and the larger public’s (unfathomable!) lack of interest in “creative destruction” and other highly speculative and intellectualized political ideas. They were plagued, too, by that bane of all left-wing movements, bitter infighting. Hadn’t the anarchists themselves split off from their fellow socialists in the First International because they objected to the authoritarian beliefs and behavior of Karl Marx? And weren’t they ultimately double-crossed by Lenin and his Bolsheviks after the revolution finally came in 1917?

Butterworth admires some of the anarchists, leaders like Kropotkin and the Communard Louise Michel (aka “the Red Virgin), who exhibited an abiding selflessness, commitment and courage, as well as rank-and-file activists who often abandoned lives of privilege to help and educate the poor, only to end up in prison or worse. About others, like the French marquis Henri Rochefort (who moved to the right later in life), he is far less sanguine, mercilessly detailing such character flaws as Rochefort’s “notorious cowardice” and lifelong resort to demagoguery and anti-Semitism. Even canonized figures can come in for a roasting, as when Butterworth describes the aging Mikhail Bakunin as a “corrupt husk” squandering an acolyte’s donations on “hiring picaresque milkmaids and excavating an artificial lake” for a villa overlooking Lake Locarno.

In other words, Butterworth isn’t an idealist himself, and he has a taste for gossipy details, such as the revelation that Michel had webbed toes and joked that they might come in handy when she and Rochefort were exiled to the French penal colony of New Caledonia in the South Pacific. Rochefort, incidentally, made a daring escape from New Caledonia, one of the dozens of exciting incidents that recommend “The World That Never Was” to historical novelists as a gold mine of potential material. As the author of a political history, Butterworth strikes a rare balance; he doesn’t flinch from moral judgment, but he’s not about to succumb to the propagandizing instinct himself by glossing over the radicals’ many flaws and impracticalities.

He has also mastered a staggering amount of material (although the Special Branch of London’s Metropolitan Police Department receives a scolding for not releasing even more of it). This is a mixed blessing: There’s stuff in “The World That Never Was” that you’re never going to find on Wikipedia or even via Google, but the book bulges with it. Too often, Butterworth tries to wedge so much information into his sentences, compelling them to accommodate one dependent clause after another like a French farmer force-feeding a goose, that almost as much violence is done to English grammar as was inflicted upon assorted Austro-Hungarian grand dukes.

Still, “The World That Never Was” has much of value to impart, from the understanding that today’s radicals may be tomorrow’s sensible visionaries to the unanticipated perils of both terrorism and counterterrorism. Butterworth points out that while the anarchists’ dream of the abolition of private property was unrealistic, many of their most cherished social programs — from the emancipation of women to social security to state-supported education — seem indispensable today. He also traces the birth of modern conspiracy theory in the diabolical machinations of Rachkovsky, the likely author (or, rather, forger/plagiarizer) of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which was invented to smear the left and has since been put to even more baleful uses.

“In the 19th century,” Butterworth writes, “Britain’s elected politicians would never have dared venture anything resembling the kind of legislation that recent years have seen passed with barely a blink of the public eye, to threaten civil liberties that have for generations been taken for granted.” To allow this to happen is to risk unforeseen consequences, the like of which we can only surmise if we have a much better understanding of the past.

It was just a few short years ago that Abe Foxman’s Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, B’nai Brith International, and the Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs all joined forces to beg Congress to deny the historical fact of the Armenian Genocide. Now they are slightly embarrassed about this, because it turns out that the Turks were not willing to return the favor by allowing Israel to kill a bunch of Turkish citizens without getting the Turks getting all upset about it.

(Elsewhere, Spencer Ackerman celebrates the end of the affair with the tale of a professional Jewish PR flack openly denying the genocide at a party a couple years back.)

Just such an overtaking-by-events affects Brian Fagan’s otherwise highly entertaining and instructive “Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans.” While his book was in press, discoveries occurred which at least complicate the picture Fagan paints. That picture is the until-lately familiar one in which Europe was, for at least a hundred and thirty thousand years, the home of Neanderthal Man, a human type which vanished around thirty thousand years ago, less than twenty thousand years after the arrival from Africa of modern human beings — variously known as “anatomically modern humans,” “homo sapiens sapiens,” and “Cro-Magnon Man” (this latter after an archaeological site where definitive examples of the type were found). There is no conclusive evidence that Cro-Magnons displaced Neanderthals by violent means, and received wisdom has hitherto been that the two populations did not much interact and certainly did not mingle. The puzzling question therefore is why Neanderthals died out so quickly after Cro-Magnons  arrived, leaving Cro-Magnons to flourish ever since in unrivalled mastery of the planet.

One of the aims of Fagan’s book is to examine this mystery, and his basic thesis is that Cro-Magnons, whose tools and cave art show that they were far smarter and vastly more adaptable than Neanderthals, were able to withstand the Ice Age then engulfing Europe, whereas the developmental stasis of the Neanderthals made them unable to cope.

The very terms of the debate as addressed by Fagan have, however, been changed by the discoveries announced while his pages were in press. One is the finding of a little finger bone in a cave in southern Siberia, whose DNA is that of a female hominid neither Neanderthal nor Cro-Magnon, and whose owner lived between thirty and fifty thousand years ago. That long-ago female of an apparently third human type is now known as X-woman.

An equally significant discovery, made this year by Svante Pääbo’s team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, is that between one and four per cent of modern human DNA is Neanderthal. Modern Africans share no DNA with Neanderthals. This is a preliminary result from the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome, about sixty per cent of which, at time of this writing, has been described. If the finding is correct it means Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals indulged in a certain amount of interbreeding after the former’s arrival in the latter’s territory. (Pääbo was among those who earlier showed that Neanderthals and the ancestors of modern humans diverged genetically about half a million years ago.)

There might be mathematical reasons why the Pääbo observations are incorrect, adding to scepticism about whether they overturn earlier comparisons of mitochondrial DNA apparently confirming that Neanderthals and modern humans kept strictly to themselves. But other bits of evidence are coming to the Pääbo team’s aid: for example, the thirty thousand-year-old teeth of a modern human child found at Abrigo do Lagar Velho in Portugal which have Neanderthal characteristics.

Add the discovery made in 2003 of Flores Man, the pygmy humans of Indonesia who seem to have lived until about thirteen thousand years ago, and the picture of human evolution becomes a much more complicated one. It might be that a mere twenty thousand years before the agricultural revolution in the Middle East, at least four types of humans co-existed and occasionally mingled, suggesting an exciting possibility: that the agricultural revolution and the solo inheritance of the earth by modern humans have a related cause. Recent examples of meetings between long-separated human groups — between Europeans and the populations of America and Africa over the last five centuries — suggest a further and, to me, very persuasive possibility: that Neanderthals, X-woman people and “homo floresiensis” vanished because they were not immune to diseases carried by modern humans.

Nothing is straightforward in this debate: some studies show that the Neanderthal population of Europe was always tiny, containing a maximum of only 3,500 females in the whole of the continent at any one time between thirty-five thousand and seventy thousand years ago, thus making it a very fragile group already on the brink of extinction. The arrival of modern man might therefore have had little or nothing to do with their disappearance — or conversely might indeed have been the final straw, if the groups competed for resources or if the disease hypothesis stands. On the other hand, there is suggestive evidence, published in the Journal of Anthropological Science in May 2009, that modern humans butchered Neanderthals and made necklaces from their teeth; modern human flint tool marks on Neanderthal bones provoke chilling speculations.

In essentials the story Fagan tells is the until-lately orthodox one of non-mingling between Neanderthals and moderns, and part of his account of the former’s disappearance is premised on the claim that while modern humans had a powerful and flexible symbol-using intelligence, Neanderthals remained culturally inert, scarcely changing their tools or way of life over the hundred thousand years plus of their possession of Europe; and that this inflexibility doomed them when new environmental challenges arose, perhaps including competition from the moderns.

In his graphic and imaginative reconstructions of life in Ice Age Europe around thirty-five thousand years ago, Fagan portrays Neanderthals as quiet, watchful folk observing the more extroverted moderns from afar, encounters between the two populations being at most intermittent and distant. Both this scenario and the book’s argument are announced together on the first page: “A weathered, hirsute face with heavy brows stares out quietly from the undergrowth,” Fagan writes, imagining a group of moderns sighting a Neanderthal on the other side of a river; “Expressionless, yet watchful, its Neanderthal owner stands motionless, seemingly oblivious to the cold. The [modern] father looks across, waves his spear, and shrugs. The face vanishes as silently as it appeared.”

As it happens, the idea that Neanderthals were culturally inert and had little symbolic imagination has been called into question lately, too; in Spanish caves occupied fifty thousand years ago (ten thousand years before modern man arrived in Europe) paleoanthropolgists in a team led by Joao Zilhao found shells and bones symmetrically perforated and painted, implying use as ornaments. But though this enriches speculation about Neanderthals, it does not subvert this aspect of Fagan’s thesis, because the distance of Cro-Magnon cultural superiority over painted shells is measurable in light-years. The implication of Fagan’s thesis is that Cro-Magnons flourished in climatic conditions that extinguished Neanderthals precisely because of their sophistication, and this remains plausible even if there were encounters between some Cro-Magnons and some Neanderthals that were culinary, sexual, or both.

Though the recent discoveries mentioned complicate matters for Fagan’s account, he does an admirable job in bringing vividly to life the Europe of between eighty and ten thousand years ago. His reconstructions are eloquent in  their inventiveness:

Western Europe, early summer, seventy thousand years ago. The bison graze peacefully in a forest clearing, knee-deep in the lush grass of the water meadow…Two young Neanderthals watch the solitary bison from close down-wind, hugging the ground under the trees. They carry stout wooden spears with stone points and are naked, so that they can move quickly and in stealth…

Fagan’s imaginative leaps on the question of contact and avoidance between moderns and Neanderthals are aided by studies of relations between surviving hunter-gatherer communities such as the San of Southern Africa, and their neighbours the farming Lala. The San and Lala distrust each other, do not understand each other’s language, and generally keep to their own ways of life; but they use signs and gestures to trade at times. In Fagan’s view this could be a model for occasional Neanderthal-modern encounters. It is just this picture, though, that recent discoveries apparently upset.

What they do not upset is the key to Fagan’s thesis about what explains the modern human superiority to the Neanderthals, namely, the “heightened consciousness” that he believes led them to conceive of “supernatural realms.” The cave art of Lascaux, the ivory Hohle Fels flutes dating to thirty-five thousand years ago, the voluptuous female figurines from the same place, the beautiful Lion Man sculpture that forms a high point of Aurignacian art, testify to an advanced sensibility, and Fagan is surely right to attribute to it “the fundamental difference between the Cro-Magnons and the Neanderthals, and one that probably caused [the Cro-Magnons] to perceive their neighbours as inferior, probably as little more than animals.” And this superiority lay in the Cro-Magnon’s “ability to conjure up mental images and manipulate [them].” Of course for survival — a matter somewhat more important than snobbery — the Cro-Magnon’s social, organizational, and communicative complexity was surely the truly crucial thing; it is in organisation that a species whose chief adaptation is intelligence rather than fangs and furs finds its best chance of survival.

Fagan follows a distinguished tradition in just assuming that the art and artifacts of the Cro-Magnons imply religion. He talks of Cro-Magnons “conceiving a supernatural realm.” I think the unhappy turn in human affairs that involves such conceiving is a late phenomenon. It is far more likely that for the Cro-Magnons, the forces and agencies which need to be engaged with, communicated with, represented, mimicked, feared, or used, were entirely natural — part of nature, not beyond or above it — and their view of it was most likely a projection from their own felt capacity as agents, together with anthropomorphizing projections of their own needs and interests. That this is almost certainly so is inferable from the known “religions” of those who predate the supernaturalistic religions of the last three thousand years — successively Judaism, Christianity and Islam — with their monarchical and tribal conceptions of deity as something that inhabits realms outside the natural world. The earlier “religion” was animistic, meaning that people saw trees, streams, and rocks as living things like themselves, but of different habits and outlooks, some of whom needed to be cajoled or propitiated — such cajoling being a form, therefore, of technology — to get them to (say) yield the rain or avoid the flood, come into fruit, help cure disease, and so usefully on.

Some of the art of Cro-Magnon peoples is indeed breathtaking — those cave paintings especially — and the effort of producing them, together with their mysterious location deep in cave systems, makes it easy to imagine that they had highly significant mystical meaning. But perhaps they did not: perhaps caves were secure places safe from the art-eroding action of weather, and were chosen to serve rather as art galleries now do, as places of repository for works worth preserving, to be enjoyed by firelight away from beasts and cold, as visual aids for storytelling perhaps — the figures seeming to move as the firelight flickers: proto-television. Is that harder to imagine than that our ancestors saw the rock-face as the membrane separating profane and sacred worlds?

In any case, it is hard to see why a propensity to religion would protect the Cro-Magnons against the Ice Age better than it protected the Neanderthals. Complex social organisation, foresight, skill, and language would certainly do this, and the Cro-Magnons had more of all these things than the Neanderthals did. The virtual lack of development in Neanderthal technology over a hundred thousand years suggests poor communication and poor imitation skills; to go extinct rather than to change in the face of new challenges even more potently denotes lack of both imagination and cognitive power. Manifestly, the Cro-Magnons lacked neither; and they are here — for we are they — today.

So: Fagan’s book has been overtaken by the onward progress of his science — this happens to lots of such books — and there are aspects of his case that invite debate. But it is an admirable book nevertheless; the re-imagining of the past is entertainingly done, and a great deal of science, especially climate science, is accessibly introduced on the way. The reconstructions, like the remarks about religion, sometimes smack of retrospective “reading-in,” as when we are given a strangely familiar picture of a modern nuclear family in an unexpected place: “Moravia, late winter, twenty-nine thousand years ago. The twelve-year-old boy sits listlessly by the hearth…he has spent the day setting fox traps with his father…the boy’s mother takes a practised look at him, and reaches for her precious cache of reindeer fat [which she melts as a treat for him to eat]…” Cue music. But one learns a great deal of pre-history in the process. Fagan takes us from Mount Toba’s massive volcanic eruption, which nearly wiped out modern man seventy thousand years ago, to the arrival and spread of agriculture ten thousand years ago, and does it both entertainingly and educatively. I look forward to the updated edition when it appears.