91av

When a television science presenter and a psychologist theorise about the origins of human culture, anything could happen. Sadly, not much does. In The Axemaker’s Gift (Grosset/Putnam, $27.95, ISBN 0 399 14088 3), James Burke and Robert Ornstein seek a single cause for the complex human condition, but they come up only with a lot of bad history. We are what we are, they say, simply because prehistoric flint-flaking exalted the left side of our brain, turning it into an unstoppable instrument that churned out speech, writing, science and modern technology. Burke and Ornstein also insist that technology is a gift handed down by special people – the axemakers – to lesser folk too stupid to see the threat that it poses.