did not extinguish innovation as efficiently as it was extinguished among our forebears in prehistory for thousands of centuries.”® That is why I say that prehistoric people, at least, were barely people. Both before and after becoming perfectly human both physiologically and in their mental potential, they were monstrously inhuman in the actual content of their thoughts. I’m not referring to their crimes or even their cruelty as such: Those are all too human. Nor could mere cruelty have reduced progress that effectively. Things like “the thumbscrew and the stake / For the glory of the Lord” ?° were for reining in the few deviants who had somehow escaped mental standardization, which would normally have taken effect long before they were in danger of inventing heresies. From the earliest days of thinking onward, children must have been cornucopias of creative ideas and paragons of critical thought— otherwise, as I said, they could not have learned language or other complex culture. Yet, as Jacob Bronowski stressed in The Ascent of Man: For most of history, civilisations have crudely ignored that enormous potential... . [C]hildren have been asked simply to conform to the image of the adult... . The girls are little mothers in the making. The boys are little herdsmen. They even carry themselves like their parents. But of course, they weren’t just “asked” to ignore their enormous potential and conform faithfully to the image fixed by tradition: They were somehow trained to be psychologically unable to deviate from it. By now, it is hard for us even to conceive of the kind of relentless, finely tuned oppression required to reliably extinguish, in everyone, the aspiration to progress and replace it with dread and revulsion at any novel behavior. In such a culture, there can have been no morality other than conformity and obedience, no other identity than one’s status in a hierarchy, no mechanisms of cooperation other than punishment and reward. So everyone had the sam