A Brief History of the Human Race Michael Cook Granta, 385pp, £20 ISBN 0393052311

If, perish the thought, you were prepared to deface your copy of the New Statesman, you might draw a straight line right across the top of this page. Think of this as a time-line representing the past 150,000 years, beginning at the moment palaeo-anthropologists believe our species, Homo sapiens, evolved to roam the face of the Earth. You now confront one of the great puzzles of human existence: measured to scale, a section no wider than the full stop at the end of this sentence could be said to represent the length of time since Europeans developed printing, Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, Wagner composed his Ring Cycle, humans invented the computer and landed a machine on Mars.

Given that early humans were virtually genetically identical to modern man, it is staggering how long mankind took to develop anything approaching civilisation. Cave art goes back some 40,000 years, and writing developed only around 6,000 years ago. Although our brains, emotions and biological tools (hands, eyes, ears) were much as as they are today, for most of our history we resembled the great hominid apes who roamed the planet two million years ago. We grubbed around and chipped pieces of stone from flints to make tools. So what happened that caused the sudden, almost miraculous development of human culture?

In A Brief History of the Human Race, Michael Cook argues that in the past 10,000 years we entered the Holocene Period, a time of considerable global warming. Evidence from polar ice caps suggests that we would have to go back around 120,000 years to see an equivalent prolonged spell of warm weather. With a stable climate, a unique opportunity presented itself: humans, who had previously lived permanently on the verge of extinction, were able to stay in one place, develop agriculture, and live in increasingly large communities.

Although this book gives a broad account of humanity over the past 10,000 years, it is not, properly speaking, a "history of the human race". It does not tell us how or why humans migrated from Africa, nor what remains they left as they travelled. Cook includes an important section on genetics, but he does not fully explain what clues modern genetic techniques offer about how humans colonised the Earth.

Instead, this is a history of human civilisation. And what seems to have happened is that, while early humans almost certainly evolved and then migrated out of Africa, civilisation does not have a common origin. Humans organised themselves in broadly similar ways around the globe, sometimes quite independently. The Fertile Crescent - Mesopotamia and specifically Sumeria - gave rise to an urbanised culture some 5,000 years ago. But similar developments were occurring elsewhere: in ancient Egypt; among the mysterious, ill-fated Harappans in the Indus Valley in India; and, more recently (perhaps 3,000 years ago), in Central America and China, where there could not have been any cross-cultural contact. This offers the best evidence yet that semi-permanent settlement in stable climatic areas is what allowed the great leap forward.

Cook focuses arbitrarily on subjects that interest him - such as the rise and spread of Islam. But he doesn't do justice to monotheism in general, regarding it briefly (and wrongly, in my view) as exclusive. The compression inevitably results in Cook missing many details. For example, there is only a brief (and unsatisfying) mention of the Roman assassin who failed to kill an Etruscan king because he could not distinguish between the monarch and his secretary. And just who was the Russian ruler who rejected Islam because the Russian people could not manage without liquor? The Black Pagoda at Orissa in India is mentioned together with "the unabashed sexuality of its sculptures". Many readers, I suspect, would like to visit it - but there is no map to tell us where it is.

The illustrative material is also patchy. The graph of data from the Greenland ice core, showing global warming, is central to Cook's argument, but it is so difficult to understand that many readers may skip it. The Inca quipu (knotted strings used to carry information around the Andes in lieu of writing) is poorly explained, and seems to be depicted upside-down. Nor are there any maps of the world's big land-masses - Pangea, Laurasia, and Gondwana - even though these will be obscure to most people.

But when Cook does go into detail, his account becomes enthralling. His description of Galileo's discovery of the moons of Jupiter is one of the best I have read. It's a pity, then, that he doesn't do justice to the rest of European science, which surely shaped so much of the world in which we live. It seems perverse to ignore this, while devoting so much space to Nasa's irrelevant photography of Jupiter's satellites.

No history of the human race is complete without an understanding of Montaigne's philosophy, Wren's architecture, Beethoven's composition. How is it that mankind can achieve such pinnacles, while perpetrating the Nazi holocaust, threatening self-destruction with atomic weapons or poisoning the planet with pollution? One purpose of history is to jerk us into a realisation of where we might be travelling, but Michael Cook seems reluctant to embark on the journey.

Robert Winston's most recent book is The Human Mind: and how to make the most of it (Bantum)

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