Humans: From the Beginning

“...weapons of war, fabricated and used by a people who had not the use of metals. The situation in which these weapons were found may tempt us to refer them to a very remote period indeed, even beyond that of the present world.” – John Frere.

In April 2009, just months after the great financial crisis almost brought about the collapse of the world’s banking system, I was made redundant by the small computer consultancy for which I worked as a software developer. It was hardly a surprise: the company’s main line of business was mortgage systems for subprime lenders, and this had hardly been a growth area in the 18 months I’d been working there. I had at that point been working in IT for over thirty years, much of it at a large international law firm, but my lengthy stay there was eventually ended by a departmental restructuring. Faced with a second redundancy in two years, I decided it was time for a complete change of direction and that I was going to write a book about human prehistory.

I realise that newly-unemployed software developers don’t typically choose this as a career move, but in my case the idea had been in the air for several years. My interest in human prehistory goes back to the early 1990s, when I read Jared Diamond’s classic The Third Chimpanzee. Prior to then, I had been more interested in the future than the distant past and I had been an avid reader of books by Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss and Isaac Asimov since my childhood. Much later, I discovered Olaf Stapledon’s future history, Last and First Men, with its breath-taking vision of eighteen successive human species, all very different to Homo sapiens yet, ultimately, sharing much of what makes us human. But I was intrigued by the realisation that in reality, Homo sapiens are not the ‘First Men’. We were preceded by many other hominins (to use the technical term), including Australopithecus, Homo erectus and the Neanderthals, all now extinct. What would it have been like to have lived in a time when there was more than one human species in existence? What were these other people like and how did they live?

The idea of earning my living as a writer was also far from new. My father, Jack Seddon, was a successful screenwriter. Beginning in the 1950s, he and his long-standing business partner David Pursall formed a prolific screenwriting partnership which endured for almost three decades. Much of their oeuvre was comedy, but their credits include two 1960s war movies, the all-star D-Day epic The Longest Day and The Blue Max, which starred George Peppard as maverick German WWI fighter ace Bruno Stachel.

I myself had been plugging away at trying to get myself published since the 1980s and had written two novels. The first garnered encouraging noises from an agent and a flicker of interest from one or two publishers, but in the end nothing came of it. The second novel, which occupied me for much of the 1990s, also failed to find a publisher. It was not until 2003 that I thought about trying non-fiction instead and, after kicking various ideas around, I decided to ‘write something about prehistory’.

However, human prehistory is a huge field and one in which I have no formal background. My degree, gained many years ago, is in the natural sciences and my knowledge at that time was little more than that of an informed layman. Where to start? The answer, in the first instance, was to read. In addition to hard knowledge, I hoped ideas would eventually come to me. I soon realised that while there is much excellent popular literature devoted to many aspects of it, there is nothing that attempts to cover the entire human past in a manner that will appeal to the general reader - the type of person who likes to get their teeth into a good work of non-fiction. I also felt there was the scope for an enthusiastic amateur to make a meaningful contribution to the debate about human origins. By the spring of 2009, the project had occupied me for almost six years. During this time, I had become considerably more knowledgeable about the subject, but I still had only vague ideas as to how I might set about encompassing the whole subject, from the earliest ape-like hominins to the rise of civilization.

Part of the problem, of course, was the demands of the day-job. Even a job that does not demand too great a commitment in terms of overtime is not conducive to a project like this and my two novels – which required far less in the way of research – had both required many years to complete.

Now, faced with unemployment in the middle of the worst recession since the 1930s, I realised that I had a choice - either I could look for another IT job, or I could do something else entirely. The first option would simply entail carrying on as before, probably after a lengthy period of unemployment in what was a very tough job market. Frankly, it didn’t sound terribly interesting. When I looked at my finances, I realised that while I wasn’t in a position to retire comfortably, I could afford to take a career break for however long I needed – within reason – to write my book. While there was – and is – an element of risk, it was a no-brainer. It still feels that way now.

© Christopher Seddon 2012