Were we the Nile Perch for the Neanderthals? What was special about us that they couldn't compete with? In an editorial in Astounding Science Fact and Fiction, John Campbell Jr proposed that we have been selecting ourselves -in very elvish ways -from earliest times.

Campbell credited his idea to the nineteenth-century anthropologist Lewis Morgan, but in truth Campbell contributed most of the story.

It runs: we select ourselves, through puberty rituals and other tribal rites. To some extent these interact with our religious stories, but as a socialising technique the puberty ritual may have preceded all but the most basic of animistic beliefs. It certainly sits at the base of our Make-aHomo- sapiens kit. But the Neanderthals may not have possessed such a cultural kit, at least not in the same effective form. If they didn't, they would probably have been much like Rincewind's edge people, indeed like all the other great apes: settled and (mostly) contented in their Garden of Eden, but not going anywhere.

What is so special about puberty rituals? What story makes them a necessary part of how we evolved ourselves into the storytelling animal? Just this, said Campbell: puberty rituals select the breeders. This is the standard mechanism of 'unnatural selection' used to breed new varieties of dahlias or dogs, only here it bred new varieties of humans or stabilised existing varieties. The wizards have always known about unnatural selection, and it is reified on Discworld as the God of Evolution in The Last Continent. Unnatural selection is not just a matter of genetics, either. If you don't get to breed, then you don't have the opportunity to pass on your cultural prejudices to your children. At best you can try to pass them on to other people's children.

Here's how it works. Over there, we see a group of half a dozen lads, perhaps aged 11 to 14. The older men have prepared an ordeal, and the kids must endure this to become accepted as full members of the tribe: that is, breeders. Perhaps they will be circumcised or otherwise wounded, and the wounds will be 'dressed' with painful herbs; perhaps they will be whipped with scorpions or biting insects; perhaps their faces will be seared with red-hot metal brands; perhaps (indeed, usually) the older men will violate them sexually. They will be starved, purged, beaten ... oh yes, we are a very inventive species in this regard.

Those who ran away were not accepted into the group,44 and so were not breeders. So, in particular, they were not our ancestors, because they weren't anyone's ancestors. In contrast, those who submitted to the humiliation were rewarded by acceptance into the tribe. Campbell's insight was that these puberty rituals selected against the immediate animal avoidance-of-pain response, and selected for both imagination and heroism: 'If I bear this pain now I will be rewarded by getting the privileges these old men get, and I can imagine that they went through exactly this, and survived.'

Later on it was the priests who administered the pain. That is how they became the priests, and how successive generations came to 'respect' them and their teachings. By then, humiliation had become its own reward, at both ends of the instrument of torture (see Small Gods), and humans had been selected for obedience to authority.

Indeed, Stanley Milgram's book Obedience to Authority shows just how obedient we are, by using the authority of a white laboratory coat to force people to torture other people, remotely.

The other people were actually actors, responding to 'mild', 'strong' and 'excruciating' pain - or so the experimental subject was led to believe -with the appropriate actions. Milgram's book shows how human beings invented authority and obedience, both very elvish sentiments. That ingredient in the story of our evolution explains Adolf Eichmann as well as Einstein: we won't go any deeper into that issue here, because we've already covered it in The Privileged Ape and Figments of Reality. A few people refused Milgram's instructions, though, and these mavericks have always been generated either by experience (some of the refusers had survived concentration camps, or had been otherwise tortured themselves) or by the Make-a-Human kit itself. Many of these kits generate a few mavericks, and we are optimistic about the Western one that uses Hollywood films to laud resistance to authority. But perhaps that comes only by working through the right genetics and the right home background.

Many of these ancient rituals have become empty now. Jews use circumcision to test the parents'

commitment, rather than that of the baby, who has no choice. Jack was the Boston foreskin collector in the early 1960s; it was a very good source of the living human skin samples that he needed for his research on pigment cells in the skin. He saw a lot of parents, many of whom went very pale and a few of whom fainted: more men did that than women. The Jewish Bar Mitzvah is very daunting to the child, in prospect, though, as with circumcision, nobody fails it -not any more. But people did fail in the past, with serious consequences. For example in the ghettos, where only a third of the population married, the mothers of the 'best' girls chose only the boys who performed their Bar Mitzvah best. This would account for the kind of verbal success that the Jewish faction of many Western populations has achieved. Another explanation, that Jews were permitted verbal abilities only because land-or property-owning was denied them, is a contextual constraint within which they had to live. Why they were good enough verbally to succeed despite that constraint is the interesting question, and Bar Mitzvah competition and selection of breeders is a persuasive answer.

Gypsy populations provide a possible counterexample, though, with very little testing of young men before marriage, which frequently takes place at ages that other cultures consider to be pre pubertal. The few gypsies who have been successful in Western cultures have not been primarily verbally successful. Music provides a good contrast, with gypsies excelling in dance while classical composers and instrumental soloists are often Jewish. Of course, gypsies also share our common selective ancestry, if we're right about puberty rites being ancestral and effectively universal.

The other great apes don't torture their children for ritual purposes, and the other hominids like Neanderthals probably didn't either. So they haven't produced a civilisation. Sorry, but that which does not kill us does appear to have made us strong.

There is another story that we now tell, about what happened to the young men around the time when people were inventing agriculture, which explains barbaric societies. Don't get us wrong here: we don't mean that torturing adolescents is barbaric. It's not, from the tribal point of view.

It is an entirely proper way to get them accepted into the tribe. 'We've done it ever since god-onhigh made the world, and to prove it, here's the holy circumcision-knife we've always used.' No, from the tribal point of view, the barbarians that we have in mind are awful; they don't have any rules or traditions ... Even the Manky tribe, over that way a couple of miles, is better than them; at least the Mankies have traditions, even if they are different from ours. And we've stolen some of their women, and they have the most amazing tricks ...

The problem is that lot up on the hillside, the young men who have been expelled from the tribe because they failed the rituals, or went of their own accord (and so failed the test anyway).

'Couple of my brothers up there with 'em, and Joel's boy, and of course the four kids that were left when Gertie died. Oh, they're all right on their own; it's when they're in that gang together, all doing their hair in that same funny way to be different, that you lock up the sheep and let the dogs loose. They've got these funny words like "honour" and "bravery" and "pillage" and "hero" and "our gang". When my brothers come down the valley to my farm -by themselves -I give