Memory is an odd thing. It is nothing like a photo album. Every time we take out a memory to look at it, we change it, until all we’re left with of the original is a story constructed in the present.

I say this because the BBC’s rescreening of Jacob Bronowski’s trail-blazing The Ascent of Man series, 50 years on, has been an opportunity to compare past and present.

First aired in 1973, the 13-part documentary series is infused with Bronowski’s desire to put scientific literacy on a par with cultural literacy:  an odyssey of the evolution of knowledge to parallel the 1969 series, Civilisation, by Kenneth Clark on the evolution of art.  As a mathematician and a poet, Bronowski was eminently well-placed for this task. I remember being enthralled by the series.

Seen again, half a century on, there is much that seems fresh and modern in the intention and the production values. There is also much that obviously reminds us that “the past is another country: they do things differently there.” For instance, the lavish use of locations and the use of computer graphics (albeit clunky) is strikingly modern. And yet the very title comes from another age, as well as sentiments such as “”Man is a singular creature. He has a set of gifts which make him unique among the animals: so that, unlike them, he is not a figure in the landscape – he is a shaper of the landscape.” Not a mention of woman.

There are also some details where the science has changed. The suggestion in episode 1 that Homo sapiens evolved in the Middle East would no longer be made. Despite this, Bronowski’s profound humanity shines through in his recognition that earlier species of Homo were tool users, not so different from us.

All these connections and disjunctures from today’s thought, I had expected. It was in episode 2 that I began to be aware of a gulf I hadn’t anticipated, though I should have. It was, perhaps, no accident that the treatment of rock art in the first episode was located in a European cave. There is no visit to the prehistoric rock art of Africa or of Australia. Art, that defining physical evidence of symbolic appreciation of the world, was reserved a special place in the scholarship of the time. It had emerged, so the account ran, in Europe because it was European humans who took the first leap towards civilisation. There is, of course, a post-imperial project at work here, preserving and transmitting the earlier imperial idea of European exceptionalism and destiny.

I am not arguing that Bronowski was racist: episode 11 was partly filmed in Auschwitz. What I am arguing is that ideas which struck me on the rewatching as part of a racist canon were common scientific currency back then. In episode two, Bakhtiari nomads are described as fixed in an eternal and recurring present, repeating the same patterns and unable to innovate or develop, a life without futures. This dismissal shocked me. Today, our trope about such peoples has changed 180^o. If anything, we romanticise them as living lightly on the land, close to nature, and being deeply spiritual. In fact, the Bakhtiari make stone carvings to guard their posterity into the future.

What episode two made me realise was how much, in the last 50 years, we have questioned and rejected the idea of development and progress. A voice from another age of optimism spoke to us in that episode as Bronowski moved on to the invention of agriculture. In the following episode, he tracks the rise of civilisation, literally the move to live in cities.  He traces the move from mud houses to stonemasonry as intellectual: “the distinction between the moulding action of the hand and the splitting action of the hand … nothing has been discovered about nature herself when man imposes these warm rounded feminine artistic shapes on her.” He contrasts this with the splitting of wood or stone to reveal the pattern that nature has put there. This, he says, is the origin of science. A laying bare of nature which parallels our own ascent: “We, human beings, are joined in families. The families are joined in kinship groups, the kinship groups in clans, the clans in tribes, the tribes in nations. And that sense of hierarchy, of a pyramid, in which layer is imposed on layer.” All of this is accompanied by the sound track of a periodically tolling bell.

Let’s follow Bronowski and split this open to reveal the pattern within. He wants to argue that every city follows the same recipe: an agricultural hinterland yielding a surplus on which rises a strong central authority. The ascent of man is linear and inevitable. It runs from stone tools through the invention of agriculture, to cities, craftsmen, kings and soldiers, and on to increasingly sophisticated knowledge and art. And I remember now how natural and seductive this evolutionary schema seemed to me half a century ago.

We know now, of course, from archaeological investigation there was agriculture without cities, cities without agriculture, and cities without kings or hierarchy. The ascent of man was not linear and inevitable but rambling loops of creative experimentation with different ways of living together, of making meaning, and of making a living. Though Bronowski celebrates the experimentation and imagination of the inventions of the set-square, the plumbline, the arch and the flying buttress in the fashioning of civic structures like cathedrals, he ignores our equal inventiveness with social structure.

I grew up with this idea of set stages in social evolution and progress that led ever-upward. It was written into the history I learned and the books that I marvelled at. The confident idea of progress had its apogee in the Victorian era and its swan song in the world of the 1950s and 1960s after the Second World War. This idea too was a cultural invention.

He is no apologist for the hierarchies of civilisation. At the end of episode three, he says “The monuments are supposed to commemorate kings and religions, heroes, dogmas, but in the end the man they commemorate is the builder.” Nonetheless, watching The Ascent of Man again is an archaeology of the mind, a picking through and reconstruction of a world that has gone or is vanishing.