How Man May Have Discovered Science : HOW THE SHAMAN STOLE THE MOON: In Search of Ancient Prophet-Scientists from Stonehenge to the Grand Canyon, <i> by William H. Calvin,</i> Bantam Books, $21.50, 288 pages

Historians who have lately taken to lambasting Christopher Columbus for exploiting innocent Third World people will find new incriminating evidence in this clever and persuasive book.

Columbus, the shaman of the book’s title, apparently used the magic of astronomy--an eclipse of the moon--to bamboozle some islanders into treating him and his rapscallion crew royally, according to author William Calvin.

The Columbus anecdote also reveals, Calvin claims, how magical demonstrations of human power over nature may have seduced Stone Age people into doing science.

Author Calvin, a professor of neurobiology at the University of Washington and an expert on the mental development of early humans, contrasts the ancient Greeks, who contemplated nature out of curiousity, with prehistoric hunter-gatherers, who “backed into science” for a purely selfish reason: knowledge of nature gave them power over their fellow tribespeople.

Calvin has looked at the evolution of the human brain in each of his five previous books for non-specialists. One of his main ideas, elaborated most fully in “The Ascent of Mind” (1990), is that the shock of the Ice Ages, coming after eons of balmy weather, “bootstrapped” human intelligence rapidly from ape-level to what it is today.

In the present book, Calvin imagines what the earliest true humans did with their powerful new minds. In particular, he tries to reconstruct the development of ancient astronomy, with special attention to eclipse prediction.

Calvin’s interest in what academics call archaeoastronomy began as a hobby. The author says he began puttering at ancient observatories in the United States and Europe as a respite from his long hours at the laboratory bench. His hobby grew serious, and this book represents a sort of progress report.

Specifically, “How the Shaman Stole the Moon” chronicles the odyssey of the author’s visits to some of the world’s most important prehistoric astronomical sites: Stonehenge and Avebury in England; the Temples of Poseidon and Delphi in Greece; and the earliest American Indian ceremonial houses, called kivas, in the Southwest--Chaco Canyon, Canyon de Chelly, Mesa Verde and the Grand Canyon, among others.

Using the travelogue as an organizing device--one familiar to readers of his earlier books and especially effective here--Calvin moves from site to site, puzzling over enigmatic ruins and developing theories about how they might have been used to predict eclipses.

The author consciously ignores the elaborate scholarly explanations that have been presented over the years. Instead, he tries to start from scratch, figuratively placing himself inside the skin of a primitive human who saw the Earth as flat, immobile and surrounded on clear nights by mysterious, slowly moving lights.

Feeling his way among the ruins with the help of a computer, surveyor’s transit and other post-Stone Age tools, Calvin eventually works out a dozen different ways for hunter-gatherers to predict eclipses.

Calvin is a stylish and companionable writer. He offers memorable you-are-there descriptive sketches of the ancient observatories and of watching sunrises and sunsets from the astronomically significant “Right Spots.”

He even portrays a fellow scientist carefully observing the behavior of a pot of oatmeal mush bubbling over a campfire. Typically, he notes in passing, in what some readers may consider an excess of scientific exuberance, his companion’s discovery that oatmeal left unstirred while cooking will become furrowed into six-sided cells like crystals in a rock, as “a solution to a packing problem when there is a temperature gradient.”

If “Shaman” has a fault, it is that Calvin, like many enthusiastic professors, bounces jauntily along at a brisk pace that sometimes blurs the technical content of his prose.

To be sure, the author’s task of compressing millennia of sophisticated prehistoric astronomical speculation into a few hours’ reading makes a certain proportion of high-density passages hard to avoid. And anyone willing to sort out the details will find his meaning perfectly clear.

In any case, “Shaman” succeeds remarkably well in its main task of putting the reader in the place of the earliest humans who wondered about the heavens, and it amply rewards the effort it sometimes demands.

Next: Jonathan Kirsch reviews “Chain Reaction” by Thomas B. Edsall (W.W. Norton) .