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BRIAN
DEER: NATURE'S PREY Page 1
The
Sunday Times Magazine (London) March 9 1997
New
research into the origins of man suggests that
fear, not aggression, was the driving force that
ensured our survival. Study of past environments
and climates shows that, rather than killers, our
ancestors were natural-born cowards, scavenging
on carcasses and skulking in the shadows as the
rainforest dwindled. BRIAN DEER reports from East
Africa
It
might sound to you like a dumb thing to say, but
when I finally got my head round the origins of
our species, the story made me cry. It was a
Sunday morning at the time, and I was chasing the
subject on Tanzania's Serengeti Plain in a rented
Hyundai four-by-four. Clouds of ochre dust boiled
behind the vehicle. Zebra and gazelle leapt up
left and right. And a compass needle bounced on
the passenger seat beside me as I sped across the
roadless terrain. There was no other person as
far as the horizons: if the car broke down I
might have starved. And then weeks of research
fused together with the landscape, bringing tears
to my sunglazed eyes.
The
funny thing was that before I checked it out, I
had assumed all that corny "Garden of
Eden" stuff was on videotape, in the can,
cut and dried, decided. After all, who can't
recall some celebrity anthropologist strolling
towards a television camera, holding forth about
how Homo sapiens sprang from Homo erectus, which,
in turn, was begat by Australopithecus, which, a
very, very, very long time ago hung around in the
trees like apes? It has been 6 million years
since we split from the chimps. Your first
thought isn't breaking news.
All
the punditry I'd seen on the subject, moreover,
was no reason to act like a wimp. By most
accounts, humanity's triumph over the animal
kingdom was a spiteful business, as Charles
Darwin's principle of natural selection was
played out between competing bands of
proto-humans, or hominids, in old world locations
such as this. Even schoolkids know how our
descent from the trees marked the start of our
use of tools and weapons - and how the most
ruthless hunters and killers amongst us proved
the fittest and therefore survived.
This
account is mostly the legacy of the science of
palaeontology - the finding and making sense of
fossils. For the best part of the twentieth
century, a steady accumulation of fossilised
hominid fragments have been indexed and displayed
in museums around the world, like keyholes to
peer into Eden. And with little else apparently
surviving decay and the crushing weight of
millions of years of rock-forming debris, they
have taken centre stage in our picture of human
origins, helping to shape our image of ourselves.
To
date, East Africa has provided most of the key
specimens - with the most celebrated site for
headline-grabbing finds not far from my route
that Sunday. The parched Olduvai Gorge, the
so-called "Grand Canyon of evolution",
and since the 1930s location of world-famous bone
hunts by the white Kenyan adventurers Louis and
Mary Leakey, was just 40km south-east of my
route, back towards the Ngorongoro Crater. I had
spent a bit of time there, among wind-eroded
sediments, where for decades they had scoured the
ground.
The
Leakey's fingers are all over palaeontology. It's
impossible to discuss it and miss them. Deploying
vast grants from the National Geographic Society
in Washington, and boosted by countless National
Geographic magazine stories, Louis and Mary
Leakey, their son Richard, his wife Meave and
their daughter Louise, acquired what amounted to
an exclusive franchise over east African fossil
sites. For the past half century, squads of
sharp-eyed local workers have tramped thousands
of square miles under their imperious direction,
to supply a stream of celebrated skull and bone
fragments for the society to photograph and film.
It
was a guy called Dr Raymond Dart, however, who
was the father of this line of inquiry. Before
World War II, as a professor of anatomy at South
Africa's Witwatersrand University, he became
renown for bringing to the public's attention a
string of 3m-year-old Australopithecus finds - a
so-called "missing link" genus he named
(It's Latin for "southern ape"). And it
was he who forged the now-commonplace assumption
that the reason why we evolved from our
tree-swinging cousins was our forebears'
relentless violence.
He
first staked this claim in 1953 in a paper titled
The Predatory Transition from Ape to Man
which, although read by only a few specialists,
did nothing less than to trigger a science-based
movement turn the century's intellectual tide.
Published in the obscure Miami-based International
Anthropological and Linguistic Review (whose
editor sheepishly claimed that Dart was referring
only to "the ancestors of the modern Bushman
and Negro, and of nobody else"), in 1961 his
ideas reached the public via a Chicago
scriptwriter, Robert Ardrey, who turned Dart's
conjectures into a 350-page best-seller, catchily
titled African Genesis. As I sped across
the Serengeti that Sunday morning, it lay caked
in dust under my compass.
"What
Dart put forward," Ardrey explained,
"was the simple thesis that Man had emerged
from the anthropoid background for one reason
only: because he was a killer. Long ago, perhaps
many millions of years ago, a line of killer apes
branched off from the non-aggressive primate
background. For reasons of environmental
necessity, the line adopted the predatory way.
For reasons of predatory necessity, the line
advanced. We learned to stand erect in the first
place as a necessity of the hunting life. We
learned to run in our pursuit of game across the
yellowing African savannah."
This
powerful notion was soon grabbed by popular
zoology when in 1967 a London Zoo curator and
children's television presenter, Desmond Morris,
broadened its appeal in another best-seller, Naked
Ape, reprinted a dozen times in 18 months.
And then, in the ideologically pivotal year 1968,
Dart's thinking reached a truly mass audience in
the opening sequence of Stanley Kubrick's 2001:
A Space Odyssey, listed by Variety
magazine as one of the top 50 moneymaking movies
ever.
I
remember my father taking me to see a rerun - and
Hal, the computer, left barely a trace on me
compared with that sequence projected in the
dark. Under eerie red skies on a barren
landscape, and following a brave caption THE
DAWN OF MAN, a bunch of guys in gorilla suits
hop about grunting, and foraging for berries and
roots. But then one grabs a zebra femur and (to
the majestic swell of Richard Strauss's Thus
Spake Zarathustra) begins pulverising stuff
in slo-mo swings, with a crazy kind of stare its
eyes.
Before
this multimedia blitz for Dart's hypothesis,
science-based debates on the origin of our
species had been short of an epic narration.
While evolutionary theory back to Darwin
suggested that we must have shared ancestors with
our three fellow ape survivors - the chimpanzee,
gorilla and orangutan - there was no convincing,
much less agreed, hypothesis as to why
this should have occurred. The complexity and
apparent purposefulness of human tissues, nerves,
muscles and so on seemed to many improbable
features to be merely the products of random
mutations.
In
what Ardrey dubbed "The New
Enlightenment", it was Dart who stepped into
the post-Darwin void to displace the hand of god.
"Australopithecus lived a grim life,"
the anatomy professor wrote, graphically
sketching his portrait of Adam and Eve. "He
ruthlessly killed fellow australopithecines and
fed upon them as he would any other beast, young
or old. He was a flesh eater and as such had to
seize his food when he could and protect it night
and day from other carnivorous marauders."
In
the late 1960s, as the liberal civil rights,
antinuclear and Vietnam War movements, reached a
crescendo, conservative ideologists seized on
this hypothesis, which seemed to point in a
welcome direction. Just as Siegmund Freud had
stirred resonances in the century's first half by
revealing the child who lives within us, so the
"killer ape" hypothesis beckoned in the
second half, suggesting that such a child, if it
survived at all, rode on a wild animal's back.
What
clearer precedent for, say, the manifest destiny
of white men to rule, or the unfairnesses of the
free market, than a scientifically-proven and
commercially-successful theory that predatory
aggression was no mere vice, but the driving
force of who we are? "Far from the truth lay
the antique assumption that man had fathered the
weapon," wrote Ardrey in full-blooded
scriptwriter mode. "The weapon, instead, had
fathered man."
That
it's a cruel world, after all, didn't you know,
is a lesson from our relatives in the wild? Even
before Dart's message became entrenched as
orthodoxy, Louis Leakey had in 1957 installed
Jane Goodall, a 23-year-old secretary from
England, to report on the common chimpanzee
population at Gombe River - maybe a day's drive
to my south-west, near Lake Tanganyika. In what
was considered science for the period, the former
waitress had arrived at Gombe, ordered the grass
cut and dumped vast quantities of trucked-in
bananas, before documenting a fractious
pandemonium of the apes. Soon she was writing
about vicious hunting parties in which our cheery
cousins trapped colubus monkeys and ripped them
to bits, just for fun.
Dart,
the Leakeys, Goodall - the lot of them - had, of
course. studied their specialities for decades.
I, meanwhile, was merely passing through, little
more than a Sunday afternoon driver. But as the
zebra and gazelle scattered around me that
morning, I reconnected with a feeling that I had
been getting for some time: that the killer ape
story was fiction. Like with the guy who more
recently wrote a book called The End of
History, claiming that human organisation had
achieved its ultimate manifestation (in American
capitalism), it was a mixture of wishful thinking
and catchy formatting, primarily intended to sell.
I
had felt something was amiss even before arriving
in Africa, but after talking with a new
generation of scientists from the United States,
Europe and Australia, and mugging-up on
shelvesful of the latest research in the library
at Kenya's national museum in Nairobi, I had
found new evidence, refuting Dart's narrative.
And as I had travelled around the Great Rift
Valley of east Africa, looking at sites where
research was happening today, it seemed to me
that his tale was little more than a thriller -
understandably attracting scriptwriters and
directors.
In
a sense, you can disprove Dart by looking into
yourself. But new, more objective, methods have
emerged to reanalyse the hard surviving evidence
of our past. With Dart and Ardrey long-dead, the
Leakey dynasty losing influence over the African
sites, and even Hyundai four-by-fours available
for hire, archaeologists, geologists,
climatologists, botanists, geneticists and all
kinds of scientists, using revolutionary
investigational methods, are breaking into the
domains of the old white adventurers. And they
are finding new keys to Eden.
*****
This
report is copyright, Brian Deer. Responses,
information and other feedback concerning this
resource homo erectus and the origins of the
human species are appreciated - via the briandeer.com homepage.
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