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.
*****
