BRIAN DEER:
NATURE'S PREY Page
5
The
tree of our species has many thousands of branches,
almost all of which withered and died. To date,
palaeontologists have invented countless names for
the bone fragments they have pulled from the ground:
Homo habilis, Zinjanthropus, Rampithecus, to name but
three more. Primatologists, meanwhile, take our
origins back past the bonobo, to squirrels and
beyond. So, why pick the emergence of Homo erectus
from Australopithecus as due any special note? Is
there anything, moreover, to be learnt from our
ancestors of more than 80,000 generations ago?
"There
is a current trend to try to find the origins of the
human mind on the Pleistocene savannah," the
dental expert Walker cautioned me. "And I have
this perennial question: why then? Why not go back to
a fish ancestor, or your grandmother, or a few
generations ago. Why pick that as the ancestral thing
you are interested in?"
The
answer, I suppose, is the speed of the change and the
depth of the impact it produced. When Emma Mbua,
curator of hominids at the Nairobi museum, showed me
a selection of famous skulls, I could see straight
away that Homo erectus represented a quantum jump.
And measured on the clock of evolution, the 200,000
years or so that it spent diverging from its
predecessor was so rapid that it almost makes you
want to talk about the day we came down from
the trees.
Bones,
however, have little to say about the way that their
owners behaved - allowing images to be conjured about
them that are driven by more recent preoccupations.
All of the Australopithecus finds have been in Africa
(the latest in Chad) and, until Homo erectus
specimens turned up in Asia, fossils were exclusively
retrieved by white adventurers in some past or actual
European colony. Dart, an Australian working in
Johannesburg, made his name during apartheid's
construction. The Leakeys have been prime exponents
of white settlers controlling the sites. Even
American expeditions in Ethiopia have had a
peculiarly imperialist feel.
The
killer ape narrative appealed to such folk, for whom
the most sophisticated scientific techniques were
deployed on fixing their beloved Land Rovers. It was
almost as if through palaeontology they felt they
could prove objectively that their kind's supremacy
was historically preordained. If old Australopithecus
murdered his way out of the trees, it could be
argued, how natural and welcome is civilisation's
advance to the polite domination of today? Look at
the ever-collapsing states of modern Africa,
moreover, and you might well be drawn by theories,
written in stone, that we were killers before we were
cooks.
It
was Ardrey, once more, who got polished the final
draft - and in whose footsteps I might literally have
trodden. The fossil hunters and zoologists were like
two "wings" of a "revolution", he
wrote, which dovetailed into a third: "The
African independence movements are rapidly converting
a continent into something approaching a political
state of nature, where primitive human behaviour may
be observed not as we should wish it to be, but as it
is."
Attitudes
are changing, however, and science mirrors that. In
the same cultural shifts that see aboriginal peoples
probed for ancient wisdoms, so Homo erectus is being
rehabilitated as something more than a beast. While
lonely skulls and stone tools once stressed
individualism, large-scale land surveys and evidence
of fire now point to the community of life. And we
now see that it was not aggression, but fear
which dominated our earliest lives. Fear - the
emotion which vicariously excites the readers of
thrillers, and which a philosopher might see as the
source of all human evil - is the default emotion of
our evolutionary line. It just never went away.
That
archaeology and other sciences should now offer us
such notions, may say as much about the changing
concerns of Homo sapiens as of those of our ancient
forebears. Hardly more than a generation ago, in the
heady euphoria of the booming 1960s, the image of the
times was the ultimate weapon: the mushrooming
nuclear bomb. In the pessimistic, economically
fragile 1990s, another image is taking hold in our
collective mind: the secure, life-giving tree.
As
our planet's atmosphere sours, as once it did for
other reasons, and the last tatters of the primeval
forest are threatened with destruction, maybe we see
something of our present predicament in the
melancholy, scavenging way of life that science now
presents for Australopithecus and Homo. "Humans
are losing confidence," Robert Foley, director
of the Duckworth Laboratory at Cambridge University,
pointed out to me. "We have started to see
ourselves as the victims, rather than the masters, of
nature."
I
think some sense of that loss was weighing on me when
I drove on the plain that Sunday. Our origins, of
course, is a story of victors, which at least some
lucky bands of Homo erectus must have numbered among.
But my emotion - if you will, a vibration - was at
one with all those branches of our evolutionary tree
that shrivelled so long ago. In the fickle, shifting,
African mosaic, there were always more losers than
winners. Some perished when their rivers turned to
mud and then dust. Others were caught by cats. Some
were too hairy to stay cool in the day. Some so
brainless they simply got lost.
From
the wheel of my red Hyundai, I looked across the
yellow savannah that afternoon and felt for a moment
that I was seeing this landscape as one of these
hominids might have done. I wondered if, two million
years ago, as the nutritious, protective forest
dwindled to islands in the grass, maybe he and his
band had made a break from a patch of wilting,
fruitless trees. Thirsty, hungry, confused and
frightened, they had set off for the empty horizon in
search of a new source of food and shade.
But
they had started too late, had found no water and as
the sun rose above them, they had slumped, defeated,
in the merciless tropical heat.
They
never fell victim to killer apes. Like us, they were
nature's prey.
