In 1968 I was given African Genesis by Robert Ardrey. It was, without doubt, the most illuminating yet frightening book I had ever read, for its thesis was that the evolutionary innovation which created the big-brained human animal Homo was its ability to kill using tools. Ardrey went further by suggesting that humans were unique in that they used their technology to kill their own kind either individually or en masse, that they ate them, and that they enjoyed doing it.
Ardrey derived much of his evidence from the fossil remains of our early ancestors, animals like Australopithecus africanus, then being found and interpreted by experts like Raymond Broome in South Africa. One of the most vivid descriptions was of the Taungs infant which appeared to have been killed by a single blow to the left side of the head, the damage to the skull being a deep, double depression. Ardrey and Broome saw this as proof that man used the distal end of a large antelope's leg bone as a weapon, and that the hunter who had killed this child was right-handed.
Ardrey saw Homo sapiens as a calculated killer. As he put it in the first line of African Genesis, 'Not in innocence, and not in Asia, was man born'.
What was so terrifying about his book was that my generation had listened on our transistor radios as Soviet freighters carrying ballistic missiles to Cuba steamed across the Atlantic while John Kennedy made it quite clear that, if they didn't turn back, he'd sink them - and we all knew what would happen then. What we inferred - and this may sound melodramatic - was that, if we humans were, as Ardrey suggested, programed to develop more and more sophisticated weapons of mass-destruction, then, one day, we were going to use them.
Some of Ardrey's arguments were subsequently, if not discredited, at least modified by later discoveries. For example, closer evaluation of the Taungs infant shows it was probably killed by a large, predatory bird, and we are not alone in the enjoyment of hunting, killing and eating our own kind, for chimpanzees in the wild have been observed doing it.
I never forgot Robert Ardrey's argument but, like so many things that shock, I learned to live with it, learned to hope that the goodness that is also inherent would prevail - until, the other day, I read The Most Dangerous Animal by David Livingstone Smith, published this year. If anything, as a read, it's even more terrifying than African Genesis.
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