Word: aped
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Cracking jokes about this $12 million "science fantasy adventure" must seem like pulling the leg of a museum dinosaur-an unfairly anarchic response to an enterprise so painstaking, so educational, so forthrightly solemn. Director Annaud even recruited Desmond Morris (The Naked Ape) to devise appropriate gestures for the actors, and Anthony Burgess (Language Made Plain) to create primitive dialects, all heavy on the grunts and gutturals. But jokes will come, especially since Quest for Fire emerges less than a year after Caveman, a goofy romp through prehistory that managed to supply the punch lines to many of Quest...
...Kalahari, who live much as man's earliest ancestors did, foraging for vegetables, sharing meat when they hunt successfully, carrying their culture in their heads. His conclusion is refreshingly optimistic: there is no proof in the hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari that man is an inherently violent "killer ape." The modern urge to mass violence appears to be acquired, not inherited...
Leakey, the chairman of FROM, discussed several areas for investigation, including the point at which man and ape diverged in the evolutionary sequence, the causes of the brain enlargement of man and his most recent ancestors, and the origins of primitive art. He also argued that it was the move to a bipedal stance--not the development of tool-making or the enlargement of the brain--that spurred man's evolution...
...paintings like Dignity and Impudence, circa 1839, he projected Victorian ideas about social hierarchy and decorum onto animals-partly to satirize human behavior (though very lightly), and mainly to suggest that the divisions of the Victorian world were rooted in the natural order. Art may be the ape of nature; but dogs, so to speak, are the apes of morality. Animals want to be men and imitate the better aspects of human behavior-fidelity, tenacity, bravery, gentleness. They cannot make the last evolutionary step, but how consoling to see each doggy eye moist with the desire to do so! Such...
What if none of this matters? That is the troubling question Stone raises throughout the novel. He vividly portrays high adventure, but then makes it look of no more account than what the cynical Marty Nolan calls "a catalogue of ape behavior." He sets his characters the task of finding meaning for their lives, then sees to it that they will fail. "There's always a place for God," Holliwell asserts. "There is some question as to whether He's in it." This issue is not normally the stuff of espionage. Those readers who like their suspense neat...