Word: aping
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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CLEARLY human bodies are the result of evolutionary forces working on the lower animals. But what about human behavior? In African Genesis, Robert Ardrey attempts to prove that modern man has evolved from a prehistoric African killer ape, and has preserved not only the physical but also the psychological qualities of that ape...
Australopithecus, like all higher primates, is unspecialized. He is physiologically equipped with no defenses; even the sharp canine teeth of his ape ancestors, Proconsul, are gone. His brain is only slightly larger than that of an ape. The most natural question to ask is, how could such a generalized defenseless creature exist...
...CHURCHILL CANVAS, by John Spencer Churchill (308 pp.; Little, Brown; $5.75). Uncle could ape a gorilla as well as any man who ever lived. "Grr, grr," he would roar, and then crouch in the branches of an oak, "baring his teeth and pounding his chest with his fists." At the beach, Uncle was always the engineer who mobilized the children to build a fortress of sand against the rising tide: "More sand for the outer defenses! Stop the moat from flooding! Hurry!" Uncle also happened to be Winston Churchill, and upon this familial foundation John Spencer Churchill-a painter specializing...
...wrote Lytton Strachey, "in which all the outlines were tremendous and all the details sordid." Certainly, in Victorian England, island swelled into Empire, man's origins retreated from Adam to ape, man's progress advanced to antitoxins and turbines. But certainly, too, there was a precipitous drop from Disraeli to pestilent drains or from Darwin to shivering streetwalkers. Characteristically, it was an age of gaslight, which lighted the dark with a baleful glare, but produced furtive, disquieting shadows...
...went to Africa in 1955 to concoct magazine articles and lick his wounds after a Broadway flop (his Shadow of Heroes, a play about the Hungarian Rebellion, opened to mixed reviews last week). He was fascinated by South African Anthropologist Raymond A. Dart, discoverer of Australopithecus, a man-ape who lived about 750,000 years ago. Ardrey was deeply impressed by Dart's contention that the small-brained Australopithecus used antelope bones as clubs and that these weapons changed him from a vegetarian into a successful predator and allowed him to develop into true, big-brained man. On this...