Word: aping
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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...
...doubt he formed societies for protection like the modern baboon. That is only part of the story, for baboons are herbivorous. Australopithecus was a flesh-eater, and he needed to kill in order to survive. But a four-foot, ninety pound ape-man is a poor match for a large animal--unless he is armed...
...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...