Word: leakey
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Throughout the earlier chapters, Leakey breaks the somewhat monotonous account of paleontological history with amusing anecdotes. He tells about his friend almost being gobbled up by a crocodile while swimming in Lake Turkanay be offers insights into the personalities of big-time anthropologists and paleontologists and draws the reader into the world of bones and fractured skulls until the reader begins to share his enthusiasm...
...Leakey devotes a large portion of The People of the Lake to explaining why the line of hominids leading to the evolution of man survived while the Australopithecene line died out. He argues that at some point our hominid line developed a complex economic system of gathering and hunting that required cooperation between individuals in a clan. This cooperative system, besides being intrinsically more productive, engendered the evolution of a special intellectual capability on the part of our pre-historic ancestors. The brains of our ancestors became increasingly subtle and complex because cooperation in a society requires that its members...
...Leakey argues that this greater degree of " intelligence," along with the inherent efficiency of cooperative societies, may have allowed the hominid line to survive while our last cousins perished. Leakey develops this argument carefully and logically so that when he holds it up to the competing theory that our ancestors survived because they were more aggressive and domineering, his view makes more sense...
...Leakey extends this argument to make his own claims about the nature of intelligence and language. He says we can no longer define man's uniqueness by either his ability to construct sentences or his ability to construct sentences or his ability to make tools. He cites the recently discovered ability in chimpanzees and gorillas to make and use primative tools as well as to create basic sentences. The progress chimpanzees and gorillas have made in the realm of language is particularly revolutionary and calls for a reevaluation of the fundamental differences between man and animal, Leakey writes...
...apes have shown they can use symbols to generalize, pose questions and express moods. These experiments contest the claims made by thinkers from Descartes to Noam Chomsky that man's uniqueness can be found in his unusual ability to think and talk in abstract terms. What is it, then, Leakey asks the reader, that makes man different? What special quality does the human brain possess...