Word: leakey
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...accomplished Fossil Hunter, Richard Leakey wittily probes the remains uncovered near crocodile-infested Lake Turkana. The authors admit that we know little about Ramapithecus, a small apelike fellow who existed some 12 million years ago; all we have are a few teeth and bones. Nor, despite the recently unearthed ribs and vertebrae, is there much more data about Australopithecus, who survived until about a million years ago, then turned down an evolutionary dead-end street and disappeared. But science has learned what happened to habilis. With a brain-half again as big as his neighbors', he not only adapted...
Stone tools, cave paintings and burial sites have provided glimpses of our immediate ancestors. But how did habilis live? The fossil record, notes Leakey, provides a skeleton key. But the lifestyles of primates, and of such modern-day primitives as the Kung and the Eskimos, offer more elaborate clues. For one thing they suggest that the existence of earlier man was not, as previously supposed, nasty, brutish and short. Gatherer-hunters, says Leakey, led a shrewd, uncompetitive life and spent little time on the hunt. What truly separated them from their relatives the chimps and baboons, however, was not their...
...Leakey does not deny that hunting, with its emphasis on teamwork and advanced weaponry, helped to civilize hominids. But he categorically rejects the idea, espoused by writers like Robert Ardrey (The Territorial Imperative), that hunting eventually turned early man into a killer. Indeed, the preponderance of evidence indicates that primitive humans were far more likely to cooperate than annihilate. The fact that history is filled with battles, says Leakey, "does not mean that the specific activity of war is written into our genes, [any] more than is the specific skill to play the game of football, the specific talent...
Thus, unlike many of his colleagues, Leakey does not believe that modern man is necessarily programmed for Armageddon. Other species faded and died out simply because they had no choice. "But in our case," says the Anthro- pologist, "extinction would be entirely of our own making, the result of being intelligent enough to create the means of our own destruction but not rational enough to ensure that they are not used...
...observations like this that grant Leakey's entertaining book its powerful moral underpinning. Only when mankind knows where it has come from can it tell where it is to go. Our past, observes Leakey, is beyond our control. Our future-and the choice between extinction or survival-is our own. -Peter Stoler...