“‘So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.’”
Will paused and looked around the room full of scientists, most of whom had little sympathy with the Genesis story of the beginnings of life. But the room was still, almost tense.
“So there we have it, folks. The creation of man. And woman. And dominion over the earth. But when did we become us? How far back were Adam and Eve? We left our hominid ancestor, Lucy, with our cousins the chimps at the edge of the savannah, venturing out of the forest into the open. Why? Well, remember the dinosaurs rushing to fill the niches left empty when the proto-reptiles went extinct? Remember the mammals rushing in to fill the dinosaurs’ niches after the Great Dying?
“For the chimps and their siblings, the hominids, failing rainfalls and shrinking forests meant new challenges to be met, new ways of life to test out there in the grasslands, had one the courage or sense of adventure to go. Including the meat-eating way of life. Can we seriously contend that we, unlike the chimps, shrank from the challenge of hunting other animals?
“Yet that is what most scientific thought holds today. This is partially in reaction to the hunting hypothesis that held sway from the mid-sixties to the mid-eighties, until ‘Hurricane Lew’ Binford pointed out that a three-and- a-half-foot creature weighing ninety pounds, with no claws, no fangs, no weapons and a negligible brain, could not have been much of a hunter.
“But could it have had the beginnings of an imagination?
“Lucy, or at least her descendant Homo habilis, lived some sort of scavenging/gathering way of life. The astonishing fieldwork of such ecological archeologists as Rob Blumenschine and his student, John Cavallo, certainly suggests it. But the belief in scavenging, and only scavenging, is now in danger of becoming as doctrinaire as the hunting hypothesis was in its day.
“ No hunting for A. afarensis or even H. habilis? Can we really believe that Lucy’s kind, and more especially habilis, already a meat-eater, would not have snatched up any small or weakened animals they chanced upon, would not have figured out some way to kill and eat this helpless prey? Do we truly believe there was no envy and admiration, to go along with their fear, of the mighty predators whose kills they scavenged? No attempt, in their own negligible way, to copy them? To ape them, in a word?
“The human psyche is the result of evolution; we come by our genocides honestly. Our propensity to kill- especially to kill our own species-is one of our evolutionary heritages. But not… not from our hominid ancestors. It predates Lucy. It comes from our primate heritage.
“We’ll probably never know for sure what Lucy and her kin thought or felt or imagined. But the chimp, sharing 99 percent of his DNA with us, who came out of the trees with us and has rituals of dominance and submission like other mammals that keep him short of violence against his own kind, contemplates killing. So we must consider the possibility that he is not far from contemplating murder. Because his codes-taboos-seem to crack under the pressures of hunt ing and those territorial games we call, in chimps and in ourselves, war.
“Yes, war. The chimp does what no other animal besides man does: he wages war-for three years in one known instance, for ten years in another-with adjacent bands of chimps. My troop at Kibale doesn’t, but they have no contact with other chimps. The war ends only when the adversary males are dead, the females seized, and the enemies’ territory annexed by the victors.
“My observations suggest the chimp also contemplates death-or at least wonders about it. He returns to an animal he has killed, pokes it, prods it, studies it, thinks about it. I believe he does this because he has a vivid imagination, and the power to create symbols. Can we believe less of Lucy’s people?
“Poor discredited Ardrey actually had the right idea-man is a creature innately dedicated to violence. Ardrey just had the wrong mechanism. He thought little fruit-eating Lucy and her kind were killer apes. No. They had the genetic capacity to be so, but not yet the conditions, personal or environmental, to trigger it.
“I believe habilis, the first true human, was a hunter, not just a scavenger. The groundbreaking studies of Kathy Schick and Nicholas Toth show that many of the flake tools that habilis created were used not only to break open bones for their high-protein life-giving marrow (a scavenger’s technique), but to remove the meat from the bones of quite large animals (Schick and Toth butchered a dead elephant using only habilis flake tools!). Scavengers have only hunters’ scraps to process; hunters have carcasses with enough meat on them to require butchering.
“Whatever his way of life, meat and marrow fed his big brain so it could grow bigger yet, more complex. Habilis probably was developing a rudimentary language (perhaps not sentences but sounds that indicated concrete things-tree, fruit, wildebeest, perhaps even you and me). Eventually he evolved into Homo erectus. Erectus almost surely could speak, surely had fire.
“Part of our nature is to hunt other animals to live. We are, after all, omnivores-we will eat almost anything. By the time of that true Homo sapiens, Cro-Magnon man, some forty thousand years ago and virtually indistinguishable from us, we had become the most deadly hunter the world had ever seen. Crossing the land bridge into the Americas, we decimated vast herds of big-game animals, driving most of them to extinction.
“But now let us go beyond hunting and killing to the next logical step, in imagination, at least. We know Lucy evolved into Homo habilis probably through the hominid Australopithecus africanus. But other australopithecines, called variously robustus, boisei, aethiopius, or paranthropus — seed and grass eaters with huge jaws and enormous grinding molars (but no canines)-were contemporaries of habilis. They disappeared from the fossil record just when habilis was becoming erectus.
“What happened to them? What happened to Neanderthal? What happened to all of the other ‘archaic’ humans who were around when the Homo sapiens explosion occurred?
“We are told that these various early human species were ‘absorbed’ by modern man. Mated with us, we fed into the gene pool. But there is no shred of DNA or other scientific evidence to show this is so. Indeed, the latest studies, based on links between language patterns and genetic traits in European populations, posits a single, probably African, origin for all modern humans. These scientists are confident that Neanderthal had nothing significant to do with modern human evolution.
“Of course there is no evidence to show earlier homos were annihilated by our line, either. Species can decline below a ‘survival line’ and go extinct all by themselves. But modern man has a great genetic capability for violence against his own kind, up to and including genocide on a massive scale. The chimps show we’ve had this capability since we were apes. Can we really just dismiss as nonsense the possibility that we got here, alone, because we killed off our relatives along the way?
“Crime statisticians can draw a picture of the average jump-out-of-the-bushes rapist with remarkable accuracy. The profile cuts across race, nationality, country of residence. Our rapist is predictably mid-twenties, not married, already involved in other criminal or antisocial activities, and a socioeconomic wreck. He usually stops raping by the age of forty.
“Remember the young rapist orang? Unmated. Equivalent in age to mid-twenties in humans. No economic base. And he stops raping and starts mating when he reaches full maturity.
“The murder statistics are comparable. The perpetrators are in the same age group as rapists, already criminal, from a lousy socioeconomic background. Murderers and rapists have several other things in common. Most are criminally inclined before and after committing their rapes or murders. They have a record of criminal offenses. They want something they aren’t getting. They operate outside the controls of their societies.
“Males kill their own kind forty to one over females. Among apes, among men. If a human female kills, it is usually her spouse.
“Ape males kill the infants of females just joining their troop; the female, deprived of her infant, immediately comes into heat again and is impregnated by the males who thus ‘know’ the offspring is theirs. Human stepfathers kill infants seventy to one over blood fathers (in the U.S. it is one hundred to one). The killings usually occur when a male-ape or man-is recruiting a new female.
“If a female kills her own infant-ape or human-she is usually young, unmated, and her resources are limited. A female with an infant-human or ape-has less of a chance to mate and reproduce than the same female without an infant.
“Finally, war. Since we left the hunting way of life to hold land and till the earth, which led to permanent
