7/9/22

I can do no better than to quote Robert Ardrey's powerful, eloquent perspective: "Humans were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres however frequently they may be turned into battlefields. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk, but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses." ( )

I really wanted to like this book however I am going to have to call it quits after almost 100 pages.

I found the writing to be verbose and I had trouble following his line of thought. There were some nuggets of interesting information about animal behavior but it wasn't enough to keep my head from bobbing up and down in sleepiness and boredom.

When I was in college, our Professors challenged our idealism and assumptions by exposing us to uncomfortable facts, of all sorts. For example, Darwin's views of Race, and Marx’s view that human history is part of natural history. And animal ethnologists and modern mechanical materialists who claimed that we are simply “naked apes”, often implying that the faults of society can be blamed on our genes, our inherited animal make up. Robert Ardrey was one of these authors. For example, in African Genesis, he gives an account of human origins:

"Hierarchy is an institution among all social animals and the drive to dominate one’s fellows an instinct three or four million years old ... The human drive to acquire possessions is the simple expression of an animal instinct many hundreds of years older than the human race itself ... The roots of nationalism are dug firmly in the social territory of almost every species of our related primate family ... Status seekers are responding to animal instincts equally characteristic of baboons, jackdaws, rock cod and men."

Ardrey was quite prescient. His description of our primate legacy is a remarkable profile of a certain bankrupt casino owner who borrowed millions of dollars from President Putin and led a world charge against republics and democracy. Who knew that jackdaws would garner significant political support? ( )

An irresistible story of Homo sapiens coming into being. ( )