Books: Animal Paragon

PEOPLE OF THE LAKE by Richard E. Leakey and Roger Lewin Anchor Press/Doubleday; 298pages; $10.95

Everyone has his own idea of how man became man, and of what life was like among the creatures, no longer apes but not yet human, who inhabited the earth more than a million years ago. In 2001, science fiction writer Arthur Clarke presented ape men who evolved, in part, by murdering those of their neighbors who had not yet learned to use clubs. Cartoonists gave us Fred Flintstone and his pet dinosaurs. The epic movie One Million B.C. offered a grunting Raquel Welch dodging various prehistoric beasts and cave men with something more than evolution on their minds.

These views of our ancestors are diverting, and even, on occasion, informative. But even the speculations of more serious anthropologists and behavioral scientists, says Richard Leakey, are far from accurate. The author should know. His own guesses have the ring of authority, and his genealogy is impeccable. Indeed, if anyone doubts the power of heredity, let him examine the lineage—or the books—of the Leakey family. A generation ago, the great anthropologists Louis and Mary first explored the highlands of East Africa in search of man’s origins. Today their son Richard spends much of his time in further examination of sun-scorched barrens in northern Kenya. He has found enough clues to burnish the names of two families: the Leakeys and the larger tribe of Homo sapiens.

In 1972 a team unearthed the nearly complete skull of a creature called Homo habilis, a proto-man who flourished some 2 million years ago. The skull, labeled “1470” for its Kenya National Museum catalogue number, gave science a new idea of early man’s appearance. People of the Lake provides some fresh ideas about how he lived. The book, written in collaboration with Roger Lewin of the British journal New Scientist, also offers some encouraging speculations on why hominids became humans.

An 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 to his environment but evolved. Habilis passed his genes along to an improved model called erectus, who evolved into modern man, a creature Shakespeare more accurately called “the paragon of animals.”

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 intelligence but their generosity. “Sharing, not hunting or gathering as such, is what made us human,” writes Leakey. “We are human because our ancestors learned to share their food and their skills in an honored network of obligation.”

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 for making fine wine, or the specific inventiveness to design interplanetary rockets.” It is nations that make war, he insists, not genes.

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.”

It is 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

Editors’ Choice

FICTION: Final Payments, Mary Gordon ∙ Innocent Eréndira and Other Stories, Gabriel Garcia Márquez ∙ Shosha, Isaac Bashevis Singer ∙ The Execution of Mayor Yin, Chen Jo-hsi ∙ The Left-Handed Woman, Peter Handke ∙ The World According to Garp, John Irving

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