Customer Reviews

African genesis; a personal investigation into the animal origins and nature of man

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4 star:		(2)
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For those dissatisfied with the ludicrous baggage of the world's gods and religions in seeking answers to questions on the origin of mankind and the source of human behaviour, Robert Ardrey is a good place to start. Though some of his conclusions are now outdated by modern research, no one has written with more poetry and skill on this topic than Ardrey. Throughout his quartet of books on human origins and behaviour [African Genesis is the first of the four] Ardrey shows how mankind is less of a fallen angel and more of a risen ape; and that man truly is still only a halfway house between the ape and the human being.

After a Broadway flop American playwright Robert Ardrey [author of the play Thunder Rock and the script for the film Khartoum among others] toured East and Southern Africa in the early 1960s. This was a time when astonishing fossil discoveries were being made in the Olduvai Gorge by the Leakey family and by others showing that humanoids had originated in Africa some 2 million years ago. Ardrey talked to the fossil-hunters, the palaeontologists and the anthropologists and learned all he could of the new discoveries and their implications for human origins and behaviour.

Ardrey's main thesis is that mankind was born in Africa over 2 million years ago, and for most of that two million years the species' success has been largely dependant on its ability to kill. Without that underlying hard edge the species would have vanished aeons ago along with all the others that failed to survive. And only if we take that unpalatable truth about ourselves into account can modern mankind be truly understood.

In this book Ardrey's hero is Australian-born palaeontologist Raymond Dart who discovered and named the first Australopithecus Africanus skull in the 1930s, and who correctly identified Africa as the first home of the human species and A. Africanus as a human ancestor in the face of ridicule and rejection by the scientific establishment for 30 years. The book is moving and beautifully written. If you want to understand human nature, and the possibilities for both the past and the future of the species, there is no better place to start than African Genesis.

For those dissatisfied with the ludicrous baggage of the world's gods and religions as the origin of mankind and the source of human behaviour, Robert Ardrey is a good place to start. Though some of his conclusions are now outdated by modern research, no one has written with more poetry and skill on this topic than Ardrey. Throughout his quartet of books on human origins [African Genesis is the first of the four] Ardrey shows how mankind is less of a fallen angel and more of a risen ape; and that man truly is still only a halfway house between the ape and the human being.

After a Broadway flop American playwright Robert Ardrey [author of the play Thunder Bay and the script for the film Khartoum among others] toured East and Southern Africa in the early 1960s. This was a time when astonishing fossil discoveries were being made in the Olduvai Gorge by the Leakey family and by others showing that man had originated in Africa some 2 million years ago. Ardrey talked to the fossil-hunters, the palaeontologists and the anthropologists and learned all he could of the new discoveries and their implications for human origins and behaviour.

Ardrey's main thesis is that mankind was born in Africa over 2 million years ago, and for most of that two million years the species' success has been largely dependant on its ability to kill. Without that underlying hard edge the species would have vanished aeons ago along with all the others that failed to survive. And only if we take that unpalatable truth about ourselves into account can modern mankind be truly understood.

The book is moving and beautifully written. If you want to understand human nature, and the possibilities for the future of the species, there is no better place to start than African Genesis.

African Genesis is a book that deals with experiments, scientific facts, and evolutionary developments. Even though its old you still have to respect all of the different information in this book. Ardrey's first explanation's are the importance of territory. He used two studies done by other Anthropologists. One with ants the other with birds. The red ant experiment was done by Eugene Maris, it was simply a little bridge that the ants wouldn't cross to leave their territory, but would cross when coming back. Eugene Maris's other works are explained in great detail in this book. His other experiments were more interesting. The bird experiment, done by Eliot Howard, explained the importance of a male establishing its territory before anything else; with birds and apes. It explains an error in Darwin's teachings of man, claiming that sexual tendencies are the first priority. Howard, in all his long career, never knew of a male bird, with territory, to lose a mate; nor a male bird without territory to gain one. Ardrey shows some of these same examples later in the book with gorillas.

Its stuff like this that makes me believe evolution over creation. Reading though the chapters the relationships of us to Australopithecus africanus or erectus is amazing. According to this book A africanus was a carnivorous smaller type of gorilla, erectus was a vegetarian and was bigger than africanus. Ardrey's Romantic fallacy deals with many animals that had true emotions and showed some examples. You see its all evolution. The last chapter is a laudatory approach to free speech. Ardrey is humble about agreeing with him or not, but not to ignore natural sciences brought to us. We are an unfinished revolution he says. He continues and then relates back to Africa's origin of man. The next book I will look for is where this one left off; for this left off at our stage. I would have liked him to continue and explain how all the different races formed if we came from Africa. But that may be too much for this book. What matters is after you read this book you have a clear understanding of Darwin's decent of man. You know that evolution is a long process and has many debates (like Ardrey's 24 paragraph debate of evidence that the use of weapons is a human legacy from the animal world). Anybody that is interested in the evolution of man and African anthropology, you'll want to start with this book.

I feel like I'm being a little generous giving this one four stars for two reason: (1) It's quite dated - So much has been learned and written, both in formal and popular science circles, since this book was first published in 1961, the arguments Ardrey puts forth are not quite as true to the mark as they once appeared to be, but more importantly (2) Ardrey's style of writing is much less suited to today's readership than it must have been 40 years ago. He ceaselessly anthropomorphosizes his animal characters far past where it's proper. This tends to detract from his overall arguments in today's more savvy readership.

Still, Ardrey had a point to make. And it's a good one. The struggle for survival in the natural world is the game our ancestors played as well, and we're here because we were good at it - better than our ancestors competing for the same niche. That's why we're here and they're not.

This book is also a starting point from which popular anthropology has its base. It was very shortly after this point in time that the Leakeys came into the public arena in a big way. So it's interesting to see where the forefront of the public view was at this point in time. There's a fairly decent summary of the work done up to that point as well. Fellows like Dart, who pioneered the field of modern physical anthropology, tend to get forgotten in the frenzy of activity that followed in the 60's and beyond. For these reasons, the book is worth getting.

Finding Ardrey's "African Genesis" may be a chore. But the Amazon book search worked for me, ...

Robert Ardrey's book on human origins is remarkably well-written. That is both a feature and a possible disadvantage. He writes so well that error--if such there be--might be invisible. It is a fascinating book to read, if only for the writing.

His thesis, that man was born to kill, and to kill with weapons made by his own hand--more or less--is hard to dispute, given history.

The book came out during a time when the prevailing ethos required, and delivered, the peaceful, noble savage.

Jane Goodall, among others, helped the ethos mightily with her first book about the Gombe chimps.

Ashley Montague wrote a book implicitly challenging Ardrey's point.

The ethos needed the peaceful, noble savage in order to have him, or his descendants, which is to say, us, corrupted by capitalism, male-oriented religions instead of the Goddess, republicans, Americans, or some other evil-of-the-day, without which everything would be so much better. If we had been then as we are now, who would we blame, and for what?

I can recall one, if not more, novels about prehistoric man in which the Neanderthals stood in for the flower children while the oncoming Cro Magnons for the Marines and paratroopers fighting in Viet Nam. Not explicitly, of course, but the point was clear. We, Homo Sap, Cro Magnon, white, were evil.

I was on campus at the time and got more than a couple of ears full of this.

Ardrey is refreshing. He deals in facts. Some of them are no longer quite as certain as he thought. The sequence of pre-human ancestors and the association of tools, or not, upon which he depended for his thesis, have been changed. Whether that makes much difference to his point or not is hard to say, since we don't know much about the newcomers, including how they related to the pre-humans Ardrey used. And, in fact, we don't know that the currently-accepted view of the sequence is correct. And it is further possible that somebody other than, say, australopithecus, both used weapons and fathered the human race. In which case, Ardrey would be correct.

He is fascinating in a number of ways, but some of the facts he presents are astonishing. For example, the types of bones of various prey found in a South African cave are grossly disproportionate to their presence in the prey themselves. Why lower jaws of small antelopes, and not the rest of the head? Why straight horns and not curved horns? The matched double dents in the heads of baboons, whose wounds fit the distal end of a medium antelope foreleg--grossly overrepresented in the bone pile--seem quite positive. The hyena skull choking on one of the bones shoved down its throat exhausts all possibilities other than that an angry australopithecus killed it.

This idea attracts opposition still.

Various television documentaries of our ancestors, either actors with terrific makeup, or superb animation, show the kind of pre-humans Ardrey discusses as unarmed victims of practically any other animal.

Ardrey refers to a paleontologist calling fangs in a hominid skull, "tools for intra-specific aggression" instead of the dread "w" word, "weapon".

Keeley and others are discussing war before history, or prehistoric violence, but considering only Homo Sap and only the last several tens of thousands of years. Even they are finding resistance, some transparently faulty reasoning.

In some cases, the violence in primitive societies is laid at the feet of white interlopers, without whose baleful presence, all was peaceful and orderly.

All in all, Ardrey makes a solid case that man is born to make, hold, and wield weapons. Whether subsequent research discredits his sequences or not, the case is well made and definitely worth reading carefully.

This book is quite old. I'd be interested in a comment about why you were looking at a review of it. Thanks.

This book truely breaks down into small digestible chunks the scientific pulp that thwart the layman. Literally for the first 3/4 of the book I could not put it down for more than two hours. I would STRONGLY recommend this to anyone who has ever wondered WHY the world turned out the way it has. This book and GUNS GERMS AND STEEL go hand in hand! Well worth the read!