African Genesis
| Author: | Robert Ardrey | |
| Language(s) | English | |
| Publisher | Bantam books | |
| Released | 6th edition (1977) | |
| Pages | 384 pp. | |
| Weight | 1.6 lbs | |
| ISBN | 055310215X | |
| Library: | Reference library | |
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For those dissatisfied with the ludicrous baggage of the world's gods and religions as the origin of mankind and the source of human behavior, 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 Though some of his conclusions are now outdated by modern research, no one has written with more poetry and skill on this topic than Ardrey.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 paleontologists and the anthropologists and learned all he could of the new discoveries and their implications for human origins and behavior.
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".
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