A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

man’s earliest ancestors. It looked more like a chimpanzee than a human being, and the Catholic
scientist Teilhard de Chardin thought the teeth were those of a beast of prey. It had a sloping
forehead, enormous brow-ridges and a receding chin. But the brain was twice as big as that of a
chimpanzee. And as more skulls, limbs and teeth were discovered, it became clear that this beast of
prey had walked upright. At first, it looked as if this was a cross between ape and man - what
earlier anthropologists such as Haeckel had called ‘the missing link’. Nearly half a century earlier
the missing link theory had apparently been confirmed when the bones of an ‘ape-man’ had been
discovered in Java. The ape-man of Peking clearly belonged to the same species. But the caves of
the Chou-kou-tien hills yielded evidence that this was no missing link. Peking man had constructed
hearths and used fire to roast his food - his favourite meal seems to have been venison. He was
therefore more culturally advanced than had been supposed. This creature, who lived more than
half a million years ago, was a true human being.
He was also, it seemed, a cannibal. All the forty skulls discovered at Chou-kou-tien were mutilated
at the base, creating a gap into which a hand could be inserted to scoop out the brains. Franz
Weidenreich, the scientist in charge of the investigation, declared that these creatures had been
slaughtered in a body, dragged into the caves and there roasted and eaten. By whom? Presumably
by other Peking men. In other caves in the area, bones of Cro-Magnon man were discovered, and
here too there was evidence of cannibalism; but Cro-Magnon man came on the scene more than
four hundred thousand years later; he could not have been the culprit. The evidence of the Choukou-tien
caves revealed that Peking man had fought against the wild beasts who occupied the caves
and had wiped them out; after that, he had fought against his fellow men and eaten them. While
editorials around the world were asking how civilised men could massacre the population of a large
city, the Peking excavations were suggesting an unpalatable answer: that man has always been a
killer of his own species.
Nowadays, that view seems uncontroversial enough; the threat of atomic annihilation has
accustomed us to take a pessimistic view of the human race. But in 1937, the ‘killer ape’ idea met
with strong resistance among scientists. According to the theory that had been current since the
1890s, homo sapiens had evolved because of his intelligence. He started life as a gentle, vegetarian
creature, like his brother the ape, then slowly learned such skills as hunting and agriculture and
created civilisation. In his book on Peking Man, Dr Harry L. Shapiro, one of the scientists at Choukou-tien,
does not even mention the mutilations in the base of the skulls; he prefers to believe they
were damaged by falling rock and layers of debris. But new evidence continued to erode the older
view. As early as 1924, the palaeontologist Raymond Dart had discovered an even older species of
‘ape-man’, which he called Australopithecus (or southern ape-man). In the late 1940s, examining
an Australopithecus site near Sterkfontein, Dart found many shattered baboon skulls. Looking at a
club-like antelope thighbone, he was struck by a sudden thought. He lifted the bone and brought it
down heavily on the back of one of the baboon skulls. The two holes made by the protuberances of
the leg joint were identical with similar holes on the other skulls. Dart had discovered the weapon
with which the ‘first man’ had killed baboons. It seemed to verify that similar thighbones found in
the caves of Peking man had also been weapons..
In 1949, Dart published a paper containing his claim that Australopithecus - who lived about two
million years ago - had discovered the use of weapons. Fellow scientists declined to take the idea
seriously. In 1953, he repeated the offence with a paper called The Predatory Transition from Ape
to Man, which so worried the editor of the International Anthropological and Linguistic Review
that he prefaced it with a note disclaiming responsibility for its opinions. For in this paper Dart