A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

advanced the revolutionary thesis that ‘southern ape-man’ had emerged from among the apes for
one reason only: because he had learned to commit murder with weapons. Our remote ancestors, he
said, learned to stand and walk upright because they needed their hands to carry their bone clubs.
Hands replaced teeth for tearing chunks of meat from animal carcases, so our teeth became smaller
and our claws disappeared to be replaced by nails. Hitting an animal with a club - or hurling a club
or stone at it from a distance - meant a new kind of co-ordination between the hand and eye; and so
the brain began to develop.
At the time Dart was writing his paper, there was one remarkable piece of evidence for the older
view that ‘intelligence came first’. This was the famous Piltdown skull, discovered in a gravel pit in
1913. It had a jaw like an ape but its brain was the same size as that of modern man. Then, forty
years later, tests at the British Museum revealed that the Piltdown skull was a hoax - the skull of a
modern man and the jawbone of an ape, both stained by chemicals to look alike. The revelation of
the hoax came in the same year that Dart’s paper was published, and it went a long way towards
supporting Dart’s views. The brain of Australopithecus was larger than that of an ape, but it was far
smaller than that of modern man.
In the early 1960s, two remarkable books popularised this disturbing thesis about man’s killer
instincts: African Genesis by Robert Ardrey and On Aggression by Konrad Lorenz. Both argued, in
effect, that man became man because of his aggressiveness, and that we should not be surprised by
war, crime and violent behaviour because they are part of our very essence. Ardrey’s final chapter
was grimly entitled: ‘Cain’s Children’. Yet both Ardrey and Lorenz were guardedly optimistic,
Lorenz pointing out that man’s aggressions can be channelled into less dangerous pursuits - such as
sport and exploration - while Ardrey declared, with more hope than conviction, that man’s instinct
for order and civilisation is just as powerful as his destructiveness. Ardrey even ends with a semimystical
passage about a mysterious presence called ‘the keeper of the kinds’, a force behind life
that makes for order. Yet the overall effect of both books is distinctly pessimistic.
The same may be said for the view put forward by Arthur Koestler in The Ghost in the Machine
(1967). Koestler points out: ‘Homo sapiens is virtually unique in the animal kingdom in his lack of
instinctive safeguards against the killing of conspecifics - members of his own species.’ (He might
have added that he is also one of the few creatures who has no instinctive revulsion against
cannibalism -dogs, for example, cannot be persuaded to eat dog meat.) Koestler’s explanation is
that the human brain is an evolutionary blunder. It consists of three brains, one on top of the other:
the reptile brain, the mammalian brain and, on top of these, the human neo-cortex. The result, as the
physiologist P. D. Maclean remarked, is that when a psychiatrist asks the patient to lie down on the
couch he is asking him to stretch out alongside a horse and a crocodile. The human brain has
developed at such an incredible pace in the past half million years that physiologists talk about a
‘brain explosion’ and compare its growth to that of a tumour. The trouble says Koestler, is that
instead of transforming the old brain into the new - as the forelimb of the earliest reptiles became a
bird’s wing and a man’s hand - evolution has merely superimposed a new structure on top of the
old one and their powers overlap. We are a ‘mentally unbalanced species’, whose logic is always
being undermined by emotion. ‘To put it crudely: evolution has left a few screws loose between the
neo-cortex and the hypothalamus’, and the result is that man has a dangerous ‘paranoid streak’
which explains his self-destructiveness.
Inevitably, there was a reaction against the pessimism. In The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness
(1974), the veteran Freudian Erich Fromm flatly contradicts Dart, Ardrey and Lorenz, and argues
that there is no evidence that our remote ancestors were basically warlike and aggressive. ‘Almost