A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

ook called The Descent of Woman; she points out that man still has strong canine teeth, which
must at one time have been far bigger. Baboons have similar teeth, and they have appeasement
signals. She goes on to propound her own theory of how man came to lose his inhibition about
killing defeated enemies. At one time, she suggests, our remote ancestors returned to the water
when droughts reduced the food on land. (This theory was first put forward by the zoologist Sir
Alister Hardy.) This is how man came to walk upright on his hind legs - because it is easier to walk
upright in water; it also explains how he came to lose his body hair, since hair would impede his
swimming. (Water animals, like otters, have short hair.) A point came when the upright, hairless
male tried having sex in the frontal position, instead of from the rear. The reaction of most females
to this, Elaine Morgan argues, would be to fight for their lives. But the females who succumbed to
frontal ‘attack’ would have babies; the others wouldn’t. Moreover, the ruthless males who ignored
the females’ cries for mercy would become fathers; the more scrupulous or timid males would die
without issue. And so, eventually, the ruthless male who could ignore pleas for mercy would
replace those who responded to appeasement signals.
There is one obvious objection to this interesting theory. The more scrupulous males would
continue to mate from the rear when the female was on heat, and so there would be no reason for
the more old-fashioned humans to die out. In addition, any sensible female, lying in a cave beside
her mate, would quickly recognise that he was not trying to kill her when he mounted from the
front. So she would have no need to make appeasement signals, and he would have no reason to
overrule them. One more stimulating theory of human violence has to be abandoned.
In African Genesis, Robert Ardrey put forward the hypothesis that when man learned to kill with
weapons his life became more violent and dangerous, so that it was the most skilful killers who
survived. He later had to admit that this failed to explain why early man - like the men who lived in
the Chou-kou-tien caves - made war on other tribes. (Mumford, of course, would reply that they
were simply small expeditions to seize a few captives for sacrifice.) In a later book, The Social
Contract, Ardrey had another suggestion: that man became dangerous when he ceased to be a
hunter and became a farmer. The habit of hunting was still in his blood, and he turned from hunting
animals to making war on men. This view had to be abandoned when Ardrey discovered that in the
earliest of all cities, Jericho - dating back to 6500 B.C. - the citizens had built three sets of walls, as
well as an enormous defensive moat. That argued that they were afraid of attack from nomadic
farmers, even at this early date. (In fact, farming had been in existence for about three thousand
years by this time.) But this evidence of Jericho certainly undermines Mumford’s theory that
warfare appeared in history only when there were rival cities. And Ardrey’s hypothesis about outof-work
hunters is contradicted by the skulls in the Chou-kou-tien caves; man was dangerous even
half a million years ago.
In 1972, Ardrey debated with Louis Leakey about the origin of war. Leakey agreed that the likeliest
date was about 40,000 years ago; but his reasons were quite different from Ardrey’s. He noted that
Cro-Magnon man learned to make fire about 40,000 years ago. So man could sit around after dark,
instead of being forced to go to his bed. And so for the first time, they could indulge themselves in
conversation, and the children could sit and listen. Story telling became an art, and most of the
stories were about hunting and clashes with other hunters. For the first time, man began to think in
terms of ‘them’ and ‘us’. This was Leakey’s own imaginative theory of how man’s imagination
became possessed by war.
Like most theories of ancient man, this has the disadvantage that it can neither be proved nor
disproved. But from our point of view, it is important because it firmly puts a finger on that central