A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

problem of criminality: xenophobia, the feeling of non-fellowship towards fellow human beings.
And this is just as likely to be found among primitive people as among the ‘underprivileged’ in a
modern city. In Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti cites an example of inter-tribal warfare in South
America in the early twentieth century. A warrior of the Taulipang tribe described in detail how
they annihilated the neighbouring tribe called the Pishauko. The quarrel seems to have started about
women, and some Taulipang men were killed. The Taulipang decided that the Pishauko intended to
destroy them, and that the only solution lay in striking first. Canetti describes how they crept up on
the Pishauko village at night, when everyone was in the communal hut. Apparently a witch-doctor
of the Pishauko warned them that their enemies were approaching. He was ignored. The Taulipang
warriors cut their way through the lianas of the stockade, then rushed into the hut and began laying
about them with their clubs; after this they set the hut on fire. ‘The children wept. All the children
were thrown into the fire... The Taulipang seized the fallen Pishauko one after the other and cut
them right in two with a forest knife... Then they seized a dead woman. Manikuza pulled her
genitals apart with his fingers and said to Ewana: “Look, here is something good for you to enter.”’
Here we see the close juxtaposition of the elements of cruelty (throwing the children into the
flames), vindictiveness (cutting the bodies in two) and sexuality.
At first sight, this story offers support to the view that this kind of violence was a latecomer on the
stage of history. This quarrel was about women. But if the Taulipang and the Pishauko had been
two neighbouring groups of apes, such a quarrel would have been unlikely, for the apes would have
mated within their own group. Neither would apes quarrel about territory; they would settle
territorial disputes by the usual aggressive displays on the boundaries, followed by appeasement
signals if things went too far. Presumably there must have been a time when our ancestors behaved
more like the peaceable apes than warlike human beings. Then we recollect the skulls in the Choukou-tien
caves, and doubts begin to arise. That happened half a million years ago; and one group
still went on to annihilate another - or, at least, take a large number of them prisoners and kill them.
Until the end of his life, Robert Ardrey remained impenitently convinced that man became man
because he lived by killing. This is what he calls ‘the hunting hypothesis’. That is to say, man
developed his human qualities because, from a very early stage, he learned to co-operate with other
men in hunting wild animals. As a result, his social instinct developed side by side with his killer
instinct. Just how long ago was not recognised until after 1960, which was the year Louis Leakey
made an important discovery at Fort Ternan in Kenya. There were the bones of one of man’s
remotest ancestors, dating back fourteen and a half million years; he was called Ramapithecus, and
he seems to have walked upright most of the time. And on the same site were hundreds of antelope
bones. So this early ape was a hunter - which means, presumably, that he hunted in packs, and
therefore had some kind of social co-operation. A battered chunk of lava suggested that it could
have been used for extracting the marrow from the bones, and that therefore Ramapithecus was
already a tool user. It was the Fort Ternan evidence that exploded a theory put forward by Ardrey
in African Genesis, to the effect that Australopithecus became a meat-eater (and therefore a killer)
during the droughts of the Pliocene period (more than three million years ago) when vegetation
became scarce. But it also strengthened Ardrey’s theory that man became human because he is a
hunter.
Ten million or so years later came Australopithecus; he looked like an ape, was about four feet tall,
and had a brain weighing about a pound (500 grams or 600 cc), one-third of that of modern man.
This was not a very notable advance on the Ramapithecus’s 400 cc. (Even a chimpanzee has a brain
about 400 cc.) But this was the creature who first discovered the use of deadly weapons. Not long