A Criminal History of Mankind (18 page)

At the moment, Maerth’s theory can be neither proved nor disproved, since there is no evidence that the eating of brains produces the effects he alleges. But it is worth mentioning here because it is at least an attempt to explain how man developed into a killer of his own kind. Konrad Lorenz’s theory is far less heterodox, but it is open to equally strong objections. He suggests that harmless species, such as doves, hares and roebucks, have no appeasement signals to stop aggression, because in normal circumstances they cannot do one another a great deal of damage. To support this assertion, Lorenz describes how he placed two doves together in a cage and one of them almost pecked the other to death. Man, he says, being basically a harmless creature, without tusks or claws, also lacks appeasement signals. This explanation has been challenged by Elaine Morgan in a book 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 out-of-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 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 Chou-kou-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 after this, there emerged another form of man with a still larger brain - about 700 cc - and who used primitive flint tools. He has been labelled
homo habilis
. And he, like Australopithecus, was active during an epoch of unprecedentedly bad weather - droughts, floods, ice ages - called the Pleistocene, which began about two million years ago. No one knows quite what caused the Pleistocene. The most popular theory is that polar ice reached such proportions that it began to split apart under its own pressure and giant icebergs floated towards the equator. But from man’s point of view, the ice and floods of the Pleistocene were infinitely preferable to the long drought - in Africa, almost twelve million years long - of the Pliocene. This was the period when man suddenly put on an evolutionary spurt and began to outdistance every other animal on the face of the earth, including his cousin the ape. And during the next million years there emerged the creature who murdered his prisoners in the caves at Chou-kou-tien:
homo erectus
. His brain was about twice as big as that of Australopithecus - which makes it about two-thirds the size of that of modern man. We know that he used fire, although he did not know how to make it; and this itself argues a highly evolved social life. It implies that when hunters came upon a tree that had been set on fire by lightning, they carefully carried away burning branches and then appointed guardians to keep it permanently alight. Man was learning to think ahead, and had therefore outpaced every other living animal. From the fact that only skulls were found in the Chou-kou-tien caves, we may speculate that
homo erectus
was a head hunter, and that therefore his capacity for violence was already well developed.

And still the human brain went on expanding. In the half million years between Peking man and ourselves, it grew by another third, and most of that growth was in its top layer, the cerebrum - the part with which we think. No one knows quite why it expanded so fast. Ardrey even suggests the fascinating notion that it may have been connected with a huge meteor - or perhaps a small asteroid - that exploded over the Indian Ocean about 700,000 years ago. Its fragments - known as tektites - can still be found scattered over more than twenty million square miles. At the same time, the earth’s poles reversed, so that south became north and vice versa. No geologist can yet explain why this happened - or why it has happened on a number of previous occasions in the earth’s history. At all events, Ardrey suggests that the explosion, or the reversal of the earth’s polarity, or both, somehow triggered the ‘brain explosion’. During the reversal period, the planet would be temporarily without a magnetic field, and the result could be that earth experienced a sudden heavy bombardment of cosmic rays and other high-speed particles of the kind that are at present diverted by the Van Allen belts around us. There would also be a sudden rise in the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere. Both these factors could cause genetic mutations which might be responsible for the ‘brain explosion’. On the other hand, this ‘catastrophe theory’ may be unnecessary. If man’s brain had already doubled in size between Australopithecus and the first
homo erectus
about a million years later, then there is nothing very startling in a further increase of about a third in another half million years.

There is, however, one outstanding mystery. Peking man already had a brain that was far bigger than that of Australopithecus; in fact, some of the larger-brained Peking men had brains as big as some smaller-brained modern men. What did he do with it? He certainly learned to build himself crude shelters made of branches, and developed more elaborate hunting techniques - he had even learned to kill elephants. Yet his tools made practically no advance. A mere 300,000 years ago,
homo erectus
was still using the crude flint choppers that
homo habilis
had been using two million years ago. And so things continued down to the time of Neanderthal man, who appeared on the scene only about a hundred thousand years ago. He was still a thoroughly ape-like creature with a receding chin and receding forehead, and his cave-dwellings indicate that he was also a cannibal. And he vanished from the face of the earth between thirty and twenty-five thousand years ago, when Cro-Magnon man - direct ancestor of modern man - appeared on the scene. Ardrey has no doubt whatever that Neanderthal was exterminated by Cro-Magnon man, and it seems a reasonable hypothesis even though most experts prefer to leave the question open. And Cro-Magnon man was the first creature to make obvious use of the enlarged brain. He made paintings on the walls of his caves; he even invented some crude form of notation on reindeer bones, probably to indicate the phases of the moon. In due course, he invented agriculture and built cities. He advanced more in twenty-five thousand years than his ancestors had in two million.

As usual, Ardrey has a striking theory to explain what happened. He points out that the ‘tanged’ arrowhead - a head that could be fastened to a shaft - was invented by a species of Neanderthal man - Aterian - who lived in the Sahara (in the days when it was a green paradise) about forty thousand years ago. That argues that they also invented the bow. And the bow and arrow, Ardrey believes, were as crucial to the ancient world as the atomic bomb is to the modern. It was the first ‘long distance’ weapon. It meant that a hunter was no longer tied to his tribe; he could go off on his own and stalk small game. And once man had become used to hunting alone - to being an
individual
- he probably began to develop the habit of thinking for himself. It is an exciting theory, and open to the single objection that, for some odd reason, the bow and arrow failed to spread beyond the Sahara culture that invented it. But then, as Ardrey points out, Cro-Magnon man knew about the sling, another long-distance weapon...