Myth: Early humans were “killer apes,” savage and violent…
Most of us have 2001: A Space Odyssey to thank for it, but wherever we may have picked it up, the Myth of the Caveman as Club-Wielding Brute is deeply entrenched in our cultural consciousness.
It’s an iconic image: A wandering tribe of African australopithecines has a rumble with another tribe over a watering hole, and the pensive Moonwatcher, having noticed that the thigh bone of a dead boar makes a formidable extension of his own arm, proceeds to use that bone to club one of the opposing gang to death, thus committing the first murder. Flash-forward to 2001, and the image of an orbital nuclear warhead platform.
The image has stayed with us over the decades, augmented by a general cultural perception that it represents a real chunk of the human past: the idea that bloodthirsty violence was an evolutionary adaptation that got us where we are today, and that it informs our understanding of who we’ve come to be, a dozen years beyond 2001.
The inclination to turn in that direction for an explanation of the human condition, especially in the mid-twentieth century, is understandable: after two world wars and tens of millions of deaths, the default assumption that human beings are innately vicious, violent and homicidal is not a great leap. Years and years of violence-ridden evening news leaked it into the public gestalt.
Beat It with a Stick
We’ve seen variations of that message all over the place – in films, on television, in novels and comic books – and Arthur C. Clarke went out of his way to make it part of the human story he sketches out in 2001. He was trying to make the story as factual as possible, and at the time, the idea of hominids as violent, murderous creatures represented the best thinking of anthropologists. Clarke got these ideas from author Robert Ardrey, whose popular books African Genesis and The Territorial Imperative had been best sellers.
Ardrey had, in turn, taken the notion from the work of Australian anatomist Raymond Dart, who had turned his mind to an interesting problem and come up with a solution that seemed to answer a number of questions about both our ancient past and our contentious present. The problem Dart tackled was explaining a pile of bones in South Africa, in a place called Makapansgat.
The Makapansgat dig was a cave containing a massive stockpile of humerus and femur bones – the long, thick, clunky ones within the upper arms and legs of mammals – and was faced with answering the question, why these bones and no others? Some of the bones were human; some were from gazelles, and so on. But beyond these, there were only fragments of other, smaller bones.
Dart’s solution was elegant. The bones, he suggested, were weapons, and their cave stockpile was essentially an armory. The long, thick humerus and femur, regardless of source, make for a deadly extension of the human arm. Such a tool would confer an overwhelming advantage in a fight.
Building on this idea, Dart recast early humans as the brutes we see in our pop-culture myths: bloodthirsty killers and cannibals, ruling the African veldt as merciless packs of enraged hoodlums, cruising the savannah, spoiling for a fight. Ardrey spread this picture far and wide, all the way to Clarke, and what came to be known as the Killer Ape Theory – the idea that violence is a human default, a necessary step in our evolution – entered the public consciousness, where it remains today.
The problem is: well, it turns out not to be the case.
Cat Scratch Fever
Enter Charles Kimberlin Brain, known for some reason as “Bob,” of the Transvaal Museum. Enthused by Dart’s Killer Ape Theory and anxious to explore it, he sought out additional bone accumulations, similar to the one at Makapansgat. An expert in cave taphonomy (the study of environmental features and conditions), Brain was an ideal investigator to continue the work.
But what he found simply didn’t fit Dart’s story. In a project that stretched on year after year, as more and more specimens were examined, Brain found a pattern that turned the Dart profile of early humanity upside down: within the bone accumulation sites, those big bones – taken at first for clubs – were covered with scratches…from the teeth of large cats.
The stockpiles were what remained of leopard kills, over time, the largest bones being the only ones too large for the cat’s jaw to break open for their protein-rich marrow. Fragments of human skulls, also too large for munching, were likewise found in the stockpiles – and likewise bore the teeth marks of big cats. Moreover, no other human artifacts were present, none of the stone tools used by hominids at the time, when they should have been, if the cave sites were in fact hominid habitats; and no stockpiles like the ones at Makapansgat have ever been found at a site of human habitation.
Dart’s picture of human brute as apex predator, then, collapsed, not many years after 2001 was released in 1968, and the Killer Ape Theory has been discarded by anthropologists, for the most part. It was the big cats – the leopard, the saber tooth and their kin – who ruled Africa as apex predators.
Humankind, on its way to world dominance, remained prey in its prehistoric years. (As a footnote, Dart was delighted when he learned that his theory had been overturned, as any true scientist would be; and lest we view Brain’s refutation as any sort of I-said-he-said, note that Brain spent 25 years at the task, examining well over a quarter of a million bones.)
Nor was 2001‘s image of the australopithecine Jets-Sharks rumble ever supported with anthropological evidence of intra-species warfare, or even battle between hominid competitors. If we have been beating each other’s brains out with clubs for three million years, then Africa would be riddled with archeological digs of battlegrounds.
And we don’t find them in Europe, where Cro-Magnon and Neandertal had their showdown far more recently. Instead, our cousins seem to have slipped away quietly, without fuss, left not upon battlegrounds but whole, within their homes.
Why does all of this matter? Because the Killer Ape Theory was disproven decades ago, yet we still see ourselves through that ghastly and disturbing filter. As well-meaning as Clarke and Kubrick (and countless other science-driven scenarists) may have been, we are still hauling around the self-image of the vicious savage, rather than that of the industrious survivor. Maybe we need a new movie, I don’t know, but it’s certainly time for a new narrative: one that cultivates the message, within our collective consciousness, that the murderous beasts among us are the exception, not the rule; and that we are, for the most part, determined and resourceful beings who lust not for blood, but for light.
Reality: Human beings were prey, not predator; survivalists, not killers...
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