The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

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.