Born in Africa_ The Quest for the Origins of Human Life - Martin Meredith [91]
CHAPTER 1
Hans Reck’s account of his journey to Olduvai—‘The Ravine of Primeval Man’—was first published in 1933. All his original notebooks on Olduvai disappeared during World War I.
Africa’s Great Rift Valley is the greatest rupture on the earth’s land surface. It was given the name by the English explorer John Gregory in his account of his journey in East Africa in 1893. He first caught sight of the Rift Valley at the Kikuyu Escarpment, just northwest of modern Nairobi. ‘We stopped there, lost in admiration of the beauty and in wonder at the character of this valley, until the donkeys threw their loads and bolted down the path’. Part of the Great Rift Valley in Kenya and northern Tanzania is still known as the Gregory Rift Valley. Nigel Pavitt’s book Africa’s Great Rift Valley (2001) includes stunning photographs.
CHAPTERS 2 AND 3
Raymond Dart held the post of Professor of Anatomy from 1923 to 1958. In an article published in the Journal of Human Evolution in 1973, he recalled his horror at the suggestion made by Grafton Elliot Smith that he should apply for the post. ‘The very idea revolted me; I turned it down flat instantly. I did not have, as he well knew, the slightest interest in holding a professorship anywhere; least of all one newly-founded, utterly unknown, as remote as possible from libraries and literature and devoid of every other facility for which I had yearned from earliest sentient manhood. He must have been stung by my response, for he said my papers could just as easily be written in the veld! ...’ Advised to consult other colleagues, Dart found them equally in favour of him going. ‘Staying would be tantamount to a dereliction of duty ... Obviously my loss would not be felt in London’.
Dart was remembered by students for his vivid repertoire of lecture-hall tricks. This included leaping up and grasping water pipes attached to the ceiling of the lecture hall to demonstrate the brachiation form of primate locomotion; knuckle-walking like a chimpanzee; and performing a ‘crocodile walk’ to illustrate how reptiles moved about. A former pupil, Trevor Jones, described him as ‘a brilliant lecturer, a superb actor with a mischievous streak’. But he was also remembered for his notorious temper, earning the nickname ‘The Terror of the Dissection Hall’. ‘He would stride between the tables watching’, recalled Trevor Jones, ‘and very often would jump onto a table to give expression to his thoughts and critics in the best of Australian’.
As a result of his nervous breakdown, he stepped down from his post for a year in 1943. In postwar years, he worked on a treasure trove of fossilised broken bones found in limestone caves in the Makapansgat Valley in the northern Transvaal, developing a theory that australopithecines had been ‘flesh hunters’ who used bones as weapons to attack and kill their own kind. In a landmark paper headed ‘The Predatory Transition from Ape to Man’, published in 1953, Dart wrote with his customary flair of how australopithecines had ‘seized living quarries by violence, battered them to death, tore apart their broken bodies, dismembered them limb from limb, slaking their ravenous thirst with the hot blood of victims and greedily devouring livid writhing flesh’.
Humankind, according to Dart, had descended from this ‘killer ape’, inheriting the same habit of using violence and weapons. ‘The loathsome cruelty of mankind to man forms one of his inescapable, characteristic and differentiative