Born in Africa_ The Quest for the Origins of Human Life - Martin Meredith [92]
Dart’s young colleague Phillip Tobias tackled him about his tendency to ‘overdo the text’. Tobias recalled: ‘He looked at me, not unkindly but bridling a little and said, “Phillip, I have to do it this way, with such a new and revolutionary concept,” then added: “If you don’t give them [expletive] 200 per cent, they [expletive]-well won’t believe the half of it”’.
Dart’s ‘killer-ape’ hypothesis was greeted largely by scepticism from the scientific community. Nor did he win much support for his claim that he had discovered ‘a new age of man’—a ‘Bone Age’ which he called the ‘Osteo-donto-keratic’, a culture based on the use of bones, tooth and horn. Nevertheless, Dart’s version of humankind’s bloody ancestry soon became part of modern folklore. The American dramatist Robert Ardrey picked up the idea and turned it into a highly successful book, African Genesis, published in 1961.
Subsequent studies of South Africa’s cave systems carried out by Dr Bob Brain of the Transvaal Museum revealed a different picture from the one Dart painted. Whereas Dart had argued that the fossil bones at Makapansgat showed evidence of bloodthirsty fighting between killer apes with weapons made of bone, Brain made a convincing case that cave-site bones had been accumulated by animal predators and scavengers such as hyenas, leopards and sabre-toothed cats, and that rather than being the hunters, our apelike ancestors were more likely to have been the hunted.
In 1966, the South African Journal of Science published a special edition to commemorate the centenary of Robert Broom’s birth. It included accounts by his son, Norman Broom, and by Professor Lawrence Wells. Wells referred to Broom’s combative nature and recalled that in 1910 ‘an unfortunate train of events’ had led him to throw over his post of Professor of Zoology and Geology at Victoria College. ‘It seems likely that then as in later years he would never have stepped an inch out of his way to avoid a fight, but rather would have taken a perverse delight in steering a collision course’.
CHAPTERS 4, 5 AND 6
Robert Broom’s verdict on Louis Leakey was: ‘He has the restlessness of the true hunter, always looking for something new; and with the intuition of true genius generally looking in the right spot’.
Both Louis Leakey and Mary Leakey have provided valuable autobiographical accounts of their endeavours. Describing the view from the rim of Ngorongoro that she came to know so well, Mary Leakey wrote: ‘As one comes over the shoulder of the volcanic highlands to start the steep descent, so suddenly one sees the Serengeti, the plains stretching away to the horizon like the sea, a green vastness in the rains, golden at other times of the year, fading to blue and grey. Away to the right are the Precambrian outcrops and an almost moonlike landscape. To the left, the great slopes of the extinct volcano Lemagrut dominate the scene, and in the foreground is a broken, rugged country of volcanic rocks and flat-topped acacias, falling steeply to the plains. Out on the plains can be seen small hills—like Naibor Soit, Engelosen or Kelogi near Olduvai: the scale is so vast that one cannot tell that the biggest is several hundred feet high. Olduvai Gorge can also be seen. Two narrow converging dark lines, softened by distance and heat haze, pick out the Main Gorge and Side Gorge, each of which is in