Unpalatable Man

One of man's earliest ancestors, says Anthropologist Louis Leakey, was a puny creature named Kenyapithecus africanus that inhabited the earth 20 million years ago. Bones that Leakey found in his native Kenya are the basis of this conclusion. But they also raise a troubling question. How did the weakling those bones belonged to ever survive his hostile environment? He would have been no match for faster and more powerful carnivorous beasts, such as the forebears of lions and leopards, and man did not begin making weapons capable of warding off attacks from big cats until about 2,000,000 years ago.

The answer, Leakey has been telling audiences on his current U.S. speaking tour, may be simply that predatory animals cannot stomach man unless they are desperately hungry. "Nature endowed us, like the shrews," he says, "with something of either a nasty taste or smell."

Back in Kenya, Leakey has seen hungry lions walk through camps past sleeping, defenseless men to stalk and kill nearby antelope. On the rare occasions when they do kill a man, he says, they merely sniff at his body and walk away in disgust with nary a taste. He also notes that the big cats feast on baboons but generally disdain chimpanzees, which are closer relatives of man and presumably give off their version of the manlike odor that these predators find so unattractive. "To this odor," Leakey believes, "we owe our survival. Man is not cat food."

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