Living Fossils

By Peter Staler

THE MAKING OF MANKIND by Richard E. Leakey Button; 256 pages; $24.95

Anthropologist Richard Leakey opens his tour d'horizon by describing some of his own finds, including the famed skull 1470 that revealed Homo habilis, the first true man, to be more than 2 million years old. Always giving credit where it is due, Leakey goes on to describe the earlier findings in South Africa of Raymond Dart and Robert Broom, who unearthed human ancestors more than 3 million years old, as well as to discuss Don Johanson's dramatic discovery of Lucy, the famous four-foot-tall Ethiopian who walked upright at least 3 million years ago. The find, Leakey notes, confirms that man's ancestors walked erect long before they began to develop the big brains that set them apart from more primal primates.

Fossils, Leakey makes clear, are essential to any understanding of man's origins. But, he maintains, bones are not enough: "The search for our origins consists of far more than simply identifying the characters in the play: we need to know what they did, when they arrived on the stage, and when and why they departed."

To learn some of these matters, Leakey and his colleagues have recently concentrated on such living fossils as the tribesmen of the Kalahari, who live much as man's earliest ancestors did, foraging for vegetables, sharing meat when they hunt successfully, carrying their culture in their heads. His conclusion is refreshingly optimistic: there is no proof in the hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari that man is an inherently violent "killer ape." The modern urge to mass violence appears to be acquired, not inherited.

Lavishly illustrated and lucidly written, The Making of Mankind convincingly explains what we know about our origins and firmly rebuts the so-called scientific creationists, who believe that evolution should be regarded merely as a theory. The Making of Mankind offers the best proof to date "that species do change and have changed as a result of evolution ... a fact as incontrovertible as gravity."

--By Peter Staler

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