'African Genesis'

Until we left Lodge Road in Maldon I kept every book I was given - unless it was cripplingly bad - and made a point of writing on the flyleaf the date I obtained it and how. Steadily, as we have 'downsized' since leaving Maldon, many of my books have gone but I retain a core of books, some of which changed my thinking. 'African Genesis' by Robert Ardrey is one.

It is a classic example of how a layman - Ardrey was an American playwright and screenwriter - can turn what might have been an obscure scientific subject into a thrilling story. Thrilling it was, because the evidence collected by Raymond Dart, whom Ardrey met in South Africa in 1955, suggested something truly frightening about the evolution of Homo sapiens.

The book was published in 1961 but I was given it by Gill's parents for my birthday in 1968, when we were in Rhodesia. Its thesis had caused a stir in scientific circles but, being cut off in the depths of Africa, I had probably not noticed.

The book opened up a whole new area of interest for me and I have continued to read similar books ever since - as well as 'African Genesis' I still have Ardrey's second book, 'The Territorial Imperative', two books by Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum, an expert in the subject, and 'Born in Africa' by Martin Meredith.

Paleoanthropology was in its infancy when 'African Genesis' was written and the amount of fossil human remains was small but Raymond Dart had made a collection of animal fossils from limestone caves which he believed showed fractures caused by our direct ancestor, Australopithecus africanus, wielding bone clubs.

That humans of that age used tools in hunting wasn't controversial but Dart and his colleagues believed that they had found remains which suggested humans, too, had been killed by being struck with a bone club. Ardrey wrote, "it was the ape-man's instinct for violence, and his successful development of lethal weapons, that gave him his dominance in the animal world from the very beginning. Those instincts are with us today." To put it another way, man is born a killer and not too fussy about whom he kills.

In the age of the cold war and major conflicts across the globe, this was a sobering thought.