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Olduvai & All That

JAMES USSHER, BORN IN 1581, attended Trinity College, Dublin, where he was ordained at the age of twenty. Four years later he became chancellor of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. Ten years after that he drafted the articles of doctrine and discipline for the Irish Protestant Church. At forty he was appointed bishop of Meath. Soon he became archbishop of Armagh. He visited England frequently and after his death he was buried, by Cromwell’s order, in Westminster Abbey. Widely honored and respected, not merely because of his ecclesiastic eminence but for prodigious scholarship, he was the first to distinguish between the genuine and spurious epistles of Saint Ignatius of Antioch. He wrote as fluently in Latin as in English, and among his most celebrated works is Annales Veteris et Novi Tentamenti, a tremendous article of faith which proves that God created the Universe in 4004 B.C.

Considering Archbishop Ussher’s erudition and prestige, nobody should have challenged his date for the Creation, but the devil’s disciples seldom rest. So we come upon Isaac de La Peyrère who, after examining some oddly chipped stones gathered from the French countryside, wrote a little book in which he asserted that these stones had been chipped by human beings who lived before the time of Adam. The year A.D. 1655 was not a good year to make such observations: M. de La Peyrère’s blasphemous monograph was publicly incinerated.

You might think this warning would be sufficient, enabling Christians to sleep comfortably through another millennium; but the Western world had begun to awaken and strict guardians of the status quo could not prevent impertinent questions from blossoming like daffodils in spring.

The Ark, for instance. How big was it? How many animals shuffled up the gangplank?

This problem, although not new, had been complicated by the voyages of Columbus and other explorers who reported seeing strange birds and beasts. In 1559 a monk named Johann Buteo had tried to clear up the matter with a learned disquisition titled Noah’s Ark, its Form and its Capacity. Alas, Brother Buteo’s statement did not assuage certain doubts.

Theologians then explained that these previously unknown creatures came into existence after the Flood just as domestic animals crossbreed and evolve, just as the mating of a cat with a wolf produces a lynx, or a camel with a leopard produces a giraffe.

Sir Walter Raleigh had something to say, as usual. New species might emerge not only through crossbreeding but also because of different surroundings. The European wildcat, when its home is India, grows up to become the panther. The European blackbird changes color and size in Virginia.

Nevertheless, despite every explanation, new and more odious questions bloomed, nourished by such infernal advocates as a French diplomat named Benoît de Maillet who wrote that germs of the first living organisms could have arrived from outer space—an idea considered preposterous until quite recently. These germs inevitably dropped into the ocean because a long time ago there was no land, and here they commenced to evolve. Hence it must follow that Man’s ancestors were aquatic: “maritime people who spend part of their life under water and who often have fins instead of feet, scales instead of bare skin.” About ninety such creatures had been sighted, we are told, and several females were delivered to the king of Portugal who, wanting to preserve these curious beings, graciously allowed them to spend three hours a day in the sea—secured by a long line. And it is said that they submerged at once and never came up for air. The king kept these maritime women for several years, hoping to communicate with them, “but they never learnt to speak at all.”

Maillet also reflected upon the metamorphosis of fish into birds:

There can be no doubt that fish, in the course of hunting or being hunted, were thrown up on the shore. There they could find food, but were unable to return to the water. Subsequently their fins were enlarged by the action of the water, the radial structures supporting the fins turned to quills, the dried scales became feathers, the skin assumed a coating of down, the belly-fins changed into feet, the entire body was reshaped, the neck and beak became prolonged, and at last the fish was transformed into a bird. Yet the new configuration corresponded in a general way to the old. The latter will always remain readily recognizable.

However bold he may have been imaginatively, Benoît de Maillet in person was altogether discreet. Rather than identify himself as the author of these intellectual flights, he contrived the anagram Telliamed, and further protected himself by attributing his theory to an Indian philosopher who had revealed it to a French missionary. “I confess to you,” says the missionary to the philosopher, prudently separating himself from the Indian’s outrageous ideas, “that notwithstanding the small Foundation I find in your system, I am charmed to hear you speak. . . .”

Maillet also stipulated that the manuscript should not be published until eleven years after his death, as though there were a statute of limitations on the digging up of heretics in order to burn or otherwise abuse their corpses.

Despite these precautions, copies of Telliamed ou Entretien d’un Philosophe Indien avec un Missionnaire Français were circulating through Paris salons during his lifetime; and the great naturalist Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, seems to have been much impressed by the startling essay.

Buffon, we should note, admitted to being one of history’s five supreme figures—the others being Newton, Bacon, Leibniz, and Montesquieu. The earth, said he, had been thrown from the sun and congealed until it attained a temperature suitable for life. That being so, the earth’s exact age could be deduced without resorting to biblical texts. One needed only to heat some iron spheres, observe how long they required to cool, and correlate this information, taking into account the earth’s dimensions. Buffon then announced that he had found our planet to be 74,832 years old. It had sustained life for the past 40,062 years, but because the temperature would continue falling it would become uninhabitable after another 93,291 years, a globe forever sheathed in ice.

Along with these facts, which have not weathered very well, he came close to anticipating Darwin: “It may be assumed that all animals arise from a single form of life which in the course of time produced the rest by processes of perfection and degeneration.” And he went on to say that the organic structure of each natural thing illustrates the following truth: life on earth developed gradually.

However, discretion may at times be advisable, and Buffon could appreciate the monumental power of the Church. No, he wrote somewhat hastily at one point, “no, it is certain—certain by revelation—that all animals have shared equally the grace of creation, each has emerged from the hands of the Creator as it appears to us today.”

One of Buffon’s pupils, Jean-Baptiste Pierre de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck, encouraged the attack on biblical dogma. He wrote that species cannot be absolutely distinguished from each other; species pass into one another, proceeding from simple infusoria to the magnificent complexity of Man.

Immanuel Kant had similar thoughts: “It is possible for a chimpanzee or an orangutan, by perfecting its organs, to change at some future date into a human being. Radical alterations in natural conditions may force the ape to walk upright, accustom its hands to the use of tools, and learn to talk.”

Schopenhauer wrote in 1851: “We must imagine the first human beings as having been born in Asia of orangutans and in Africa of chimpanzees. . . .”

James Hutton, a Scottish geologist and farmer, a gentleman of numerous parts—philosopher, chemist, jurist, Quaker, inventor, physicist—Hutton found the world not in a grain of sand but in a brook gently transporting sediment to the sea. Only one portrait of this extraordinary man survives, revealing a long, sad face. The face of somebody who has looked so far, comments Loren Eiseley, that mortals do not interest him. For the lesson of the industrious brook was this: mountains, plains, rivers, and oceans must be the result of slow topographical changes. The earth’s surface must have been lifted and then eroded, which would take a while. Indeed, Hutton wrote, “we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.” Apparently he did not think this contradicted the Bible because he is said to have been gravely shocked when charged by the Royal Irish Academy with atheism; so shocked that he became physically ill and never quite recovered.

Then along came Sir Charles Lyell who demonstrated in three stout volumes, Principles of Geology, how the earth had been modified in the past and how this process continues. If, let us say, you watch some pebbles tumble from a crag, you are watching a mountain disintegrate. Furthermore, he said, any catastrophic flooding in the past had resulted not from a stupendous rain but from glaciers melting.

This latter argument especially troubled the faithful because the Bible was explicit: forty days, forty nights. Rain rain rain rain. Fifteen cubits of water. We had God’s Word. Besides, look at the evidence.

In 1726, for example, the city doctor of Zurich, Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, had unearthed a fossilized skeleton near the village of Oeningen. This ancient sinner, according to Scheuchzer’s calculations, went down for the last time in 2306 B.C.

“You will like to know, my learned friend,” wrote Scheuchzer to the prominent British physician and naturalist Sir Hans Sloane, “that we have obtained some relics of the race of man drowned in the Flood. . . . What we have here is no vision of the mere imagination, but the well-preserved bones, and much in number, of a human skull, quite clearly distinguishable. . . .”

Dr. Scheuchzer then wrote an uncompromising pamphlet titled A Most Rare Memorial of That Accursed Generation of Men of the First World, the Skeleton of a Man Drowned in the Flood, which informs us that together with the infallible testimony of the Divine Word we have other proofs of a Deluge: various plants, fishes, insects, snails, quadrupeds, et cetera. Of human beings drowned on that occasion, however, few traces survive because their corpses floated on the surface of the waters and soon decayed. How fortunate that Oeningen Man should be preserved.

Dr. Scheuchzer provided an illustration of his remarkable find: “a carefully executed woodcut now offered for the consideration of the learned and inquiring world. . . . It does not merely present certain features in which a vivid imagination could detect something approximating to the human shape. On the contrary, it corresponds completely with all the parts and proportions of a human skeleton. Even the bones embedded in the stone, and some of the softer components too, are identifiable as genuine. . . .”

And there was the testimony of a German pastor, Johann Friederich Esper, who had uncovered the shoulder blade and jaw of another Flood victim in a cave near Bamberg.

During the nineteenth century additional proof turned up. William Buckland, Dean of Westminster and author of Reliquiae Diluvianae, reported a unique burial in South Wales—a female skeleton which became known as the Red Lady because her bones were stained with red ocher. Such mortal deposits, Buckland wrote, “by affording the strongest evidence of a universal deluge, leads us to hope that it will no longer be asserted as it has been by high authorities, that geology supplies no proofs of an event in the reality of which the truth of the Mosaic records is so materially involved.”

Just the same, renegade Christians continued boring holes in the Ark:

Scheuchzer’s rare memorial, upon close examination, proved to be all that was left of a giant salamander.

Esper’s fossils could not be reexamined because they had somehow disappeared, but on the basis of contemporary drawings it would seem that what he picked up were the bones of a cave bear.

Buckland’s so-called Red Lady was indeed human—though male instead of female—but nothing about the discolored scraps indicated that this person had drowned. Apart from sex, in fact, all that could be scientifically determined was that his bones, which had been discovered in association with Paleolithic tools, were older than the date of Scheuchzer’s flood, perhaps older than the date established by Archbishop Ussher for the creation of the universe. Just how old Dean Buckland’s masculine lady might be—ah, that would be hard to say. One can scarcely estimate how long men and women have been going about their affairs. To resolve such questions quite a lot more information would be necessary.

Then, in 1857, while the Neander valley near Düsseldorf was being quarried for limestone, workmen blasted open a cave and the shattering reverberations have not yet died away. Within this cave lay a wondrously complete skeleton. Laborers shoveled it aside because they were after something more valuable; but the owner of the quarry, Herr Beckershoff, either noticed these bones or was told about them and decided to save them. By this time, however, all that could be collected were some bits of arm and leg, part of the pelvis, a few ribs, and the skullcap. Herr Beckershoff thought these might be fragments of a bear, and after keeping them awhile he gave them to the president of the Elberfield Natural Science Society, J. C. Fuhlrott.

Fuhlrott realized that the bones were human. The slanted brow of the skullcap and the thick, bent limbs convinced him that this individual must have lived a long time ago. Possibly he had been washed into the cave while Noah was riding out the storm. In any event somebody important ought to be notified, so Fuhlrott called on Professor Schaaffhausen who taught anatomy at the University of Bonn.

Schaaffhausen carefully appraised and measured Fuhlrott’s treasure: “The cranium is of unusual size, and of a long, elliptical form. A most remarkable peculiarity is at once obvious in the extraordinary development of the frontal sinuses. . . . The cavity holds 16,876 grains of water, whence its cubical contents may be estimated at 57.64 inches, or 1033.24 cubic centimeters.” Or, in dried millet seed, “the contents equalled 31 ounces, Prussian Apothecaries’ weight.” This skull and the attendant bones, Professor Schaaffhausen deduced, probably belonged to one of the “barbarous, aboriginal people” who inhabited northern Europe before the Germans arrived.

Not so, replied other experts. The bones of a forest-dwelling hydrocephalic, said one. A cannibal somehow transported to Europe, said another.

Probably a Dutch sailor, said Professor Andreas Wagner of Göttingen.

An old Celt who perished during a tribal migration, said Dr. Pruner-Bey of Paris.

A Mongolian Cossack killed in 1814 while the Russians were chasing Napoleon across the Rhine, said a colleague of Schaaffhausen’s, Professor Robert Mayer. Unmistakably a Cossack because, if you will be good enough to observe, the femur is bent inward, which is characteristic of a man accustomed to riding horses. No doubt this soldier had been wounded and crawled into the cave to die.

T. H. Huxley, soon to be Darwin’s champion, also thought the skeleton was recent. An odd specimen, granted, but still a member of Homo sapiens.

Darwin himself would not comment; he seldom did unless he could be absolutely sure.

The great panjandrum of the era was Rudolf Virchow, director of the Berlin Pathological Institute. In his opinion the bones Fuhlrott displayed were not prehistoric but merely diseased. The bent legs were a consequence of rickets. The bony ridge above the eyes, together with other apparent malformations, were the result of arthritis. What could be more obvious? Also, this individual had suffered a number of blows on the head. Yet in spite of injury and disease he had lived to a ripe old age, which would be conceivable only in a settled community; and as there were no settled communities thousands of years ago it must be self-evident that the Neander valley bones were recent.

Nobody cared to debate Virchow. There is a portrait of him seated tensely in an armchair. A long sharp nose supports thin spectacles; he looks acutely intelligent, crisp, impatient, and merciless.

Years later these bones would be unpacked and scrutinized again, compared with similar finds, and subjected to a variety of microscopic, electronic, and chemical tests, with the result that we now know quite a lot about Fuhlrott’s caveman. It has even been determined that he was unable to raise his left hand to his mouth because of an elbow injury.

And we have learned enough from other Neanderthal remnants to make a few tentative generalizations. For instance, it could be deduced from an Iraqi skeleton that the owner was arthritic, blind in one eye, and had a birth defect limiting the use of his right side. Now what this means is that he would have been unable to hunt, which in turn means that somebody had to provide his food. Care of the infirm and elderly is not what comes to mind when the word Neanderthal is mentioned.

Something else we don’t think of in relation to these people is a concept of life after death; yet the Neanderthals buried their dead, which implies concern. Furthermore, the characteristics of a burial may tell us what the survivors were thinking. At least that is the assumption we make. Fires had been kindled on the graves of two Belgian Neanderthals, presumably to lessen the chill of death. And in France, at La Chapelle-aux-Saints, a hunter was interred with a bison leg—food for his long journey.

Another French site held bits and pieces of a man, a woman, two children about five years old, and two babies. Flint chips and bone splinters were discovered in the man’s grave and a flat stone lay on his head, either to protect him or to prevent him from coming back. The woman was buried in a tight fetal position, as though she had been bound with cords. Perhaps, like the stone slab, this was meant to confine her. Or maybe it saved work by reducing the size of the grave.

On a gentle slope near this family plot another child had been buried—its head separated from its body. The head lay almost a yard higher on the slope. Why this child did not lie with the others, and why the head was detached, is not known.

Quite a few Neanderthal graves were found at the Shanidar cave in northern Iraq. Several of these people appeared to have been killed by rocks falling from the roof, possibly during an earthquake. In one trench lay a hunter with a fractured skull, and when the surrounding soil was analyzed it disclosed pollen from a number of brightly colored wildflowers related to the hollyhock, bachelor’s button, grape hyacinth, and groundsel. The existence of so much pollen could not be attributed to wind or to the feces of animals and birds. The only other explanation is that flowers were scattered on his grave by somebody who loved him.

A less agreeable picture came into focus at Monte Circeo, fifty miles south of Rome. Laborers at a tourist resort were widening a terrace when they exposed the entrance to a cave that had been sealed long ago by a landslide. The owner of the resort, accompanied by some friends, crept on hands and knees through a tunnel leading deep into the hillside and finally they entered a chamber that had not been visited for perhaps 60,000 years. By lantern light they saw a human skull, face to the earth, within a circle of stones. Anthropologists suspect the skull may have been mounted on a stick and dropped in that position when the wood decayed; but the unforgettable part of this ceremony must have occurred before the skull was mounted, because the aperture at the base had been enlarged, almost certainly in order to extract and eat the brain.

Neanderthal rituals in Switzerland clearly focused on the bear. A number of boxlike stone structures found in Alpine eaves contain bear skulls. One of these crude chests held seven skulls arranged so that the muzzles pointed to the chamber entrance, while farther back in the cave six more skulls had been set in niches along the wall—one with a bone thrust through the arch of the cheek.

What this bear business means, nobody knows. Maybe the earliest human pageantry involved a bear. Even today a few Stone Age tribes conduct ceremonies whose principal figure is a bear, and some ethnologists regard this as the last glint of light from Neanderthal times.

Says Herbert Wendt: “It was in the time of cave bears that the first cultural and religious ideas arose, that the first magicians appeared, that Man achieved dominion over Nature and began to believe in the support of supernatural powers.”

What did they look like?—these people we faintly abhor and seldom think about, yet who seem always to be not far away.

Museum dioramas are familiar: shambling, hairy, ape-faced monstrosities wearing animal pelts, the males holding spears or clubs, the females usually crouched beside a fire. This is the image, but it may not be accurate. Our impression is based on a skeleton reconstructed and studied in 1908. The relatively uncorrugated inner surface of the skull suggested that the brain had been simple, with convolutions resembling those of apes. The 1908 examiners also deduced a “simian arrangement” of spinal vertebrae and concluded that Neanderthal man slumped along with knees bent, on feet very much like the feet of a gorilla.

In 1957 this skeleton, which was that of a male, was reexamined. The gentleman was not exactly typical. He might have been fifty years old, which in those days was very old indeed. He suffered from arthritis of the jaws and spine, and perhaps of the lower limbs. The 1957 inspectors issued this statement: “There is no valid reason for the assumption that the posture of Neanderthal man . . . differed significantly from that of present-day man.”

And in museum displays their faces are never painted because it was assumed that Neanderthals had not crossed that threshold of humanity where the idea of decorating something—a wall, or themselves—would occur to them. Well, maybe. But powdered black manganese, yellow ocher, and various red pigments are found at their campsites, frequently in stick-shaped pieces that appear to have been rubbed on a soft surface.

As for other artistic efforts, probably there were none. No sculpture has been found, nothing but tantalizing hints. A bone with a hole drilled in it. An ox rib with a collection of unnatural streaks. A bit of ivory polished and artificially stained.

Yet these same people, struggling toward a new plateau, seemed unable or unwilling to distinguish between animal meat and the carcasses of their neighbors. Twenty mutilated skeletons were discovered in a Yugoslav cave, skulls bashed, arm and leg bones split lengthwise to get at the marrow. And in France another grisly accumulation turned up—some of the bones charred, implying a barbecue.

Neanderthal front teeth, when examined under a microscope, often show a number of parallel scratches, the result of an eating habit. Even today certain primitive people stuff big chunks of meat into their months and use a knife to hack off what they are not able to chew, which leaves scratches on their teeth. These scratches almost always run diagonally from upper left to lower right, proving that the gourmets in question are right-handed—as you will see if you act out the scene. Now this information is not as useless as you might think, because man is the only animal that prefers one hand to another, and neurologists suspect there may be some kind of relationship between this preference and the development of speech. If that is correct, those minuscule marks on Neanderthal teeth could help to solve one of the most fascinating questions about our predecessors—whether or not they could speak.

The answer would seem to be: Yes.

Yes, but only a little. So say linguist Philip Lieberman and anatomist Edmund Crelin who reconstructed the vocal tracts of some fossilized men. They concluded that European Neanderthals did not have much of a pharynx, and without a decent pharynx it is impossible to articulate g or k or several vowel sounds. Consequently a Neanderthal’s power of speech would be limited. Furthermore, say Lieberman and Crelin, he could not have pronounced his few sounds in quick succession. He spoke slowly, about one-tenth as fast as we do, perhaps one-twentieth as fast as a Spaniard.

It is alleged that Pharaoh Psamtik in the seventh century B.C. had two infants reared beyond the sound of human voices on the theory that when they began to talk they would necessarily resort to man’s earliest language. One child finally said “bekos”—which is the Phrygian word for bread. But that k would seem to preclude Phrygian as the Neanderthal language.

James IV of Scotland conducted an almost identical experiment. He gave two babies to a mute woman who lived alone on Inchkeith Island, and we are told that the children grew up speaking perfect Hebrew. However, with a stunted pharynx it would be exceptionally difficult to speak Hebrew. At the moment, therefore, all we can do is speculate.

But the absorbing question about Neanderthals is not what they spoke; it is what became of them.

Did they vanish because of some inability to meet a changing climate?

Could they have been slaughtered, liquidated, terminated with extreme prejudice, by the Cro-Magnon people?

Or could these two supposedly distinct races be, in fact, the same?

Present wisdom holds that the last unadulterated Neanderthal died 40,000 years ago. However, one April evening in 1907 some Russian explorers led by Porshnyev Baradiin were setting up camp in an Asian desert when they noticed a shaggy human figure silhouetted against the late sun on a ridge just ahead. Whatever the thing was, it appeared to be watching them. After a while the creature turned and lumbered away, so they ran after it but were quickly outdistanced. This was the first meeting between Westerners and Yeti, or Sasquatch as the beast is called in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.

Soviets do not treat these encounters with as much levity as do Americans; there are Soviet anthropologists who believe that a few Neanderthals have survived in the deserts and mountains. European and American scientists doubt this. More significant than such reports, they say, are the features of people around us. In other words, although the race is extinct, Neanderthal characteristics have endured.

So they are among us at least in a vestigial sense, and just possibly as an isolated race that exists like the giant condor in remote pockets of the earth. Frequent reports of midnight brushes with humanoid monsters indicate a certain tremulous anticipation—which is to say, an abiding belief—but thus far no hairy pelts have been tacked to the wall.

In any event, while Rudolf Virchow and his nineteenth-century colleagues were disparaging Fuhlrott’s caveman, a most outrageous book was published. Its author—a tall, bald, white-bearded gentleman—subsequently became known as the Shy Giant. He read so slowly, wrote so slowly, even thought so slowly, remarks biographer William Irvine, “that he always felt desperately behindhand, like a tortoise concentrating every energy on the next step, as he creeps in frantic haste toward impossible horizons. . . .”

This sounds exactly like a living Neanderthal, but of course it was Charles Darwin. And twenty-eight years earlier he almost did not get to sail on the Beagle because Captain Fitzroy, who believed one could pretty well judge a man by his features, mistrusted the shape of Darwin’s nose. He thought the young man looked indecisive. We can only guess what might have happened, or failed to happen, had Fitzroy himself been more decisive and stamped his foot and lifted the gangplank so Darwin could not slip aboard.

Then the Scopes trial, that little masterpiece of idiocy, might never have been staged.

Nor should we have had that immortal debate between Thomas Huxley, on behalf of Darwin, and Bishop Wilberforce, known unkindly as Soapy Sam, on behalf of God:

“It would be interesting to know,” said the bishop, “whether the ape in question was on your grandfather’s or your grandmother’s side.”

But it is not a sound idea to prick a man as intelligent as Huxley, who whispered, “The Lord hath delivered him into my hands.” And getting to his feet he answered aloud: “If you ask me whether I would rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means of influence and yet who employs those faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion, then I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.”

Whereupon, we are told, a lady in the audience fainted. And good Captain Fitzroy, trembling with honorable Christian rage, picked up a Bible and was just prevented from throwing it at Huxley. Fitzroy later was promoted to vice-admiral, which seems to be the natural course of events.

One is tempted to caricature Fitzroy. Still, whatever his faults, the man was not a simpleton. He came from a distinguished family, which perhaps proves nothing, but he had traveled around the world on the survey ship Beagle once before, and had been appointed a captain at the age of twenty-three. His surveys were accurate and highly valued, and he was a Fellow of the Royal Society. It is said, too, that after getting to know Darwin he changed his opinion. All the same, no matter how hard you try to look without prejudice upon Captain Fitzroy, it seems best to admit that this is an individual you cannot love.

However, the important thing is the debate, not the audience, and those traditional opponents Science and Religion once again entered the arena when Thomas Huxley challenged Soapy Sam.

It is the scientist, of course, armed with some impertinent fact, who attacks first—though the maneuver may be oblique or heavily veiled. Then the ecclesiastic must counterattack, for the very good reason that he perceives a threat to his office and to his life’s work. The status quo must be protected, the heretical march of knowledge obstructed, whether it be the development of anesthetics, the experiments of Galileo, or the deductions of infamous bulb-nosed naturalists.

Both attitudes are easy to understand. Science feels obligated to inquire, whereas the Church comes armed with infallible dogma.

Thus we have Dr. John Lightfoot, Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge and Master of Saint Catherine’s, nailing down the particulars in Archbishop Ussher’s article of faith: “Heaven and earth, center and circumference were created all together and in the same instant, clouds full of water. This took place, and Man was created by the Trinity on the 23rd October, 4004 B.C. at 9 o’clock in the morning.”

Gilgamesh the Sumerian may have been eating ham and eggs at that hour, but never mind; what impresses us is Dr. Lightfoot’s stately assurance.

By contrast, old Darwin frets about each mistake he makes, telling us he is ready to weep with vexation, referring to himself as “the most miserable, bemuddled, stupid dog in all England.” He goes then, we are informed, and walks through the winter morning—this aloof old genius—walking by himself and meditating, so early that he startles foxes trotting to their lairs at dawn.

Accompanying these famous champions we now and again meet an individual who, like some overexcited spectator at a wrestling match, resolves to assert himself by clambering into the ring. Consider a certain Denis or Didier Henrion, a seventeenth-century French engineer, who measured various bones that probably came from a brontosaurus and then announced without qualification that our progenitor Adam stood 123 feet, 9 inches tall. Eve, he said, had been five feet shorter. M. Henrion did not calculate their weight, which is too bad, nor Eve’s other measurements, which must have been formidable; but what we would like to know most of all is why he positioned himself so awkwardly in the path of common sense.

Then we have the case of a respected historian named von Eckhart.

Early in the eighteenth century Professor Johannes Bartolomaus Beringer who taught natural history at the University of Würzburg, and who collected fossils, dug up hundreds of stones containing the imprint of fruits, flowers, spiders, turtles, snakes, frogs, and so forth. He studied them carefully because he had never seen anything like them and he therefore assumed that his report would have unusual scientific value. He published his conclusions in a handsome book titled Lithographiae Wirceburgensis, illustrated with twenty-two plates of the finest specimens. Unfortunately, von Eckart had persuaded some boys to carve and bury these fakes where Professor Beringer would be sure to find them.

It was a practical joke born of petulant dislike for Beringer, yet something beyond malice seems to have been involved: there is an undertone of hostility toward science.

This brings up the American Goliath, born of animosity toward hard-shell Protestants. An Iowa cigar manufacturer named Hull and a preacher named Turk argued about giants in the earth. Reverend Turk of course defended the Bible. Hull, choking with disgust, resolved to mock him as viciously as Eckhart had mocked Beringer.

In the summer of 1868 Hull bought a five-ton block of gypsum at a quarry near Fort Dodge and sent it by rail to Chicago where a stonemason was hired to sculpt a proper giant. The monster was then aged with acid and shipped to the New York village of Cardiff where Hull had a relative—William Newell—who buried it on his farm.

A year later Newell employed some laborers on the pretext of digging a well. Very soon their picks struck a stony ten-foot corpse, and considering that they knew nothing of the plot their fright does not seem unreasonable.

Thousands of sightseers arrived, so many that the town of Syracuse put a horse-drawn omnibus in service to Newell’s farm. Among these visitors was Ralph Waldo Emerson who judged the slumbering colossus to be “undoubtedly ancient.” The curator of the New York State Museum called it “the most remarkable object yet brought to light in this country”—a comment that might be variously interpreted. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes also paid a visit. Dr. Holmes drilled a hole behind one ear in order to inspect the substance, which suggests that at the very least he was uncertain. Most people thought it was a fossilized antediluvian man.

Whether or not Reverend Turk made a pilgrimage to Newell’s farm, we don’t know; but it would be safe to assume that when he heard about this giant in the earth he fairly quivered with satisfaction. How vindicated he must have felt. How joyous. How proud. Maybe a little complacent. Even a bit pontifical. If only we knew what he said to the diabolic cigar manufacturer.

And when Hull at last decided to crucify the gullible pastor, how did Reverend Turk respond? Did he pray? Did he forgive? Did he foam at the mouth? Furthermore, one can’t help wondering if the experience taught him anything. Probably not. Fundamentalists are apt to be so fundamental.

More sophisticated, more enigmatic, and infinitely more knowledgeable than our cranky American atheist was the British sponsor of Piltdown Man—that veritable missing link with a human cranium and the jaw of an ape.

“Several years ago I was walking along a farm-road close to Piltdown Common, Fletching, when I noticed that the road had been mended with some peculiar brown flints not usual in the district. On enquiry I was astonished to learn that they were dug from a gravel-bed on the farm, and shortly afterwards I visited the place, where two labourers were at work. . . .”

So begins the account of Mr. Charles Dawson, a rotund Uckfield lawyer and amateur antiquarian who discovered the famous skull. He told his story in 1912 at a meeting of the London Geological Society, to which he had been invited by Dr. Arthur Smith-Woodward of the British Museum, and his remarks later were printed in the society’s journal. Several renowned scientists were present when Dawson spoke, and for many years a painting titled Discussing the Piltdown Man hung on the staircase of the society’s headquarters.

Dawson said that after coming upon fragments of a skullcap he got in touch with Smith-Woodward, who examined the bones and considered them so important that he joined the search. Together they turned up quite a lot. According to Dawson: “Besides the human remains, we found two small broken pieces of a molar tooth of a rather early Pliocene type of elephant, also a much-rolled cusp of a molar of Mastodon, portions of two teeth of Hippopotamus, and two molar teeth of a Pleistocene beaver.”

From an adjacent field they recovered bits of deer antler and the tooth of a Pleistocene horse. All the specimens, including those of Piltdown Man, were highly mineralized with iron oxide.

The Piltdown cranium did not quite fit the Piltdown jaw, which made a few scientists uneasy. Yet they had been excavated at the same level, and despite the apelike lower jaw the molars were flat, indicating that the jaw worked with an acceptably human rotary motion. Then too, it would be exceedingly strange if, side by side, a prehistoric man had left only his skullcap while a prehistoric ape left only its jaw. Therefore they must belong to the same beast.

So excited was Dr. Smith-Woodward that he built a little house near the gravel bed, and when visitors arrived he could talk about nothing else.

A few more specimens were picked up: small bones from the nasal bridge and some delicate turbinal bones which support the membrane inside the nasal cavity. These turbinal bones were quite fragile; they fell apart when lifted out, but the shards were collected and glued together. And one hot August day Father Teilhard de Chardin, who had become interested in the project, was seated on a dump heap beside the pit idly running his fingers through the gravel when he noticed a canine tooth.

This tooth caused further debate at the Geological Society. It was very large, perhaps too large, and it appeared to be the tooth of a relatively old man whereas the jaw was that of a young man. Did this tooth come from another skull?

Piltdown Man eventually was accepted by English scientists, not without discomfort, as certain applicants for a social club may be accepted; but among friends and relatives, so to speak, he was admitted to the evolutionary tree. Elsewhere his credentials were not approved. Giuffrida-Ruggeri in Italy, Mollison in Germany, and Boule in France all thought the jaw belonged to an ape. American experts, too, looked skeptically at the reconstruction.

Against their doubts stood the simple argument of the discovery: fossil remains taken from Pleistocene gravel, much of it excavated under the meticulous supervision of Dr. Smith-Woodward of the British Museum.

Year after year the dispute simmered.

Then in 1953 the skull got a new custodian, Dr. Kenneth Oakley, who subjected it to a fluorine test. Buried bones gradually absorb fluorine from water in the earth; the longer the burial, the more fluorine.

Results of Oakley’s tests were astonishing and puzzling. On the basis of fluorine content the jaw and skullcap did indeed belong together, yet they held less fluorine than animal bones taken from the same stratum. The contradiction so exasperated Dr. Oakley that he abruptly told a colleague: “This thing is bogus!” But his intuitive thrust was ignored, perhaps because the skull had been in the museum such a long time—almost forty years. One hesitates to denounce an old acquaintance.

A few months later an Oxford anthropologist named J. S. Weiner was driving home at night when he clearly understood that Piltdown Man was a fake. And it is curious how often an insight such as Weiner’s is accompanied by actual physical movement. The astronomer Kepler, while drawing a figure on the blackboard for his students, was seized by an idea which led to our modern concept of the universe. The mathematician Poincaré reported that just as he was getting aboard an omnibus, just as his foot touched the step, a brilliant realization unfolded: “that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry.” Beethoven, writing to his friend Tobias von Haslinger: “On my way to Vienna yesterday, sleep overtook me in my carriage. . . . Now during my sleep-journey, the following canon came into my head. . . .” A. E. Houseman: “Two of the stanzas . . . came into my head, just as they are printed, while I was crossing Hampstead Heath. . . .” And we have the testimony of Bertrand Russell who says that while walking toward Cambridge, capriciously tossing a tin of pipe tobacco and catching it—at the exact instant a ray of sunlight reflected from the metal surface of the tin he understood the basis of a certain philosophical argument. Goethe, too, experienced a swift flowering of knowledge while out for a walk, just as he noticed the whitened skull of a sheep on a hillside.

So it happened with the anthropologist, driving alone at night from London.

Weiner mentioned his startling thought to Sir Wilfred Le Gros Clark at Oxford. Then he took a chimpanzee jaw and spent a while filing down the molars. He was surprised by how quickly the teeth could be redesigned to look like human teeth. He dipped the chimp’s jaw in permanganate until it acquired a suitable brownish hue and when it was dry he laid his new fossil on the desk of Le Gros Clark. He is said to have remarked with a look of innocence: “I got this out of the collections. What do you suppose it is?” And Sir Wilfrid, who knew immediately, exclaimed: “You can’t mean it!”

They decided to have a conference with Oakley.

Soon after that conference Piltdown Man started falling apart. Those distinctively human molars had been artificially flattened; close inspection revealed that their surfaces were not quite on the same plane, as though the counterfeiter had altered his grip when he moved from one tooth to the next. The delicate turbinal bones were not what previous investigators had presumed them to be; they were merely a few bone splinters of indeterminate origin. The canine tooth found by Teilhard de Chardin was X-rayed and discovered to be a young tooth that had been ground down until the pulp chamber was almost exposed, which would not happen to a living tooth.

New chemical tests showed a nitrogen concentration of 3.9 percent in the jaw, 1.4 percent in the skullcap. There was also, on this occasion, a discrepancy in the fluorine content.

Details were noticed that should have been noticed earlier. Stone “tools” from the pit had been superficially stained with iron salts—except for one that had been colored with bichromate of potash. An elephant-bone pick, when examined under a glass, revealed uncharacteristic marks. This implement, said Oakley, was probably obtained from a Middle Pleistocene brick-earth or sandy formation: “The ends were whittled with a steel knife. . . .”

Various bones taken from the pit were given a newly developed test for uranium salts. If the bones had come naturally to their ultimate resting place the Geiger counter should have clicked along at more or less the same speed, but Oakley noted a wide spectrum, including one “fossil” so radioactive that when left on a photographic plate it took its own picture.

Thus, after forty years, the walls came tumbling down. The pit had been salted from top to bottom. The skullcap was old, perhaps even Neolithic; the jaw was recent and apparently belonged to a female orangutan. Of eighteen specimens collected by Dawson and Smith-Woodward ten unquestionably were fraudulent. As to the other eight, they are not held in high esteem.

Punch ran a cartoon showing Piltdown Man in a dentist’s chair with the dentist saying, “This may hurt, but I’m afraid I’ll have to remove the whole jaw.”

And a motion was put before the House of Commons: “That the House has no confidence in the Trustees of the British Museum. . . .”

Among those trustees were some rather celebrated personages including Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and a member of the royal family.

Many scientists regarded the great Piltdown farce as not only an embarrassment but a waste of time. Others disagreed. It did stimulate public interest in anthropology; it did remind professionals of the need for accurate data and improved analytical procedures.

One is entitled to ask, of course, how so many eminent scientists could have been fooled for such a long while. There’s no satisfactory answer. Dr. Louis Leakey suggested that the Piltdown bones were accepted as genuine because they fitted the pattern of what a very early human skull ought to look like. And this preconceived image must have been known to whoever contrived the hoax. Leakey himself had been dissatisfied with the skull, yet the idea of a forgery never occurred to him.

Asking himself how he could have been duped, he recalled a day in 1933 when he went to the British Museum. After explaining to the curator that he was writing a textbook on early man, he was escorted to the basement where the Piltdown fossils were kept in a safe. They were removed from the safe and placed on a table, together with reproductions. “I was not allowed to handle the originals in any way,” said Leakey, “but merely to look at them and satisfy myself that the casts were really good replicas.” The originals were then locked up, leaving him with only the casts to study. “It is my belief now that it was under these conditions that all visiting scientists were permitted to examine the Piltdown specimens. . . .”

Two other important questions cannot be answered. First, who was responsible? Second, what was the motive?

Charles Dawson, who died in 1916, is thought to have been the villain. Whoever concocted the fake had known quite a lot about anatomy, geology, and paleontology. Dawson qualified. There were no other suspects. “It is certainly not nice to accuse a dead man who cannot defend himself,” wrote the Dutch geologist von Koenigswald, “but everything points quite clearly to his responsibility for the forgery.”

Besides, Dawson once claimed to have observed a sea serpent in the Channel—although one must admit this is not impossible. Another time he was sure he had found a petrified toad. And he seems to have been fascinated by the concept of missing links. He picked up a tooth that he thought must be intermediate between reptile and mammal. He attempted to cross a carp with a goldfish in order to create a golden carp. He said he had unearthed a strange boat—half coracle, half canoe. Furthermore, he is known to have washed old bones with potassium bichromate.

Very well, suppose we ascribe the forgery to Dawson. Next, why did he do it? Why would Dawson, or anybody, go to all that trouble? For the pleasure of humiliating the authorities? To stir up a drowsy neighborhood? To make money? To obstruct and detour the search for knowledge?

And did he plan to reveal the hoax?

Fictional crimes are more gratifying: the author keeps you writhing in suspense, which is his job, but at last he tells you.

So much for cranks, fakes, jongleurs, and fanatics. Dawson, Hull, von Eckhart, M. Denis Henrion—no matter how diverting these testy eccentrics might be, they contributed nothing. They acted out their compulsions, that was all.

At the same time, offstage, a number of earnest men had been at work.

Eugène Dubois, following Darwin’s conjecture that originally we lived in a “warm, forest-clad land,” left Holland for the Dutch East Indies where he served with the colonial military forces as health officer, second class. In 1891 on the island of Java he unearthed some extremely heavy, chocolate-brown bones, harder than marble—remnants of a 700,000-year-old creature whose low skull resembled that of an ape, yet whose legs were adapted to walking erect. That the bones were ancient could not be disputed, but Dubois’ claim that they represented a transitional form of life was not greeted with much enthusiasm. Most professionals who examined these bones in Europe thought he had brought back the top of an ape and the bottom of a man.

A few years later a fossil-collecting German naturalist who was traveling through China noticed a human tooth in a druggist’s shop, where it was regarded as a dragon’s tooth and would soon have been ground up for medicine. This tooth, along with other fossilized scraps of humanity, led paleontologists to a hillside near the village of Choukoutien, southwest of Peking, which yielded the remains of some exceptionally old Chinese. But by now the Second World War was gathering and archaeological work became difficult, especially after Japanese forces occupied Choukoutien in 1939. Chinese scientists grew increasingly concerned, and in 1941 they asked that the fossils be taken to America.

It is known that the Choukoutien fossils were packed in two white wooden boxes, labeled A and B, destined for the port of Chingwangtao where they were to be put aboard the SS President Harrison. A detachment of U.S. Marines was assigned to guard them.

Almost certainly these boxes left the Peking Union Medical College in a car which was going either to the U.S. Embassy or to the Marine barracks.

Beyond this point the journey of the prehistoric Chinese is obscured by swirling mist. Their bones are said to have been scattered and lost when Japanese soldiers stopped a train carrying the Marines. They are said to have disappeared from a warehouse in Chingwangtao which was twice ransacked by the Japanese. They are said to have been aboard a barge that capsized before reaching the President Harrison—although this sounds unbelievable because the President Harrison ran aground at the mouth of the Yangtze, quite a long distance from Chingwangtao. Then there is the possibility that an enterprising chemist may have gotten hold of them, in which case we must assume they were pulverized and swallowed.

Even now, decades later, the search for these bones goes on. Considering how much evolutionary evidence has accumulated since 1941, we might ask why anthropologists are so anxious to locate one particular batch of fossils.

There has never been a loss of such magnitude, says Dr. Harry Shapiro of the American Museum of Natural History, “for these ancient bones represented a veritable population of at least forty individuals—men, women and children—from a stage of human evolution previously unknown. . . . Although a few additional representatives of this ancient population have recently been discovered as a result of renewed exploration by the Chinese, it is unlikely that anything approaching the original sample will ever be restored.”

Conceivably a few men might still be alive who know exactly what happened. If so, the inscrutable old Chinese could reappear. But more probably, somewhere between Peking and Chingwangtao, they passed from the hands of those who knew their scientific value into the hands of those who either didn’t know or didn’t care. And it is this last thought that appalls Dr. Shapiro, who reflects upon the dismay and sadness we would feel if we heard that Shakespeare’s manuscripts had been found, only to be burned by a maid who looked at them without comprehension.

In Africa it’s a different story, less tragic but more incredible because here we are concerned with men who supposedly knew what they were doing. The first important fossil turned up in Africa was contemptuously dismissed.

Momentous news is greeted like this more often than you would suspect. Einstein’s germinal bolt of lightning did not attract much notice for eight years. Francis Bacon anticipated Newton’s law of gravity by half a century, but the times were out of joint. The linguist Grotefend correctly deciphered an obscure cuneiform script and published his evidence in three reports, all of them ignored. Olaus Roemer, a seventeenth-century astronomer, discovered that light traveled at a fixed rate instead of propagating instantaneously, yet academic scientists rejected this idea for fifty years.

It happened again in 1924 when a Johannesburg anatomy professor named Raymond Dart reported on a miniature skull found in a limestone quarry near a railroad station called Taungs.

Two crates of fossil-bearing rock had been delivered to Professor Dart while he was getting dressed for the wedding of his friend Christo Beyers—“past international footballer and now senior lecturer in applied anatomy and operative surgery at the University of Witwatersrand.” Dart immediately opened both crates. The first was a disappointment; he saw nothing but petrified eggshells and turtle shells.

The second crate held a gem: nearly enclosed by rock was the skull.

Dart returned to it as soon as Beyers had been legally committed. With a hammer, a chisel, and one of Mrs. Dart’s knitting needles he set to work, delicately, because the little creature he meant to release had been imprisoned for almost a million years.

“No diamond cutter ever worked more lovingly or with such care on a priceless jewel,” he later wrote, “nor, I am sure, with such inadequate tools. But on the seventy-third day, December 23, the rock parted. I could view the face from the front, although the right side was still embedded. . . . What emerged was a baby’s face, an infant with a full set of milk teeth and its permanent molars just in the process of erupting. I doubt if there was ever any parent prouder of his offspring than I was of my ‘Taungs baby’ on that Christmas.”

The skull seemed to be that of a young ape, yet its cranium was too large—implying a large brain, a brain in which for the first time intellect might outweigh instinct—and its roundness suggested that the creature had walked erect. Dart estimated that when fully grown the baby would have been perhaps four feet tall and would have weighed about ninety pounds.

Cautiously he named it Australopithecus, Ape of the South; but in a paper for the British scientific journal Nature he pointed out certain human characteristics and indicated that his baby belonged in the family somewhere between Pongidae and Hominidae: “The specimen is of importance because it exhibits an extinct race of apes intermediate between living anthropoids and man.”

Not so! Not so in the least! cried European authorities, none of whom had examined the South African infant.

“Professor Dart is not likely to be led astray,” commented the British anatomist Sir Arthur Keith. “If he has thoroughly examined the skull we are prepared to accept his decision.” But presently Sir Arthur changed his mind: “. . . one is inclined to place Australopithecus in the same group or sub-family as the chimpanzee and gorilla. It is an allied genus. It seems to be near akin to both.”

“There are serious doubts. . . .” wrote Smith-Woodward of Piltdown fame.

“. . . the distorted skull of a chimpanzee just over four years old, probably a female,” said Professor Arthur Robinson.

Not a hominid but an anthropoid ape, said Hans Weinert. Not a member of the human gallery, said Wilhelm Gieseler. Related to the gorilla, said Wolfgang Abel. And there were others. The consensus being that Dart’s child was a chimpanzee.

Only one ranking professional agreed with Dart. This was Dr. Robert Broom, who looked like everybody’s grandfather, who spoke with a Scottish burr, and who had become widely known—however implausible it may sound—for studying reptiles in the Great Karoo. He is described as a small, elderly gentleman who invariably wore a business suit with a high, starched collar, a black necktie, and a black hat. This was his uniform no matter where he happened to be, even in the bush. He was a medical doctor and part-time paleontologist who liked to collect things. In Ardrey’s eloquent phrase: “fossils, Rembrandt etchings, postage stamps, susceptible girls.”

A couple of weeks after Dr. Broom heard about the Taungs skull he came marching into Dart’s laboratory unannounced, ignored everybody, strode to the bench on which the skull rested, and dropped to his knees. He remained for the weekend as Dart’s houseguest and spent almost the entire time inspecting Australopithecus. He agreed that it was an intermediate form of life.

Because of Dr. Broom’s reputation the skull became famous, so famous that witty young men would ask: “Who was that girl I saw you with last night?—is she from Taungs?”

But along with the simpletons, as usually happens, a few intelligent people spoke up. An editorial in the London Observer concluded with these lines:

There must needs be some who will say that the discovery of a damaged skull in subtropical Africa makes no difference. Admittedly it does not affect us materially like the discovery of wireless or electric light. The difference is in outlook. The stimulus to all progress is man’s innate belief that he can grasp the scheme of things or his place therein. But this stimulus compels him to track his career backward to its first beginnings as well as to carry it forward to its ultimate end. The more clearly he sees whence he has come the more clearly he will discern whither he is bound. Hence it is not an accident that an age of immense scientific advance produced Darwin with his Theory of Origins, or that a later period of social unrest has stimulated archaeologists to reveal the strength of the social tradition. Viewed in some such intellectual context as this, the Taungs skull is at once a reminder of limitations and an encouragement to further endeavour. Its importance, significant in itself, is enhanced by the fact that its message has been preserved through unimaginable ages for discovery here and now.

The Observer’s thoughtful opinion did not convince everybody. Letters from around the world arrived at Dart’s office, warning him vociferously, emphatically, with magisterial certainty, that he would roast in Hell. The London Times printed a sharp rebuke, addressed to Dart, from a woman who signed herself “Plain but Sane”:

“How can you, with such a wonderful gift of God-given genius—not the gift of a monkey, but a trust from the Almighty—become a traitor to your Creator by making yourself the active agent of Satan and his ready tool? What does your Master pay you for trying to undermine God’s word? . . . What will it profit you? The wages of the master you serve is death. Why not change over? What will evolution do for you when dissolution overtakes you?”

And, regardless of evolution or dissolution, Profit was much on the mind of a gentleman who owned property in Sterkfontein, northeast of Taungs, for he issued a pamphlet with this invitation:

“Come to Sterkfontein and find the missing link!”

Given any conversation about men, apes, evolution, and all that, somebody inevitably will use the phrase missing link, often as a derisive question: “Why can’t they find it?”—followed by hostile laughter. The unmistakable inference being that the link can’t be found because it never existed, which proves that Archbishop Ussher must have been right. Oh, not 4004 B.C. exactly, but once upon a time the clouds split with a blinding flash, a huge Anglo-Saxon finger pointed down, and immediately the earth was populated with dinosaurs and cavemen. And if, let’s say, a bona fide living breathing furry link could in fact be produced—a specimen undeniably half-and-half—you may be sure it would be angrily rejected, identified either as a peculiar chimpanzee or as a hairy little man with rickets.

The skull seems to be the determining factor. If the skull looks reasonably human—well then, the owner must have been human. Otherwise it was some sort of ape.

Consider the brow, the jaw, the dome. Especially the dome. Is it high, capacious, handsomely rounded?—a suitable receptacle for a human brain? If so, we have Man. Hominidae. Glory of the universe.

Does it resemble a football?—flattened, unimposing, diminutive? Then we have Pongidae, brute keeper of the forest.

The problem with such attractive and shapely logic may be illustrated by the fact that Lord Byron’s brain measured 2,350 cubic centimeters while that of Anatole France measured just 1,100. It should follow, therefore, that Lord Byron was at least twice as intelligent as Anatole France. You see the brambles on this path.

Besides, the average cranial capacity of Cro-Magnon skulls is 1,650 cubic centimeters while that of modern Europeans is about 1,400—which implies that the human brain is shrinking. It could be. And perhaps for the best.

But this leads in another direction, so let’s return to the Transvaal, to Professor Dart patiently sifting the earth for additional scraps of Australopithecus.

In the Makapan valley he discovered where a troop of these “chimpanzees” had stopped, and the campsite revealed gruesome proof of human behavior—an assortment of baboon skulls together with that of another Australopithecus child. The jaw of each baboon skull, as well as that of the child, had been broken in such a way as to suggest a feast. Chimpanzees customarily eat plants and fruit, not baboons, nor do adult chimps eat their own children. So, Dart reasoned, these creatures a million years ago were evolving rapidly.

He showed his skull collection to an expert in forensic medicine who told him that the Australo infant and forty-two baboons had been dispatched by powerful blows with a hard object. Dart suspected that the hard object, or objects, might still be around. Presently he found them: antelope leg bones. In some instances a particular bone could be fitted to the break in a particular skull. The fragile, porcelain-thin skulls of infant baboons had been emptied of their brains, then crushed and tossed aside, says Dart, just as a human child might crush and throw away a breakfast eggshell.

He published an article about these carnivorous Transvaal citizens in 1949, and being a scientist he gave it an appropriate title: “The Predatory Implemental Techniques of Australopithecus.” Very few people who read it liked it.

Six years later a scientific congress met at the town of Livingstone near Victoria Falls. Dart was allotted twenty minutes, which meant he scarcely had time to summarize what he had learned. His talk seems to have been ignored. Many of the scientists did not bother to look at the exhibit he had prepared. Those skulls could not have been fractured by our ancestors. Probably a band of hyenas killed the baboons. Or some leopards. Or it could be that porcupines, which occasionally collect bones to chew on—porcupines might be responsible.

Said von Koenigswald, speaking for most of the Establishment: “It is easy to take such bones for implements, and this is in fact often done. But a comparison of the picture produced by Dart shows without any doubt that these bones have been gnawed and split by hyenas.”

However, a British paleontologist named Sutcliffe who had spent a great deal of time studying hyenas did not agree. He said it would be uncharacteristic of hyenas to leave all those skulls around. Hyenas pulverize everything. Then, too, some rudimentary “tools” were unearthed in the Australo encampment, and the shaping of implements for a specific purpose is a trait that distinguishes Homo sapiens from beasts.

Rather cautiously the professionals began revising their opinion of Dart’s exhibit.

Meanwhile, Dr. Broom had been attracted to the Sterkfontein lime-works where some fossils were turning up. The plant manager, Mr. Barlow, previously had worked at Taungs and he now understood that there were commodities other than lime; he was gathering fossils and selling them to tourists. Through him Dr. Broom got a few interesting bones, though nothing important. Then one day Mr. Barlow said, “I’ve something nice for you this morning.” And he produced a jaw with recently broken teeth which Broom bought for two pounds. However, because the matrix looked different, Broom suspected it had not been dug out of the quarry. When asked about this, Barlow grew evasive. Dr. Broom therefore returned to the limeworks on the manager’s day off and showed the jaw to some workmen. None of them recognized it.

Broom then had a serious talk with the plant manager, who admitted he had gotten the jaw from a boy named Gert Terblanche. Broom drove to the Terblanche home. Gert was at school. Broom drove immediately to the school. He arrived just after noon, during playtime, and spoke to the headmaster. The boy was located and took out of his pocket “four of the most wonderful teeth ever seen in the world’s history.” These teeth, says Broom, “I promptly purchased from Gert, and transferred to my own pocket.”

The boy had noticed the jaw protruding from a ledge. He had worked it loose by beating it with a rock, which accounted for the broken teeth.

In 1939 the price of lime dropped, closing the Sterkfontein quarry, and the Second World War further restricted archaeological work.

After the war Prime Minister Jan Smuts asked Dr. Broom to see what else he could find at Sterkfontein. Barlow was now dead, but from him Dr. Broom had learned to appreciate dynamite, so that very soon the vast African silence was being thunderously violated. And almost at once, remarks William Howells, first-rate fossils began describing small arcs in the air to the tune of his blasts.

The most startling find was an immensely powerful jaw—a jaw so massive that its owner came to be known as the Nutcracker Man. Further bits and pieces of these robust nutcracker people, or near-people, revealed the significant fact that their skulls had been crested like the skulls of orangutans or gorillas.

Dart and Broom now were convinced that East Africa was where it all began, but very few professionals agreed with them. Africa seemed rather distant. One would expect humanity’s cradle to be nearer the center of things. Not that our first squiggly tracks ought to show up on Thames mud or the Champs-Élysées, but Africa did seem remote. A more familiar setting—Italy or Greece, let’s say—would be perfect. The Dutch East Indies, possibly. Java might be acceptable. Perhaps China.

Louis Leakey then clambered out of the Olduvai Gorge where he had been prospecting for eighteen years, and he brought undeniable news.

Olduvai is a Masai word for the sansevieria plant which grows wild in that area. The gorge is about 25 miles long and 300 feet deep: a parched canyon where anthropologists, rhinos, cobras, and black-maned lions go about their business in dignified solitude, except for an occasional truckload of apprehensive tourists from Nairobi. It is a splendid place to study human evolution because quite a lot was happening here and because erosion has made it possible for scientists to get at the remains.

Archaeologist Hans Reck commented in 1913: “It is rare for strata to be so clearly distinguishable from one another as they are at Olduvai, the oldest at the bottom, the most recent at the top, undisturbed by a single gap, and never indurated or distorted by mountain-building forces.”

Leakey, with his wife Mary, camped season after season at the edge, walked down into the gorge looking for bones, and shared a water hole with various large animals. “We could never get rid of the taste of rhino urine,” he said, “even after filtering the water through charcoal and boiling it and using it in tea with lemon.”

He sounds like the natural descendant of those nineteenth-century British explorers, men and women both, who marched presumptuously in when common sense should have kept them out. Eighty years ago one of his aunts arrived at Mombasa with the idea of touring the continental interior. Local officials, aghast at such madness, told her to go home; instead, she took a firm grip on her umbrella, hired a string of porters, and walked to Uganda. No doubt she approved of a nephew who chose to spend his life associating with dangerous animals and fever-laden mosquitos in the serene conviction that none of them would dare interrupt his work.

Leakey’s first diamond in the rough was, as we might expect, a chunk of somebody’s skull. It looked human—if compared to Dart’s semihuman Australopithecus—and was about 750,000 years old. This, as professionals say, hardened the evidence that the African evolutionary line had continued. Leakey’s man fitted nicely between ourselves and Dart’s bone-wielding cannibalistic baboon killers.

Between 1961 and 1964 the Leakeys uncovered some two-million-year-old bones. The skulls indicated a large brain and the reconstructed hands looked altogether human. But we have trouble granting the existence of humans two million years ago—humans of any sort—not to mention those who may have been sophisticated enough to invent a device still used by various people around the world. By Argentine cowboys, for example, and by Eskimos who use it to capture geese and ptarmigan. That is, the bola. For there is evidence in the form of stone spheres from Bed II at Olduvai that those people used bolas to hunt animals. The spheres, which have been deliberately worked, are the size of baseballs. They might have been nothing more than hammers or clubheads, or balls meant to be thrown individually, though it would be strange to spend so much time shaping an object that could be lost. The reason Leakey suspected they were bolas—the stones encased in hide and connected by thongs—is that they often are found in pairs, or in sets of three.

It’s a bit staggering to think that bolas may have been whirling across the earth for two million years.

A number of occupied sites have been located. At one of them the debris forms a curious pattern: a dense concentration within a rectangular area fifteen feet long by thirty feet wide. Outside this rectangle practically nothing can be found for three or four feet in any direction. The ground is bare. Then, beyond this vacant area, the artifacts show up again, though not as many. The explanation is simple. The littered rectangle was their home, surrounded by a protective thorn fence. Trash was tossed over the fence.

At another site there is a ring, about fifteen feet in diameter, consisting of several hundred stones. Occasionally the stones form a mound. The Okombambi tribe constructs shelters like this. For two million years they’ve been doing it. The mounds of rock support upright poles over which grass mats or hides are stretched to break the wind.

So the chronicle of humanity continues to lengthen. Now and again this record is frankly reassuring. In 1966 on the French Riviera, while a hillside was being excavated to make way for some luxurious apartments, the site of an ancient encampment was revealed. And there, 400,000 years old, lay a human footprint. It tells as much as anything. The footprint proves that we have tenure on earth as certainly as the whale and the crocodile. We, too, have taken part in the grand scheme.

Flipper-bearing lungfish moved ashore in East Africa—in East Africa or some other warm forest-clad land—where they turned into tree shrews which turned into apes. Then, fifteen or twenty million years ago, presumably when forests were dwindling because of a change in climate, some adventurous or desperate apes moved from the trees to the savannas. Here, anxious to see what was happening, because it could mean life or death, they spent most of their time upright.

And on the plain, unprotected, they learned the value of tools and the use of fire.

After that it was downhill all the way, or uphill—depending on your estimate of mankind—from omnivorous thighbone-wielding assassins to those erect Ice Age people with whom we can sympathize, who felt a previously unknown need to worship, to make music, to dance, and paint pictures.

Evidence that our Ice Age ancestors could appreciate music is tentative, unlike the vividly painted animals that register their love of graphic art, yet what seems to be a musical instrument still exists in southern France. In a cave at Pêche Merle a set of stalactites appears to have been worn down unnaturally, and when struck with a chamois-covered stick each column produces a different note. Ascribe this to chance or not, as you like.

At Le Tuc d’Audoubert, half a mile inside the cave, a pair of bison were modeled in high relief on a clay bank—the bull ready to mount the cow. The clay is now dry and deeply cracked, otherwise the animals seem unaffected by the millennia that have passed since they were formed. They surge with vitality. But the arresting thing about this tableau is not the elemental vigor of the bison or the skill with which they have been realized; more startling is the fact that the mud floor of the cave shows a ring of little heelprints, as though children had been dancing. In other words, these two animals were the central images of a ritual, a bison dance. And it is possible that the young dancers wore bison horns and pelts, just as in the eagle dance American Indians wear eagle feathers and represent themselves as eagles, circling, sweeping, fluttering.

Prehistorians agree that this grotto was the scene of a ritual, though some of them are not sure about the dancing; they favor a kind of backward march, a goose step in reverse, which is such an ugly concept that it may well be correct. Neither theory has been certified, however, so let’s assume the children were dancing.

In either case, why should this performance have been limited to children? The answer is fairly obvious. At an appropriate age each child was admitted to tribal membership, just as today the Church observes a rite of confirmation. Deep inside Le Tuc d’Audoubert these novitiates danced around a male and female bison, dancing from childhood toward the mysteries of adult life.

Not far away, in the cave known as Les Trois Frères, an entire wall is covered with snowy owls, rabbits, fish, muskoxen, mammoths, and so on—with arrows flying toward them from every direction. This complicated mural may very well illustrate something of profound mystic significance. The numinous spirit of life, for instance. But probably what it represents is more immediate and understandable: Hunger. Meat for the table.

Sex and the stomach, remarks one anthropologist, such are the dominant themes of most philosophy.

Still, in this same cave, cut into the rock twelve feet above the ground with a stone knife, we find a very different philosopher—a prancing round-eyed antlered Wizard who gazes emptily down upon today. Something about the position of his hands is strangely terrible and important, but what does the gesture signify? What is he telling us? If only we knew. All we can be sure of is that he has dominated this wall for thousands of years, dressed in a stag’s pelt with the tail of a horse.

Less enigmatic and threatening than the Wizard of Les Frères is the ivory Venus of Lespugue, who now holds court not in her original cave but in a glass cabinet at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, just a step from the Trocadéro métro. She is flanked by mirrors so that after pressing the minuterie button you have sixty seconds to contemplate her prodigious feminine melons, north and south. Unspeakably poised, tranquil as a water lily, this stained and fractured Aurignacian princess waits, more beguiling than your favorite movie actress. Modern sculpture seldom says as much.

Further evidence of man’s complex artistic roots turned up at La Genière, near Serrières-sur-Ain. Excavators came across a limestone plaque tucked into a layer of the Middle Stone Age, and on this limestone scrap had been engraved that popular subject the bison—engraved decisively, powerfully. Most unusual, however, was the fact that this one resembled a polychrome bison on a wall painting at Font-de-Gaume some 300 kilometers distant. So close indeed was the resemblance between these animals that the famous abbé-archaeologist Henri Breuil wrote: “. . . one is forced to consider the possibility that both are by the same hand. Who knows whether that small limestone plaque from Serrières could not have been a sketch for the wall painting. Or was the drawing of La Genière, on the other hand, just a souvenir of a pilgrimage.”

Did the artist who painted the wall at Font-de-Gaume carry his preliminary sketch all the way to La Genière? Or did a prehistoric tourist so greatly admire the mural that he, or she, bought or stole the sketch in order to take it home?

Both thoughts are surprising. Who could have imagined such artistic concern during the Stone Age?

Alas, regardless of ancient aesthetics, we are here confronted by a fake. Professor Viret of Lyon observed suspiciously: “On ne saurait pas manquer d’être frappé de la profondeur et de la régularité du sillon de la gravure.” In other words, authentic Stone Age engravings almost always are drawn softly, delicately, whereas the beast at La Genière had been delineated with deep regular strokes.

Professor Viret, troubled by this discrepancy, submitted the limestone bison for laboratory analysis, and beneath ultraviolet light one could see that the fluorescence of the line sharply differed from the fluorescence of the surface. This meant the engraving must be recent. Quite recent. And here, too, just as in the case of Charles Dawson, although the faker cannot be positively identified, circumstantial evidence does point to somebody: one of the workmen at La Genière. It’s been learned that he was familiar with the Font-de-Gaume wall painting, and he is known to have made an engraving of a deer in the same style. The deer is not as good, probably because he didn’t have a model. Forgers are better at copying than at creating.

So, regrettably, the limestone plaque cannot persuade us that our ancestors would travel 300 kilometers to view the latest chef d’oeuvre.

However, when sifting evidence one must be careful. Consider the engravings of mammoths discovered at Les Eyzies. In 1885 these were denounced as fakes. Modern investigators, though, have doubts about the nineteenth-century doubts. For example, certain anatomical peculiarities of a mammoth—which are clearly represented at Les Eyzies—were unknown even to scientists in 1885.

And the Altamira paintings were ridiculed for a long time, mostly because nineteenth-century scholars were able to perceive a “slightly mediocre air of modernity.”

All of which should remind us that one can be not only too gullible, but too skeptical.

Besides, as the twentieth-century scholar Luis Pericot-Garcia has remarked: “Without aesthetic ability, the experience gained by apprenticeship in a school, and the background of a tradition, no artist would spontaneously paint a bison such as those at Altamira.”

Herbert Kühn, who examined the work at Lascaux, discovered that the figures had been outlined with knives before they were painted, and these outlines first had been delineated with a brush—perhaps made from the plume of a snipe—because such fragile drawing could not be rendered any other way. Parenthetically it may be noted that in German the snipe’s plume is die Malerfeder, the artist’s feather, and when equipped with a bone handle it becomes a perfectly adequate little brush. The Lascaux artwork, however, does not seem to have been brushed on; almost certainly the paint was squirted, very much as we spray-paint automobiles. The surface was prepared with oil and fat, then powdered colors were blown onto the sticky background through bone tubes. Now this is quite a sophisticated technique, which clearly supports Pericot-Garcia’s theory. There must indeed have been schools.

Ice Age pigments are genuine oil colors, not much different from those used by artists today, says Kühn. “The ochres would have been pounded fine in mortars, and in many caves ochre-crayons have been found. . . .”

On a rock bench at Altamira lay a supply of crayons, sharpened and neatly arranged, resembling women’s lipstick displayed on a cosmetics counter, just as the artist left them 12,000 years ago. Or perhaps long before that. Say 15,000. The mere existence of these crayons seems astonishing, yet still more so is the arrangement—the fact that it was not a disorderly collection but a coherent spectrum from which the artist could select whatever he thought appropriate. It is this evidence of planning which truly surprises us because we assume that those spear-carrying fur-clad hunters did not shrewdly organize their thoughts, did not quite bring their minds into focus. Not unless it concerned survival. Organizing for a mammoth hunt, yes. But one man, a cave muralist, reflectively choosing his palette?

And if you still think Ice Age artists lacked sophistication, it might be observed that a grasshopper incised on a bone at Les Trois Frères was portrayed with such fidelity that the insect’s species has been determined.

They seem to have been modern enough in other ways. One engraved bone depicts a man who is either watching or following a voluptuous nude woman—a picture that bluntly points out, with little equivocation, how you and I happen to be here.

Professor Magín Berenguer suggests that man entered the world of art by way of these adipose Venuses, where the entire expressive force is concentrated on fecundity. Then, through his art, man established the immense distance which separates him from all other created things.

So be it.

Lungfish to shrew to ape to man. For better or worse that was the sequence; at least it’s a sequence acceptable to many anthropologists. As always, however, there are creepers of dissent pushing in every direction.

According to Richard Leakey, who has continued the work started by his father: “Early man was a hunter, but I think the concept of aggressiveness—the killer-ape syndrome—is wrong. I am quite sure that the willingness of modern aggressive man to kill his own kind is a very recent cultural development. . . .”

Says George Schaller: “Man is a primate by inheritance but a carnivore by profession. . . .”

David Pilbeam: “I have grown increasingly skeptical of the view that hominids differentiated as weapon-wielding savanna bipeds. I am as inclined to think that changes in a predominantly vegetarian diet provided the initial impetus. Also I believe that too little emphasis has been placed on the role of language and communication. . . .”

F. Clark Howell: “We still do not know the source of the hominids, but it is possible that their origin may lie between seven and fifteen million years ago, and perhaps not only in Africa. . . .”

Von Koenigswald: “I definitely believe man’s earliest ancestors came from Asia. . . .”

Or you may choose to go along with paleontologist Bjurn Kurten, who thinks man did not evolve from the ape but vice versa. He considers it possible to draw a direct line of ancestry from ourselves to a small-jawed animal called Propliopithecus that lived thirty or forty million years ago.

If none of this sounds appealing you can always return to the comfortable certitude of Archbishop Ussher.

The ultimate question, though, toward which all inquiries bend, and which carries a hint of menace, is not where or when or why we came to be as we are, but how the future will unfold.