{"id":4571,"date":"2015-09-19T20:51:07","date_gmt":"2015-09-20T01:51:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/?p=4571"},"modified":"2015-09-20T03:27:17","modified_gmt":"2015-09-20T08:27:17","slug":"pbs-answers-the-burning-question-what-does-robert-ardrey-have-to-do-with-homo-naledi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/2015\/09\/19\/human-nature\/pbs-answers-the-burning-question-what-does-robert-ardrey-have-to-do-with-homo-naledi\/","title":{"rendered":"PBS Answers the Burning Question: What Does Robert Ardrey have to do with Homo naledi?"},"content":{"rendered":"

PBS just aired what’s billed as a NOVA\/National Geographic Special\u00a0entitled Dawn of Humanity\u00a0<\/em><\/a>on the stunning discovery of a trove of remains of an early human species dubbed Homo naledi<\/em> <\/a>in a South African cave.\u00a0 According to the blurb on its website,<\/p>\n

NOVA and National Geographic present exclusive access to a unique discovery of ancient remains. Located in an almost inaccessible chamber deep in a South African cave, the site required recruiting a special team of experts slender enough to wriggle down a vertical, pitch-dark, seven-inch-wide passage. Most fossil discoveries\u00a0of human relatives\u00a0consist of just a handful of bones. But down in this hidden chamber, the team uncovered an unprecedented trove\u2014so far,\u00a0over 1,500 bones\u2014with the potential to rewrite the story of our origins.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There’s nothing surprising about the fact that a story about Homo naledi<\/em> appeared on NOVA.\u00a0 What’s really stunning, however, is its content.\u00a0 To all appearances it appears to have been\u00a0supplied by an ancient Blank Slater<\/a> who was frozen like a popsicle some time back in the early\u00a070’s, and then had the good fortune to be\u00a0thawed out like Rip van Winkle\u00a0just in time to write the script for Dawn of Humanity<\/em>.\u00a0 One can certainly quibble about his take on the significance of Homo naledi<\/em>, but one thing is certain.\u00a0 He has favored us with a remarkable piece of historical source material.<\/p>\n

It all starts innocently enough.\u00a0 We are introduced to Lee Berger<\/a>, who headed the team that discovered Homo naledi<\/em>.\u00a0 There are\u00a0scenes of him strolling across the South African landscape with his two dogs, poking into limestone caverns of the sort where his nine year old son discovered the first fossil remains of Australopithecus sediba<\/a>, <\/em>like Homo naledi<\/em> another\u00a0creature with a small, ape-like brain that walked upright on two feet.\u00a0 He points to the places where the remains of several other individuals of that species were later found.\u00a0 Things continue in that sedate vein until suddenly, at minute 35:15, we are shaken out of our pleasant rut by the announcement that the abundance of the sediba<\/em> remains,<\/p>\n

…might help explain the Australopith’s<\/em> transition into our genus, Homo<\/em>.\u00a0 They might also prove or disprove a highly influential theory about the dawn of humanity.\u00a0 A theory inspired by the very first discovery of an Australopith<\/em> fossil.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We are informed that the discovery referred to\u00a0happened in 1924.\u00a0 The place was South Africa, and the discoverer was Prof. Raymond Dart<\/a> of the University of Witswatersrand in Johannesburg.\u00a0 Miners had sent Dart a chunk of limestone in which was embedded the skull of a hominid child, different and more primitive than any previously discovered.\u00a0 He named the new species Australopithecus africanus<\/em>.\u00a0 At that point, around minute 36:45, we get our first hint that PBS is about to administer a strong dose of propaganda.\u00a0 Quoting from the script,<\/p>\n

Darwin and (Thomas Henry) Huxley predicted that our origins would be in Africa based on comparative anatomy.\u00a0 You know, they looked at the skeletons of chimps and gorillas and they looked at ours and they went, “Well they’re so close to us, and they’re more close than anything else, so it must have been in Africa.”\u00a0 And then the sort of second generation of evolutionary biologists shied away from that.\u00a0 They started to find fossils in Europe.\u00a0 They started to find fossils in\u00a0Asia.\u00a0 And of course that tied in very nicely with the sort of racist, imperialistic thoughts of the day.\u00a0 They couldn’t abide the thought of it being in Africa.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I rather suspect that the reticence of this “second generation of evolutionary biologists” to immediately accept Dart’s “out of Africa” theory was due to the fact that they had based their life’s work on developing theories about the emergence of early man in the only places where fossil evidence had actually been found up to that time.\u00a0 It’s really not too hard to imagine that they may have been unenthusiastic about seeing all that work washed down the drain.\u00a0 Of course, we’ve long been familiar with the tendency of the “progressive” inmates at PBS to instantly seize on such understandable regrets\u00a0and transmogrify\u00a0them into something as sinister and criminal as\u00a0“racist, imperialistic thoughts.”\u00a0 That’s old hat.\u00a0 What’s really surprising is that, in what follows, we are treated to a long-winded denunciation of the “Killer Ape Theory.”\u00a0 At 40:45 we learn,<\/p>\n

Raymond Dart was building a theory about how the Australopiths<\/em>, our apelike ancestors, became human.\u00a0 His ideas about the dawn of humanity were the touchstone for thinking about our origins for generations.\u00a0 In the 1940’s, more examples of Australopithecus<\/em> began to be found, and a key site not only had fragments of Australopithecus<\/em>, but also the bones of many other fossil animals.\u00a0 And Dart noted that these bones were broken in a special way.\u00a0 Dart became convinced they were weapons made by our primitive ancestors.\u00a0 Was this the key to what first made us human?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At this point, PBS has passed well beyond prissy comments about racism and imperialism to the full blown distortion of history.\u00a0 In the first place, Dart’s thinking never became a “touchstone” for anything, and certainly not for generations.\u00a0 He never even published anything about hunting behavior in early hominins until 1949, and what you might call his “seminal” paper on the subject, The Predatory Transition from Ape to Man<\/em>,\u00a0didn’t appear until 1953.\u00a0 Both papers were published in obscure venues, and both were largely ignored.\u00a0 Dart never claimed\u00a0that bones that\u00a0“were broken in a special way” were weapons.\u00a0\u00a0Rather, he claimed that the\u00a0double-headed humerus, or upper foreleg bone, of a common type of antelope had been the weapon, and the bones that “were broken in a special way” were actually skulls\u00a0with indentations that appeared to be the result of\u00a0the use of that bone as a club.<\/p>\n

In any case, next we learn that Dart had been a medic in World War I, and,<\/p>\n

..had seen at first hand the barbarity humans are capable of.\u00a0 It made sense to him that the origins of humanity were steeped in blood.\u00a0 Raymond Dart’s experience in the World War may have colored his interpretation of what these bones and teeth meant.\u00a0 You know it gave him a view of sort of the dark side of humanity and the violence of humanity, and he came up with this idea that Australopithecus had figured out that bones and teeth were hard, and could be used as weapons to kill other animals.\u00a0 The sort of “Killer Ape Theory” of early humans.\u00a0 Dart believed that the more aggressive and adventurous\u00a0of our ape-like ancestors abandoned their forest environment and moved into savannahs.\u00a0 There, they became hunters and predators.\u00a0 His theory, that this violent transformation gave rise to humanity soon found an audience far beyond the small world of paleoanthropology.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In fact, there is no evidence that all this psychobabble about World War I is anything but that.\u00a0 Dart’s claims were based on compelling statistical evidence, which is left unmentioned in the program.\u00a0 In the first place, a large and statistically anomalous number of the humerus bones proposed as weapons had been found in association with the africanus<\/em> remains.\u00a0 Damage to the skulls of other animals supposedly inflicted with these weapons was not randomly located, but occurred far more often in locations where one would expect it to occur if it had been inflicted with a bludgeon or club.\u00a0 Dart’s interpretation of these facts has often been challenged, most prominently by C. K. Brain<\/a> in his The Hunters or the Hunted?,<\/em> published in 1981.\u00a0 Brain noted that twin puncture wounds found on an Australopith<\/em> skull may well have been left by a leopard.\u00a0 Sure enough, the skull in question is featured on the program, and the puncture marks described as if they were incontrovertible proof that Dart’s apes had never hunted.\u00a0 As it happens, however, Brain is a careful scientist, and never maintained anything of the sort.\u00a0 Indeed, in The Hunters or the Hunted?<\/em> he describes in detail two important objections to the leopard theory, and while he certainly challenged Dart’s theories, he never suggested that they had been incontrovertibly disproved.\u00a0 Predictably, these facts are left unmentioned in the program.<\/p>\n

At this point I started wondering why on earth PBS would\u00a0start laying on such thick dollops of propaganda\u00a0to begin with.\u00a0\u00a0Possible hunting in A.\u00a0africanus<\/em> wasn’t\u00a0really germane to the behavior of a newly discovered species like\u00a0Homo naledi<\/em>, the apparent theme of the show, nor to\u00a0that of Australopithecus sediba<\/em>, for that matter.\u00a0 I wasn’t left hanging for long.\u00a0 At that point, the ancient Blank Slate Rip van Winkle the program had been channeling all along tipped his hand.\u00a0 After all these years, he had hardly forgotten the shame and embarrassment he and his fellow “men of science” had experienced at the hand of a certain playwright by the name of Robert Ardrey<\/a>!\u00a0 Suddenly, at about the 42:50 point, the screen is filled with\u00a0Ardrey’s image.\u00a0 Then we see in quick succession images of two Life<\/em> magazine covers and one of Penthouse<\/em>, all three of which prominently announce articles he had written.\u00a0 The narrative continues,<\/p>\n

In the 1950’s there was a drama critic and playwright names Robert Ardrey, who became very interested in human origins, and he went to Africa and spoke with Raymond Dart.\u00a0 And Robert Ardrey, being a dramatist, could write like anything, and he wrote this amazing book published in 1961 called African Genesis<\/em> (dramatic drumbeat).\u00a0 African Genesis<\/em> became a pop-science publishing sensation\u00a0of the early 1960s.\u00a0 Ardrey’s ideas, building on those of Raymond Dart, helped frame public debate about the dawn of humanity for the next 20 years.\u00a0 (Potts cuts in) The very first sentence in that book; I remember it because I read it as a teenager and was enthralled by it, “Not in innocence, and not in Asia, was mankind born.”\u00a0 And in that one sentence he encapsulated Raymond Dart’s ideas, that it was an African genesis, and that where we came from was not from an innocent creature (dramatic drumroll), but from the most violent of killer apes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At this point we’re treated to one of the favorite gimmicks of the Blank Slaters of yore.\u00a0 The program segs to scenes from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey<\/em>.\u00a0 We are assured that Kubrick was influenced by Ardrey, and then shown the familiar opening scene, with an ape-man smashing everything in sight with a bone wielded as a club.\u00a0 The only problem is that Ardrey didn’t write the script for the movie.\u00a0 We find the same trick in that invaluable little piece of historical source material, Man and Aggression<\/em>, a collection of Blank Slater\u00a0rants published in 1968 and edited by Ashley Montagu.\u00a0\u00a0Most of the attacks are\u00a0directed\u00a0at Ardrey and Konrad Lorenz, but William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies<\/em>, is thrown in for comic effect in the same fashion as Kubrick.<\/p>\n

Next, at about 45:45, there is a schtick about how tartar from sediba’s<\/em> teeth was examined, revealing that\u00a0it contained phytoliths,\u00a0microscopic particles of silica that are found in some plant tissues.\u00a0 At 48:15 the narrative continues,<\/p>\n

Here, at last, is evidence that will help support or disprove Dart\u2019s theory…\u00a0The tooth evidence from sediba indicates a diet very similar to todays chimpanzees.\u00a0 While they may have eaten some meat, there\u2019s little to back up Raymond Dart\u2019s theory that they were killer apes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here one can but roll one’s eyes.\u00a0 The plant evidence in sediba’s<\/em> teeth hardly indicates that its consumption of meat was as the same as, not to mention greater or less than, that of chimpanzees.\u00a0 Here, too, we find revealed the remarkably anachronistic nature of this whole production.\u00a0 Left unmentioned is that fact that chimpanzees are, after all, killer apes, too.\u00a0 They organize hunting parties with the intention of killing and eating other species, and they also carry out organized attacks on other chimpanzees, often killing them in the process as well.\u00a0 None of this is mentioned in the program.\u00a0 Indeed, when\u00a0Jane Goodall first\u00a0observed and reported the behavior referred to she was furiously denounced and subjected to incredibly demeaning ad hominem<\/em> attacks by the Blank Slaters.\u00a0 It’s as if none of this ever happened, and the program is frozen in time back around 1975.\u00a0 The rest consists mainly of pleasantries about the recovery of the Homo naledi<\/em> remains.<\/p>\n

In reality, the “killer ape theory” that we have just seen\u00a0dusted off and trotted out for our benefit is largely a Blank Slater propaganda myth.\u00a0 Modern apes kill, and when they kill they are certainly violent.\u00a0 They can, therefore, be accurately described as violent killer apes.\u00a0 The “killer ape” of the Blank Slaters, however, is a nightmare figment of their imagination – a furious, violent creature constantly attacking everything around it, as so gaudily portrayed in\u00a0Stanley Kubrick’s film.\u00a0\u00a0Nothing in any of Ardrey’s books even comes close to a description\u00a0of such psychopathic\u00a0B\u00a0movie monsters.<\/p>\n

The very magazine covers mentioned above, shown as the narrator lays on the propaganda about killer\u00a0apes, are revealing in themselves.\u00a0 I happen to have copies of all three of them, and none of the articles by Ardrey they contain has the least thing to say about the “killer ape theory.”\u00a0 Instead, they all deal in one way or another with the real theme of all Ardrey’s work; the existence of innate human nature.\u00a0 And that, I\u00a0strongly suspect, is the real reason the program even mentions Ardrey.<\/p>\n

All appearances to the contrary in Dawn of Humanity<\/em>, the debate about the “hunting hypothesis” is now over for all practical purposes.\u00a0 It has been decided in favor of\u00a0Ardrey.\u00a0\u00a0Clear marks of butchering have been found on bones dated to more than 3 million years before the present.\u00a0\u00a0It has been suggested that the bones were\u00a0scavenged from the kills of other predators, but the idea that it never occurred to early hominins to hunt between that time and half a million to a million years before the present, a period during which early man clearly began using stone tipped and fire-hardened hunting spears,\u00a0is nonsense.\u00a0 It is doubly nonsense in view of the observed hunting behavior of chimpanzees.\u00a0 Even the impeccably politically correct Scientific American<\/em> admitted as much in an article\u00a0entitled Rise of the Human Predator<\/em>, that appeared in the April 2014 issue.\u00a0 More remarkable still, in a PBS series entitled Becoming Human<\/em><\/a> that aired in 2009, we were informed that,<\/p>\n

Homo erectus probably hunted with close-quarters weapons, with spears that were thrown at animals from a short distance, clubs, thrown rocks, weapons like that. They weren\u2019t using long distance projectile weapons that we know of.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Homo erectus hunt was simple but effective. It fed not just their larger brains, but the growing complexity of that early human society.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Why, then, this grotesque anachronism, this latter day program frozen in time in the early 1970’s?\u00a0 As I mentioned earlier, the Blank Slaters have forgotten nothing, and forgiven nothing.\u00a0 They know that the reason for Ardrey’s enormous influence wasn’t the “killer ape theory.”\u00a0 Rather, the constant theme of all Ardrey’s work was his insistence on the existence of innate human nature.\u00a0 Virtually all of the “men of science” in the behavioral sciences at the time his books began appearing, at least in the United States, firmly supported the Blank Slate orthodoxy, insisted that virtually all human behavior was a result of learning and culture, and denied the existence of any such thing as innate behavioral traits in human beings.\u00a0 Ardrey was right, and they were all dead wrong.\u00a0 A “mere playwright” had shamed them and exposed them for the charlatans they were.<\/p>\n

Today books and articles about innate human behavior, and its analogs in other animals, roll off the presses as if the subject had never been the least bit controversial.\u00a0 The Blank Slate orthodoxy has been smashed,\u00a0and the one man whose writings were far and away the most influential weapon in smashing it was Robert Ardrey.\u00a0 As for the “men of science,” they are engaged in a game of bowdlerizing history to hide this inconvenient truth.\u00a0 The usual tactic is to ignore Ardrey, elevating some pretender to the role of “slayer of the Blank Slate.”\u00a0 If he is mentioned at all, it is only to briefly note, after the fashion of Steven Pinker, that he was “totally and utterly wrong”\u00a0based on some alleged inaccuracy in one of his books that had nothing to do with the overall theme.\u00a0 That’s why I said that artifacts like\u00a0Dawn of Humanity<\/em>\u00a0are valuable because of\u00a0their historical interest at the beginning of this post.\u00a0 For such remarkable anachronisms to even appear, someone has to be seriously out of step with the official line.\u00a0 It has to be someone who knows just how\u00a0significant and influential Ardrey really was, a fact demonstrated by the very magazine covers that appear on the program.\u00a0 Insignificant nobodies weren’t invited to write articles for Life magazine in the late 60’s and early 70’s, not to mention Penthouse, and pieces by Ardrey can be found in many other familiar magazines of the day.\u00a0 Furthermore, that “somebody” has to be\u00a0so bitter about\u00a0Ardrey’s demolition of his precious Blank Slate dogmas\u00a0that his hatred boils to the surface, revealing itself in such remarkable productions as the one described here.\u00a0 When that happens we occasionally learn something about the Blank Slate debacle that the “men of science” would prefer to leave swept under the rug.\u00a0 A little truth manages to leak out around the edges.\u00a0 This time the truth happened to touch on the real historical role of a man named Robert Ardrey.<\/p>\n

\"Robert<\/a>
Robert Ardrey<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\tTweet<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

PBS just aired what’s billed as a NOVA\/National Geographic Special\u00a0entitled Dawn of Humanity\u00a0on the stunning discovery of a trove of remains of an early human species dubbed Homo naledi in a South African cave.\u00a0 According to the blurb on its website, NOVA and National Geographic present exclusive access to a unique discovery of ancient remains. … Continue reading “PBS Answers the Burning Question: What Does Robert Ardrey have to do with Homo naledi?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[101,181,105,297,166,28,272,198],"tags":[193,324],"class_list":["post-4571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-blank-slate","category-evolutionary-psychology-2","category-historical-revisionism","category-human-evolution","category-human-nature","category-hunting-hypothesis","category-robert-ardrey","tag-blank-slate-2","tag-robert-ardrey"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pwEq0-1bJ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4571"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4571\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4599,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4571\/revisions\/4599"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}