Lighting the dawn of Man’s history

Press, 12 September 1981, Page 17

Lighting the dawn of Man’s history

The Making of Mankind. By Richard E. Leakey. Michael Joseph, 1981. 256 pp. Illustrations and maps. $29.95. (Reviewed by W. R. Philipson) Did stone-age man ride on horseback over the steppes 30,000 years ago? Did agriculture gradually evolve millenia earlier than the time usually accepted for its sudden appearance say 10.000 years ago? In his latest book, “The Making of Mankind." Richard Leakey discusses

Bedroom spying

The Friday Spy. By C. R. Nicholson. Corgi, 1981. 411 pp. $6.75. Madeleine Lee, a young beauty from New England on holiday in Spain in 1936, was caught up by events which horrified and fascinated her at the same time. Flown to Hitler’s Germany she found herself drawn deeper and deeper, not always against her will, into a grey world of espionage, and a gay world of debauchery where the end to a night's entertainment was to attend the dawn parade at a concentration camp. By the time the Second World War began Madeleine had become Baroness von Hengstenberg, agent of the S.S., agent of the British Government, the toast of Germany, and an accomplished warmer of beds that looked as though they might stretch all the way to the top of the Nazi hierarchy. Nicholson's story is rescued from being just another saga of sex and sadism among the Nazis by the compassion he brings to his chief characters, and by the plausible diversions of a splendidly ingenious plot. — Navlor Hillary.

increasing evidence for these revolutionary ideas. Carvings of horses fitted with what undoubtedly seem to be headstalls occur at least 15,000 years ago, which is long before horses are thought to have been domesticated. Another line of evidence puts back the possible time of domestication to 30,000 years. Horses which are regularly tethered develop the habit of crib-biting — that is, they impatiently gnaw and chew wooden objects. As a result their teeth become worn in a pattern that is never found in free horses. As this characteristic tooth shape occurs in many fossil remains of horses from the ice age, it is concluded that man had by then already tamed the horse. It is still debatable whether increasing population pressure forced man to become a settled agriculturalist instead of a hunter-gatherer, or whether the practice of agriculture allowed numbers to increase. But it appears that aggregation into small, settled communities with permanent stone buildings would have been possible without the extensive raising of crops. One 11,500-year-old village in the Near East was found, when excavated, to have granaries containing grains of wild einkorn wheat. These could have bteen harvested from neighbouring mountainsides even at the present time. Indeed, one enterprising archaeologist armed himself with a neolithic sickle and on a grassy slope in Turkey harvested 6 lbs of wild wheat in an hour. The members of a single family, he calculated, could harvest more grain in three weeks than they could consume in a year. The domestication of cattle could also have occurred much earlier than has been supposed. Cattle remains, in association

with living sites of prehistoric man, have been thought to be those of wild oxen. As there were never any wild cattle in Africa any fossils found there must represent herds brought in from Asia. Since ox bones are known from human sites in Africa at least 13,000 years old, it follows that cattle were domesticated elsewhere considerably earlier than that. All this suggests that man began controlling the animals and plants around him at a very early stage, and Richard Leakey’s account begins with the appearance of man’s ancestors on the open plains of Africa millions of years ago and carefully traces their transformation into modern man. Much of the story is known to him at first hand, and he has the gift, rare among scientists, of making his subject clear and vivid to the layman. Successive chapters describe the gradual progression from the earliest prehuman fossils, the developing skills of men as tool makers, their artistic achievements, and so much of their way of life and religious beliefs as can be deduced from evidence accumulating from sites all over the world. These are compared with the practices of modern men who are still engaged in a huntergatherer existence. A great deal has been written about the innate aggressiveness of man, a theme begun by the archaeologist Raymond Dart and popularised by Robert Ardrey. Richard Leakey disagrees totally with this gloomy appraisal of our nature. We are not a killer ape — each of us grows up moulded by the society in which we live. “Man is not programmed to kill and make war (he says) ... his ability to do so is learned from his elders.’’ Nor will the future inevitably bring a j war of annihilation; it is up to us to choose.