The body is good but tails away

Bryan Appleyard

ORIGINS RECONSIDERED: IN SEARCH OF WHAT MAKES US HUMAN by Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin Little, Brown & Co, .£18.99, pp. 375 There are two quite distinct ways of considering this odd book. The first is as a straightforward work of paleoanthropology by one of that discipline's most celebrated practitioners. The second is as a less specialised work of popular science that attempts to transfer scientific insights into a wider cultural and moral context. I can- not pretend to be an authoritative judge of its success in that first role; I am pretty sure, however, of its failure in the second.

The prologue is thrilling. Richard Leakey's life is replete with the kind of material that sets publishers swooning. We find him working, protected by armed guards, for the Kenyan Government in an attempt to stop elephant and rhinoceros poaching. From this role he tracks back over his life as a fossil-hunter primarily in the Great Rift Valley, the 'cradle of mankind'. He tells of the complete failure of his kidneys in 1979, his departure from Kenya, expecting to die, and of his salva- tion by a transplant from his brother. Mixed in with this narrative is the detail and speculation involved in his work and particularly his fascination with Kenya's Lake Turkana:

I felt that there, in the arid sediments around that magnificent lake, answers were to be pieced together that went beyond the ques- tions normally asked in science.

That lake provides the primary narrative of the book, the discovery of the Turkana Boy, an almost complete pre-human skeleton about 1.5 million years old, by Leakey and his team. With his co-author Roger Lewin he begins the story by imag- ing the scene that led up to the death of the boy — 'Herds of three-toed horses and gigantic wildebeest were already drinking along the sandy beaches . . .' There is then a long, digressive account of the excava- tion, mingled with diary entries from his colleagues and some history of the inter- pretation of fossil remains.

This is badly handled and disperses the excitement of the Prologue. There is some- thing rather thinly chummy about the Leakey-Lewin prose that flattens out

climaxes and rambles irritatingly. One seizes on the simple fact that the skeleton had made Leakey think about human origins with some gratitude. Similarly, the clear statement on page 67 at the opening of Part Two of the precise significance of the Turkana Boy comes as a relief. He was a homo erectus, a peak of apeness, after which things started to become more dis- tinctly human. This species was, Leakey believes, at the real beginning of the burgeoning of compassion, morality, and conscious aware- ness that today we cherish as marks of humanity.

The main body of the book now becomes an account of the evidence and competing theories about human evolution, again with a good deal of personal, anecdotal digres- sion. Once more there is an irritating dis- persal of interest. It is as if we were watching material being gathered for a book rather than reading the thing itself.

Occasionally there is a helpful thematic crystallisation. Leakey, for example, imag- ines the life of a group of Australopithecus hominids. They are basically baboon-like, except that they are bipedal. At first sight the troop of homo erectus he then describes looks similar. But socially they are differ- ent. There is less tension among the males and more co-operation in the group as a whole. The point is that co-operation has proved to be an evolutionary advantage, that creates a more complex social life and that, in turn, requires larger brains.

From such evidence Leakey sees the roots of humanity as benign rather than savage. Warfare, for him, arose not from our hunter-gatherer ancestors but from the territorial demands of agricultural civilisa- tions:

I do not believe that violence is an innate characteristic of humankind, merely an unfortunate adaptation of certain circum- stances.

The main bulk of the book orbits around such insights and outlines Leakey's current position on the various evolutionary theo- ries. There are long explanations of such matters as the conflict between the 'Mito- chondria' Eve' theory and the multi- 'It doesn't have to be the recipe for happiness. A half-hour, sugar-induced high would suffice.'

regional model. And there is some enter- taining guesswork about the possibility of a meeting between Cro-Magnon and Nean- derthal man — communication would have been 'limited at best', perhaps involving no more than a 'sort of ritualistic exchange of ivory pendants and fine artefacts'.

This is all good, informative stuff in the Attenborough/Bronowski mode of popular exposition. It is still far too slackly written, but the material is there if you want it and one cannot remain too irritated by the style in the face of Leakey's evident warmth and enthusiasm. But then we move on to the concluding sections, 'In Search of the Mod- ern Human Mind' and 'In Search of the Future', in which Leakey the fossil-hunter turns into Leakey the philosopher.

This is all unsatisfactory because Leakey does not appear to have very much to say. His discussion of consciousness, for exam- ple, simply embraces Nicholas Humphrey's idea of the Inner Eye, whereby we became self-conscious through the development of an ability to imagine what was going on in the minds of others — a huge evolutionary benefit in a complex, social structure.

He goes on to point out the vast signifi- cance of self-consciousness and then warns of the arrogance it engenders. It makes us feel 'special' and encourages an arrogant anthropocentrism, whereas, in fact, our consciousness is no more than 'a fragile entity, a cognitive illusion created by a few neuronal tricks in the midst of gray matter'. This is bog standard popular sciencespeak which takes perverse pleasure on insisting on how 'insignificant' we are. It is, for a variety of fairly obvious reasons, a mean- ingless posture in this form, and Leakey does not help by adding a coy, 'I won't stray into this treacherous philosophical territory' just after he has blundered in.

It is this clumsy coda rather than the literary shortcomings of the book which is its worst failing. Leakey is so obviously an attractive figure, wishing to communicate a great enthusiasm, that most people will be patient with the meanderings of this book. But the ambitions of the ending are in another category. Here the book exploits our feelings of goodwill towards an honourable man in order to make a leap far beyond paleo- anthropology. His 'goodness' is being trans- lated into a wider wisdom, the fossil-hunter becomes a preacher, warning us about the arrogance of self-consciousness and insisting on the closeness of our connection to all of nature. It will not work for the widely read because the ending is all platitudes. But, for others, it will, precisely because of the success of the relentless efforts of popular science to convince us that platitudes are enough, that origins, whether in physics or biology, amount to explanations, and that clear-eyed science has made the foggy vision of philosophers and theologians redundant. Believe any of that and you will believe anything. But, then again, people do.