African Genesis

This book has been read, minor colour change to orginal red cloth bindings to covers. Some minor markings first inner pages from previous owner. Beautiful inland expanding colour plates. Some minor wear to upper edge of inner pages, original text not obscured or damaged. Spine intact, no creases. ""Not in innocence, and not in Asia, was mankind born." So opens Robert Ardrey's earthshaking 1961 classic African Genesis, his first professional foray into the scientific realm.

In 1955 Ardrey travelled to Africa to examine the collection of the then-obscure paleontologist Raymond Dart. He saw, culled from a cave occupied by early humans, a collection of antelope jawbones perfect for sawing, and antelope forelegs perfect for clubbing. He saw the skull of a juvenile proto-human, apparently bashed in. A growing body of evidence suggested that man had evolved on the African continent from carnivorous, predatory stock, who had also, long before man, achieved the use of weapons.

An acclaimed dramatist, Ardrey's interest in the African discoveries sprang less from purely scientific grounds than from the radical new light they cast on the eternal question: Why do we behave as we do? Are we naturally inclined towards war and weapons? From 1955 to 1961, Ardrey commuted between the museums and libraries and laboratories of the North, and the games reserves and fossil beds of Africa trying to answer that question.

The result was African Genesis. In a sweeping work that encompasses the evolutionary roots of nationalism and patriotism, private property and social order, hierarchy and status-seeking, and even conscience, Ardrey tells a story of man never before heard, and redefines what exactly it means to be human." Good Reads "Robert Ardrey was born in the South Side of Chicago in 1908. He attended the University of Chicago to study biology, but became the writing protegé of Thornton Wilder. He graduated in the midst of the Great Depression and supported himself with odd jobs while he wrote under Wilder's watchful eye. His first play, Star Spangled, opened on Broadway in 1935.

He continued to have plays produced on Broadway. His most famous, Thunder Rock, became a sensation in wartime London, and is now regarded as an international classic. Ardrey's plays caught the attention of MGM executive Samuel Goldwyn; in 1938 Ardrey moved to Hollywood, where he would become MGM's highest paid writer. He is credited with over a dozen films, including The Three Musketeers (1948, with Gene Kelly), The Wonderful Country (1959, with Robert Mitchum), and Khartoum (1966, directed by Basil Dearden, starring Charlton Heston and Laurence Olivier) for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Screenplay.

In the 1950s, increasingly disenchanted with Hollywood, Ardrey travelled to Africa to write a series of articles. This trip renewed his interest in human origins, and he returned to his academic training in the sciences. In 1956 he moved with his wife and two sons to Geneva, and spent the next five years travelling and researching in Eastern and Southern Africa, conducting research for what would become his first scientific work, African Genesis (1961).

African Genesis and Ardrey's subsequent books were massively popular and deeply controversial. They overturned core assumptions of the social sciences and led to a revolution in thinking about human nature. Fundamentally Ardrey argued that human behavior was not entirely socially determined, rather evolutionarily inherited instincts help determine behavior and format large-scale social phenomena. Subsequent science has largely vindicated his hypotheses.

Robert Ardrey is the winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the inaugural Sidney Howard Memorial Award, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and received an Academy Award Nomination for best screenplay for his film Khartoum. Time magazine named African Genesis the most notable book of the 1960s." Good Reads