ABSTRACT
John R. Durant, in addressing this issue of the mythological character of theories of human evolution, points out how the ‘beast in man’ myth, in particular, has been carried over from Christianity into, first, Erasmus Darwin’s own model of human descent, and then into the twentieth century in S. Freud, R. Dart, R. Ardrey and K. Lorenz. The researcher’s ideological or political appraisal of the present defines what it is that the study of human evolution is, in the final analysis, explaining. Writers on human evolution are of course haunted by the ever-present possibility of a dramatic find turning up the week before publication and rendering their efforts obsolete at birth. While this text was being written there have been at least two major finds in East Africa, one an extremely early Sivapithecus fossil and the other a nearly complete skeleton of a Homo erectus youth whose mature height would have been around 6 foot.
