ABSTRACT
Morris proposed several terms, including "the hunting ape" and "the killer ape," and since then other writers, partly in admiration and partly in rebuttal, have countered with "the moral ape" and "the empathetic ape" and "the territorial ape." At the same time, another part of our own substance hasn't yet been caught and distilled in any catchphrase, a quality whose distinctiveness deserves its own recognition as a hominoid achievement. we emerged as the only "wandering ape," a transformation that also let us become, uniquely, "the traveling ape." Since the early 1930s, three generations of this "centrally pivotal family," as the Leakeys have been called, have devoted themselves to searching East Africa for human ancestors. Part of an idea that Sir Grafton Elliot Smith came up with but never fully sketched out—his thought that human ancestors may have left the trees because they had to, "stimulated perhaps," he wrote, "by some local failure of the customary food"—now seems prescient.
