ABSTRACT
What images come to mind when someone says “human evolution”? Is it perhaps a series of gradually evolving males stretching across a page, from a knuckle-walking ape on the left to a fully upright-walking modern specimen on the right? The first crouching hominid carries a stone, the next a club, and finally, a briefcase or a gun, depending on the artist’s politics. Perhaps it’s the image of the Australopithecine “Lucy” and her mate, described in Chapter I? Or an African desert scene, such as in the opening of Stanley Kubrick’s film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which two bands of agitated apemen battle over a waterhole and suddenly discover that a bone can be a weapon: Voila! Intelligence is born! Or is it a more idyllic picture outside a cave where fur-clad men with clubs are dragging home an outsized deer carcass as women suckle babes, tend fires, and scrape skins? Maybe it’s a cave painting of stick-figure males, supposedly at war, or else hunting gorgeously portrayed exotic animals.
