THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 27, 1994 TAG: 9411220578
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY CHRISTOPHER DINSMORE
LENGTH: Medium: 69 lines
THE ORIGIN OF HUMANKIND
RICHARD LEAKEY
Basic Books. 171 pp. $20.
RICHARD LEAKEY opens The Origin of Humankind with a preface in which he says, ``It is every anthropologist's dream to unearth a complete skeleton of an ancient human ancestor.''
He goes on to describe the frustration of sketchy clues - bone fragments and teeth - that most paleoanthropologists experience. Most paleoanthropologists. But not Leakey.
He inherited the ``Leakey luck'' from his renowned parents, Mary and Louis, who did groundbreaking work in human origins in the late 1950s and '60s. Digging around the shores of Lake Turkana in his native Kenya, Richard Leakey found one of the oldest known intact skulls of a human ancestor. He also discovered Turkana boy, a complete, 1.5 million-year-old skeleton of a Homo erectus, a species that later evolved into today's humans.
In The Origin of Humankind, Leakey sets out to sketch a layperson's version of the scientific debate surrounding human evolution. Like an aged professor resting on his laurels, Leakey lectures readers as if they were first-year college students in a survey course.
Leakey has been out of the debate on human evolution for a number of years. In 1989 he was named head of the Kenya Wildlife Service; earlier this year he resigned the post after the Kenyan president stripped the agency of much of its power. Leakey is largely credited with turning around a long decline in Kenya's wildlife population and with reviving its tourism base. But along the way he made enemies who accused him of racism and of assigning a greater value to animals than to humans. In the end his political opponents outmaneuvered him.
His book traces the chronology of human evolution starting with man's divergence from the great apes and leading to the ascendance of anatomically modern human beings. The book closes with three chapters on how art, language and consciousness arose.
Leakey is at his best when writing about what he knows best - the early steps along the evolutionary road taken 1 million to 7 million years ago. He authoritatively describes the fits and starts of ancient relatives, some of whom died out and others who later evolved into Homo sapiens.
But the closer Leakey gets to the present and the further he gets from the fossil record, the less clear his presentation becomes. He even tries his hand at a fictional account of what life might have been like at an ancient hominid site.
Leakey's research, on the other hand, is excellent and timely. He cites a paper written as recently as February. In each chapter he cites numerous sources and points of view about the various steps in human evolution. Rather than being authoritative, though, the content seems addled.
The book needed a last chapter to tie together informational loose threads. It also could have done with less of Leakey's theorizing on the evolution of human consciousness.
The development of art and language can be determined to some extent by an examination of the fossil record, but consciousness - and Leakey admits this much - is a great unknown. Leakey pushes on anyway, rendering a sophomoric rehash of the philosophical and psychological arguments about whether, how and to what extent humans and animals are conscious of themselves and their environment. MEMO: Christopher Dinsmore is a staff writer. by CNB