C. K. Brain is significant, not just for the baboons he has observed and
the fossils he has found, but for the fact that, in doing so, he refuted the
Killer Ape theory. He challenged Ardrey and many of his own colleagues
with his seminal work, The Hunters or the Hunted?: An Introduction to
African Cave Taphonomy* (1981). In it, Brain described his exhaustive
study of fossils he and others found in the Sterkfontein valley, a place
that has since been dubbed the “Cradle of Humankind.” Brain’s
conclusions were radical for the time: our ancestors were neither hunters
nor gratuitously homicidal; if we were fighting, he asserted, it was for our
very lives against a host of predators far better equipped than we were.
From a paleoanthropologist’s point of view, the Sterkfontein and
neighboring Swartkrans valleys represent the motherlode; for nearly a
century now, paleontologists have been excavating the caves and quarries
that pock these arid valleys west of Johannesburg. Over the years,
hundreds of fossils of baboons and early hominids have been found here,
including nearly intact skeletons, some of which are more than three
million years old. The region, which is now a World Heritage site, has
also yielded some of the oldest known evidence of controlled fire (one
million years BCE). Of particular interest to Brain was the fact that many
of these fossilized bones, hominid and otherwise, bear evidence of
predation. Big cats and hyenas haunted these caves, too; they still do, and
they offer valuable clues to our formative experiences with large,
dangerous animals.
There is no question that the world inhabited by our hominid forebears
was a perilous place at ground level: we were smaller and just about
everything else was bigger than today. Our carnivorous neighbors, in
whose eyes we would have been considered relatively small game, were
superior to us in every way that mattered. This long and precarious phase
in our early development, before we mastered tools and fire, may well
have inflicted the “wound” Robinson Jeffers alluded to in his untitled
poem, which also begged the pressing question: