Robert Ardrey ‘African Genesis’ 1961

A few quotes:
‘…that remarkable killer, Australopithecus africanus, the last animal before man…our last direct ancestor in the animal world…. Man is a predator with an instinct to kill and a genetic cultural affinity for the weapon.’
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‘We and our greater philosophers must grant, I believe, that the masters of a universal society [i.e., “One World” government] with the aid of a captive science might just possibly succeed in producing, over a long period, a lasting answer to the problem of our animal nature: a universal human slave inherently obedient to other people’s reason.’

‘Any animal with a capacity for learning must in part be a product of his environment. Any animal with a capacity for hunger must in part be dominated by economic motives. But to believe that the fascination with war and weapons, or the imagined accomplishment of a perfect crime, or unyielding temptation to lord it over somebody or everlasting drives to acquire someone else’s wealth; to believe that such as these find their source in human society and may be exorcised forever by environmental manipulation is to make of a man a most modest blackboard on which any other may write his name.’
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‘The human being in the most fundamental aspects of his soul and body is nature’s last if temporary work on the subject of the armed predator. And human history must be read in these terms….
Weapons preceded man. Whether man is in fact a biological invention evolved to suit the purposes of the weapon must be a matter of future debate…’
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‘No man can regard the way of war as good. It has simply been our way. No man can evaluate the eternal contest of weapons as anything but the sheerest waste and the sheerest folly. It has been simply our only means of final arbitration. Any man can suggest reasonable alternatives to the judgement of arms. But we are not creatures of reason except in our own eyes.’
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‘I assert first the paradox that our predatory animal origin represents for mankind its last best hope . . . we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen..’
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‘Civilization is a compensatory consequence of our killing imperative; the one could not exist without the other.

The limitation of conscience lies in its territorial nature…. Conscience organizes hatred as it organizes love.

Far antedating the predatory urge in our animal nature, far more deeply buried than conscience or territory or society lies that shadowy, mysterious, undefinable command of the kind, the instinct for order. And so, when a predatory species came rapidly to evolve its inherent talent for disorder, natural selection favoured as a factor in human survival the equally rapid evolvement of that sublimating, inhibiting, super-territorial, institution which we call loosely, civilization.
It is a jerry-built structure, and a more unattractive edifice could scarcely be imagined. Its greyness is appalling. Its walls are cracked and eggshell thin. Its foundations are shallow, its antiquity slight. No bands boom, no flags fly, no glamorous symbols invoke our nostalgic hearts. Yet however humiliating the path may be, man beset by anarchy, banditry, chaos and extinction must at last resort turn to that chamber of horrors, human enlightenment. For he has nowhere else to turn.’