Man: ape in wolf's cothing?
Perhaps the most famous of scientific frauds was the fake Piltdown Skull of 1910, a
"missing link" fabricated by a person unknown. That anonymous joker put together an
ape's jaw with a human skull. Desmond Morris has grafted the most ignorant fairy
tales about human society onto a body of basically sound ideas about human biological
evolution. The Naked Ape is a barefaced hoax.
As a gimmick, Morris pretends to describe the human animal just as it would be
pictured by a zoologist if it were a newly-discovered species. "Naked ape" is a clinical
term (like "black-footed squirrel") which is supposed to denote men's most noticeable
characteristics: their lack of fur. But evidently, Morris has become a rich man because
to millions of his readers, nudity is a novelty. It should be obvious that the most
important thing about human animals is not that they are naked, but that they are
clothed. In other words, they produce what they consume; they turn the artificial into
the necessary, and (like Morris) sometimes confuse it with the natural.
His book is a hymn of praise to modern capitalism. All the current practices,
preoccupations. superstitions, myths and manners are, according to Morris, highly
admirable. Furthermore, they are natural because they stem from man's past as a
wolflike, monogamous, predatory killer. Frequently this approach becomes so
manifestly silly that we are tempted to suspect the author of perpetrating a spoof, a
sarcastic attack on the ludicrous legends of human nature:
One of the essential features of the hunt is that it is a tremendous gamble and so
it is not surprising that gambling, in the many stylised forms it takes today,
should have such a strong appeal.
We can safely wager that not one of the fish-eyed zombies who stand for hours in front
of a fruit machine has yet thought of defending his addiction with the excuse that it
stems from the bloodthirsty excitement of his prehistoric past. Derision is the only
intellige