My favourite anthropologist

Richard Leakey certainly has a pedigree. His parents Louis and Mary practically invented paleo-anthropology; through their discoveries, they were the first to unearth a scientific context for the emergence of the human race.

One of the ideas that immediately began to carry weight after Darwin's "Origin of the Species" is the notion that humans war and compete because it comes naturally - we're all fighting in the primordial ooze to survive.

Leakey's take is almost a quasi-spiritual one.

When he looks at human prehistory, he does not see a species whose most obvious characteristic is internicine conflict. He believes that, in fact, what singles human beings out is that we became adept at altruism.

What is his evidence? Well, for starters, look at language. Where primates can convey significant information to each other through gestures, eye contact, and posture, human beings can share themselves, their innermost selves, by manipulating their vocal chords into a recursive vocabulary of sounds with syntax and structure - language. And language, if nothing else, is a tool for understanding (and making oneself understood) with tremendous subtlety.

He looks at sharing in human and primate cultures. Chimpanzees have a certain kind of rudimentary sharing and begging, but nothing comparable to what humans have. In every human society on Earth, it is common for a person to give of not only their surplus, but even of their need, to another, even a complete stranger.

And in the fossil record, there is no evidence of war - anywhere - prior to the time that human beings became sedentary and agricultural. Once we began to have possessions, we began to fight over them.

Perhaps that is why, deeply rooted in our faith, we have the idea that sin began with Adam and Eve. We were made in the image of God - altruistic beings not inclined to selfishness. When God looks favourably on Abel's sacrifice (meat - that of a nomad), and frowns on Cain's (grain - that of the sedentary 'civilized' man,) maybe He was trying to tell us something?