The Soul of the Ape

This is a difficult book to review. The essential core is Eugene Marais´ manuscript incorporating his thinking on the evolution of consciousness, and the persistence of unconscious instinct in primates and humans. The author studied law, and some medicine apparently, before being swept up in the

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Boer war - on the losing side. Following the war (1903 perphaps) he retreated to the bush, and spent the next three years observing and studying a troop of baboons. As Robert Ardrey (who has written an extensive introduction to this book) points out, it was another sixty years before anyone again conducted such careful fieldwork with primates in the wild. Marais wrote intelligently, and in many ways presciently, on the question of nature and nurture in primates, virtually laying out the template for all subsequent studies. However - and this is where the story becomes the story - his work was largely (and indeed the manuscript literally) lost until 1961 when Ardrey dedicated his ´African Genesis´ to Marais, and until 1968 when the manuscript resurfaced.

The power of Marais is not so much that he has explicated a complete theory of (in Ardrey´s words) ¨..the evolutionary theory of the subconscious mind in man¨, but that he was possibly the first to set out to do so, that he built his theory on direct observation of primates in the wild, and that although his entire life was lived under the shadow of tragedy he managed to do so much. Reading this book is not so much an exercise in coming to grips with evolutionary psychology, but a homage - an extended dedication is it were - to a man who perhaps better than many perceived the frailty and potential of mankinds´ character and intelligence.

One hopes that someday someone will reissue Marais´ short stories about baboon life (originally published as ´My Friends the Baboons´) alongside this manuscript, with Ardrey´s introduction (and a more sympathetic cover illustration).

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