Books: Into the Open Spaces

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THE NAKED APE, A ZOOLOGIST'S STUDY OF THE HUMAN ANIMAL by Desmond Morris. 252 pages. McGraw-Hill. $5.95.

There are 193 living species of monkeys and apes, 192 of which are covered with hair. Number 193 is the naked ape called man. Anthropologists have filled libraries with evidence that shows how far man has grown away from the ape, but in this latest of the current spate of ape books, British Zoologist Desmond Morris takes a different tack.

He argues that Homo sapiens, for all the brilliant achievements of his civilization, would be far better off if he admitted that he still has a lot of the old ape left in him.

Drawing on established anthropological and zoological theories, and embellishing them with some wildly imaginative concepts of his own, Morris traces man's sharp divergence from the other primates back about 15 million years. At that time, he says, a sudden change in climate occurred that sharply reduced the size of the forests and forced a still hairy ape to go foraging in the great open spaces.

Separated from arboreal security and easy pickings of fruits and nuts, man's ancestors, says Morris, were forced to become hunters to survive. In the swift pace of the hunt, those with the least body hair became least overheated and ran down the most game; through a process of evolutionary selection, man gradually shed his furry coat entirely. Those who competed most effectively with the stronger and swifter carnivores of the open spaces were those who began to walk and run in an upright position, increasing their speed and freeing their hands to grasp weapons of the hunt. Those who learned to outsmart their four-legged competitors were the ones whose brains grew larger and whose maturation rate slowed down, extending their childhood and giving them more time to learn the lessons of survival from their parents.

Pair-Bond. Emergence from the forest, says Morris, also converted man into "the sexiest primate alive." To ensure that the female would be faithful to the male while he was away hunting, and that the male would remain with the female to help in the extended rearing of the more slowly developing offspring, the "pair-bond," or love, came to Homo sapiens. At the same time, sexual relations became more rewarding to both male and female; the once brief mating season turned into a year-round affair.

In describing the development of man's sexual attitudes, Morris offers some ingenious observations. At some point in time, he says, the male of the species began to make his sexual approach from the front of the female instead of from the rear. As a result, the male was no longer provided with the immediate attraction of the female buttocks. It is in compensation for that loss, Morris insists, that women are now endowed with an enticement that no other female primate possesses: the "protuberant, hemispherical breasts" that "must surely be copies of the fleshy buttocks."