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successfully, the weaker males as well as the stronger ones had to play their part. They had to play a central role and could not be thrust to the periphery of society, as happens in so many primate species. What is more, with his newly developed and deadly artificial weapons, the hunting ape male was under strong pressure to reduce any source of disharmony within the tribe. Thirdly, the development of a one-male one-female breeding unit meant that the offspring also benefited. The heavy task of rearing and training the slowly developing young demanded a cohesive family unit. In other groups of animals, whether they are fishes, birds or mammals, when there is too big a burden for one parent to bear alone, we see the development of a powerful pair-bond, tying the male and female parents together throughout the breeding season. This, too, is what occurred in the case of the hunting ape.
    In this way, the females were sure of their males’ support and were able to devote themselves to their maternal duties. The males were sure of their females’ loyalty, were prepared to leave them for hunting, and avoided fighting over them. And the offspring were provided with the maximum of care and attention. This certainly sounds like an ideal solution, but it involved a major change in primate socio-sexual behaviour and, as we shall see later, the process was never really perfected. It is dear from the behaviour of our species today that the trend was only partially completed and that our earlier primate urges keep on re-appearing in minor forms.
    This is the manner, then, in which the hunting ape took on the role of a lethal carnivore and changed his primate ways accordingly. I have suggested that they were basic biological changes rather than mere cultural ones, and that the new species changed genetically in this way. You may consider this an unjustified assumption. You may feel—such is the power of cultural indoctrination— that the modifications could easily have been made by training and the development of new traditions. I doubt this. One only has to look at the behaviour of our species at the present day to see that this is not so. Cultural developments have given us more and more impressive technological advances, but wherever these clash with our basic biological properties they meet strong resistance. The fundamental patterns of behaviour laid down in our early days as hunting apes still shine through all our affairs, no matter how lofty they may be. If the organisation of our earthier activities—our feeding, our fear, our aggression, our sex, our parental care—had been developed solely by cultural means, there can be little doubt that we would have got it under better control by now, and twisted it this way and that to suit the increasingly extraordinary demands put upon it by our technological advances. But we have not done so. We have repeatedly bowed our heads before our animal nature and tacitly admitted the existence of the complex beast that stirs within us. If we are honest, we will confess that it will take millions of years, and the same genetic process of natural selection that put it there, to change it. In the meantime, our unbelievably complicated civilisations will be able to prosper only if we design them in such a way that they do not clash with or tend to suppress our basic animal demands. Unfortunately our thinking brain is not always in harmony with our feeling brain. There are many examples showing where things have gone astray, and human societies have crashed or become stultified.
    In the chapters that follow we will try to see how this has happened, but first there is one question that must be answered—the question that was asked at the beginning of this chapter. When we first encountered this strange species we noted that it had one feature that stood out immediately from the rest, when it was placed as a specimen in a long row of primates. This feature was its naked skin, which led me as a