| Summary/Abstract |
At the tail end of an overland trip from Cairo to Cape Town in 2002, travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux – then more than 60 years old and writing his thirty-eighth book – had lunch with Professor Lee Berger, an archaeologist and paleoanthropologist at the University of the Witwatersrand, in a Johannesburg mall. Recalling their conversation in his book Dark Star Safari, Theroux recounts how the professor challenged him to make a threatening face. Theroux attempted his best grimace, but his failure to bare his teeth was, for Berger, a sign that humans were ‘undoubtedly a peaceful species’. According to him, the ‘paedo-morphic face’ (or child-like, rather than aggressive, features) that humans had developed showed that they
were largely defined by ‘peacefulness and cooperation’ rather than conflict. ‘Warfare is symbolic,’ he concluded.
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