Robert Ardrey Papers

• 1908 Born Robert James Ardrey in Chicago on October 16, second child of Robert Leslie and Marie (Haswell) Ardrey.
• 1920 Ardrey's father dies of influenza.
• 1926 Graduates from Hyde Park High School.
• 1927 Enters the University of Chicago.
• 1930 Attends Thornton Wilder's seminar on creative writing; graduates from the University of Chicago with a Ph.B. degree and a Phi Beta Kappa key.
• 1933-1934 Lectures on Mayan culture as a guide at the Chicago World's Fair.
• 1936 Ardrey's first play, Star Spangled, is produced in New York.
• 1937 Receives a Guggenheim Fellowship "to pursue research and creative writing in the drama."
• 1938 Has two plays produced in New York: Casey Jones and How to Get Tough About It; marries Helen Johnson June 12.
• 1939 Ardrey's play, Thunder Rock, is produced in New York.
• 1940 Receives the Playwright Company's Sidney Howard Award for Thunder Rock; RKO releases They Knew What They Wanted, the first of almost a dozen motion pictures with screenplays by Ardrey.
• 194? Works in the Office of War Information in New York.
• 1946 Ardrey's play, Jeb, is produced in New York.
• 1955 Visits Africa for the first time; meets Raymond A. Dart for the first time.
• 1957 Publishes a series of articles on Hollywood in the Reporter.
• 1958 Ardrey's Shadow of Heroes: A Play in Five Acts from the Hungarian Passion has its first production at the Piccadilly Theatre in London
• 1960 Divorces his first wife; marries Berdine Grunewald, a leading South African actress, on August 11.
• 1961 Atheneum publishes African Genesis: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man; Shadow of Heroes is produced in New York.
• 1962 Moves to Rome, Italy.
• 1963 Receives a Wilkie Brothers' Foundation Grant.
• 1966 Atheneum publishes The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations; Ardrey's screenplay for Khartoum (United Artists, 1966) receives an Academy Award nomination.
• 1968 Atheneum publishes Plays of Three Decades, which includes Thunder Rock, Jeb and Shadow of Heroes.
• 1969 Atheneum publishes the American edition of Eugene Marais' The Soul of the Ape with an introduction by Ardrey.
• 1970 Atheneum publishes The Social Contract: A Personal Inquiry into the Evolutionary Sources of Order and Disorder.
• 1971 Selected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; writes an outline for a thirteen episode documentary to be entitled "The Evolutionary Nature of Man," a BBC project which is never produced.
• 1972 Receives the Professional Achievement Award of the University of Chicago Alumni Association; "Toxic Substances in Plants and the Food Habits of Early Man" published in Science; Wolper begins production of The Ardrey Papers, a feature length film on human evolution.
• 1975 The Ardrey Papers, now entitled The Animal Within, receives its first public showing in Chicago.
• 1976 Atheneum publishes The Hunting Hypothesis: Personal Conclusion Concerning the Evolutionary Nature of Man.
• 1977 Moves from Rome to Kalk Bay, Cape Town, South Africa.
• 1978 Completes his last American lecture tour.
• 1979 Finishes the manuscript, "The Education of Robert Ardrey: An Autobiography."
• 1980 Dies of lung cancer in Kalk Bay, South Africa, January 14.

1908

Born Robert James Ardrey in Chicago on October 16, second child of Robert Leslie and Marie (Haswell) Ardrey.

1920

Ardrey's father dies of influenza.

1926

Graduates from Hyde Park High School.

1927

Enters the University of Chicago.

1930

Attends Thornton Wilder's seminar on creative writing; graduates from the University of Chicago with a Ph.B. degree and a Phi Beta Kappa key.

1933-1934

Lectures on Mayan culture as a guide at the Chicago World's Fair.

1936

Ardrey's first play, Star Spangled, is produced in New York.

1937

Receives a Guggenheim Fellowship "to pursue research and creative writing in the drama."

1938

Has two plays produced in New York: Casey Jones and How to Get Tough About It; marries Helen Johnson June 12.

1939

Ardrey's play, Thunder Rock, is produced in New York.

1940

Receives the Playwright Company's Sidney Howard Award for Thunder Rock; RKO releases They Knew What They Wanted, the first of almost a dozen motion pictures with screenplays by Ardrey.

194?

Works in the Office of War Information in New York.

1946

Ardrey's play, Jeb, is produced in New York.

1955

Visits Africa for the first time; meets Raymond A. Dart for the first time.

1957

Publishes a series of articles on Hollywood in the Reporter.

1958

Ardrey's Shadow of Heroes: A Play in Five Acts from the Hungarian Passion has its first production at the Piccadilly Theatre in London

1960

Divorces his first wife; marries Berdine Grunewald, a leading South African actress, on August 11.

1961

Atheneum publishes African Genesis: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man; Shadow of Heroes is produced in New York.

1962

Moves to Rome, Italy.

1963

Receives a Wilkie Brothers' Foundation Grant.

1966

Atheneum publishes The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations; Ardrey's screenplay for Khartoum (United Artists, 1966) receives an Academy Award nomination.

1968

Atheneum publishes Plays of Three Decades, which includes Thunder Rock, Jeb and Shadow of Heroes.

1969

Atheneum publishes the American edition of Eugene Marais' The Soul of the Ape with an introduction by Ardrey.

1970

Atheneum publishes The Social Contract: A Personal Inquiry into the Evolutionary Sources of Order and Disorder.

1971

Selected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; writes an outline for a thirteen episode documentary to be entitled "The Evolutionary Nature of Man," a BBC project which is never produced.

1972

Receives the Professional Achievement Award of the University of Chicago Alumni Association; "Toxic Substances in Plants and the Food Habits of Early Man" published in Science; Wolper begins production of The Ardrey Papers, a feature length film on human evolution.

1975

The Ardrey Papers, now entitled The Animal Within, receives its first public showing in Chicago.

1976

Atheneum publishes The Hunting Hypothesis: Personal Conclusion Concerning the Evolutionary Nature of Man.

1977

Moves from Rome to Kalk Bay, Cape Town, South Africa.

1978

Completes his last American lecture tour.

1979

Finishes the manuscript, "The Education of Robert Ardrey: An Autobiography."

1980

Dies of lung cancer in Kalk Bay, South Africa, January 14.

To the world of Hollywood of the 1940s, Robert Ardrey was a screenplay writer whose juxtaposition of visual and sound sequences could create an atmosphere drawing on all the senses as well as the intellect. For the audience of his play, Thunder Rock, in the 1950s Ardrey created a multidimensional impression of an historical era complete with jostling social classes. In 1952 he presented a distillation of panhuman institutions as a background to political satire in a novel entitled Brotherhood of Fear. Then to the astonishment and initial dismay of the scientific community of the early 1960s, Robert Ardrey without the expected academic apprenticeship published the immediately successful and controversial African Genesis, which popularized a series of esoteric and intricately interrelated concepts about the origins of man. From this point on he became a respected authority on a way of viewing human nature which paved the way ultimately for the extension of the field of population genetics to human behavior. There is no real intellectual disjuncture between Ardrey the playwright and Ardrey the anthropologist. He brought to all his endeavors, whether film, play, novel, or academic tome, the ability to hierarchize and distill from a range of contributing factors and produce an infallibly convincing impact on his audience. In addition a perceptiveness about human nature was coupled with a need to search for underlying and uniting principles. Once aware of a principle he was able to apply it retrospectively, so that past experience, serendipitous information and active inquiries all coalesced to provide grist for his analytic mind. The notion that human beings were on an evolutionary continuum with the animals and shared a consequent core of behavior proved irresistible to him. Once convinced that man evolved from an ape species in Africa all the lines of evidence and implications of this discovery had to be imagined, explored, tested and the outcome then communicated to the world in a creative form. The prolific writer of plays and screenplays became a prodigious correspondent in the quest for information from specialists in paleontology, anatomy, geology, zoology, ethology, botany, primatology to throw light on the central themes of his new enthusiasm and inspire three more books. Robert Ardrey was born in Chicago in 1908. In characteristic spirit he provides in his unpublished autobiography enough information from different perspectives and levels to allow the reader to place and evaluate all events in concert with others. The immediate matrix for his teenage years was that of Al Capone's neighborhood in Chicago, with its opportunities for eyewitness analysis of the rules of human violence. Ardrey places this arena in the broader context of world politics, national events and human achievement in a number of fields, such as aviation, literature, live theater and music. Ardrey the young man, rescued both from a national and his own personal depression by his sister's gift of music lessons, was able to find work as a pianist in the speakeasies of the Prohibition era. He was at this time very obviously aware of the contemporary renaissance in the theater, brought about by Eugene O'Neill, Elmer Rice and Maxwell Anderson, as well as the impact on music and society of individual composers such as Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Vincent Youmans and Irving Berlin. He exhibited as much obvious pride in the human achievements of the time as he did glee at some of the rather dubious survival strategies, necessitated by the Depression. His own creativity in this respect included the faking of Gregorian chants to suit the requirements of his employer's sermons. Ardrey's natural propensity for looking at topics from a range of perspectives was stimulated and reinforced by a course offered at the University of Chicago during his sophomore year. The Nature of the World and Man explored the nature of the world's beginnings from the point of view of an astronomer, physicist, chemist, geologist, zoologist, physiologist, anatomist and geneticist. Enthusiasm for this scheme of things remained latent, while Ardrey pursued the professional possibilities sparked by Thornton Wilder's course in the techniques of play writing. By 1932, two years after graduation, Ardrey had written a novel, a play and a novella none of which he attempted to publish. Star Spangled (1936), Ardrey's first play to appear on stage, explored the cultural conflict in different generations of a Polish immigrant family. Despite poor reviews this play earned him a Guggenheim Foundation award to pursue research in creative writing in drama. Something in the spirit of théâtre engagé in Europe, his plays tend to portray working people dealing with the problems particular to their own social stratum or ethnic group. Casey Jones (1938) centers around railway workers. How to Get Tough About It (1938) deals with cement mill workers and their struggles with labor racketeers. Thunder Rock, the most successful of his plays, later made into a film, portrayed Europeans in the 1940s, a time of high maternal death rates, conservatism in medicine, Brahms and Florence Nightingale. Jeb (1946) was the story of a black man made militant by his failure, despite training, to acquire work deemed that of a white man. Some of Ardrey=s plays were moderately successful but most floundered due to prevailing misfortunes in the theater world. Meanwhile, however, he had acquired a contract with Samuel Goldwyn to write screenplays for a just burgeoning Hollywood. In his autobiography Ardrey attributes his popularity among producers as a screenwriter to his ability for providing technical directions for the camera along with the dialogue and scene settings. His films tend to be exuberant both in action and setting, with more swashbuckling and pursuits on horseback than soliloquy. His scripts give details for screen settings busy with local color. Privy through insight to the forces of human behavior in Hollywood, Ardrey was in general cheerfully skeptical as to the motives of political groups. He became passionately interested, however, in a number of political issues affecting those involved creatively in the film industry. He sought ways to outwit the outmoded censorship of the Hays Office, which was domineered by the Roman Catholic Church. In anger and something akin to grief he joined in the Writers' Guild battle against the blacklisting of those with contrived communist sympathies. He exhibited the same uncharacteristic vehemence towards Richard Nixon and his whole campaign, and for a brief spell poured all his energies into the successful promotion of Adlai Stevenson's political career by writing and producing a television biography of him. In 1955 Ardrey was half planning a trip to Africa with a Hollywood colleague. A chance presented itself for the trip to pay for itself. Clearly acknowledged as someone whose judgment on broad issues was as much to be trusted as was his ability to communicate his opinions in a witty and concise style, Ardrey was commissioned by the editor of the Reporter to write about any African topics he chose. Several people saw in Ardrey's trip to Africa an opportunity to avoid the vagaries of trans African mail and entrusted him with personal missives and quests. Each somehow contributed to his sudden and impassioned interest in man's early origins. Richard Flint, a geologist, sought information on various African lake beds. Kenneth Oakley of the British Museum, perhaps the most significant of all, gave Ardrey a plaster cast of a perforated pre human skull plate, with instructions to ascertain if the wound had been inflicted before or after death. What Ardrey described as his "B Picture Instinct" led him to seek out Raymond Dart, head of the Anatomy Department of Witwatersrand Medical School. Dart was rumored to have discovered in conjunction with pre human remains weapons and other evidence of hunting, meat eating and murder. Ardrey developed deep and lasting affection for those whose personal and intellectual integrity and acumen he admired. He sought their advice, expressed unstinting appreciation, credited them with insight and discovery which he might have accorded himself, and engaged in regular correspondence with them. Raymond Dart and his ideas commanded Ardrey's immediate sympathies and loyalty. One of Dart's australopithecine skulls, known later as the Taung baby, showed simultaneous evidence of a small brain case and the centralized foramen magnum of a bipedal creature. This combination of anatomical features was in conflict with the then popular notion that brain development preceded upright posture in the evolutionary scheme. The skull's dentition was arranged in a semi circular formation, thought unique to man, and exhibited neither exaggerated defensive canines nor the heavy grinding molars of a plant eater. These characteristics, together with the geological evidence that edible vegetation was scarce in the relevant area, led Ardrey to share Dart's conviction that the skull belonged to a carnivorous human ancestor. Based on a general acceptance of the Old Testament and the constrained archaeology of biblical scholars, it was a widely held and untested assumption in the Western world that man had first appeared in Asia, probably in the fertile strip between the Tigris and the Euphrates. Among paleontologists such as Louis Leakey and his followers, however, it had long been obvious that man had evolved in Africa. The widespread popularity of African Genesis, published in 1961, made this immediate common knowledge. At the same time in persuasive and elegant prose Ardrey described successively more sinister scenarios from the archives of pre and early man. Based on Dart's interpretation of the fossils, he strongly suggested that the use of weapons in the pursuit of indispensable meat for food not only preceded by millions of years but also brought about the increase in size and complexity of the human brain. Less palatable to followers of Christ, Rousseau, Marx and Freud alike was the notion that man in his primal state was inclined to deal fatal blows to his fellows. Moreover, man's ingenuity was derived from and remains primarily geared towards the development of weapons for use in territorial displays, threats and defense. The Territorial Imperative (1966) sets out to show that defense of territory is an ubiquitous pan species behavior. At a time when ethological studies were few and corroboration between those few almost non existent, Ardrey's correspondence bears testimony to a tireless tracking down of information on territorial behavior in as many species as possible. Possession of territory emerged from his research as an almost universal pre requisite to mating and as such the almost sole object of intra species male fighting. Ardrey suggested then that the human male, no less than other vertebrate males, is prompted for his own selective advantage by the territorial imperative, and this in tandem with his propensity for weapons makes war and violence the inevitable outcome of limited space. A stern critic of inferences about animal or human behavior based on observation of laboratory or zoo animals, Ardrey suggested in The Social Contract (1970) that much light could be thrown on human problems by studying animals in the wild. From a number of ethological studies he demonstrated that successful animal societies have biological mechanisms for restricting their numbers and well defined dominance hierarchies for integrating group and individual needs. Since man had evolved essentially as a social animal, Ardrey suggested that ethology could provide better insights into the causes and solutions of human stress than either psychology or sociology. The title of Ardrey's final book, The Hunting Hypothesis (1976), provided anthropology with a convenient label for a sequence of concepts, neither originating from Ardrey, nor interrelated in quite the way he described. Oakley in 1954, Washburn and Avis in 1958, Washburn and Devore in 1961 and Campbell in 1974 had all previously published articles claiming that hunting and meat eating had either triggered human intellectual and anatomical evolution or been instrumental in shaping social and sexual behavior. Beyond the evidence of dentition, stone tools and bones already sifted through in his previous books, Ardrey first sought proof of actual dependence on meat. Based on information garnered from paleobotanists, he first made a case for the absence of vegetation on the Pleistocene savannah other than grass and seeds. From biochemists and nutritionists he sought to establish that the digestive systems of herbivores, probably consumed by early man, were essential links in the conversion of linoleic acid in grass to the long chain fatty acids essential to brain and neural development. On the basis of testimony from plant toxin experts, he suggested the irrelevance to the early hominid diet of any foodstuffs only rendered edible by cooking. Coprolite analysts, solicited by Ardrey, reported an absence of plant remains among the limited Neanderthal samples which they had examined. In this way, Ardrey systematically collected evidence to test the essential basic assumption that early hominids had depended on meat for survival. He then drew on several ethological studies of the social carnivores to supplement what had already been said by Bernard Campbell, Sherwood Washburn and Irvin Devore about the probable way of life of early and even fairly recent man. It is Ardrey's distillation from so many varied sources in The Hunting Hypothesis that has given the now standard anthropology textbook portrait of Homo sapiens as a super intelligent primate with wits honed, cooperation fostered and social arrangements shaped by hunting strategies. By long and illogical tradition in the social sciences, proffering an explanation is tantamount to condoning, if not championing, all the abuses and variations of the situation explained. In the name of the hunting hypothesis the idea, not the book Ardrey has been repeatedly attacked, by cultural anthropologists in particular, as an apologist and proponent of military and personal aggression on the one hand, and oppressive male/female power structures on the other. This is not consistent with the content of his four books, in which Ardrey exhibits an appreciation, which goes beyond pragmatism, for man at his most noble and altruistic and a deep regret for the results of more sinister human tendencies. It is at even greater variance with the character of Ardrey himself, who emerges unmistakably from the tone of his plays, films, political activities, books and above all his correspondence as a man of observant and exuberant compassion and enduring concern for others.

1908

Born Robert James Ardrey in Chicago on October 16, second child of Robert Leslie and Marie (Haswell) Ardrey.

1920

Ardrey's father dies of influenza.

1926

Graduates from Hyde Park High School.

1927

Enters the University of Chicago.

1930

Attends Thornton Wilder's seminar on creative writing; graduates from the University of Chicago with a Ph.B. degree and a Phi Beta Kappa key.

1933-1934

Lectures on Mayan culture as a guide at the Chicago World's Fair.

1936

Ardrey's first play, Star Spangled, is produced in New York.

1937

Receives a Guggenheim Fellowship "to pursue research and creative writing in the drama."

1938

Has two plays produced in New York: Casey Jones and How to Get Tough About It; marries Helen Johnson June 12.

1939

Ardrey's play, Thunder Rock, is produced in New York.

1940

Receives the Playwright Company's Sidney Howard Award for Thunder Rock; RKO releases They Knew What They Wanted, the first of almost a dozen motion pictures with screenplays by Ardrey.

194?

Works in the Office of War Information in New York.

1946

Ardrey's play, Jeb, is produced in New York.

1955

Visits Africa for the first time; meets Raymond A. Dart for the first time.

1957

Publishes a series of articles on Hollywood in the Reporter.

1958

Ardrey's Shadow of Heroes: A Play in Five Acts from the Hungarian Passion has its first production at the Piccadilly Theatre in London

1960

Divorces his first wife; marries Berdine Grunewald, a leading South African actress, on August 11.

1961

Atheneum publishes African Genesis: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man; Shadow of Heroes is produced in New York.

1962

Moves to Rome, Italy.

1963

Receives a Wilkie Brothers' Foundation Grant.

1966

Atheneum publishes The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations; Ardrey's screenplay for Khartoum (United Artists, 1966) receives an Academy Award nomination.

1968

Atheneum publishes Plays of Three Decades, which includes Thunder Rock, Jeb and Shadow of Heroes.

1969

Atheneum publishes the American edition of Eugene Marais' The Soul of the Ape with an introduction by Ardrey.

1970

Atheneum publishes The Social Contract: A Personal Inquiry into the Evolutionary Sources of Order and Disorder.

1971

Selected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; writes an outline for a thirteen episode documentary to be entitled "The Evolutionary Nature of Man," a BBC project which is never produced.

1972

Receives the Professional Achievement Award of the University of Chicago Alumni Association; "Toxic Substances in Plants and the Food Habits of Early Man" published in Science; Wolper begins production of The Ardrey Papers, a feature length film on human evolution.

1975

The Ardrey Papers, now entitled The Animal Within, receives its first public showing in Chicago.

1976

Atheneum publishes The Hunting Hypothesis: Personal Conclusion Concerning the Evolutionary Nature of Man.

1977

Moves from Rome to Kalk Bay, Cape Town, South Africa.

1978

Completes his last American lecture tour.

1979

Finishes the manuscript, "The Education of Robert Ardrey: An Autobiography."

1980

Dies of lung cancer in Kalk Bay, South Africa, January 14.

To the world of Hollywood of the 1940s, Robert Ardrey was a screenplay writer whose juxtaposition of visual and sound sequences could create an atmosphere drawing on all the senses as well as the intellect. For the audience of his play, Thunder Rock, in the 1950s Ardrey created a multidimensional impression of an historical era complete with jostling social classes. In 1952 he presented a distillation of panhuman institutions as a background to political satire in a novel entitled Brotherhood of Fear. Then to the astonishment and initial dismay of the scientific community of the early 1960s, Robert Ardrey without the expected academic apprenticeship published the immediately successful and controversial African Genesis, which popularized a series of esoteric and intricately interrelated concepts about the origins of man. From this point on he became a respected authority on a way of viewing human nature which paved the way ultimately for the extension of the field of population genetics to human behavior.

There is no real intellectual disjuncture between Ardrey the playwright and Ardrey the anthropologist. He brought to all his endeavors, whether film, play, novel, or academic tome, the ability to hierarchize and distill from a range of contributing factors and produce an infallibly convincing impact on his audience. In addition a perceptiveness about human nature was coupled with a need to search for underlying and uniting principles. Once aware of a principle he was able to apply it retrospectively, so that past experience, serendipitous information and active inquiries all coalesced to provide grist for his analytic mind. The notion that human beings were on an evolutionary continuum with the animals and shared a consequent core of behavior proved irresistible to him. Once convinced that man evolved from an ape species in Africa all the lines of evidence and implications of this discovery had to be imagined, explored, tested and the outcome then communicated to the world in a creative form. The prolific writer of plays and screenplays became a prodigious correspondent in the quest for information from specialists in paleontology, anatomy, geology, zoology, ethology, botany, primatology to throw light on the central themes of his new enthusiasm and inspire three more books.

Robert Ardrey was born in Chicago in 1908. In characteristic spirit he provides in his unpublished autobiography enough information from different perspectives and levels to allow the reader to place and evaluate all events in concert with others. The immediate matrix for his teenage years was that of Al Capone's neighborhood in Chicago, with its opportunities for eyewitness analysis of the rules of human violence. Ardrey places this arena in the broader context of world politics, national events and human achievement in a number of fields, such as aviation, literature, live theater and music. Ardrey the young man, rescued both from a national and his own personal depression by his sister's gift of music lessons, was able to find work as a pianist in the speakeasies of the Prohibition era. He was at this time very obviously aware of the contemporary renaissance in the theater, brought about by Eugene O'Neill, Elmer Rice and Maxwell Anderson, as well as the impact on music and society of individual composers such as Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Vincent Youmans and Irving Berlin. He exhibited as much obvious pride in the human achievements of the time as he did glee at some of the rather dubious survival strategies, necessitated by the Depression. His own creativity in this respect included the faking of Gregorian chants to suit the requirements of his employer's sermons.

Ardrey's natural propensity for looking at topics from a range of perspectives was stimulated and reinforced by a course offered at the University of Chicago during his sophomore year. The Nature of the World and Man explored the nature of the world's beginnings from the point of view of an astronomer, physicist, chemist, geologist, zoologist, physiologist, anatomist and geneticist. Enthusiasm for this scheme of things remained latent, while Ardrey pursued the professional possibilities sparked by Thornton Wilder's course in the techniques of play writing. By 1932, two years after graduation, Ardrey had written a novel, a play and a novella none of which he attempted to publish.

Star Spangled (1936), Ardrey's first play to appear on stage, explored the cultural conflict in different generations of a Polish immigrant family. Despite poor reviews this play earned him a Guggenheim Foundation award to pursue research in creative writing in drama. Something in the spirit of théâtre engagé in Europe, his plays tend to portray working people dealing with the problems particular to their own social stratum or ethnic group. Casey Jones (1938) centers around railway workers. How to Get Tough About It (1938) deals with cement mill workers and their struggles with labor racketeers. Thunder Rock, the most successful of his plays, later made into a film, portrayed Europeans in the 1940s, a time of high maternal death rates, conservatism in medicine, Brahms and Florence Nightingale. Jeb (1946) was the story of a black man made militant by his failure, despite training, to acquire work deemed that of a white man. Some of Ardrey=s plays were moderately successful but most floundered due to prevailing misfortunes in the theater world. Meanwhile, however, he had acquired a contract with Samuel Goldwyn to write screenplays for a just burgeoning Hollywood.

In his autobiography Ardrey attributes his popularity among producers as a screenwriter to his ability for providing technical directions for the camera along with the dialogue and scene settings. His films tend to be exuberant both in action and setting, with more swashbuckling and pursuits on horseback than soliloquy. His scripts give details for screen settings busy with local color.

Privy through insight to the forces of human behavior in Hollywood, Ardrey was in general cheerfully skeptical as to the motives of political groups. He became passionately interested, however, in a number of political issues affecting those involved creatively in the film industry. He sought ways to outwit the outmoded censorship of the Hays Office, which was domineered by the Roman Catholic Church. In anger and something akin to grief he joined in the Writers' Guild battle against the blacklisting of those with contrived communist sympathies. He exhibited the same uncharacteristic vehemence towards Richard Nixon and his whole campaign, and for a brief spell poured all his energies into the successful promotion of Adlai Stevenson's political career by writing and producing a television biography of him.

In 1955 Ardrey was half planning a trip to Africa with a Hollywood colleague. A chance presented itself for the trip to pay for itself. Clearly acknowledged as someone whose judgment on broad issues was as much to be trusted as was his ability to communicate his opinions in a witty and concise style, Ardrey was commissioned by the editor of the Reporter to write about any African topics he chose. Several people saw in Ardrey's trip to Africa an opportunity to avoid the vagaries of trans African mail and entrusted him with personal missives and quests. Each somehow contributed to his sudden and impassioned interest in man's early origins. Richard Flint, a geologist, sought information on various African lake beds. Kenneth Oakley of the British Museum, perhaps the most significant of all, gave Ardrey a plaster cast of a perforated pre human skull plate, with instructions to ascertain if the wound had been inflicted before or after death. What Ardrey described as his "B Picture Instinct" led him to seek out Raymond Dart, head of the Anatomy Department of Witwatersrand Medical School. Dart was rumored to have discovered in conjunction with pre human remains weapons and other evidence of hunting, meat eating and murder.

Ardrey developed deep and lasting affection for those whose personal and intellectual integrity and acumen he admired. He sought their advice, expressed unstinting appreciation, credited them with insight and discovery which he might have accorded himself, and engaged in regular correspondence with them. Raymond Dart and his ideas commanded Ardrey's immediate sympathies and loyalty. One of Dart's australopithecine skulls, known later as the Taung baby, showed simultaneous evidence of a small brain case and the centralized foramen magnum of a bipedal creature. This combination of anatomical features was in conflict with the then popular notion that brain development preceded upright posture in the evolutionary scheme. The skull's dentition was arranged in a semi circular formation, thought unique to man, and exhibited neither exaggerated defensive canines nor the heavy grinding molars of a plant eater. These characteristics, together with the geological evidence that edible vegetation was scarce in the relevant area, led Ardrey to share Dart's conviction that the skull belonged to a carnivorous human ancestor.

Based on a general acceptance of the Old Testament and the constrained archaeology of biblical scholars, it was a widely held and untested assumption in the Western world that man had first appeared in Asia, probably in the fertile strip between the Tigris and the Euphrates. Among paleontologists such as Louis Leakey and his followers, however, it had long been obvious that man had evolved in Africa. The widespread popularity of African Genesis, published in 1961, made this immediate common knowledge. At the same time in persuasive and elegant prose Ardrey described successively more sinister scenarios from the archives of pre and early man. Based on Dart's interpretation of the fossils, he strongly suggested that the use of weapons in the pursuit of indispensable meat for food not only preceded by millions of years but also brought about the increase in size and complexity of the human brain. Less palatable to followers of Christ, Rousseau, Marx and Freud alike was the notion that man in his primal state was inclined to deal fatal blows to his fellows. Moreover, man's ingenuity was derived from and remains primarily geared towards the development of weapons for use in territorial displays, threats and defense.

The Territorial Imperative (1966) sets out to show that defense of territory is an ubiquitous pan species behavior. At a time when ethological studies were few and corroboration between those few almost non existent, Ardrey's correspondence bears testimony to a tireless tracking down of information on territorial behavior in as many species as possible. Possession of territory emerged from his research as an almost universal pre requisite to mating and as such the almost sole object of intra species male fighting. Ardrey suggested then that the human male, no less than other vertebrate males, is prompted for his own selective advantage by the territorial imperative, and this in tandem with his propensity for weapons makes war and violence the inevitable outcome of limited space.

A stern critic of inferences about animal or human behavior based on observation of laboratory or zoo animals, Ardrey suggested in The Social Contract (1970) that much light could be thrown on human problems by studying animals in the wild. From a number of ethological studies he demonstrated that successful animal societies have biological mechanisms for restricting their numbers and well defined dominance hierarchies for integrating group and individual needs. Since man had evolved essentially as a social animal, Ardrey suggested that ethology could provide better insights into the causes and solutions of human stress than either psychology or sociology.

The title of Ardrey's final book, The Hunting Hypothesis (1976), provided anthropology with a convenient label for a sequence of concepts, neither originating from Ardrey, nor interrelated in quite the way he described. Oakley in 1954, Washburn and Avis in 1958, Washburn and Devore in 1961 and Campbell in 1974 had all previously published articles claiming that hunting and meat eating had either triggered human intellectual and anatomical evolution or been instrumental in shaping social and sexual behavior. Beyond the evidence of dentition, stone tools and bones already sifted through in his previous books, Ardrey first sought proof of actual dependence on meat. Based on information garnered from paleobotanists, he first made a case for the absence of vegetation on the Pleistocene savannah other than grass and seeds. From biochemists and nutritionists he sought to establish that the digestive systems of herbivores, probably consumed by early man, were essential links in the conversion of linoleic acid in grass to the long chain fatty acids essential to brain and neural development. On the basis of testimony from plant toxin experts, he suggested the irrelevance to the early hominid diet of any foodstuffs only rendered edible by cooking. Coprolite analysts, solicited by Ardrey, reported an absence of plant remains among the limited Neanderthal samples which they had examined. In this way, Ardrey systematically collected evidence to test the essential basic assumption that early hominids had depended on meat for survival. He then drew on several ethological studies of the social carnivores to supplement what had already been said by Bernard Campbell, Sherwood Washburn and Irvin Devore about the probable way of life of early and even fairly recent man. It is Ardrey's distillation from so many varied sources in The Hunting Hypothesis that has given the now standard anthropology textbook portrait of Homo sapiens as a super intelligent primate with wits honed, cooperation fostered and social arrangements shaped by hunting strategies.

By long and illogical tradition in the social sciences, proffering an explanation is tantamount to condoning, if not championing, all the abuses and variations of the situation explained. In the name of the hunting hypothesis the idea, not the book Ardrey has been repeatedly attacked, by cultural anthropologists in particular, as an apologist and proponent of military and personal aggression on the one hand, and oppressive male/female power structures on the other. This is not consistent with the content of his four books, in which Ardrey exhibits an appreciation, which goes beyond pragmatism, for man at his most noble and altruistic and a deep regret for the results of more sinister human tendencies. It is at even greater variance with the character of Ardrey himself, who emerges unmistakably from the tone of his plays, films, political activities, books and above all his correspondence as a man of observant and exuberant compassion and enduring concern for others.