the rise and fall of the third chimpanzee

Today paleoanthropologists work with more than twenty species of hominins. A Neanderthal fossil was the only hominin remain known at the time of Darwin. Darwin's graphic representation of relationships between organisms is now employed to construct phylogenetic trees at all levels of biological organization. However, discoveries in every branch of biology since the time of Darwin have affirmed the essential unity of life, including the 30 million or more extant species and more than 600 million extinct species. How, when and where life originated remains an inscrutable challenge to science. Darwin saw human beings as an integral part of this evolutionary history. The biological revolution that Darwin initiated has given us a view of an earth that was once devoid of life and where life originated and evolved from simpler preexisting forms over immense periods of time.

This book exposes and analyses how convivial and pacific primitive man regressed toward savagery and evolved toward his enslavement in empires. Rome after Constantine, Byzantium and the Ottonian Germanic Empire floundered, and violence and cruelty reigned thereafter supreme among some European nations. The three civilized Christian empires, i.e. In the West, 1,200 years ago, the ephemeral barbarous Carolingian Empire made of the military service a condition for the possession of land. The vast majority of the empires that surged after the fall of Rome had standing armies and excelled in ferocity. Standing armies exercising assiduously even in periods of peace, existed 2000 years ago only in China and Rome. In the Old World, Sargon I, the Semite from Akkad, built a 5,000 man strong army, 4,300 years ago, and used it to create the first known savage empire. Primitive Man lived in pacific, monogamous, sharing communities whose characteristics are still observable in this century in some communities (Inuit, Hottentot) and were reported in 1584 by English settlers to pertain to the Algonquin nations occupying the Atlantic shores of North America, yet the immense majority of human congregations that formed in the course of time evolved in hideous, ruthless political entities drenched in the blood of animal and human sacrifices, and remained so up to our days.

Diamond 1 and any informed person notices it daily when watching news on TV. Death, misery and social violence are the lot of the vast majority of the human race. In most human societies, power is based on force, on lack of measure, on violence and on contingency. A chronological record of historical events shows that there is progress in humanization accomplished by some human societies but relapses in barbarity and regressions are also observed, which obscures the sense of the evolution.

The rise and fall of the third chimpanzee