The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations by Robert Ardrey

Author:Robert Ardrey
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2019-11-24T23:00:00+00:00

6. The Nation

Madagascar is evolution's liveliest museum. It is a chip off history, an enormous chip 1000 miles long floating in the Indian Ocean, 250 miles at its closest point from the southeast African coast. And deep though the sea may lie between them, Madagascar seems also to be a chip off the African continent that somehow came loose a very long time ago. Just how it came loose and wound up where it is -- whether it is a piece of flotsam left behind by the drifting of continents or whether it was a victim of local geologic grievance -- is a matter of some debate. It is one debate which hopefully we may stay out of.

Something happened to Madagascar; that we know. And it happened so cleanly, with such surgical purity, that it left Madagascar's inhabitants of the time all but untouched by subsequent world events. Lions and tigers and leopards and jaguars, wolves and jackals and coyotes have all [175] evolved since the ancient event; on Madagascar there are no large predators at all. Monkeys first appeared in the Oligocene, thirty or forty million years ago; though elsewhere they spread all over the Old and New Worlds, on Madagascar there are none. The most primitive apes that we have so far found laid down their bones in Egyptian fossil beds at an oasis near Cairo, Fayum. That was not too long after the monkey's appearance. Since then one ape or another, at one time or another, reached all of Africa, of temperate Europe and Asia, and penetrated as far as Indonesia where a last sad descendant, the orangutan, today hangs in trees like yesterday's oversized fruit and swings his way slowly, heavily toward extinction. But the ape did not reach the New World of the two Americas, and he did not reach Madagascar.

The green strip of sea was just too broad, like a moat forbidding the world's evolving zoo. Competition is an essential force in evolutionary progress -- competition within a species, competition between species, the competition of predator and prey. That effective moat, the strip of green sea called the Mozambique Channel, shielded Madagascar's early inhabitants from lethal competition with the world's evolving fangs and claws and brains and weapons, and from broader competition with all those teeming superior species which mammal vitality would so effectively bring forth. No elephants would ever march in silent single file through a Madagascar forest; no giraffes would peer down from spotted watchtowers, or goats from windy peaks; no zebras or other horses, no elands or other antelopes would ever graze the sunny pastures of the high pink plateaus. There is no sure evidence that man himself came to the enormous island until the time of Christ, and when he came it was not from Africa but from Indonesia, far beyond the Indian Ocean. Man did not arrive from nearby Africa until he came escorted by Arab slavers.

All -- men, zebras, elands, elephants, goats, giraffes, monkeys, apes, lions -- belonged to evolution's future when Madagascar put out to sea.

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