Robert Ardrey (b. October 16, 1908, Chicago, Illinois...d. January 14, 1980, South Africa) was an American playwright and screenwriter who returned to his academic training in anthropology and the behavioral sciences in the 1950s.

African Genesis and The Territorial Imperative, two of Robert Ardrey's most widely read works, as well as Desmond Morris' The Naked Ape (1967), were key elements in the public discourse of the 1960s which challenged earlier anthropological assumptions. Ardrey's ideas notably influenced Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick in the development of A Space Odyssey, as well as Sam Peckinpah, to whom Strother Martin gave copies of two of Ardrey's books. Hammond Innes' novel "Levkas Man" (1971) was also influenced by Ardrey's views on the Stone Age roots of human aggression.

Paleoanthropology more less

As a science writer for the informed non-specialist reader in paleoanthropology, which encompasses anthropology, ethology, paleontology and human evolution, Robert Ardrey was among the proponents of the hunting hypothesis and the killer ape theory.

Ardrey postulated that precursors of Australopithecus survived millions of years of drought in the Miocene and Pliocene epochs, as the savannah spread and the forests shrank, by adapting the hunting ways of carnivorous species. Changes in survival techniques and social organisation gradually differentiated pre-humans from other primates. Concomitant changes in diet potentiated unique developments in the human brain.

The killer ape theory posits that aggression, a vital factor in hunting prey for food, was a fundamental characteristic which distinguished prehuman ancestors from other primates.

These themes have also been investigated in academia by, among others:

Konrad Lorenz: On Aggression (1966)
University of Chicago "Man the Hunter" symposium (1966): Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore , eds., Man the Hunter: Symposium on Man the Hunter, University of Chicago. Chicago: Aldine Publishing.
Sherwood Washburn and Chet Lancaster: Man the Hunter (1968). ( Washburn's students Lee and DeVore organised the 1966 Chicago conference.)
Craig Stanford: The Hunting Apes: Meat Eating and the Origins of Human Behavior, Princeton University Press (2001).
Erich Fromm: The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973)
Matt Cartmill: A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature Through History (1996)

Researchers

Some of the scientists whose research particularly informed Robert Ardrey's scientific investigations, and with several of whom Ardrey consulted at length while developing his four major works in Africa from the 1940s through the 1970s, include: