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:
- Warder Clyde Allee
- Charles Kimberlin Brain
- Robert Broom
- Helmut Buechner
- Clarence Ray Carpenter
- Raymond Dart
- Eliot Howard
- James Kitching
- Louis Leakey
- Eugene Marais
- Kenneth Oakley