The Beast Within

Back in the Eighties, a 10-year-old named Cyril Grueter dragged his parents to a screening of Gorillas in the Mist. Bold and haunting, it tells the true story of American primatologis Dian Fossey, who bonded with the mountain gorillas of central Africa. “I was intrigued by the beauty of these creatures,” says Grueter, now in his 40s and a biological anthropologist at the University of Western Australia. “I read everything I could get a hold of about them, and I knew that studying these primates would become my career.”

I reckon I know how Grueter felt. Piqued by the dystopian classic Planet of the Apes, my own fascination with the great apes took hold some years later when my dad gave me a copy of Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, a doorstop of a book co-authored by the late Carl Sagan. What a communicator. Truly, if Sagan had been your science teacher back in high school you’d have abandoned plans to study law or engineering and signed up instead for anthropology or astronomy. A quarter of a century after his premature death at 62, Sagan’s words can still make you think, wonder and marvel in equal measure.

In (with wife Ann Druyan), Sagan ventures millions of years back in time to probe why we are the way we are. “We humans are like a newborn baby left on a doorstep,” he wrote, “with no note explaining who it is, where it came from, what hereditary cargo of attributes and disabilities it might