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Desmond Morris wrote The Naked Ape in four weeks to pay for a house

Ellsworth Toohey
Apr 21, 2026
∙ Paid

Cover to the first edition of The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris.

Desmond Morris, the English zoologist whose 1967 bestseller The Naked Ape argued that modern humans are basically fancy primates still running on Stone Age software, died Sunday near Dublin at 98, according to the New York Times. Twenty million copies and 23 translations later, the book is st…

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