The director of the Smithsonian Institution's Human Origins Program Rick Potts, cited Ardrey's work as inspiring him to go anthropology.

[7]: 119  At the same time he renewed an acquaintance with prominent geologist Richard Foster Flint and investigated claims made by Raymond Dart about a specimen of Australopithecus africanus.

[13] The Territorial Imperative further developed the nascent science of ethology and increased public interest in human origins.

[3][4] The strategic analyst Andrew Marshall and U.S. Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger are known to have discussed The Territorial Imperative in connection to military-strategic thinking.

[16] The Social Contract: A Personal Inquiry into the Evolutionary Sources of Order and Disorder is the most controversial book of the Nature of Man series.

[18][19] Ardrey argued that, while inequality was not necessarily a social evil, it could only be justly expressed under conditions of absolute equality of opportunity.

"[20] The Social Contract continued Ardrey's refutation of cultural determinists through interwoven analyses of animal and human behavior.

Recent analyses of human anatomy, stone tools and animal bones are helping to fill in the details of this game-changing shift in subsistence strategy.

The famed biologist and naturalist E. O. Wilson, the noted anthropologist Colin Turnbull, the acclaimed journalist Max Lerner, and the noteworthy social scientist Roger Masters, among others, all wrote effusive reviews.

[25][26][27][28] Antony Jay wrote that "Robert Ardrey's books are the most important to be written since the war and arguable in the 20th century.