“Now the mouse tracks continue off to the right—and the beetle tracks are seen no more. So what’s written here is that the mouse has snaffled itself a beetle snack.”
We got ourselves back up into a sitting position.
The first thing: reading the signs
“Very impressive,” I said.
“Very wwimpressive, believe me, compared to what a real tracker could do, but good enough for our purpose. There are several things I want you to see from this. The first thing is this: Chimpanzees make and use tools, so tool-making and tool-using are not uniquely human, but the reading I’ve just done here is uniquely human. Of course what I’ve done so far is only a sample of the hunting process. It’s like a still from a motion picture, which can suggest a mood and a theme but can’t convey the process of the film, which is intrinsically motion. At any moment during the hunt, the hunter is considering these questions: What was the animal doing when it made this track? How long ago was it here? Which way was it heading? How fast was it going? How far away will it be by now?—keeping in mind the season, the time of day, the temperature, the condition of the ground, the nature of the terrain, and of course the typical behavior of the animal being tracked and other animals in the neighborhood as well.
“Here’s a small example. One day an anthropologist was tagging along with a !Kung hunter in the Kalihari. Around noon they abandoned one hunt as hopeless and started looking around for something else to go after. Soon they came across a gemsbok track the hunter judged to be just a couple hours old. After half an hour of tracking, however, the hunter called it off. He explained that the track hadn’t been made that morning after all, pointing out as proof a gemsbok hoofprint with a mouse track running across it. Since mice are nocturnal, the gemsbok track had to have been made during the night. In other words, this particular gemsbok was long gone.”
“Yes, I see.”
“Now, this isn’t a feat of observation and ratiocination that’s going to win that !Kung hunter a Nobel prize, but it’s a feat that is light-years beyond anything our nearest primate kin is capable of. An ape with the right sort of training may persuade you that it’s doing what we do when we talk, but no ape with any amount of training will ever persuade you that it’s doing what this !Kung hunter was doing when he tracked the gemsbok.”
“I’m sure you’re right.”
“This is what I’m proposing here, Jared: We didn’t cross the line when we started using tools, we crossed the line when we became hunters. Our nonhuman ancestors were tool-makers and -users but they weren’t hunters, because they didn’t have the mental equipment to be hunters. In other words, we became human by hunting—and of course we became hunters by becoming human. And, by the way, hunting is not an exclusively male activity among aboriginal peoples of today, so there’s no reason to suppose it was an exclusively male activity among our earliest human ancestors.”
“Excuse me—I hope this won’t sound like an inquisitorial question—but it sounds like you’re saying that we hunted before we were hunters. How can you hunt before you’re a hunter?”
“How can you fly before you’re a flier, Jared?”
“I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”
“The same question has to be resolved for every evolutionary development. Here’s the classic challenge: If the eye developed gradually, then it was useless till it was all complete and functional, and being useless, it conferred no benefit on its owner—so why did it evolve at all? The answer is that something less than an eye is useful to its owner. Any sensory tissue, no matter how primitive, is better than none. No matter how the eye began, it gave its owner a slight edge. The same is true of a behavior like hunting. Even the most primitive tracking ability will give you a slight edge over those who don’t have it—and any slight edge tends to increase your representation in the gene pool. As the hunters’ representation in the gene pool increases, the behavior spreads, and in each generation the best hunters—even if they’re well below modern standards—will have an edge and will tend to be better represented in the gene pool. In other words, hunting ability—which in humans doesn’t mean speed or power but rather intelligence—was the vector for natural selection in the case of human evolution. Intelligence of a human order wasn’t just a lucky accident; it didn’t evolve just so we could have beautiful thoughts.”
“It seems like language would have had a role in all this.”
“Of course it did. I told you we became human when we developed a new lifestyle. Nonhuman primates make their living by foraging, but foraging doesn’t require much communication. A band of primates can settle into an area and begin foraging without any planning or coordination or cooperation or allotment of tasks. They just move in, and everybody starts munching. But this sort of behavior won’t work for primate hunters. You can’t just move in and have everybody start hunting. Hunting teamwork is what pays off—but in primates no hunting teamwork is genetically wired in, the way it is with wolves or hyenas. In primates, hunting teamwork can only come about through communication.”
“So you’re saying language developed as an adjunct to hunting.”
“Language developed because it conferred advantages. It didn’t have to confer only one advantage. Language ability made you valuable as a hunting partner—therefore it also made you valuable as a mate. Language ability meant you were both more likely to survive and more likely to reproduce.”
“It seems to me that language and hunting developed reciprocally, then. And if that’s the case, then we became human not just by hunting but by hunting and talking.”
B nodded. “You’re not contradicting me, though you seem to think you are. You’re just anticipating me. I can’t say everything at once.”
For some reason, this comment struck me as funny, especially when I imagined myself responding to it with: “Well, why not?” For a moment I thought I’d be able to hold it in and suppress it, but my central nervous system had other ideas, and I started sniggering, then I started chuckling, then I started snorting, then I started guffawing—and it was at this point that B decided to join in, and we laughed ourselves good and silly for about two minutes.
We both ended up gasping for breath and grinning foolishly, with tears running down our faces, and for a split second she had something in her eye that made me think she almost mistook me for a fellow human being. Then we both took a deep, shuddery breath, got a grip on our e
motions, and went back to work.
The “hunting gene”
Again she patted the ground in front of us. “I said there were several things I wanted you to take from this demonstration. The first is that we became human by reading the signs—and of course by talking. We didn’t become human by banging on rocks or by making up sonnets. Intelligence invited us to explore a new lifestyle, based on hunting and foraging rather than just foraging alone. This new lifestyle demanded—and rewarded—new forms of communication and cooperation.
“Here is the second thing I want you to take from this demonstration. There will inevitably be people who imagine that I’m offering a rationale for ‘human violence.’ Nothing could be further from my mind. In the first place, no special rationale is needed for humans, because humans are not remarkably or unusually violent—outside of our own culture, which represents a tiny, tiny fraction of humanity. Outside of our culture, humans are violent in the same circumstances that other species are typically violent—in establishing and defending territory. This has nothing—literally nothing—to do with political boundaries. Germany isn’t a territory in a biological sense. The connection between political territoriality and biological territoriality is purely metaphorical. Do you know what I mean by that?”
“I haven’t the foggiest idea.”
“Maybe we can get to it later. Just at the moment I want to make sure you see that, outside of this one deranged culture of ours, we humans are not more violent than other species—and it wasn’t hunting that made us as violent as we are. Our foraging ancestors were just as violent. Nonhunters are just as violent. Vegetarian species are just as violent. Nor are we the only species whose members visit violence on each other. Nothing could be further from the truth. Aside from predation, virtually all violence observed in the biological community is intraspecies violence. I can’t explain everything here all at once, so you’ll have to follow up on this on your own if you’re interested.
“There will be people who will take what I’m saying and make out of it an endorsement of sport hunting. Again, nothing could be further from my mind. The fact that humans evolved as hunters didn’t implant in them an irresistible urge to slaughter wildlife. The successful hunter isn’t the one with the most bloodlust. Bloodlust is not required—is irrelevant. Watch hunters in the wild and you’ll see this. They don’t go about their business frothing at the mouth, and they don’t kill gratuitously.”
“Excuse me,” I said, “and again I hope this won’t sound inquisitorial. It seems to me I’ve read about archaeological finds of vast kills of bison that apparently were mostly left to rot by human hunters. They killed them, picked out the parts they wanted, and abandoned the rest.”