Several million years ago several environmental niches were filled by clever and adventurous primates. Chimpanzees, being woodland animals, mainly ate fruit. Baboons, like men, had moved on to the savannah and lived on roots, grass and seeds—both baboons and chimpanzees ate meat but it constituted only five per cent of their diet. The savannah apes had a similar territory and diet to the baboons but had discovered new strategies. The division of labor and sharing freed their males to spend more time getting meat. Gathering would continue to give the communes of apes reliable basic sustenance, but scavenging and then hunting provided concentrated protein. This was a vital step forward giving the apes time to think, and later time to philosophize.
Herbivorous elephants have to spend three quarters of their time eating their low quality food. The carnivorous lion on the other hand only spends about 15 per cent of its time seeking and eating its food rich in protein.
The step to scavenging was fairly easy. There was always some recently dead creature not far away on the savannah and the alert apes would have noticed circling vultures. At Sterkfontein in South Africa, Elisabeth Vrba and Philip Tobias found accumulations of savannah ape bones apparently collected by a predator (possibly a leopard) in its den. There were no stone tools in that layer but in a higher and more recent layer there were stone tools and a pattern of animal remains typical of a scavenger. It seems that the scavenger (Homo habilis) was a toolmaker while his predecessor who made no tools (A africanus) was prey. From scavenging it was not such a large step for the emergent men to appreciate that carcasses could be created.
Sherwood Washburn in 1956 argued that hunting was the key to human development. Washburn reasoned that, because the apes were slow they had to substitute cunning and cooperation for speed. The new art of hunting in groups required an effective means of communication at a distance: the development of language was the result. The hunting theory of Washburn became accentuated into the theory of “the killer ape” promoted by Robert Ardrey. Robert Ardrey says:
Man is man and not a chimpanzee, because for millions upon millions of years we killed for a living.
But killing for a living cannot have led to speech. Shouting to companions is the last thing that a hunter would do if he did not want his prey to bolt, and speaking arose too late to have been triggered by hunting millions of years before.
The contentment of the hunter gatherers and their sensitivity to their environment belies the hunting hypothesis of human aggressiveness. The hunter gatherer way of life is not one of grinding insecurity, incessant toil and hardship. It offers as much, if not more, leisure than people have today. Hunter gatherer communities have total confidence in their ability to obtain sustenance from their environment and feel no need to store or save for the long term. Though it no longer appeals to us, pampered by our advanced technology, hunter gathering is comfortable and secure to those brought up to it. Moreover, many of today’s hunter gatherers like the San of South West Africa have been forced by gardeners and farmers into harsh environments on the margins of deserts. They comfortably survive, but, before they were thrust to the desert margins, the hunter gatherers would have had much lusher pickings. It is no exaggeration to call it the “Garden of Eden”—all was provided simply by reaching out or digging up a root.
Marshall Sahlins who has studied stone age economics in depth assures us “all people’s wants are easily satisfied”. Males of the T’Kung hunt for only 21 hours a week and the women—who provide two thirds of the food—gather for only 12 hours. In terrain which to us is inhospitable desert, they have sufficient.
Richard Leakey thinks our aggression may be a pathological response to the human condition that has emerged since the first urban communities of 10,000 years ago. He writes:
For perhaps two million years, human ancestors had practised nomadic hunting-and-gathering, in a way of life that was characterized by stability rather than change in terms of technology and culture. Then the ancient way of life was virtually abandoned over a period of a few thousand years.
We may be still suffering the trauma of that immense change.
But mankind hunted animals to extinction long before we were shown the gate of the Garden of Eden. Of the savannah apes, the steps to scavenging and hunting were too great for A robustus. They did not realize the value of meat or, if they did, they found competition with Homo and the baboons too difficult. Homo forced them to eat less nutritious food needing a lot of processing. They evolved jaws suitable for low grade food but were marginalized by their proto-human rivals, became their prey and were pushed into extinction. Were our insensitivity to the other inhabitants of the Garden, our incompetence as custodians and our genocidal destructiveness the reasons for our expulsion? Have present day hunter gatherers been marginalized precisely because they are not aggressive enough?
A killer instinct is possibly a contributory factor to world domination, generating a particularly aggressive competitiveness that has been partly instrumental in mankind’s progress. Of course, many dinosaurs were savage killers too—our killer instinct might be part of our dinosaur heritage.
From this survey, some factors that influenced the emergence of the intelligent mammal were:
- manipulative forelimbs with grasping fingers and opposable thumbs
- binocular vision
- color vision
- omnivorous diet
- curiosity and opportunism
- upright posture
- exceptionally lengthy childhood dependence on parental care enabling teaching to occur with development of higher skills and creativity
- large brain
- toolmaking; sharing, division of labor and cooperation
- aggression and a callous indifference to other species, as well as other humans, fostered by hunting
Have the dinosaurs of 70 million years ago left any signs of their having any of these characteristics?
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