Beefing it up: The Hunting Apes. Meat Eating and the Origins of Human Behaviour by C.B. Stanford

Abstract

Princeton University Press, 1999. £14.95 / $24.95 hbk (xi + 253 pages) ISBN 0 691 01160 5The BSE crisis has been taken by some to suggest that meat eating is really far more trouble than it is worth and that we would all be much happier on a diet of alfalfa sprouts (assuming, of course, that they have not been genetically modified). According to Craig Stanford, however, if it were not for meat, we would not be here at all.In The Hunting Apes, meat eating, or to be more precise, meat sharing, is seen as the crucial element that promoted the increase in human brain size 200 000 years ago. This development sparked the cultural revolution that currently allows us not only to share meat, but also to interfere with it (from the latest River Cafe recipe to Dolly the sheep). This is an interesting idea and Stanford builds up support for his central thesis with a detailed exploration of hunting and meat sharing among the extant great apes (in which he refreshingly refuses to buy into the ‘make love, not war’ image of bonobos, and points out exactly how similar they are to common chimpanzees) and some informed speculation on early hominid socioecology.The book presents new information in an accessible and engaging manner. However, Stanford fails to make it clear exactly how meat sharing pushed humans so much further along the road to cultural sophistication compared with the chimpanzee. True, patriarchy in human societies is examined but this sits uneasily with the rest of the book; the leap between common ancestors foraging in the forest to gender studies in the modern world is too great. I feel that this is an important omission because it gives the book an overall feeling of anti-climax and the nagging suspicion that something is missing. Meat sharing cannot be the only factor that makes humans unique, because the cognitive capacities required are present also in meat-sharing chimpanzees, who, clever though they are, will never develop the technology to clone the red colobus monkey they hunt so effectively.There are at least two other relevant factors that need to be considered: changes in human life-history patterns and the coevolution of language and the brain, which are discussed in Terence Deacon’s excellent book on this subject1xThe Symbolic Species. Deacon, T. See all