The Hunt for Human OriginsA View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature Through History.Matt Cartmill

Abstract

In I920 Carveth Read, professor of psychology at University College London, brought out a book on The Origin of Man and His Superstitions, in which he argued the most distinctive features of humankindbipedalism, big brains, cooperative social organisation, sexual division of labour, and so on-evolved when our most ancient, apelike ancestors abandoned their arboreal, vegetarian existence for a way of life as terrestrial predators. Hunting in packs for meat, the earliest humans were wolves with primate clothing. Yet unlike wolves they were less than fully adapted to the niche, with the result the aggression and cruelty inevitably entailed by the predator-prey relationship, fuelled by an ever-expanding imagination, have been inclined to get out of hand. For this reason, Read surmised, the history of our species is littered with atrocities committed not only against other animal kinds but also by beings against one another. Few people seem to have paid much attention to Read's book, and contemporary reviews were generally dismissive or hostile. In the opinion of most reviewers, the book's arguments scarcely deserved to be taken seriously, since they rested on a theory which, in reputable scientific circles, was by then thoroughly discredited. This was the Darwinian theory of evolution by variation under natural selection. There can be no doubt, wrote one reviewer of Read's book in Man, that Natural Selection has been a far less important factor in evolution than was thought in the last century. Barely three decades later, however, the tables had completely turned. Darwinism had made a triumphant comeback under the guise of the modern synthesis, and the world's leading authorities had come to dismiss counter-Darwinian accounts of evolution with the same contempt with which their predecessors not so long ago had brushed aside the Darwinian theory itself. All this came too late to save Read's book from oblivion. Yet, ironically, alongside the neo-Darwinian resurgence in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War there emerged a purportedly novel hypothesis concerning origins-essentially identical to what Read had proposed in I920-which caught the imaginations of scientists and the lay public alike. According to this hypothesis, the critical step to humanity was taken when the ancestral man-ape left the trees in pursuit of red meat on the open savannas. The originator of the hypothesis, who never once cited Read's work, was the anatomist Raymond Dart. Dart had already made a name for himself as the discoverer of the hominid precursor Australopithecus africanus, and most of his subsequent writings were devoted to speculating about the way of life of this creature. Initially, Dart had portrayed Australopithecus as something of a scavenger, eking out a subsistence from the meagre pickings left over after other, more effective beasts of prey had eaten their fill. But from the early I950S Dart began to paint a very different picture, in increasingly lurid colours. Australopithecus, it transpired, was a killer-ape, a specialised and highly efficient big-game hunter, bringing to bear a combination of bipedalism and a weapons technology which provided a decisive superiority in the struggle for existence. In a celebrated passage, Dart described these killer-apes as carnivorous creatures, seized living quarries by violence, battered them to death, tore apart their broken bodies, dismembered them limb from limb, slaking their ravenous thirst with the hot blood of victims and greedily devouring livid writhing flesh. Nor were they averse to unleashing their bloodthirsty instincts upon one another in acts of brutal cannibalism. As the descendants of these creatures, Dart concluded, we are inexorably shackled to a violent and destructive nature has continued to wreak havoc throughout the entire course of history. While Dart's colourful prose may have raised a few eyebrows in more sombre scientific circles, the hunting hypothesis of origins was itself eagerly embraced. In the revived Darwinian climate, the challenge was to show how distinctive traits could have arisen as adaptive responses to specific environmental conditions, and the hypothesised shift to a hunting way of life seemed to provide all the answers. Yet it takes more than to explain why the story of the killer-ape, with all its moral embellishments and implications for human destiny, was taken up so enthusiastically at particular time. For one thing, there was, and still is, no shred of reliable evidence to support it, nor is there any reason to believe beings have an instinc-