Man the Hunted

Not long ago, I came across a book that looked interesting, Man the Hunted: Primates, Predators, and Human Evolution, written by two anthropologists, Donna Hart and Robert Sussman.  Almost half of the book discussed the many varieties of man-eating predators who for millions of years have enjoyed transforming our delicious ancestors into steaming feces.  Would it shed light on the drastic reduction in man-eating predators?  Would it explain why we plunged into our disastrous experiment with tool making, which has brought us to the brink of planetary disaster?  It did not, but it was both interesting and odd.

In the deepest, darkest auditoriums of academia, the wizards of primatology are engaged in a yowling catfight over the primary factor that influenced the course of human evolution.  The choices are: (a) being hunters, or (b) being prey.  Apparently, (c) all of the above, is rewarded with a dunce cap and a paddle whack.

The authors believe that the general public, and a sizable mob of halfwit professors, have been stupefied by the trendy Man the Hunter myth.  It proclaims that our ancestors were bloodthirsty hunters, and hunting encouraged us to become aggressive, violent, sociopathic killers, and monstrous oppressors of women.  Folks entranced by this myth also believe that their human ancestors were never eaten by predators, because they were far too smart to be killed by lions, leopards, or wolves.

The authors are on a mission from God to torpedo the Man the Hunter myth and illuminate readers with the shining truth — Man the Hunted.  Our ancestors were slow, weak, and lacked fierce teeth, sharp claws, and long horns.  On the ground, they were easy prey.  Thus, our evolutionary journey was largely influenced by being yummy meatballs in a hungry cathouse.  This encouraged us to live in groups, pay close attention to reality, cooperate with one another, and become smart, lovable, feminist hominids.

Readers discover that it was impossible for our ancestors to consume meat prior to the invention of cooking, because we lack the teeth and digestive system of carnivores.  Well, actually, we’re omnivores, like our chimp, bonobo, and baboon relatives, all of whom eat both plant and animal foods, uncooked.  Maybe our smaller teeth evolved following the invention of cooked food. 

It’s impossible to accurately determine when we began manufacturing spears, controlling fire, cooking food, or using complex language.  These interesting and unusual innovations had enormous unintended consequences.  They unlocked the entrance to a fantastically dangerous path.

I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that bonobos and chimps, our closest living relatives, have managed to inhabit the same ecosystem for two million years without trashing it.  They wisely avoided the temptation to fool around with technology beyond sticks and stones.  The book revealed an even more astonishing success story, the crocodiles, critters that have a special fondness for inattentive humans.  Today’s crocs are nearly identical to the crocs that lived in the dinosaur era, 200 million years ago.  They live in the water, floating close to the surface, and patiently wait for a thirsty critter to stop for a drink — a simple and awesomely brilliant strategy.

Bonobos and chimps provide us with an important lesson.  Their territories are separated by the Zaire River, so they’ve never met.  The bonobos are like free love hippies, whilst the chimps sometimes act like brutal biker gangs.  Why the difference?  The two species are almost genetically identical, and they inhabit the same ecosystem.  But in bonobo country, there are no chimps, baboons, or gorillas.  So, they have more food, less competition, and life is grand.  In chimp country, it doesn’t pay to be a gentleman.  The most aggressive male is always first in line at the buffet, as well as the primary sperm pump.

The authors lash out at Demonic Males, by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, a gospel of Man the Hunter.  It discusses species that kill their own kind, like orangutans, chimps, gorillas, and humans.  For these species, aggressive behavior could provide some benefits, so this trait has not been discouraged by natural selection.  This infuriates Hart and Sussman, because blame is shifted to the females, who shamelessly burn with desire for demonic males, and then give birth to cute little baby demons.

All parties agree that bonobos were dealt an unbeatable hand and won the jackpot.  If humans had been dealt a similar hand of luxurious abundance, we’d probably be running around naked in an African paradise, having sex ten times a day.  Instead, we got a crap hand — the queen of technology, the joker of excess cleverness, and the ace of self-destruction.

All parties agree that, in theory, humans could mindfully choose to outgrow their rough habits, and transform into adorable sweeties.  Our unpleasant behavior is learned, not genetic.  The Pygmies, Bushmen, and other hunter-gatherers were generally good-natured.  Hunting doesn’t automatically turn us into monsters.

All parties agree that humans are not crazy-violent by nature.  Competition, crowding, scarcity, and anxiety trigger our belligerence.  So, what the heck is this argument about anyway?  Certainly, the demonic male meme has the pungent funk of Judeo-Christian juju, the crabby old sky god who never tires of exterminating city dwellers and other despicable deviants.  Where’s the science?  Well, the science of human evolution provides us with a few hundred pieces of a 100 billion-piece puzzle, and numerous versions of the story are continuously being rewritten, hence the hissing primatologist catfights.

With brains substantially larger than Homo sapiens, Neanderthals managed to live on this planet for maybe 200,000 years without leaving permanent scars.  Scientists sneer at their embarrassing lack of technological innovation (dullards!), and disregard their stunning success at sustainable living (who cares?).  Scientists are quirky folks obsessed with stuff like space colonies and computer-driven electric cars.  (I was surprised to learn that Neanderthals may have gone extinct because they ate too much meat.)

The book is about genetic evolution, not cultural evolution.  Cultural evolution is what has blown the human journey off the rails, ignited the turbo thrusters, and sent us skyrocketing into the dark unknown.  Cultural evolution provided shortcuts that gave us spears and hammers far faster than genetic evolution could enhance our anatomical assets.  Today, the pace of techno-innovation has grown to furious hurricane force.  So, does the hunter vs. hunted catfight really matter?  The planet is not being destroyed by naughty genes.  Wouldn’t it be wiser to yowl and hiss about our toxic culture instead?

Humans evolved in a healthy, wild, natural world.  Our ancestors’ lives were highly adapted to the ecosystem they inhabited.  Survival required being constantly alert to the ever-changing sights, sounds, and smells.  Humankind still exists because our ancestors were acutely aware.  Infants born today have genes that evolved during our hunter-gatherer era, genes fine-tuned for thriving in a tropical savannah amidst hungry leopards, hyenas, snakes, and crocodiles.

But look at us.  We now live in a brutally lobotomized ecosystem where being eaten is no longer a normal everyday possibility.  We live amidst crowds of strangers.  We hunt and forage in supermarkets.  We spend the last years of our lives filling diapers.  Imagine what we’d look like if we spent the next 100,000 years sitting on our butts, staring at glowing screens, and guzzling soda pop.

Many species of bipedal hominids have evolved over seven million years.  Humans are the last of the line.  Few of our bipedal cousins survived as long as the chimps have; they flamed out.  The happy ending here is that a perfect storm of manmade predicaments seems destined to yank the rug out from under our culture.  We won’t have to spend the next 200 years having loud catfights over climate change, contraceptives, or evolution.  Humankind will be dealt a very different hand of cards.  Will we be lucky?

Hart, Donna and Sussman, Robert W., Man the Hunted — Primates, Predators, and Human Evolution, Westview Press, New York, 2005.

Wrangham, Richard and Peterson, Dale, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, Houghton Mifflin Company, New York, 1996.

Wrangham, Richard, “Out of the Pan, Into the Fire: How Our Ancestors’ Evolution Depended on What They Ate,” Tree of Origin, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2001.

Greenland Dreams

I recently took a mental voyage to Greenland, which began when I read Knud Rasmussen’s book, The People of the Polar North, published in 1908.  Rasmussen (1879–1933) was born and raised in Greenland, the son of a Danish minister and his Danish-Eskimo wife.  Most of Knud’s buddies were Eskimos (Inuit), and he fluently spoke both languages.  The family moved to Denmark when Knud was 14, and he soon realized that the wild frontier was far more healthy and alive than the noisy crazy crowds of civilization.

At the age of 23, he eagerly returned to Greenland.  His mission was to document the little known culture and history of his people, before they were overwhelmed by the intense madness of modernity, or driven to extinction by disease.  He had absolute respect for the indigenous culture, and he excelled at getting the wild people to trust him with their stories.  Reading this book struck some deep ancestral chords.  It was a magic portal into a saner and healthier world.  Stories like this are good medicine.  They put things in a clearer perspective.

In those days, Greenland was intensely alive — birds, fish, whales, seals, walruses, reindeer, bears — a precious treasure of abundance and vitality that is beyond the imagination of contemporary minds.  The spiritual realm of the Eskimos embraced the entire family of life, a realm in which humans were no more significant than lemmings or lice.  Humans were not the dominant animal, and Eskimo culture was perfectly free of self-important gods and goddesses.  Everything was alive, and all were related.

In the old days, all things animate and inanimate were alive, and all beings were able to communicate with each other.  People could change into bears, and bears could change into people.  There were far fewer boundaries.  Every community had at least one shaman, and he or she was kept busy attending to the affairs of the spirit world.  They understood the mysteries of hidden things, and had power over the destinies of men.  Rasmussen always sought out the shamans in his travels.

The Eskimos did not have permanent homes; they followed the food.  One group regularly waited for the walruses to come ashore at Taseralik, usually in September.  The huge slow-moving animals were sitting ducks on the rocks, and up to 50 were killed per hour.  The clan spent the long dark winters there, hunting for seals, and dining on the meat and fish they had stored.  In April, when the ice began breaking up, they moved to the mouth of the Ström Fjord, and hunted seal and walrus.  In June, they moved to Iginiarfik and caught capelin, small fish like smelt.  Then they returned to Taseralik to catch halibut.

Living near the Arctic was challenging for two-legged mammals that evolution had fine-tuned for living in the tropics.  By far, Eskimos were the most high-tech subsistence hunters that ever lived.  In open waters, they hunted and fished in kayaks and umiaqs.  When it was time to move camp or visit other villages, they traveled across the ice on dogsleds, which required thick ice.  There were many times when thin ice appeared to be thick ice, and this illusion shortened many lives.  During the long, dark winters, the average temperature was -25° F (-31° C).

Sila, the weather, was a power that dominated Eskimo life.  Greenlanders did not spend their days staring at cell phones, because Sila would blow them away with 150 mph (240 kph) winds, or bury them in sudden avalanches, or wash them away with flash floods, or drown them in stormy seas, or melt the ice they were sledding across.

There was also Nerrivik (“the food dish”), the woman at the bottom of the sea, who ruled the beings of the water world.  She was a moody power, and she often withheld the seals from hungry hunters.  When this happened, shamans were required to journey into her world, tidy her hair, and calm her down.

Rasmussen’s buddy, Peter Freuchen, took a nap during a storm when the temperature was -60° F (-51° C).  When he awoke, his feet were frozen.  This cost him a leg.  Rasmussen told the story of Qumangâpik, who had four wives and 15 children.  The first wife froze to death, the second was buried by an avalanche, the third died of illness, and the fourth froze to death.  Of his 15 children, one starved, four were frozen, and five died of illness.  Qumangâpik froze to death, with his wife and two little children.  Three of his kids outlived him.

In Greenland, it was ridiculously easy to die from brief lapses of attention or the fickle whims of luck.  When they ran out of meat, they ate their dogs.  Then they ate corpses.  Sometimes they killed and ate the weak.  Many times, everyone died.  They did not rot away in nursing homes.  For those who became a burden on the clan, the ride was soon over.  You were either strong and healthy, or you found enjoyment in the afterlife, which was a good place.  There was no Hell for heathen Eskimos.

There was no television, radio, internet, or cell phones.  There were no malls, roads, or cities.  There was no money.  There were no rich or poor.  Nobody starved unless everyone starved.  There were no lawyers, soldiers, farmers, herders, police, politicians, pimps, prostitutes, salespersons, miners, loggers, fashion models, or recreational shoppers.  Eskimos were purely wild and free people, living in a wild and free land, like undamaged human beings.

Eskimos pitied (and giggled at) the Danes, because they suffered from hurricane minds — they never stopped thinking.  Rasmussen once observed an Eskimo who appeared to be deep in thought.  Knud asked him what he was thinking about, and the man laughed.  The only time we think is when we’re running low on meat.  Their language included no tools for discussing abstractions or ideas.  They rarely made plans for tomorrow.  They warmly glowed with “an irresponsible happiness at merely being alive….” 

I also read Gretel Ehrlich’s book, This Cold Heaven, published in 2001.  She was an American who had made several extended visits to Greenland between 1993 and 1999.  She was fascinated by Rasmussen’s stories, and had read the 6,000 pages of his expedition notes.  The chapters of her book flip-flop between discussions of Knud’s life, and descriptions of the folks she met while visiting Greenland.

The recent decades had not been kind for Greenland, as the cancer of a cash economy spread, taking a heavy toll on the remaining wildlife.  But compared to her California home, it seemed like paradise.  Her friend Maria told her, “It’s too bad for you when you visit Greenland, because then you have to keep going back.  When you have been with those people — with the Inuit — you know that you have been with human beings.”

Robert Peary went to the North Pole in 1909.  Like many white lads, the incredible beauty of Inuit women inspired him, with immense throbbing excitement, to toss his Christian virtues to the wind.  In 1997, Ehrlich met two of his granddaughters at Thule.  They lamented that when the Europeans stomped ashore in 1721, there were 16,000 wild heathen souls in all of Greenland.  It wasn’t long before the population fell to just 110, thanks to smallpox.  Now there are 60,000, thanks to the industrial food system.

When Rasmussen traveled across northern Canada in the 1920s, he reported a vast herd of migrating caribou that took three days to pass.  During the warm months, the skies of Greenland were filled with millions of migrating birds that came to nest on rocky islands.  Happy people harvested many birds and eggs.  In 1933, the birds got their revenge.  Kivioq was an Arctic delicacy, consisting of dead auks stuffed into seal gut and allowed to rot for two months.  Rasmussen died from salmonella poisoning after gobbling down a bowl of it.  Urp!

Today, the era of nomadic living is over.  In 1995, the village of Uummannaq was home to 1,400 people and 6,000 dogs.  All settlements reeked of “dog shit, seal guts, and unwashed bodies.”  Epidemics of distemper periodically hammered down canine overpopulation.  Dogs were kept chained all the time, except on hunting trips.  Male dogs that broke free were a public nuisance, and it was the village dogcatcher’s job to simply shoot them on sight.

Ehrlich went on a few hunting trips, riding on a dogsled across the ice.  It felt like a prehistoric experience, but there was one huge difference.  The harpoons and bows had been replaced by high-powered rifles.  It was now far easier to kill seals and polar bears from a distance. 

People no longer hunted and fished for subsistence alone.  In addition to food and furs for their family, they also needed surplus, to pay for electricity, phones, ammunition, heating oil, groceries, computers, cigarettes, alcohol, etc.  The more wildlife they destroyed, the more money they could make, and the more cool stuff they could buy.  This vicious cycle grew into a mass hysteria.  Many people were hunting and fishing as if they were the last generation.

Trouble was born when the Danes first laid eyes on a thriving ecosystem.  Their civilized brains began spinning with excitement, calculating how much wealth could be reaped by exterminating Greenland’s wildlife.  It was impossible for their minds to contemplate the notion of turning around, going home, and leaving the Eskimos in peace.  

Even if the Eskimos had promptly hacked the first missionaries and traders into dog food, they were powerless to prevent the heavily-armed Danes from gang-raping their paradise, and poisoning their ancient culture with the insanity of mindless materialism.  When guns, knives, pots, and matches became available at trading posts, few wild folks anywhere rejected them.  We have a weakness for tools. 

Shortly after Ehrlich’s book was published, a mob of wildlife advocates discovered the reckless destruction in Greenland, and commenced to yowl and bellow.  Greenland shrugged.  It is, after all, the twenty-first century.

New Greenland Government Allows Spring Bird Hunt

Greenland, Day 3: The Dying Hunters

Greenland’s Narwhal Hunters Off the Hook, Again

Greenland: Beluga Quotas - The Sky's The Limit

A Farewell to Greenland’s Wildlife

PS: In 1972, eight Eskimo mummies were discovered at Qilakitsog.  They date to 1460 AD, and were remarkably well-preserved by freeze-drying, including their clothing, tattoos, and even their lice.

Rasmussen, Knud, The People of the Polar North, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., London, 1908.

Ehrlich, Gretel, This Cold Heaven — Seven Seasons in Greenland, Pantheon Books, New York, 2001.