by
Princeton University Press, 1999
Reviewed by
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Review
What do you see when you look into the eyes of a chimpanzee?
Is it, as Stephen Jay Gould recently wrote in the New York Times, an "undeniable affinity" that evokes "an eerie fascination that we usually express as laughter or as fear?" Is it the case, as Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man, that "the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind"?
It is this fundamental premise of Darwin that underlies Craig B. Stanford's interesting new book, The Hunting Apes: Meat Eating and the Origins of Human Behavior. As Stanford, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Southern California, studied chimps and other higher primates during the past decade, he developed a hypothesis about what triggered the evolution of primitive australopithecines into Homo erectus about 1.8 million years ago.
Early in his book, Stanford states his hypothesis this way: "I argue that the origins of human intelligence are linked to the acquisition of meat, especially through the cognitive capacities necessary for the strategic sharing of meat with fellow group members."
It isn't just the hunting of meat, Stanford claims, but the resulting shift in social interactions among hominids who have meat that is the engine of evolutionary change. His view of the crucial role of meat in the development of human intelligence places Stanford in the middle of one of anthropology's most contentious and politically charged debates - "Man the Hunter" versus "Humans the Gatherers." Very simply put, the "hunter" view holds that human evolution took a great leap forward about 1.8 million years ago when males picked up weapons and began to hunt for meat. The "gatherer" version puts less emphasis on men hunting meat and views the evolutionary jump as more of a cooperative, male-female food-gathering, food-sharing social shift.
There are variations within both schools of thought. A new hypothesis holds that the sudden progression in human evolution actually occurred because australopithecines learned how to cook nutrient-rich tubers - roots such as potatoes and beets. That hypothesis has been attacked as a politically correct fantasy.
This fight, in its many forms, goes to the difficulty that modern humans have in sorting out what is and isn't true about the lives of their very ancient ancestors. Early hominid evolution is a field long on hypothesis and short on hard data, which exists mostly in the form of a few dozen good skulls and some stone tools. And what the hard data really say about the very distant past is open to interpretation, for, as anthropologists say, "there is always an alternative story."
Stanford's story is particularly interesting because he looks at chimps, gorillas, and the other great apes, and wonders about behavioral similarities between them and early hominids.
"I began to think about writing this book while I was studying chimpanzees and their prey in East Africa in the early 1990s," Stanford writes. "Nearly every journal article on human origins that I had ever read paid homage to the importance of chimpanzee behavior in understanding the lives of early hominids. But these papers were just lip service; the authors rarely took very seriously the integration of the different routes to understanding human origins."
Chimps are important in understanding humans, he says, because they "hunt and eat the meat of a variety of mammals." They are "funhouse mirrors of our ancestry; the same stock produced us, but with a filter of millions of years of adaptations . . . ."
Stanford adds to the mix a study of the behavior of some of the more remote groups of modern hunter-gatherers, such as the !Kung of the Kalahari desert and the Hadza of northern Tanzania.
"By considering what apes do, what modern humans do, and what early hominids probably did, we may come up with an integrated view of human behavior," Stanford writes.
Weaving together the threads of evidence and observation from various species of apes, humans included, is complicated. Stanford does it clearly and is refreshing in his directness. When he disagrees with a predominant view in his field, he simply says so. Because he uses the behavior of modern humans to develop his hypothesis, the author feels obliged to note that "many anthropologists . . . assume that we should not use modern-day hunter-gatherers as examples of the range of early human social and ecological adaptations. This reluctance is entirely unwarranted. There is no other large, highly social, tool-using biped except ourselves. This is what Homo habilis was 2.5 million years ago."
Stanford proposes that meat hunted by men and brought back to a base camp was key in the evolution of larger-brained humans. But his argument isn't quite that simple, for it isn't the hunting of the meat that is critical, but the dramatic shift it caused in the social structure of the hominid groups.
"I have portrayed the roots of human behavior as manipulation and social cunning that arise from the use of meat in our ancestors," Stanford concludes. "That is very different than saying that, because of a meat-eating past, we have an innately aggressive nature."
In Stanford's version of human origins, the male-female roles at first appear traditional - the men hunt, the women stay home. But it isn't that straightforward. Early hominids used meat as a currency, a valued good, Stanford says. Males used it to dominate females, primarily for sexual purposes. Yet females "are not passive receptacles . . . They are active strategists in pursuit of their own interests and often are the driving forces behind the social system itself."
Stanford focuses heavily on the role of females, for the male-female debate is so tied up in modern-day feminist politics that science sometimes becomes an afterthought. He envisions the hominid woman this way: "She must wheel and deal to get it (meat), just as the male is wheeling and dealing to secure her as a mate, partner, or link in his political support chain. Far from the passive secondary role in which some early models of human behavioral evolution portrayed her, these females actively pursue their own ends, and also achieve their own spheres of power and influence, that affect both male control strategies and the social dynamics of the entire group."
Stanford believes it was the new, more complicated interaction between males and females as they shared meat that drove human evolution forward. That the men did the hunting, he says, there is little doubt. But the hunting was only one step in the dance that led to higher intelligence.
Stanford wrote the book for readers with "no background in human evolution or primate behavior," but it certainly helps if you have at least read an essay or two by Stephen Jay Gould and have some knowledge of natural selection.
Jim Dawson covered cops, courts, education, politics, and most of the other standard newspaper beats before moving into science writing for the Minneapolis Star Tribune 10 years ago.
Most models of the origins of early humans depict them as weaklings struggling to survive in a world that was so inhospitable that only by dint of their cleverness could they get by at all. Only a few current researchers have challenged this view. Henry Bunn of the University of Wisconsin looks at early humans and sees creatures small in stature but strong enough to have overpowered lions and hyenas to take the carnivores' kills away from them.
You may purchase this book (262 pp., hardcover) directly from:
Bwindi-Impenetrable Great Ape Project and Predatory Behavior and Ecology of Wild Chimpanzees - sites both focusing on aspects of Craig Stanford's research.
African Ape Study Sites - provides details on all of the major primate research projects underway in Africa.
Long Foreground: Overview of Human Evolution - a wonderful teaching "module" at Washington State University on the evolution of humans, and a good place for background information.
Anthropology Resources on the Internet - a thorough listing by the American Anthropological Association of dozens of sites. Includes general-interest sites as well as university anthropology home pages and related science sites.
Primate Info Net - a gateway to information for researchers and teachers, with links to organizations, teaching resources, news, and more. Maintained by the Wisconsin Regional Primate Research Center.
Related HMS Beagle articles:
Servants of Nature: A History of Scientific Institutions,Sudden Origins: Fossils, Genes, and the Emergence of SpeciesTime, Love, MemoryThe Tower of Babel: The Evidence against the New CreationismBiohazard:
The Chilling True Story of the Largest CovertUnnatural Selection: The Promise