“The earliest hominids probably scavenged and took small prey with their hands, as chimpanzees and baboons do. Only their next step was unique: they began to use tools to butcher large carcasses that nonhuman primates cannot exploit. The difficulty of this leap (to the use of tools to butcher) belies the charge that scavenging offers no challenge that might select for human qualities. . . Scavenging is not at all easy for a slow, small, dull-toothed primate. To locate scavengeable carcasses before others did, we had to learn how to interpret the diverse cues to the presence of a carcass in riparian woodlands. They include the labored, low-level, early-morning, beeline flight of a single vulture toward a kill; vultures perched in mid-canopy rather than at the crown of a tree, where they nest; appendages of a concealed leopard or of its kill dangling from a branch; and tufts of ungulate hair or fresh claw marks at the base of a leopards favorite feeding tree. At night, the loud 'laughing' of hyenas at a fresh kill, the panicked braying of a zebra being attacked, the grunting of a frightened wildebeest---all serve notice of where to find an abandoned carcass when morning comes." (p. 94-95, Blumenschine and Cavallo, 1992)
Starting off with a bang: “The earliest hominids probably scavenged and took small prey with their hands, as chimpanzees and baboons do.” This is the foundation their argument, equating early hominin behavior with that of chimpanzees and baboons. Fair enough. Except that in Stanford’s paper which I cited last post, “The Predatory Behavior and Ecology of Wild Chimpanzees,” the author states, “wild chimpanzees (particularly the males who do most of the hunting) show little interest in dead animals.” Okay, so much for the scavenging chimps. Unfortunately, of course, since B&C start by presenting this as fact, all the rest of their conclusions follow from this erroneous statement. Did they just not know what chimps eat, or did they ignore it and make up chimp behavior to suit their theory; because that’s, effectively, what happened?
They continued with the following assertion: “The difficulty of this leap (to the use of tools to butcher) belies the charge that scavenging offers no challenge that might select for human qualities.” Since they haven’t proved that hominins were scavenging, the statement makes no sense. It’s a non sequitur. Simply because people used tools to butcher is no proof that they scavenged the animals they butchered, much less that it was selected for. They don’t appear to realize that, if scavenging were selected for in human evolution at such a late date, we’d still be scavengers.
The authors did have a flash of reason when they observed, “Scavenging is not at all easy for a slow, small, dull-toothed primate.” Forget about unarmed. So, why would we do it? It’s doubtful we could scavenge enough food to compensate for the energy expended to get it. Scavenging is easy for hyenas and vultures; they’d clean everything up long before slow us got to the carcass, even if we wanted to eat the meat.
The authors finished with a fanciful flurry of heightened imagination; for a minute they thought they were writers:
“To locate scavengeable carcasses before others did, we had to learn how to interpret the diverse cues to the presence of a carcass in riparian woodlands. They include the labored, low-level, early-morning, beeline flight of a single vulture toward a kill; vultures perched in mid-canopy rather than at the crown of a tree, where they nest; appendages of a concealed leopard or of its kill dangling from a branch; and tufts of ungulate hair or fresh claw marks at the base of a leopards favorite feeding tree. At night, the loud 'laughing' of hyenas at a fresh kill, the panicked braying of a zebra being attacked, the grunting of a frightened wildebeest—all serve notice of where to find an abandoned carcass when morning comes.”
Pay attention to the phrase “riparian woodland”: “woodland down by the river,” another cogent, if unintentional observation by the authors. Other than that, they didn’t appear to think much beyond their thesaurus. Or they haven’t spent much time looking at vultures. I’d challenge them to spend a day on foot out in, say, the John Day country of eastern Oregon and try and find one carcass with enough meat on it for them to get a reasonable bite or two. Hell, just find any old carcass, meat on the bones or not. Roadkill doesn’t count; stay to the backcountry. Go ahead, follow all the vultures you want. And in the early morning light, try and find where the coyotes were last night. Did you hear the roar of a mountain lion? Track it down and see if it killed anything.
The authors are, alas, delusional and woefully inexperienced. We are exceptionally poorly equipped to be scavengers. We are not so poorly equipped to be hunters; we’re good at throwing things. The odds of us finding game to kill are much greater than the odds of finding a leftover carcass. If you’ve ever been deer hunting, try and remember the number of dead deer you’ve seen (that weren’t shot) compared to the number of lives ones you’ve seen. In my experience, the ratio is probably bigger than 1:100. Our blunted sense of smell alone would rule us out for scavenging.
Me thinks a major stumbling block to understanding stone tools, is that paleo-anthropolgists tend to think of the first stone tools as butchering tools: hand-axes and scrapers; that’s why they place so much weight on early flaked tools which were, largely just that. They ignore the virtual certainty that the first stone tools were nothing more than the stones themselves, unprocessed. And not just for cracking open marrow bones or turtle shells, but for tossing at prey. There’s a reason why we developed a throwing shoulder early after descending; and there’s a reason why ball games are so universally important. Kill a seagull by pitching a baseball at him? You bet. A trick like that can stand between you and starvation, or at least a good meal. I imagine we came down from the trees as primarily spear-chuckers, but I’ll bet we added rocks to our arsenal early on.
No matter how common it is, it’s always a bit unsettling to find academic authors making such basic mistakes. Hopefully, some of their colleagues raised the same flags I did.
There’s always hope, right?
No comments:
Post a Comment