The Myth of Man As Hunter

By Barbara Ehrenreich

It must seem odd to the duck and deer populations that Americans have paid more than $255 million this summer for the experience of being prey. In Jurassic Park we had the supreme thrill of being hunted for food by creatures far larger, faster, and -- counting teeth and claws -- better armed than we are. With the raptors closing in, we saw how vulnerable the human body is -- no claws, no exoskeleton, no blinding poison sprays. Take away our guns and high-voltage fences and we are, from a typical predator perspective, tasty mounds of unwrapped meat.

If the experience resonates to the most ancient layers of our brains, it's probably because we spent our first million years or so not just hunting and gathering, but being hunted and gathered. T. Rex had been gone for 60 million years when our progenitors came along, but there were saber-toothed tigers, lions, cougars, leopards, bears, wolves and wild boars waiting at the edge of every human settlement and campground.

The myth of "man the hunter" has flatteringly obscured our true prehistory as prey. According to the myth, "man" climbed down from the trees one day, strode out into the savanna with a sharpened stick in his hand and started slaughtering the local ungulates. After that, supposedly, the only violence prehumans had to worry about was from other stick-wielding bipeds like themselves. Thus some punctured australopithecine skulls found in Africa were at first chalked up to "intentional armed assault" -- until someone pointed out that the punctures precisely fit the tooth gap of the leopard.

Humans didn't even invent effective action-at-a-distance weapons until a mere 40,000 or so years ago. Only with these new tools, like the bow and arrow and the spear thrower, could our ancestors begin to mimic the speed and sharpness of a big cat's claws. Even so, predator animals remained a major threat. As late as the 7th century B.C., a stela erected by the Assyrian King Assurbanipal recounts the ferocity of the lions and tigers after torrential rains had flushed them out of their lairs; the great King, of course, stamped out the beasts.

Our collective memory of the war against the predator beasts is preserved in myth and fairy tale. Typically, a mythical hero starts out by taking on the carnivorous monster that is ravaging the land: Perseus saves Andromeda from becoming a sea monster's snack. Theseus conquers the Minotaur who likes to munch on Athenian youth. Beowulf destroys the loathsome night-feeding Grendel. Heracles takes on a whole zoo of horrors: lions, hydras, boars. In European fairy tales it's the wolves you have to watch out for -- if the cannibal witches don't get you first.

No doubt the greatest single leap in human prehistory was the one we made from being helpless prey to becoming formidable predators of other living creatures, including, eventually, the ones with claws and fangs. This is the theme that is acted out over and over, obsessively, in the initiation rites of tribal cultures. In the drama of initiation, the young (usually men) are first humiliated and sometimes tortured, only to be "reborn" as hunters and warriors. Very often the initial torment includes the threat of being eaten by costumed humans or actual beasts. Orokaiva children in Papua New Guinea are told they will be devoured like pigs; among Indians of the Pacific Northwest, the initiates were kidnapped or menaced by wolves; young Norwegian men, at least in the sagas, had to tackle bears single-handedly.

As a species, we've been fabulously successful at predation. We enslaved the wild ungulates, turning them into our cattle and sheep, pushing them into ever narrower habitats. We tamed some of the wolves and big cats, trivializing them as household pets. We can dine on shark or alligator fillets if we want, and the only bears we're likely to know are the ones whose name is teddy. In fact, horror movies wouldn't be much fun if real monsters lurked outside our theaters. We can enjoy screaming at the alien or the raptor or the blob because we know, historically speaking, it was our side that won.

But the defeat of the animal predators was not a clear-cut victory for us. With the big land carnivores out of the way, humans decided that the only worthwhile enemy was others like themselves -- "enemy" individuals or tribes or nations or ethnic groups. The criminal stalking his victim, the soldiers roaring into battle, are enacting an archaic drama in which the other player | was originally nonhuman, either something to eat or be eaten by. For millenniums now, the earth's scariest predator has been ourselves.

In our arrogance, we have tended to forget that our own most formidable enemies may still be of the nonhuman kind. Instead of hungry tigers or fresh- cloned dinosaurs, we face equally deadly microscopic life forms. It will take a whole new set of skills and attitudes to defeat HIV or the TB bacterium -- not the raging charge on the field of battle, but the cunning ambush of the lab.

And then there are all the nonliving enemies -- Pinatubo, Andrew, the murderously bloated Mississippi -- to remind us that the earth has not passively accepted our dominion over it. We will go down, locked in incestuous combat with our own kind, while the earth quakes, the meteors hit and the viruses mindlessly duplicate in our living organs. Or we will take another great leap like the one our protohuman ancestors took so long ago when the threat was still from predator beasts: We will marshal all our skills and resources, our tools and talents, and face the enemy without.