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Early chopping tools sped up the butchering process, making hunting more efficient and encouraging more of it. But this also placed early humans in an odd spot on the food chain: large predators who were nonetheless wary of the truly big predators. This gave them a strong incentive to study and master the behavioral patterns of everything above and below them on the food chain.
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That added up to a lot of information, however, about a lot of different animals, all with their various distinctive behaviors and traits. To organize that growing store of knowledge, and to preserve it and pass it along to others, Shipman argues, those early humans created complex languages and intricate cave paintings.
Art in particular was animal-centered. It’s significant, Shipman points out, that the vast majority of the images on the walls of caves like Lascaux, Chauvet, and Hohle Fels are animals. There were plenty of other things that no doubt occupied the minds of prehistoric men: the weather, the physical landscape, plants, other people. And yet animals dominate.
The centrality of animals in that early artwork has long intrigued anthropologists. Some have suggested that the animals were icons in early religions, or visions from mystical trances. Shipman, however, argues that the paintings serve a more straightforward function: conveying data between members of a species that was growing increasingly adept at hunting and controlling other animals. Lascaux, in this reading, was basically primitive Powerpoint. The paintings, Shipman points out, are packed with very specific information about animal appearance and behavior.
“It’s all about animals,” Shipman says. “There are very few depictions of humans and they’re generally not very realistic. The depictions of animals are amazing, you can tell this is a depiction of a prehistoric horse in its summer coat, or that this is a rhino in sexual posture.”
This storehouse of knowledge eventually allowed humans to domesticate animals. Evidence from early human settlements suggests that wolves were domesticated into dogs more than 20,000 years before people first domesticated plants. These new companion animals — not only dogs but eventually horses, camels, cows, goats, sheep, pigs, and others — in essence allowed human beings to appropriate a whole new set of abilities: to be better hunters, to kill off household pests, to haul goods, pull plows, create fertilizer, and protect homes against intruders. Not to mention the food and raw materials their bodies yielded up. Of course, the domesticated animals benefited, too: Human dependence on them ensured their survival and spread, even as some of their wild cousins were hunted to extinction.
The great value that was gained from these “living tools,” as Shipman calls them, also meant that people with a particular interest in animal behavior, and who were especially acute about observing, predicting, and controlling it, were more likely to thrive in early human societies and to have more offspring. To the extent that there was a genetic component to these skills, Shipman argues, it spread. Just as humans selected for certain traits in domestic animals, those same animals were unconsciously shaping their domesticators right back.
“Domestication was reciprocal,” Shipman writes in her Current Anthropology article. And our weakness for pets, she suggests, may be a vestige of that bilateral domestication.
Shipman readily admits that what she’s proposing is a hypothesis, and she hopes other scholars will help to flesh it out. So far, the reception has been mixed. Other researchers exploring the origins of language and art are reluctant to ascribe it to something as limited as the predators and prey early humans faced — the need to convey information about other human beings, for example, could have been just as important in spurring the development of language, if not more. Anthropologists like Manuel Dominguez-Rodrigo of Spain’s Complutense University of Madrid disagree with Shipman that early tool use arose to deal with dead animals; it’s more likely, he argues, that the first stone tools were used to process plants.
And it may be, too, that we find puppies cute not because of some innate desire to domesticate wild animals, but simply because puppies share some of the features — big eyes, clumsy movements, stubby limbs — that human babies have.
Still, for scholars of human-animal studies, the ambition and scope of Shipman’s argument are good in and of themselves, throwing into relief the ways that our own development has made us one of the world’s great symbiotic species, thriving through a set of partnerships with other animals.
Shipman’s argument “is radical to the degree that it really puts front and center the animal-human bond in a way that it hasn’t been before,” says King. “It’s not just background noise — yeah we hunted them, yeah we lived with them, yeah we ate them — it truly shapes the human evolutionary trajectory. That seems to me a really good thing to be doing.”
Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas. E-mail
drbennett@globe.com.
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