The Hunting Apes: Meat Eating and the Origins of Human Behavior - Softcover

Stanford, Craig B.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691088888 ISBN 13: 9780691088884

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2001

Synopsis

What makes humans unique? What makes us the most successful animal species inhabiting the Earth today? Most scientists agree that the key to our success is the unusually large size of our brains. Our large brains gave us our exceptional thinking capacity and led to humans' other distinctive characteristics, including advanced communication, tool use, and walking on two legs. Or was it the other way around? Did the challenges faced by early humans push the species toward communication, tool use, and walking and, in doing so, drive the evolutionary engine toward a large brain? In this provocative new book, Craig Stanford presents an intriguing alternative to this puzzling question--an alternative grounded in recent, groundbreaking scientific observation. According to Stanford, what made humans unique was meat. Or, rather, the desire for meat, the eating of meat, the hunting of meat, and the sharing of meat.

Based on new insights into the behavior of chimps and other great apes, our now extinct human ancestors, and existing hunting and gathering societies, Stanford shows the remarkable role that meat has played in these societies. Perhaps because it provides a highly concentrated source of protein--essential for the development and health of the brain--meat is craved by many primates, including humans. This craving has given meat genuine power--the power to cause males to form hunting parties and organize entire cultures around hunting. And it has given men the power to manipulate and control women in these cultures. Stanford argues that the skills developed and required for successful hunting and especially the sharing of meat spurred the explosion of human brain size over the past 200,000 years. He then turns his attention to the ways meat is shared within primate and human societies to argue that this all-important activity has had profound effects on basic social structures that are still felt today.

Sure to spark a lively debate, Stanford's argument takes the form of an extended essay on human origins. The book's small format, helpful illustrations, and moderate tone will appeal to all readers interested in those fundamental questions about what makes us human.

About this title

Review:

Most evolutionary biologists agree that what makes humans unique among animals is our brainpower. But why--and how--did we evolve our oversized brains? Craig Stanford dusts off the old "Man the Hunter" theory, roundly criticized as replete with bad (and sexist) assumptions, and finds a thick, juicy, postmodern steak at the heart of it. He argues, "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."

Stanford studied the great apes, especially chimpanzees, and came to the conclusion that among primates, meat is a valuable commodity both nutritionally and socially. Although many other foods are nutritionally desirable, meat is unique in its social desirability, and for males, it represents power:

Underlying the nutritional aspect of getting meat, part of the social fabric of the community is revealed in the dominance displays, the tolerated theft, and the bartered meat for sexual access. The end of the hunt is often only the beginning of a whole other arena of social interaction.

In Stanford's view, females play a crucial role in keeping groups together and cementing individual relationships. Meat plays an important role in the way males fit in to a society, and the ability of males to get meat readily may very well explain their societal dominance. These conclusions are not liable to be nearly so controversial as the way Stanford gathered his data--he drew broad parallels between chimps and modern hunter-gatherer societies. Stanford also admits that a lack of fossil evidence supporting his meat/brain link is problematic. The Hunting Apes is an interesting look at what is likely the worthwhile center of a discredited evolutionary theory. --Therese Littleton

From the Back Cover:

"The 'Man the Hunter' model of the 1960s was simultaneously one of the most influential and reviled of ideas about human origins. It fell easy victim to numerous criticisms (drawn especially from work on chimpanzees), and dropped from favor during the 1970s. There was, however, a baby in that bath and Stanford has rescued it, dried it off, and refined it with volumes of new data and theory. The result is a sophisticated and provocative synthesis of ėMan the Hunterķ and chimpanzee behavioral ecology."--Jim Moore, University of California, San Diego

"Stanford's essay neatly captures the powerful role that hunting has played in human evolution and in the minds of evolutionists."--Richard Wrangham, Harvard University, author of Demonic Males: Apes and the Originis of Human Violence

About this edition

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0691088888
• ISBN 13: 9780691088884
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272