9. The Lions of Gorongosa

Hunting is the master behavior pattern of the human species. It is the organizing activity which integrated the morphological, physiological, genetic and intellectual aspects of the human organisms and of the population who compose our single species. . . . Hunting played the dominant role in transforming a bipedal ape into a tool-using and tool-making man who communicated by means of speech and expressed a complex culture in the infinite number of ways now known to us.

These thoughts were recorded by William S. Laughlin, professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, in 1968. The year before, California's S. L. Washburn had presented a similar view:

Human hunting is made possible by tools, but it is far more than a technique or even a variety of techniques. It is a way of life, and the success of the hunting adaptation (in its total social, technical, and psychological dimensions) dominated the course of human evolution for hundreds of thousands of years. In a very real sense our intellect, interests, emotions and basic social life are evolutionary products of the success of the hunting adaptation.

No inquiry into the social contract can be completed without review of what is known or speculated about man's hunting past. It is the period of human evolution that so decisively separated our way from the evolution of the largely vegetarian monkey or ape. If man's disposition for violence has evolutionary origins, then our long hunting history cannot be neglected through simplistic reference to the non-violent chimpanzee. If human social organization differs widely from that of the subhuman primate, then it is to our hunting days that we must look for possible causes. But there are many questions, and our authorities confront each other with opposed views. And so in this chapter I shall not only attempt to reconstruct our hunting way but to explore those arguments which would magnify or diminish its role in the human emergence.

While Washburn and Laughlin present much the same view, Washburn's is the more conservative statement since he refers to the hundreds of thousands of years in which hunting has dominated our course. The human brain experienced sudden enlargement a little over half a million years ago, and so Washburn refers to the time of true man. Earlier was the time of the hominid, the being who resembled ourselves in almost every way excepting his brain, a third as large. And Laughlin's reference to the transformation of a bipedal ape into a tool-making man is the larger statement, since it speaks not just of a character of man, but of the making of man. And this was the thesis originally projected by Raymond A. Dart, with his shocking paper in 1953, "The Predatory Transition from Ape to Man."

I told Dart's story in African Genesis -- of his discovery in 1924 of the extinct small-brained South African being, Australopithecus africanus; of his claim that it was a hominid, a member of man's evolutionary line; of his conclusion that africanus was a carnivore, a hunter, and that he was armed with weapons long before the coming of man's big brain. The controversy was enormous and proceeds to this day. One question, however, that was only being opened when I wrote my earlier book has today been settled. In 1967 our foremost paleontologist, Alfred S. Romer, in the course of his presidential address told the American Association for the Advancement of Science: "Australopithecus and his kin are unquestionably morphologically antecedent to man, and with one or two exceptions all competent investigators in this field now agree that the australopithecines of the early Pleistocene are actual human ancestors."

In that most embattled and enchanting of scientific fields, where new discoveries compete with old prejudices to enliven every passing year, the slogan for professional and amateur alike must be "Publish and duck." One question has been settled. And another has been received in such scientific fashion that any may publish an answer without ducking. This question asks, How long ago? and a decisive contribution to study of the ancient past has come from the laboratories of the physical sciences. While the nuclear physicist has presented mankind with some unholy problems, he has presented anthropology with a variety of means for dating old wood, old lava beds, even old, elusive bones. Carbon fourteen, potassium-argon, fission track and other techniques all rest on the principle that certain unstable radiogenic particles will through atomic rearrangement achieve stability at given rates. Potassium, for example, has an unstable isotope which at an infinitely slow pace degenerates into argon, an element which in an ancient volcanic rock would not naturally appear. By delicate laboratory process the quantity of argon may be measured, so that we know with small possible error the rock's age. By such means do we announce the age of rocks brought back from the moon.

Absolute dating has in the past decade revolutionized our knowledge of the human past. For African Genesis my wife drew a chart of fossil men and what was known in 1961 of our ancestors. On it, as my best guess, she placed Dart's africanus as 800,000 years ago. Only an amateur with no reputation to lose would have dared a date quite so ancient. Yet now we know that the South African fossil bed can be no less than twice as old. And Clark Howell of the University of Chicago is today finding australopithecine remains in the beds of southern Ethiopia's Omo River twice as old as that. Kenneth Oakley's authoritative Frameworks for Dating Fossil Man gives the age of the Omo remains as about 3,500,000 years.

Much has happened in the decade since I was finishing the writing of African Genesis in the south of Spain. Two questions, then of utmost controversy, have been settled: the australopithecine ancestry of man, and the age in which these ancestors lived. Also, it is generally conceded that he ate meat. But in the best tradition of African anthropology, new discoveries have unloosed new storms of controversy, old prejudices have fallen into new fits of bad temper. New questions emerge, distinctly unsettled. How important to the survival of men or near-men was the eating of meat? Did we truly hunt, or did we scavenge the kills of others? If big-brained man for a half-million years killed animals larger than himself, did likewise his small-brained hominid ancestors? And if the hunting way has contributed as much to the human way as many authorities propose, then just how ancient is it?

The decade that has encouraged others to ask new questions has given me time, as well, to think things over. Whereas earlier I was preoccupied with the australopithecine's dependence on the weapon for survival, I find myself equally concerned today with his dependence on society. Was it not the necessity^for early man, and earlier hominid, to hunt in cooperative bands that gave us the evolutionary basis for present societies? And was it not, within these societies, the division of labor between the males who roamed in their hunting bands and the females who stayed home with their slow-growing young -- a pattern s6 unlike most primate species -- that set a social pattern which has remained with us ever since? And would not these two characters of selective necessity -- the cooperation of a small male group and the separation but interdependence of the two divisions of the whole society -- have placed a biological foundation beneath early consequences of varied sort, such as the need for language?

It is an hypothesis useless to consider if no survival value was attached to the eating of meat; or if we hunted such small animals that cooperative hunting was unnecessary; or if we merely scavenged for a living, an activity little different from that of the monkey or ape, scrounging on his own. Let us begin by inspecting the need for meat.

You will read many an informed article today stating that throughout 99 percent of our history man was a hunter. While the figure is conservative, it rests on most simple arithmetic. About ten thousand years ago man began to gain control over his food supply. Probably first in the Middle East we started to domesticate such grains as wheat and barley, then a bit later through selective breeding to domesticate animals like cattle and sheep. Our attention turned to fields and to pastures. We began to live in villages, then, with a surplus of food such as we had never known, in towns. But the process was a slow one. For several thousand years these early farmers still depended for their food in large part on hunting. Not till five thousand years ago could it be said that any significant portion of mankind had become independent of the hunting way. Yet if the hunting hypothesis as projected by Washburn and Laughlin and so many others is correct, throughout certainly the half-million-year history of true man we had depended on our skill as hunters for survival.

The way of life that we now take for granted and on the foundations of which we have built civilizations occupies but one percent of the time of the big-brain's preoccupation. And it is in this short period that present cultures have divided and subdivided, acquired peculiarities and parochial dedications. Earlier there was but one culture, that of the hunter, and its character was determined not by man alone but by the animals we hunted or competed with. A few of us, no doubt, depended on such uninspired activities as digging up clams, but such early peoples were exceptional. When the modern anthropologist asserts the essential unity of mankind as resting on the hunting way, he refers to the half-million years minus five thousand when, if our children were to eat, we killed animals large enough to feed us all.

The hypothesis is challenged not only by such reckless assertions as that of William and Claire Russell that hunting has absorbed us for a mere fifty thousand years, but by the far more respectable argument of many anthropologists that discounts the importance of meat in the diet of contemporary hunting peoples. The common phrase states that 80 percent of the foodstuffs in the diet of such primitive groups consists of wild plants collected usually by women and children. We were never, in other words, that dependent on the hunt. But there are at least two vital oversights.

Ethnology -- the proper word to describe the scientific observation of primitive peoples -- has a place in the reconstruction of our ancestral past, but its evidences must be handled with extreme care. That hominid and Homo included vegetable foods in their diet must have been as true then as it is today. But the vegetarian predilection of today's hunters encounters Richard Lee's summary of twenty-four hunting peoples in Africa and South America revealing only one in which as much as 80 percent of the diet comes from gathering wild plants. This is the Hazda of East Africa. But if we turn to James Woodburn's study of the Hazda, we shall discover that the percentage was calculated not calorically but by weight. There is a difference between a pound of lettuce and a pound of beef, if a man is to liye out his years.

Even lacking the means to check the caloric validity of Lee's other cited sources, we find among the twenty-four warm-weather peoples in his list only five others who gain more than 60 percent of their food from plant sources. And when we turn to North American cold-weather peoples living above the latitude of New York City, such as the Eskimo or Chipawayan or Chinook, we discover just four out of thirty who look to wild plants for even 50 percent of their food. Yet these are the only modern hunting peoples whose protein necessity may be compared to early man surviving a half-million years of ice-age Europe and Asia.

Warm Africa, with lower protein necessity, was the scene of our still earlier hominid evolution, and Lee himself has contributed a carefully documented study that might seem to offer analogy. The IKung Bushmen live at a series of waterholes in southwestern Africa. (The ! represents a language click which, after a decade and a half of frustrated trial, I do not recommend that the reader attempt.) Counting calories, not ounces, Lee found that 70 percent of IKung diet is the product of gathering, not hunting. But what do they gather? In the favored area of this particular Bushman group is an ample forest yielding the high-protein mongongo nut. So hard-shelled is the nut that it may lie on the ground for a year without rotting. And the sensible Bushman prefers picking up nuts to pursuing animals all over the Kalahari Desert.

Lee's study is of an extraordinarily fortunate hunting people. Out of a daily intake of 2,140 calories, the !Kung Bushman derives precisely 190 from foods other than meat and nuts. That he thrives on such a diet would seem likely, and Lee found 10 percent of his population over sixty years old. But Henri Vallois of Paris' Mus6e de l'Homme, after a study of memorable dedication found that of 382 fossil remains of Pleistocene man, just ten had passed fifty years at death. "Few individuals passed forty years. ... If the period from twenty to thirty years is considered as the main period of a couple's fecundity, it is evident that when the eldest members of a family reached adult age, usually their mother had already died and the father was not far from his end." Lee's fortunate IKung Bushmen -- an unfortunate choice for study if we are to look for revelations concerning pre-history -- may with their lucky mongongo nuts have achieved a certain affluence, and even old age. Our ancestors did not.

Much may be learned from those living fossils, contemporary peoples who reject the modern way. That all possess a most exquisite knowledge of the natural world on which they depend speaks much for the human stock. That no living people, however primitive, speaks a language less complex grammatically than our own tells the linguist much about the probable antiquity of human communication. Such observations become even more dramatic when we recall that the few marginal hunting peoples remaining today are human evolution's losers, and that we are comparing them with those original winners whose genes were to seed the continents. But the traps facing the ethnologist are many. There is the second error.

Even were we to presume on the basis of contemporary evidence that our hunting ancestors were never in truth that dependent on meat, still the investigator would face a mighty fact. Our contemporary hunters are not that primitive. None lacks the use of fire or cooking utensils. And few are the natural nourishing foods other than meat -- honey and nuts are examples -- that may be digested by man without cooking. Yet fire and certainly cooking utensils must, from the long view of pre-history, be regarded as recent inventions.

Cereals, whether wild or domesticated, were unavailable to the human diet before we had a way to cook them. Crops and pots came as partners in the agricultural revolution, and that was a mere ten thousand years ago. So long as we had fire, roasting and baking were theoretically possible, and our use of fire boasts a longer history. Pekin man, 400,000 years ago, had his hearths at Choukoutien, and still earlier hearths have been found in Hungary and the south of France. All of the evidences of controlled fire lie in the north and date from periods of glacial cold.

Was fire used for cooking in such times, or simply for keeping warm? While surely man must have discovered that certain tubers and roots became edible if left in the heat of the hearth, and there are even the charred remains of hackberries from Choukoutien, still the evidence is quite simple that fire was for keeping warm. In Africa, a continent presenting many a problem but not that of freezing to death, we find no evidence for such early control of fire. Dart once believed that his Makapan Valley australopithecines in South Africa had used fire, but the claim has been disproved. Curiously enough, just a mile away in the same valley's Cave of Hearths we find sure evidence of controlled fire, as we do at Montagu Cave in South Africa's Cape Province, and at Kalambo Falls in Zambia. But none dates from over fifty thousand years ago.

If the conversion of vegetable matter into a fuel comprehensible to the human stomach was of survival necessity to evolving man, then it becomes impossible to explain why fire came so late to Africa. We must conclude, I believe, that the demand for vegetable foods on the part of our ancestors was marginal. Our own implacable children, confronting vegetables, reaffirm ancient decision.

Ethnology's analogy I believe quite false. Our remaining primitive hunting peoples depend more on the hunt than is generally accepted. And these people, all users of fire, have available far more wild vegetable foods than did our ancestors. Meat was never a luxury, as it is to the chimp or baboon. But we cannot leap to the conclusion that because the eating of meat was of survival value to evolving man, the cooperative hunting band was a social necessity. Small animals were available for traps and snares.

Few competent physical anthropologists would deny that in this last half-million years of big-brained man we hunted and killed large animals. Choukoutien, the site in China that I have mentioned, was discovered in the 1930's, and its caves show human occupancy from about 400,000 until 200,000 years ago. Pekin man, now classified as Homo erectus, was an early edition of Homo sapiens, and, like his Java cousin, Pithecanthropus, he had a brain about one-third smaller than average modern size. Yet in the very earliest of the Chinese deposits his remains are surrounded by masses of reindeer bones, evidently his chief item of diet. That his smallish brain of 1,000 cc. does not deny him the status of Homo may be judged by comparison with that of Anatole France, whose brain was precisely the same size. Though he wore the smallest hat in Paris, nothing prevented him from being one of the great French authors.

For two of Pekin man's contemporaries, Java man and a newly discovered skull from Tanzania's Olduvai Gorge, we have no direct evidence for hunting, but both give us precisely the same absolute date, 495,000 years ago. A remarkable site in Kenya, however, only a shade later, provides all the evidence one could need. Here we have no remains of the occupant, but we have his exquisite weapons and abundant remains of his prey.

Olorgesaillie was once a lake bed -- or series of lake beds -- deep in Kenya's Rift Valley, not an hour's drive from Nairobi. The site was discovered by L. S. B. Leakey, and elegantly developed and described by Glynn Isaac, who places its age as 400,000 years. (And in passing we should recall that this was 350,000 years before the first known use of fire in Africa.) Here for ages an ancient lake spread or retreated with shifts of rain and drought, and exposed or engulfed the record of those who lived beside it. We were true men without doubt; but whether we were of the early erectus edition such as Leakey found at Olduvai or of our own modern sapiens is doubtful. The quality of the weapons might indicate fully developed man, for they are the almond-shaped hand axes of the style known as Acheulian, beautifully wrought, man's principle weapon for hundreds of thousands of years. Their quantity, however, defies explanation.

The visitor to Olorgesaillie may today walk about on narrow, raised catwalks and observe for himself an outdoor museum of our ancient past. In one area twenty meters in diameter Isaac found 148 of the weapons, all from a single short period of occupancy. Another sixteen meters across produced 524. At an incredible third site of only 180 square meters, smaller than my apartment in Rome, Isaac found 620 weapons and tools all on a single surface. The observer looking down from the catwalk experiences the most eerie identification with the human past as he views several hand axes standing upright, points jabbed into the clay, just as they were abandoned by their owners 400,000 years ago.

And there were large animals in plenty, too. Their abundant fossils range from giant pig to horse to hippo. Most mystifying of the faunal remains left behind by these Acheulian men are the innumerable teeth of Simopithecus, an extinct baboon of the period. He was perhaps four times as large as the modern baboon, a creature who, as we have seen, gives enough trouble to contemporary man even with modern weapons. How did we with our hand-held weapons kill such primate monuments? One might conclude that it was impossible, and that we scavenged the kills of mightier predators. But where is the cat that could kill such baboons? There was the saber-tooth in those days, massive but unquestionably slow. That he did it is unlikely.

While I may suggest that none but the cooperating hunting band, working at night, could have disposed of Simopithecus, let us leave the question open until we have inspected the problem of scavenging in the next section of this chapter. For the moment let us accept that for the last half-million years true man has left evidence that he consumed animals far larger and more dangerous than himself. And let us turn our attention to the question of antiquity: Is it only in the time of Homo that we find our fossil remains associated with the remnants of animals larger than ourselves, and that we could have killed -- if indeed we ourselves killed them -- only through the cooperative efforts of a band? Let us move back a few paces in time.

In African Genesis I described Tanzania's remote, dry Olduvai Gorge as the Grand Canyon of Human Evolution. And through the devotion of Louis and Mary Leakey it has since proved to be just that; tourist buses run to it today. By 1961 the Leakeys had found, beyond an immense number of stone artifacts, just one fossil hominid, which Leakey described as Zinjanthropus, the Nutcracker man. I enhanced, to my regret, no subsequent cordial receptions on the part of Dr. Leakey by correctly describing it as a variant of Australopithecus robustus, a vegetarian cousin of Dart's southern africanus, discovered by Robert Broom in South Africa many years before. Zinjanthropus is today so classified. Robustus, with his huge molars specialized for the munching, largely vegetarian life, and the crest on the skull to which necessary, powerful muscles were attached, could never have become a human ancestor. He was a side line.

Then however, several years after the publication of my book, Leakey announced the discovery of what he called Homo habilis. Here was the meat-eater with the slim, light teeth, the clean skull undecorated by crest, resembling Dart's africanus. His brain was a shade larger, his anatomical characters were closer to the human line. Here was a being as close to the veritable human ancestor as one was ever likely to find. And the Leakeys had found him at the bottom of the Olduvai Gorge, in what is known as Bed One, with an age confirmed by both potassium-argon and fission-track dating as almost two million years. Habilis was a hominid, four times as old as our most ancient traces of true man, with a brain less than half the size of ours. The shock of the discovery, spreading out from Olduvai's dusty range, provided an earthquake for anthropology from which it has never recovered.

Arguments skittered about like cats on a hot scientific roof. Leakey denied that habilis was an australopithecine. Today almost every authority -- Le Gros Clark, Oakley, Campbell, Robinson, Howell -- disagrees with him. Habilis was a halfway house on the evolutionary slopes of the climb to man. Whether we call him Homo or not is a matter of semantics, so long as we do not deny that he was an advanced member of Dart's africanus family. But whether or not he was a successful hunter of large animals is a question far from semantics. If he captured nothing but turtles, snared nothing but rodents and birds, seized as do modern baboons nothing but the gazelle's helpless fawns, then the hunting band was unnecessary. The social organization of ancient, small-brained hominids of the human line rests in part on the answer.

We know today that all of Bed One, Olduvai's oldest deposit, and the lower portion of higher Bed Two antedate by at least a million years our earliest evidence of true, large-brained man. Whatever is found in these deposits, accumulated ever so slowly beside a forgotten lake, has almost all been derived from the hominid living-sites excavated by the Leakeys. The stone implements were the work of a being with a brain less than half the size of ours, and Mary Leakey's painstaking analysis reveals them not just as crudely chipped pebbles but as a true stone industry, a variety of tools or weapons following specialized styles. As a shaper of stone, habilis was no novice. Was he then a novice hunter?

In the confusing early announcements of the habilis discovery, sensationally but inadequately reported by the world press, he was so described. And in many a mind that should know better the impression still lingers: before true men the hominid killed only small or very young animals. But in the years that followed the discovery, fossil remains of prey animals littering the living-sites have been identified of a size to challenge the lion. That they were eaten finds its evidence in the quantities of bone smashed by stones to extract the marrow.

A large extinct waterbuck, for example, appears at the same level as the earliest site. Another, an extinct antelope called Strepticeros maryanus, named for Mrs. Leakey, was first found in Bed Two, then later in number in early Bed One. It is related to the kudu, a favorite today of big-game hunters. The eland, largest of antelopes though not the most dangerous, has yet to appear in any early sites. But Hippotragus gigas does. Leakey describes it as a creature "of gigantic size," larger than today's sable and roan antelopes.

I find most impressive Leakey's description of a large, edible, extinct beast found on the earliest habilis living-floor. The animal has been classified as Oryx sp indet, which means that, while it was a member of the oryx family, no one can make up his mind which species it was. Leakey describes it as "more massive than any living species of oryx," and if he is correct, then lions should flee.

The most massive oryx today is the gemsbok of South West Africa. The genus is characterized by long, straight, lethal horns which, unlike most antelopes, they use not just for display but to defend themselves. George Schaller has found that East African lions almost always kill by suffocation. But the lions of southwestern Africa's Etosha Pan have learned better. To grasp a gemsbok by the throat accepts the probability that the straight, sweeping rapier horns will disembowel you. And so the local lions have developed a safer tradition. They take the gemsbok from the rear, break its back at a vulnerable point, and go off to sleep until the animal dies. Yet Oryx sp indet was larger.

Nothing in habilis' faunal assemblage -- the variety of animal companions found with his remains -- confirms the belief that he confined his butchery to turtles and rodents and birds. In a later year the Cambridge University Press published a definitive study. A specialist, L'Abbe Lavocat, considered rodents and found that at the early habilis sites their number varied between few and very few. Only at a site at the top of Bed One and the bottom of Bed Two, some hundreds of thousands of years later, did rodents appear in number. Dr. Leakey in the same publication analyzed the remains of Bovidae, which at Olduvai we may loosely classify as antelope. He commented on the abundance of such remains, and the taste for such grazers and browsers which man has always had. (At Choukoutien, reindeer contributed three quarters of all animal bones.) Apparently the near-man of Olduvai Bed One had the same taste. Dr. Leakey wrote:

Perhaps the most remarkable fact that emerges so far is the scarcity of fossils representing the smaller members of the Bovidae, for example the duikers, the dik-dik, the oribi, the steinbok and klipspringer. This cannot be due to the bones of these species escaping notice since thousands of bones of much smaller animals are in the collections. There must therefore be some other and at present unexplained reason for the scarcity of small antelope remains on the living-floors of the early hominids.

Leakey's comment, which closes his long section on the Olduvai mammals, suggests to me that the great scientist, who has contributed more material to our understanding of human evolution than any other man in history, apprehended more than he cared at this date to commit to record. The absence of small antelopes would affirm the reality of the hominid hunting band.

Only solitary hunters -- the leopard, or the cheetah skulking long-legged through concealing grass, flat diamond-shaped snake-like head held low and inconspicuous until its range has been closed and it can unleash its blinding speed -- regularly kill prey smaller than themselves. The solitary male has only himself to feed, the solitary female herself and her cubs. A duiker will do. But social hunters have many mouths to feed, and small prey become a mouthful apiece. So the wolf pack takes caribou and moose, the hyena takes wildebeest and zebra, the lion pride accepts the lethal risks of the African buffalo. When times are hard, of course, they will take what they can get. Wolves will eat mice. But it is not their way. Cooperative hunting makes possible and demands the big kill. Only the big kill makes possible the appeasement of many appetites.

Four times as long ago as our earliest example of large-brained man, a hominid weighing eighty pounds with a brain less than half the size of our own killed prey animals as formidable as any we know today. Possessing only such hand-held weapons as could kill at close quarters -- wooden or bone bludgeons, stones well but more crudely chipped than those at Olor-gesaillie -- the feat would have been impossible had habilis and other australopithecines not hunted in highly organized, cooperating bands. Even with such bands the difficulty seems such that we must take seriously the proposition that he did not himself do the killing but scavenged the kills of others.

Let us inspect the predatory community, which I believe will provide the answer.

The Gorongosa is an animal Eden lying low near the southeast African coast where the warm Indian Ocean breathes annually its damp monsoon on the sprawling land. And so, unlike most African game reserves -- dry, high-altitude, open- -- the Gorongosa is a tropical garden. Palms finger its horizons, palmetto thickets conceal waterbuck rumps. Flooding rivers in the wet season leave long pastures in the dry. Rain forests with drooping lianas surround glades supplying hartebeest comfort. Unending groves of fever trees satisfy the visitor with a strange lime-greenish world, satisfy the leopard with ample crotches to climb to, satisfy the happy elephant with more practical-sized trees to push over than he can ever get around to, even if he lives to a hundred. And there is so much to eat. Never have zebras been sleeker, hippos louder, buffalos so stupid, baboons so numerous, sable antelopes so visible, lions so pleased with it all. But perhaps the best thing about the Gorongosa, from an animal viewpoint, is that until a very few centuries ago men never came here at all.

Not many men come here even today. Mozambique -- southern Africans usually speak of it as Portuguese East -- is a land somewhat the shape of California and Oregon together, somewhat larger, and somewhat more difficult to get to. Its giant park, stretching back to the mountains, lies a hundred miles inland from the port of Beira, but how to get to Beira is a problem. If one reaches it from Louren^o Marques, hundreds of miles to the south, then how to get to Lourenco Marques becomes the problem. When the persistent collector of game reserves, however, at last reaches the tidy lodge with its cabins and rondavels, its lawns and encircling flamboyant trees, its swimming pools for old and young and even its African attendants for children whose parents go lion-watching, he will find only eighty beds. He will encounter no traffic jams along the tracks and trails, just as the lion whom he encounters will regard him as a rare, unimportant, and most definitely boring being.

If visitors to the Gorongosa have it good, then so have the lions. There is so much game that one need scarcely stretch out a paw. One singular pride has achieved an affluence available nowhere else on the continent. Years ago the Portuguese, a bit naive in such matters, built a group of tourist cabins too close to the summer floods. The cabins in the end were abandoned, and lions took over. Today a Jioness looks out a window, yawns in the midday heat; the tail of some sleeper hangs over the edge of what was once the dining-room roof. Your car passes. The lioness in the window> like a grandmother in an Italian hill-town, yawns again. She was not that interested in your passing in the first place.

It is a leisurely, ordered, luxurious world bearing strong resemblance, perhaps, to that other Eden in Miocene East Africa, twenty million years ago, where the first human ancestor took the irreversible decision to become something more than an ape. In those early days the East African rains were heavier, the rivers brighter, the forests denser, the pastures richer. Like the Gorongosa, it was an animal paradise endowed with all things but men. And in such a setting did we, the infant hominid, on the path to bipedalism take our first step.

The visitor to the Gorongosa -- or to any African game reserve -- clutches invariably a hope that he will see a lion make a kill. The hope is a comment on our hunting past. Be the visitor clergyman or soldier, housewife or schoolmarm, Japanese or Swede, it will be always the same. Jung wrote: "Just as our bodies still keep the reminders of old functions and conditions in many old-fashioned organs, so our minds too, which apparently have outgrown those archaic tendencies, nevertheless bear the marks of the evolution passed through, and the very ancient re-echoes, at least dreamily, in fantasies." The visitor's fantasy is an echo of our universal human experience.

Man identifies himself with the lion. And that is why the lion is the most important of animals in the human view. Chimps, rats, rhesus monkeys may adorn our laboratories. It is the lion that adorns our coins, our gates, our museum steps, our cinema trade-marks, our coats-of-arms, our metaphors, our memories of things we never saw. His cerebral capacities may be unworthy of mention; we like his mane. His indolence would affront the tortoise; we envy his roar. The male's despotism would make a Stalin shudder; yet the most idealistic student, entering a game reserve, will hope to see a lion make a kill. It is the way we are, and the way the lion is. Even when with a certain sophistication we recognize that the vast male is too lazy to kill and will almost surely leave it to the ladies, still with unwavering fidelity we shall treasure the image engraved in olden days on our collective memories: Lions are power. It is Adler plus Jung.

The image has good reason, for this is the beast we faced before the advent of weapons that could mysteriously kill at a distance. There is a myth in science, that the lion fears fire. The myth was punctured by George Adamson. Few men on earth know so much about animals as Adamson, senior game warden for a generation in Kenya's wild Northern Federated District. Though man-eating lions are rare, a portion of his duties was to find and kill such beasts when from some native village reports came in of excessive human loss. In a Nairobi hotel room I asked, "But how would you know which was the man-eater?"

It is really quite simple, Adamson told me. You have only to go to the village, retire to its outskirts, and light a fire at night. There you sit, your gun across your knees, and you wait. The lion that is not a man-eater will stay away, since the fire is a signal of human presence. But for the same reason the man-eater will come. And so when you see eyes approaching, you shoot.

I myself do not recommend the Adamson system of human bait as a way of life. But his experience demonstrates that it is not fire that the predator fears but the man beside it. Like most animals, he has acquired a respect, by now probably innate, for man and his weapons that kill at a distance. But if through some chance he has tasted human meat and the taste has been attractive enough to overcome his fear, then fire will not repel but attract him. That fire in itself will frighten off predators is an anthropological myth. And we may even speculate as to why the use of fire in Africa, with its vast population of great cats, was so long delayed. Before we possessed such a long-distance weapon as the bow and arrow, they had no reason to fear us or to regard us as other than prey. In such a time and place fire was no friend.

For good reason we fear and adore the lion, and call him king of the beasts. We bested him with our long-distance weapons, and so today in a protected area he ignores us as a sweaty nouveau. But if we were hunters, then for millions of years we were members of the same predatory community. Within the large assemblage of species we were fellows and competitors in killing for a living. And in our predator community -- cheetah, leopard, hunting dog, wolf, hyena, the long-gone saber-tooth cat -- the lion was king.

Our newly acquired knowledge of the predator community will clear up many a question, contradict many an assumption. Until today we have known almost nothing about the more dangerous predators, and our ignorance has been as great a handicap as was a decade ago our ignorance of the primate. But the long, definitive studies by George B. Schaller and Hans Kruuk, although they may not yet have reached press when my own investigation is published, provide the evidence we need. And a principal conclusion concerning any natural association of predators is that all species kill and all species scavenge. The intensity of competition between predators to scavenge any kill is of an order that could have left small room for that ill-adapted little carnivore, our ancestor.

The key to the conclusion was Kruuk's observation of just how formidable a hunter that reputed coward, the hyena, can be. Kruuk began his studies in 1964 in Tanzania's Ngorongoro crater. Two million years ago, when australopithecines frequented the nearby Olduvai Gorge, Ngorongoro was an immense volcano. Subsequently it collapsed, leaving in its interior what geologists describe as a caldera of one hundred square miles. With year-around water and year-around pasture and forage the caldera became another animal Eden which has attracted one of the densest populations of hyena in all Africa. Kruuk recognized that there were not enough lions in the area to provide meat supply for themselves and the hyenas too. The hyena packs must be killing on their own. Yet there was little sign of such activity. When did they do it?

Kruuk solved the problem by following packs at night, driving cross-country without lights. How he solved the problem of not killing himself, I do not know. But the hyena secret was revealed. The animal has most sensitive nocturnal vision, far more so than have most prey. Zebra or wildebeest that could outrun the pack in the daytime cannot at night. And so the hyena by concerted action can catch and kill virtually anything. In a thousand observations of hyenas feeding, both in Ngorongoro and on the Serengeti plain, Kruuk found that on over 80 percent of occasions they were eating prey that they had killed themselves.

The hyena, however, has an emotional problem. The excitement of the kill is just too much for him and so the pack sets up a racket to grace an inferno. Lions for miles around are notified that a free meal is available. Kruuk has made a tape recording of the din, and, played anywhere, it is guaranteed to attract lions within fifteen minutes. In the Ngorongoro, lions hardly ever bother to hunt, and with their usual dim view of hard work live in affluence off hyena effort. Complementing Kruuk's observations, Schaller has found that in the Serengeti, where hyenas are fewer and lions must work harder, still about 25 percent of what seem lion kills have been killed by somebody else. Hyenas, of course, are formidable enough so that a pack can resist two or three lions, but, reinforced by a friend or two, then the lions will take possession. And in the meantime the leopard, out of deference to the overwhelming larceny of both lions and hyenas, has evolved a normal behavior pattern of taking his prey up a tree to safety.

Some years ago De Vore and Washburn published their opinion that evidence could not support the scavenging hypothesis, and that scavenging could have become a source of meat only when man became a hunter formidable enough to drive other carnivores off a kill. What they wrote of man could only have been more true of the smaller, more poorly armed hom-inid. It is a view that Schaller, on the basis of the new evidence, supports. In 1969, fascinated by the problem, he and a colleague, Gordon Lowther, turned themselves into hominids and, unarmed and on foot, went out into the Serengeti to see if they could make a living. They caught a sick, abandoned zebra foal and a young giraffe that behaved strangely. Captured, it turned out to be blind. They concluded that quite primitive hunters could have gained a fair meat supply from such prey. And indeed, as we have seen, the weeding out of defectives is a normal function of predators. But although it was a period of birth-peak among gazelles, they had the opportunity to take few fawns and dismissed them as a significant source of food. So far as scavenging was concerned, by following the flight of vultures they came on a buffalo that had evidently died of disease or old age. Despite earlier scavenging, a fair amount of meat was still on the carcass, but Schaller records that the discovery was a matter of luck and could not happen frequently. The remains of lion kills offered nothing but a few pounds of brains protected by skulls that neither lions nor hyenas had been able to open. Schaller concluded that so slim and unreliable were the rewards of scavenging that only by persistent and cooperative hunting could the hominid have commanded a reliable food supply.

So long as we accepted the hyena in the cowardly image that has prevailed since the days of Herodotus, then we might be free to visualize our meat-eating ancestors as driving off the craven pack while they themselves made off with the leftovers of lion satiation. With our new information, however, we must conclude that the hyena, quite capable of killing adult wildebeest, would have been only too happy to dispatch us.

The predatory community is a scavenging community as well. The leopard has excellent reason to take his prey up a tree, for he cannot compete; and the hominid was less formidable than the leopard. Despite the ferocious competitions, we may with luck in our hominid days have made off with a stolen joint or two, as Schaller has demonstrated. But the bone piles adorning ancient living-sites were in large part the rewards of hunting. Smarter than hyenas, we did not announce a triumph to our competitors, but sneaked off with our prey and kept our mouths shut.

The cooperative hunting band was a reality in the lives of true men and the earlier hominids wherever bones have collected on living-sites. We could not otherwise have killed as large animals as are found, and scavenging could have accounted for no significant fraction. The band was of survival value in defense as well, for we were edible. As an evolved primate, we were as attractive a prey as the baboon, and we lacked his capacity to seek rapid safety in trees. And so we faced two ways: we hunted and we were hunted.

I shall waste no reader's time on the quaint proposition, advanced by some, that before we had adequate weapons the great carnivores feared us as they do today. There is a remarkable study, however, published in March 1970, proving that carnivores dined on australopithecines. It is worth recording for its scientific ingenuity alone.

When C. K. Brain returned from Rhodesia to South Africa's Transvaal Museum, he determined to reinvestigate an austra-lopithecine site called Swartkrans, about an hour's drive north of Johannesburg. It was a site discovered by Robert Broom. Unlike Raymond Dart's great Makapan cave, which had been occupied solely by africanus, Swartkrans revealed only the remains of robustus. A lime deposit in the very high veld, Swartkrans has always had an enigmatic character. Broom and later John Robinson found scores of robastus individuals together with the remains of thousands of animals. But if robustus was largely a vegetarian, as Robinson demonstrated, why should there have been such butchery? Then a good many years ago a toothpaste manufacturer seeking lime blasted the deposit to pieces, making it so enigmatic that the scientists gave up. And this was the mystery that Brain determined to make sense of.

And sense he has made. The site was never a cave but a natural drain carrying surface water underground. In this pipe-like formation was deposited lime enclosing the bones washed down from above. The analysis and classification of fourteen thousand fossils by Brain and his talented wife showed a definite limitation of animal size. With few exceptions, nothing like the larger antelopes or zebra appeared. Robustus was about as heavy as they came. Brain next went into the Kruger Park and analyzed the evidence of leopard kills. The range of size was the same. The limit was the weight that a leopard could take up a tree. Robustus had been larger and stronger than africanus, and likewise armed to defend himself, as his small canines attest. But he had been as vulnerable to the leopard as wart hog or springbok or any prey of proper size.

There remained a problem. Why should leopards always have come here? Brain studied the nearly treeless high veld, consulted botanists. There is a rare clump of trees beside Swartkrans' limy pipe, encouraged by the drainage of water. Trees had always been there. Leopards, to escape scavenging competition, had for tens of thousands of years made for the rare trees with their prey. There in a crotch they ate their fill, letting portions drop below, later to be washed down the drain and to create future mysteries. They ate the hominid in plenty, but they ate true man as well. There is at least one Homo erectus in the assemblage.

This is the essence of as elegant a reconstruction of the past as paleontology can provide. It proves, above all, our vulnerability in trie time of the hominid coming, and the proposition that we faced two ways: those whom we would kill, those who would kill us. An objection may be made that the vegetarian robustus had a better flavor than the meat-eater, africanus. But Kruuk has the record of an Ngorongoro leopard who dined almost exclusively off jackals. And the objection, too, overlooks the hyena (there were more species then than now), more formidable than the leopard, who will eat anything, including his brethren. That the vulnerable way was ours is the most haunting conclusion of Brain's study. There is a by-product, however, as striking.

The difference between the Swartkrans fossil assemblage produced in large part by a solitary killer and the fossil assemblage associated with africanus at Makapan is total. Seventy or eighty . thousand Makapan fossils have by now been developed and classified by Dart, James Kitching, and their crew. Antelope of medium or large size -- all beyond leopard capacity -- dominate the deposit. Far more thoroughly investigated than Olduvai's habilis remains, the fossils follow the same pattern and point to the conclusion that in more primitive africanus days we were the same social hunters with the same hunting bands who, despite all danger, favored large prey as our only source of sufficient food.

We were lions among lions, though, vulnerable as we were, we could scarcely have lolled in such indolence. As with the lion, however, courage and cooperation were the heralds of our future kingship. And there was something more still. During a short recent stay in the Gorongosa, I found that on two nights lions killed hippopotamus. Only a decade or two ago it was regarded as an impossible feat. Admittedly the Gorongosa lions are enormous, as their prides are enormous; some can field a hunting team of a dozen adult and sub-adult killers. But the 5,500-pound hippo is likewise enormous and with jaws like an armored steamshovel can crush a lion as a dog snaps a kitten. Grazing far from his protective pool, he is as dangerous a prey as imagination affords. One knows how the lions did it: through the same tactics and cooperation as we used in our hunting days. But legitimately we may ask why did they do it, with such an abundance of large and less menacing game at hand?

We may ask the same question about habilis -- lacking fangs, claws, proper physical power -- as beside an ancient East African lake he faced Oryx sp indet. And if ever we come on a, reliable answer, we shall know a fortune more about lions and men.

When our years proceeded like dusty moments and millennia were but long-drawn days, and even a million years bore no punctuation marks but the slow cycles of prevalent rains, prevalent droughts, spreading forests or eroding sands, then natural selection with divine unsentimentality encouraged or discouraged the being that would eventually be man. It was a time for imperceptible failure, unappreciated success. We lived. We drew necessary breath. We did our best according to biological command as old as the amoeba. We reared our young as does the elephant because they were there. We greeted life as the lark greets the morning, for no excellent reason. We died reluctantly, as dies the wart hog, for no reason more appreciable. We climbed the mountain. Why? We languished in the valley. Why? We did our best, and, doing our best, we obeyed the same laws as the lion or the monkey, the Uganda kob or the slim impala.

The ancestral hominid, lacking significant brain or other imposing assets of body, surrendered himself without protest to natural dispensations. He lived, died, loved, lost, rose, knelt, fought without mercy, embraced without qualification, suspected, accepted, conducted the unconscious human pilgrimage within the stringent boundaries that survival laid upon him. That he produced us was no part of his plan. Yet as we look back at his ancient trail we must accept him as a part of ourselves. If we have foresight, then his were the necessities that lent foresight selective value. If we are self-aware, then his were the glimmerings, the wonderings, the vague intimations that fingered the way. If we can speak, then with little doubt the beginnings of language were his. But to consider only the beginnings and the gropings is not enough. For he perfected a social group more reliable than the vertebrate world had ever seen, or would ever see again. So strong must have been its ties, so settled its number, that its character remains with us today.

The hunting band we may calculate as a group of nine, ten, perhaps eleven adult and sub-adult males, supporting a whole society of about fifty. Contemporary hunting peoples live in smaller societies of about twenty-five, but with their weapons they may kill at a distance and the hunters have less need for each other. Very little longer than ten thousand years ago, whether true man or hominid, we killed at close quarters. The wooden club, the heavy bone, the hand ax, the thrown stone were our only decisive weapons. Surely we made traps, arranged snares. At a Solutrean site in France, Neanderthals' drove wild horses over a cliff, perhaps for millennia; the fossilized remains of thirty thousand horses lie at the base. For the normal hunt, however, too few hunters would have been unable to surround or ambush the game. And too many would have implied a community of women and children bigger than a hunting range could support.

The band itself was almost surely all-male. In the lion pride the male, not only lazy but heavy on his feet, leaves the hunting indolently to the lionesses. Earlier I mentioned the peculiarly reversed sexual dimorphism of the hyena. Since the female is larger and stronger, hyena hunting packs are mixed. So likewise mixed are the other major social hunters, the wolf and the African hunting dog. But the hominid, an evolved primate, suffered the misfortune that nature did not design him to be a hunter. We lacked not only power, speed, and lethal accessories: we lacked, as do all apes, children who would grow up in a hurry. And so probably from the beginning of meat-eating our female ancestor found that her place was in the home. The young lion may by an age of less than a year have achieved such independence that he needs little adult attention. Hunting-dog pups at six months, as I have described, can very nearly keep up with the running pack. But the young of no higher primate, chimp, gorilla or hominid, conveys such privilege on the mother.

That in our evolving days the female did not hunt has suggested to Adriaan Kortlandt a most curious hangover virtually universal in our species. It is the "girlish" throw. Women throw underhand as does the chimp, and few with whatever frustrating practice can achieve the overhand throw of the man. His is a motor pattern which only the male has inherited, perfected by many thousands of generations of armed hunting.

Our hominid social group suffered, in consequence, functional segregation. There was the band of adult and sub-adult males who went out on the hunt. And there was the home group at cave or living-site, the women, infants, boys too young to hunt, girls too young to reproduce. These were the collectors who scoured the locality for scarce edible fruits and plants, snared a bird or rabbit, even caught a fawn or two. And so there was the man's world, and there was the woman's world, and there was obligation. Of almost two hundred species of living primates, we are the only one in which beyond the time of weaning anyone feeds anybody else. With meat-eating came division of labor and the obligation of the hunter to feed those who could not hunt.

The sexual segregation of adults in the hunting society marked the beginning of human division of labor. When pups are small the hunting dog, gorging himself at the kill, brings home food that he regurgitates not only for the pups but for those who have stayed home to guard them. This too heralds division of labor. But the guards may or may not be the mothers, or even females. It is a constantly shifting arrangement. In hominid society began the first permanent social division based on functional contribution to the society as a whole. And with it came interdependence, and compulsory responsibility. If the hunting band forgot its obligations and failed to return from some savanna saloon, the society would soon perish. Natural selection, operating at the level of groups, determined superior social responsibility as a condition of survival.

Social obligation was born on the African savanna long before the coming of the enlarged brain. The hunting band killed for the group, not just for itself. And the daily or frequent necessity to bring back the meat to the living-place brought other determinants to the hunting life. Leaving meat on the savanna after a kill was to surrender it not only to our competitors in the predatory community but to the omnipresent, all-seeing vultures as well. It was this necessity to return that set a limit on the size of the hunting range, which in turn set a limit on the size of the total group. And the limit of range was probably smaller in hominid days than in the time of true man. John Napier has made a remarkable study of the foot bones of habilis and concluded that at this stage of our evolution we could run well enough but lacked the capacity for the walking stride. Long marches were denied us or made difficult.

It may have been this restriction on the size of our hunting range that introduced the territorial principle of fixed boundaries and exclusive use of space to the hunting primate. Territory, as we have seen, appears sporadically in the vegetarian primate. Definitely it is a portion of the primate behavioral repertory, but just as definitely it is not always expressed. For the social hunter, handicapped by an incapacity to roam far distances, a protected and exclusively possessed hunting territory was compulsory, or rival hominid bands would make off with his game. Even the highly mobile wolf, lion, and hyena divide up potential hunting space. Only the hunting-dog pack, so fearsome that it drives all game from an area, is non-territorial and must keep moving to fresh areas, keeping ahead of its reputation.

We were not so fearsome. And the earlier we go back into our evolutionary times of anatomical restriction, the smaller our range must have been and the more severe our need for exclusive space. Territorial behavior, I should surmise, was an early imperative in the lives of our ancestral hunters. But I should likewise speculate that until expanding populations enhanced demand for the best hunting space, competition was not too severe. We practiced, like many a species, territorial spacing through avoidance. We had disputes and feuds, undoubtedly. But we had troubles enough, all of us, to discourage other than occasional shouting matches with troublesome neighbors.

It was communication not with neighbors but with one another which must interest us, for cooperative hunting would in itself have encouraged the development of rudimentary speech. Of our predatory competitors the lion has developed tactical hunting beyond any other. A group of lionesses will size up the prey and its situation, take advantage of any obstacle like a stream or bog, leave one or two, perhaps, to attract attention while the others vanish to perfect the ambush, then, as a trap is sprung, drive the prey directly into the grasp of hidden killers. George Schaller has furnished me with a series of sketches drawn from his observations, and they resemble nothing so much as plays in American football. Yet lions fail frequently through imperfect timing. Hidden from each other, someone fails to reach position when the trap is sprung.

A capacity for vocal signals and warnings would have been of selective benefit to any hominid hunting band. Yet I doubt that the hunt itself was the cradle of language. Signals little more elaborate than those of the baboon or rhesus monkey would have provided an ample repertory. Where true language would contribute survival value, in my opinion, lies in the storage of information as a social asset of the hunting band, and in the education of the young.

I have discussed in an earlier chapter the function of education as second only to defense in most animal societies. And the slower the maturing of young in a given species, the greater therefore must be the demand for maximum learning. Slow growth would otherwise be a selective disadvantage. We must assume, then, that education rated high in hominid social values. Yet the hominid in his vulnerability was an odd sort of hunting creature. You did not take your little boy along when you went hunting Oryx sp indet. How, then, did he learn to hunt?

Let us reflect again on the segregated nature of the whole hunting society. The home was a definite concept, as the restricted size of bone-strewn, tool-scattered living-sites attests. At the two-million-year level of Olduvai the Leakeys found an oval construction of stones which they interpreted as the foundation for a rough shelter. I remain doubtful. In 1969 such oval constructions, definitely foundations, were found in the south of France just a few hundred yards from the harbor in Nice. But just as definitely they are a mere three hundred thousand years old, and their remains are unique until relatively recent times. The Leakey discovery, I believe, remains one of our better anthropological mysteries. There was little need for shelter in the Olduvai Gorge, and there is the problem of movement as well.

The existence of living-sites does not imply year-round occupation. Seasonal movement along with the seasonal movement of game must have occurred. Territories themselves may have shifted. Still, wherever the society camped, deeply engraved on our evolving minds must have been two ideas: There was the home-place where women put down their infants, where young-of-an-age formed peer groups and played at the hunting game, where men came home weary with their loads of meat, fat or slim as luck dictated, partially butchered probably at the kill. It was as if we acted out two charades, and the home was one stage. The other was where the action was, the wide world of the hunter, the overbearing, menacing bush, the suspense-ful waterhole, the limitless savanna defying and challenging the evolving foot. The hunting band's scene was one of alertness, of discovery, of plans, of lifetime camaraderie, of violent action, of dawn-to-dusk danger.

The bipolar nature of hominid society -- the functional segregation, the physical separation, the disparity of styles, routines, and goals -- I suggest became the cradle of language as we know it. Things had to be told. A hunter was injured, a child was sick. Hunters returning empty-handed had to tell apologetically of the big one that got away. Leopards menacing the home-place had to be described by the women, numbered, placed on the map if the group was to be defended. As important as any motive, granted the commands of hierarchy and alphaness, was the hunter's necessity to boast before an audience when the big one did not get away; to tell and retell the precise details, the most remote contingencies of the day's heroic deeds. We still do it. Thus, to the selective advantage of the group, the experiences of the day's hunt became committed to the traditions, to the lore, to the wisdom and advantage of future generations. The boys were listening.

Perhaps it is a crude way to state it, but the difference between animal and human languages is storytelling. Today's explorers of linguistic frontiers, men like Noam Chomsky, Eric Lenneberg, Thomas Sebeok, find impossible the child's rapid learning of language entirely by associative learning, by reinforcement theory -- in other words, by an effort to please the parent or to avoid his displeasure. Most parents I am sure will agree. A biological basis for the learning of language demonstrates itself in the learning of grammar. Some inborn pattern must exist to dictate not just the learning of words but their proper sequence. I myself see the origin of grammar in storytelling, in subjects and predicates, in tales told so long ago that they preceded the expansion of the human brain and contributed to its organization.

Animal language describes or defines a situation as it exists: to alert, to warn, to ring the bell of action or the bells of rejoicing, to beg, threaten, appease. Human language recalls a situation, relates cause and consequence, anticipates the future. It tells a story, points a moral. The hominid hunting band that even on a most rudimentary level commanded such an instrument scored a selective triumph over its predatory competitors. Information could not only be stored but, like the rule of kings or the wealth of merchants, be passed on to descendant generations. For the boys, as I have said, were listening. And slowly was created the shining weapon of human communication, and the means of preparing the immature and the vulnerable, through the sophistication of listening, for the day of the buffalo and the night of the lion.

Looking back across that incalculable sea from the time that is now to the times that once were, I find it beyond our powers of discrimination to evaluate like some deceased's estate our varied inheritances from the hominid. Which was worth more, which less? Which has enhanced the hopes of civilized man, which, maladaptive, has damaged us? For certainly two million years we were continuously dependent on the weapon in the hand to make possible the-survival of a terrestrial primate so ill-armed by nature. Without the invention of the weapon, we could not exist. Yet our affinity for a cultural device that made our existence possible became, as we all know, a dubious legacy. But through the same unimaginable time we were perfecting cooperation, social obligation, individual responsibility to the group at a level to which no other primate had ever risen.

It is as if certain patterns, certain biological short cuts -- I call them propensities -- perfected or pioneered by the early hominid contributed circuits to the nine billion neurons of the enlarging brain to come. Thus the storytelling patterns may have supplied a biological foundation for what we call grammar. And as the weapon has thrown deep shadows across human history, so language has brought it what light we know.

In its influence on the modern brain, less immediately apparent is the nature of the all-male hunting band. I have described it as a cooperating group of nine or ten or eleven able-bodied adults and adolescents. Smaller groups undoubtedly existed, but at disadvantage in the cooperative hunt. And a number much larger would have involved, as I have said, a community of dependents too numerous for the limited hunting range to supply. In the very earliest days, of course, the African savanna must have been, in Kortlandt's phrase, a butcher's paradise. Unskilled as we were at the hunt, prey animals granted us but passing fear. Flight distance must have been slight, and our problems of stalking negligible. But vividly we must also recall that in such times, long before habilis, our feet were yet poorly adapted, our new bipedal posture ungainly, our weapons awkward and grasped by inexperienced hands. The naivety of the hunted was balanced by the naivete of the hunter. We must likewise recall that an injured animal is an infuriated animal. And our powers of flight, in such an era, must indeed have been lamentable.

I can visualize no time in the history of the meat-eating hominid when hunting was other than a dangerous trade. As our skills and our anatomical adaptations evolved, and our reputation on the savanna worsened, so evolved likewise the wariness and the defenses of our prey. That we succeeded was a tribute to native primate wit that neither prey nor our predatory competitors could match. If a wolf pack, hunting cooperatively on Isle Royale in Lake Superior, can test a moose, then gather in a nose-together tail-wagging circle somehow to consult, somehow to decide that this moose is too tough a customer, and so to abandon it, then certainly greater must have been our powers to consult and decide. But primate wit could not have been enough for as vulnerable a predator as were we.

Our intimate knowledge of one another: our size-up that the hunter on our flank, while strong, was also a bit stupid; our acceptance of decision on the part of an alpha leader who knew more than we could ever know about the erratic ways of the wildebeest before us; our admiration for the young fellow just beyond who, though inexperienced, had already exhibited such daring; our slow, silent closure of the hunting ring, deadly perhaps for somebody. In trust we lived; in trust we died. And the social integrity of our little group was our one assurance of survival.

There is an observation on modern life that, while preposterous in its proportions, cannot be neglected: Our juries include eleven members and a foreman. Our traditional army squad includes eleven soldiers and an officer. In the United States we have nine Supreme Court justices. Rare is the government, whatever its proliferation of ministries, in which more than nine, ten, or eleven ministers combine actual power. Rare likewise is the contact sport fielding a team of less than nine or more than eleven. The Soviet Union's Politburo has eleven members. It has even been suggested to me that when Jesus chose his apostles, he chose one too many.

Is this a social propensity in the male inherited from our hunting past? Only rawest speculation could affirm it. Then is it simply a coincidence? The laws of chance must cast doubt. We do not, cannot, and shall never know. The number eleven may be an evolutionary rule in dispositions of the human male, just as the unlucky number thirteen may be a red, flashing, warning light of historic value. All that we may safely adduce is that in male dispositions of trust and mutual understanding, the limited groups of big-brained man remain in the same range of number as in our small-brained ancestors. And discomposing reflections suggest themselves: We may regard the tendency as an inheritance, like the motor pattern of the overhand throw, from the millions of years of our hunting past. Or we may reflect on a more drastic interpretation: Though from the times of little africanus, now being found in Ethiopian stream beds over three million years old, the capacity of the brain has trebled, still with all our technical proficiency our social proficiency has remained about the same.

In his Men in Groups Tiger has properly emphasized the male bond, the preference of men to be with men which any cocktail party will demonstrate. He regards it as the spine of human societies, and looks to its evolutionary origins. The book was published in 1969, just too soon to include as significantly as it might the dispositions of the hunting band. While we know that all-male groups are common throughout many species, we know also that they seldom serve a social function or reveal significant organization. It was the evolutionary way of a particular primate who took to the savannas and the hunt -- ourselves -- that, making use of the tradition of segregated males, welded it into a sub-group so powerful as to remain with us today.

Contemporary industrial managers may thoughtfully reflect, as did McGregor with his Theory Y, on the efficiency, the cooperation, and the emotional satisfactions of the small group of workers. Thus for millions of years were our innate needs for identity, stimulation, and security satisfied. TJie sociologist, contemplating the depredations of juvenile gangs, may indulge in similar reflections. City planners and architects, facing the urban wilderness, may recall the rule of eleven, whatever its numerical validity, with despair of just possibly a flash of enlightenment. Supervisors of penal or mental institutions may discover in it clues of more immediate value. The educator may sigh: "Very interesting. Just what do I do next?" The hostess may keep it in mind, along with the collateral indication that men may just possibly enjoy men for reasons other than homosexuality.

The small male group was the way of our coming and, despite all expansion of the human neocortex, remains a factor of satisfaction in modern life. Yet we must keep in mind that the hunting band was created and perfected by natural selection on a field of violent action.

The success of the hunting adaptation, as Washburn wrote, indeed affected as evolutionary products "our intellect, interests, emotions and basic social life." But we must not forget that the hunting adaptation occurred far longer ago than a few hundred thousand years, and long antedated the formative period in which our brain expanded. Nor may we be allowed to forget, either, that, unlike the gorilla or chimpanzee with their adaptation to the forest and a vegetarian existence, what we were adapting to was the open, hazardous savanna and a life of violent action.

How long ago the adaptation took place is a matter more of curiosity than of final significance. We may be sure that two million years ago the sites at the bottom of Olduvai Gorge were inhabited by successful hunters, and that is long enough in evolutionary terms. But their skill both at hunting and at fashioning stone tools and weapons would indicate an earlier history. Howell's discovery of similar australopithecines in Ethiopia more than a million years earlier seems logical. What stuns the imagination is a discovery of Leakey's at Fort Ternan, in Kenya. It was a being far more primitive, yet exhibiting many of the characteristics of Australopithecus africanus, and it has been accepted by all authorities as a hominid whose evolutionary way had already departed from that of the ape. Its age -- also accepted by all authorities -- is 14,500,000 years.

You and I, who live to seventy years or so, cannot apprehend two million years, let alone almost fifteen million. But the creature was an ancestor, without doubt. Leakey called him Kenyapithecus, and refers to him today by that name. Others, however -- notably, Elwyn Simons at Yale -- have disputed the name and demonstrated that a fossil found in India in the 1930's and called Ramapithecus was an approximate contemporary and was in" fact the same being. Competent authority agrees with Simons, and so, according to scientific usage, we must refer -- though reluctantly -- to Leakey's discovery as Ramapithecus. The confusion has obscured the importance of what may be the great scientist's most overwhelming find.

Leakey's Fort Ternan hominid proves that fifteen million years ago our way and the ape's had parted. And it suggests, though it does not prove, that even then we were armed hunters.

In 1960, the year before he made his discovery, Leakey showed me photographs of the site with the simple comment, "You never saw so many bones." And the site, limited in size, resembles precisely the living-sites at the bottom of Olduvai Gorge. The next season the Leakeys recovered 1,200 fossils from the assemblage as well as the remains of the hominid. Two years later I had the opportunity to inspect them in Nairobi. The fossils were so well preserved that it was difficult to accept their age. An ashfall had covered them, and it was like something that had happened last Tuesday. There were antelope bones and horn cores in plenty. The descent of ash had come so quickly that there were bones still articulated, some leg bones still joined at the knee; there had been no time to rot apart before consignment to fossilization's deep-freeze. One browsed through an animal Pompeii, and there was the same eerie sense as at Olegorsaillie. By weird magic, one stood in a past beyond comprehension.

The assemblage strikingly resembled those oihabilis at Olduvai and africanus at Makapan. The fractured portions of the hominid jaw were clean. The molars showed almost no trace of vegetarian wear. The canines were no larger than my own.

I discussed the significance of the canine tooth in African Genesis. All monkeys and apes then known have formidable fighting canines. If you will feel along your gum above your own eyetooth, you will find a root out of all proportion to the size of the tooth. It is a vestige, a souvenir from the time when we too had fighting teeth. But we could not have survived, lacking such teeth to defend ourselves, had we not become continuously dependent on the weapon in the hand. The reduced canine is a hallmark of true men and all australopi-thecines, and it was a telling point in Dart's argument that the australopithecines were armed.

Washburn himself, in the classic symposium volume Behavior and Evolution, in 1958 demonstrated with a mass of measurements that since in apes and monkeys male canines are far longer than female, their size cannot be related to such functions as ripping up tough foods. He wrote: "Large canines in the male cannot be related to diet, as the females eat the same things, and the males do not provide food. They are related to dominance in, and protection of, the group, both of which functions were replaced in early human societies by tools."

In his reference to tools, Washburn was following anthropology's custom of not saying "weapons" out loud. The argument, indisputable in terms of man, could scarcely be disputed when controversy concerning the australopithecines rose in the 1960's. Even earlier the ecologists G. A. Bartholomew and J. B. Birdsell had in 1953 demonstrated on theoretical grounds that no hominid lacking fighting teeth could have survived without weapons.

And Leakey's Fort Ternan hominid lacked fighting teeth. Could it be possible that the human ancestor fifteen million years ago already went armed? Elwyn Simons, by now with two specimens from India, showed that reduced canines were a species characteristic, and that the Fort Ternan ramapithecine was not a freak. But in the meantime an alternative interpretation of the reduced canine had come along. And since the issue bears such implications concerning the human way, we had best consider it.

Very recently -- in fact, in early 1970 -- two studies of an extinct ape called Gigantopithecus have appeared. His remains have been found in China and India, and he was a monstrous creature suitable for primate nightmare. About nine feet tall and weighing in the neighborhood of six hundred pounds, he first appears about six million years ago in the midst of the Pliocene drought when forests had all but shrunk away. Gigantopithecus had adapted to life on the grasslands by eating seeds, small roots, stems. One might call it the hard way, supporting such a bufk with such a diet. And the giant, though an ape, lacks fighting teeth. His canines are flat with his molars. He is an exception to primate rule.

The argument has been advanced that ramapithecine reduction of canines may have come about through similar diet. We cannot yet judge, since we know too little about our Miocene ancestors. But the argument offers little but difficulty. Ecologically it seems impossible. Gigantopithecus dates from a time when the world-wide Pliocene drought presented crucial problems to all forest creatures. A physically invulnerable monster, he found a way of life in the grasslands. But the little, vulnerable ramapithecines, almost ten million years older, date from the Miocene, as luxurious a period as the world has ever known. There were forests where now are deserts. A colleague of Simons' at Yale has described the Indian environment of the time as one of sluggish rivers, tropical forest, with perhaps some tree-dotted savanna. Why would a primate in such a time have turned to eating seeds? And where would he have found them? High-altitude Kenya was an equally rich primate paradise, with more savannas, it is true, on the higher ridges, and more grassland creatures like the antelope, but everywhere abundant forest galleries in the valleys.

I find it quite credible that in the Pliocene drought a primate to survive turned to the hard way of seed-eating; I find it quite incredible in the Miocene. David Pilbeam, another of Simons' colleagues at Yale, writes cautiously concerning the hypothesis: "Although the canines of Gigantopithecus were small like those of the Hominidae, morphologically and functionally they were very different. Gigantopithecus canines were large grinding teeth, not the chisel-like slicers of Hominidae." The ramapithecine canines were chisel-like.

On May n, 1968, Louis S. B. Leakey, that Christopher Columbus of anthropology, weighed in with what may be the conclusive evidence, even though in a preliminary report. At Fort Ternan new excavations at the living-site revealed small areas where antelope skulls had been smashed to extract the brains, and limb bones to extract the marrow. Depressed fractures were of a sort that no hyena or other carnivore could have achieved. There was even a lump of lava with battered edges which presumably had been used to do the job. It could be the first known tool.

Since to demonstrate the antiquity of the hunting way we need not go back to the Miocene, let us leave what may become a most horrendous future controversy where it stands today. All those devoted to the primal innocence of man, to his lack of innate aggressiveness, to a denial that violence is a portion of our nature and is solely determined by environmental circumstance, will rise up in favor of eating seeds, a diet perfect for finches. We do not yet know enough, and they could still be right. What must fascinate me is a question more.philosophical than scientific, and becomes the ruin of one of my favorite hypotheses.

When Leakey presented his evidence for meat-eating in the Miocene, flushed down the pipeline like one of Brain's bones at Swartkrans went my deprivation hypothesis to become appropriately fossilized. In African Genesis I proposed that ou" ancestors turned to the eating of meat in the depths of the Pliocene drought, when forests had so shrunk that we could no longer compete with the better-adapted forest ape for remaining fruit, and we took to the savannas and the hunt. We were expelled from Eden. It was a beautiful hypothesis, appealing to a dramatist, and it was widely accepted. Leakey ruined me.

Why, in the midst of the earlier lush Miocene with its abundance of forest, fruits, shoots, buds to enchant any arboreal primate, did we turn to the terrestrial life, to the pursuit of meat and the hazards of terrestrial life? My Pliocene hypothesis was an environmentalist's answer, a deprivation conclusion like "poverty causes crime," and, like so many environmentalist answers, may have turned out to be wrong. But what could have inspired us in a time as luscious as a Rubens nude to forsake the comfort and security of arboreal primate life to embrace the dangers of the hunt and the competitions of a more practiced predatory community?

I recall a conversation with Kenneth Oakley in London before African Genesis was published and I had yet to place my own bets. We played with the possibility that the human emergence had taken place not in the deprived Pliocene but in the earlier, affluent Miocene. And I was the one to object: Why should we have done it? Oakley, that most elegant of hard-nosed scientists, yet most imaginative, simply shrugged and phrased his answer as a question: "Adventure?"

Why is man man? We have pondered in this chapter certain human propensities which seem to have originated in our long hunting days. We have inspected the all-male hunting band with its habitual exclusion of females, and the mark it may have left on us despite the coming of the big brain. We have considered the hunting territory, anticipating so clearly even the territory of the salesman. We have speculated on the storytelling origins of language as an integrating and educational necessity in small but functionally divided societies. We have considered loyalty, cooperation, mutual trust as the imperative for order if such societies were to survive. And I have purposely postponed till now consideration of that probable consequence which today so absorbs us, our record not just in the morning papers but in all history of a propensity for violence.

If Leakey's Miocene discoveries are correctly interpreted, then we chose the violent life; it was not forced upon us. Environmentalism may explain Gigantopithecus and the seed-eating way. But why should the ancestral hominid in the richness of Miocene primate times have deserted his arboreal fruits for the hazardous hunt and meat-eating? Every knowledge of innate needs that I possess suggests that the ancestral primate went up the ladder to stimulation, excitement, identity. In a word: adventure.

No one who has had personal experience with monkeys or apes can discount the innate pressure to explore that invests them. Against all reprimand, threats, punishment, they will still explore and gladly take the place to pieces. When the adventurous Miocene primate, for causes perhaps no more definitive than curiosity, launched himself onto the predatory way, he compounded the exploratory legacies of the primate and the violent satisfactions of the predator. If such was the cause, then the human being stands nakedly as an ultimate consequence.

Adventure may or may not have been the motive that began the human way. Whatever it was that set us on our course, still for too many menacing millions of years we found our daily satisfaction in violence. We attacked, or we starved. We dared, or we were selected out. We adapted, anatomically and physiologically, to the hunt. Our muscular buttocks, unlike those of any other primate, provided us with strength to throw, to stab, to crush. Our flattened feet provided speed and endurance in the chase. Glands that once directed the timid primate to flee rearranged their chemistry to direct the hominid to attack. We became creatures adapted in all ways to the excitements, of violent action. Until five thousand years ago there was no other way to survive. And if it was only then that organized warfare became a significant human entertainment, perhaps we may understand it as a substitute for the lost hunting way.

I have little patience for those who regard the human propensity for violence as unrelated to our hunting past. If we think of our adaptation as one of appetite and capacity for violent action, then it becomes apparent why man will pursue man as eagerly as he once pursued game; and it becomes equally apparent why, in a mere five thousand years, our appetite has not deserted us. With almost as little patience do I listen to the argument that it is the long-distance weapon, freeing man of the necessity to witness with his own eyes the gruesome consequences of his action, that has made possible man's murder of his own kind. No portion of recorded history instructs us that massacre and brutality must be accomplished at greater than arm's length. Nor does prehistory encourage the view.

J. B. Birdsell once asked Raymond Dart how many of his australopithecines met violent ends, and Dart gloomily answered, "All." He may have exaggerated, but if we consider all the fossils we possess from most ancient times, then a remarkable proportion show evidence of violent death. Habilis himself died of a little-publicized fractured skull directly on top of his head. Since he met his end on an open lakeshore, one must assume either that he died of a blow or that the sky fell in on him. At Choukoutien the skulls of forty individuals were found in the caves, with few body bones. Every evidence has suggested that Homo erectus practiced head-hunting, and that only the heads were brought home. The skulls had been opened at the base to extract the brains, indicating cannibalism. Among the later Neanderthals, murder -- perhaps ritual murder -- is common. As striking as any example is that of the oldest known Homo sapiens, found near Budapest in 1965. Called Ver-teszollos man, he had a brain as large as our own, he lived 350,000 years ago, and he was found with stone weapons similar to those found in East Africa. He had been killed by one of them.

A propensity for the violent solution is scarcely new in our kind. And if we regard it as just one consequence of our adaptation to violent action demanded by the hunting life, then much becomes clear in our times. Not only murder but riot, assault, vandalism, destruction of property may be seen as violent actions satisfying an appetite without which at one time we could not have survived, but for which little socially acceptable nourishment exists today. And much becomes clearer, too, concerning the attitude we must take toward a force within us that so seeks our destruction.

Should the most hopeful interpretation be correct -- that what has come to us through evolutionary legacy is less the need for violent action than the need for the adventure that it satisfies -- then we may glimpse our course, whether or not we have the will to take it. Thoughtlessly, unconsciously, yet systematically, modern societies destroy "whatever opportunities for adventure may exist. The young mother, bearing a child, faces an overwhelming adventure lacking neither prize nor hazard. Yet the feminist decries motherhood as an unworthy female ambition, devalues the experience. The young man going out into the world faces an intellectual conspiracy advising him that competition is demeaning. And another adventure is devalued. Most smothering of all must be our dedications at the obese altar of the Gross National Product. Just so long as material values surmount all others and material efficiency must be reckoned as our highest morality, then the devouring organization must swallow us. And adventure for the individual must vanish into forgotten scenes of gladiators, clipper ships, Horatio Alger, the North Pole, Polynesian maidens, the frontiersman, Vasco da Gama.

I do not know that our present course is reversible. Neither, however, do I know that our demand for adventure lies at the heart of things. It may be safer to assume that a disposition to take the violent way comes to us just as we see it and history records it, without subtle evolutionary overtones. It is the way we are, and we always shall be. And we must live with it.

If we see, clearly and with conviction, that every human baby born bears the potential resources of the arsonist, the vandal, the murderer, then we shall raise our children differently. If our educational philosophy accepts individual responsibility, not social guilt, as the final determinant of conduct, then we shall see some remarkable changes in the curriculum presented to our students. If we, social members as a whole, agree that no longer shall we applaud the violent, no longer shall we extend our charity to the violator while we ignore the violated, then a quite simple event may take place. Violence, whatever its temptations, could go out of fashion.

The suggestion may seem Utopian. But social attitudes have successfully reduced other social threats. There is no living people lacking a tabu against incest. Yet incest must tempt in every human family. By such a tabu, and by no other means so far as I can see, shall we subdue the violent demon that lies within us all.

As a people normally gets the government it deserves, so a society normally receives the punishments it asks for. And so long as we support the Age of the Alibi, just so long must we inhabit the Age of Anxiety. There must come a limit, of course, when the social order to endure accepts violent means to suppress violent disorder. And we shall then see an endless procession of concentration camps, death penalties, public whippings, and police ascendancy. It is the likelier outcome, no doubt.