Chapter 3. One Invention that led to Present-day Human Nature: The First Domestication of Animals
Civilization is based, not only on men, but on plants and animals. J.B.S. Haldane
Animals are not brethren, they are not underlings. They are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time. Henry Beston
3.1 Instead of beginning a review of Homo Sapiens’ Most Important Properties by talking about the complex and puzzling Ability to Speak, it is clarifying to focus first on the simpler, and earlier acquired, Ability to Tame and Exploit some of their fellow Creatures
What would you guess is the most numerous and common type of bird that now inhabits
our planet? Is it the sparrow—e.g. the House Sparrow? Or the starling? Or the seagull—
e.g. the Herring Gull? If my local newspaper is to be believed, the correct answer (by a
very wide margin) is the chicken. The author of the short newspaper article from which I
learned this prima facie fact did not have in mind the Prairie Chicken, of various species,
which is listed in the index of my copy of Roger Tory Peterson’s A Field Guide to the
Birds (1964, p.277). Instead, the subject of this article was the domesticated chicken,
comprised of familiar varieties like Rhode Island Red, White Leghorn, etc., whose meat
you find for sale in grocery stores. In fact, humans eat the incredible number of about 30
billion of these birds each year, more than 1,000 per second. Nevertheless, Peterson does not see fit to discuss them at all in his book.
There are at least two considerations that might lead professional ornithologists
like Roger Tory Peterson not to pay attention to domesticated chickens. The first is that 2 these experts might suppose that, since chickens are closely associated with human beings, and since it is wrong to think of humans as parts of the natural world, it must follow from these points that domestic animals also cannot belong to that same world.
However—in view of the facts that (a) there only is one planet Earth, and (b) at the present time humans and their activities take up a very large part of the energy and space of that planet—it might strike someone as unreasonable to the point of nonsense to suppose it is either appropriate or possible to distinguish the natural world on one side, from something else on the other. For example, another article from my newspaper anonymously quotes an author writing for The New Scientist as follows:
Humans are undoubtedly the most dominant species the Earth has ever
known. In just a few thousand years, we have swallowed up more than a
third of the planet’s land for our cities, farmland and pastures. By some
estimates, we now commandeer 40 per cent of all its productivity. And
we’re leaving quite a mess behind: plowed-up prairies, razed forests,
drained aquifers, nuclear waste, chemical pollution, invasive species, mass
extinctions and now the looming spectre of climate change. If they could,
the other species we share Earth with would surely vote us off the planet.
On the other hand, the opposing view is expressed in a third newspaper report entitled “New Age Quarrel”:
A geological dispute is brewing as British geoscientists lead a push to
establish a new chapter in the history of the Earth—one based on human
activity, The Australian reports. The rabble-rousers argue that the changes
wrought since the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago are so profound 3
they are visible in the physical and living fabric of the planet. They have
called for the creation of a new epoch in the official geological time scale,
one they have named the Anthropocene. Detailed scientific arguments for
designation of the Anthropocene are expected to be thrashed out in August
[2008] at the 33rd International Geological Congress meeting in Oslo. One
naysayer, Australian geologist Jim Gehling—who helped establish the
Ediacaran period in the geological time scale—said: “This is just the
vanity of the human species. . . . We don’t need a geological epoch to
describe a single historical event, however long- or short-lasting it might
be.”
A second point that might have led ornithologists not to recognize the importance or even the existence of chickens is that those birds and their eggs are only brought into being in the first place in order for them to be killed and eaten very soon afterwards.
Accordingly, chickens are apparently little more than living products that humans have created (using various unnatural and artificial means to do so), in order to serve selfish purposes of their own. For instance chickens, considered in themselves, do not seem to have any independently sufficient reasons for existing, or any future state towards which natural processes are causing them to evolve.
Again however, several points throw doubt on the usefulness of this last way of thinking about domesticated creatures. For one thing, the great majority of wild birds apparently live in much the same fashion, and on approximately the same time-scale, as chickens do. For instance, I remember reading in what struck me at the time as a credible source (however, I apologize for not remembering what source it was) that, on average, 4
of all the many billions of wild birds alive on the Earth at any particular moment, just one year later, fully half of them will be dead.
Still another mitigating factor is that humans, employing their so-called artificial methods of domestication and selective breeding, are not the only creatures who have
entered into symbiotic relations with organisms of other species. For instance, the
biologist David Attenborough points out that certain species of ants raid the nests of ants of other species, and carry off the pupae they find there. When those pupae hatch, the young ants then serve their captors, by collecting food and feeding it to them.
Attenborough says it is necessary for at least some of the “slave-making” ants to operate in this fashion, because these ants have such large jaws that they are not able to feed themselves. (See Attenborough, 1979, p.104.) In another book by the same author (1984, p.116) he describes still other kinds of ants that have discovered a way of getting access to the nutrients contained in grass, by using domesticated aphids as intermediaries.
Aphids are tiny insects that only digest a small part of the sap they regularly suck from grass leaves, and excrete the rest as a sugary liquid known as honey-dew, which those ants are able to eat and digest in turn. Thus, the ants’ relations with the aphids turn out to be approximately the same as those of human dairy farmers with their cows. To speak more precisely, the ants collect the aphids into large herds, which they protect from other insects that invade their grazing area, by squirting the invaders with formic acid. Then they follow a regular schedule of “milking” the aphids, in order to nourish themselves with the resulting honey-dew. Attenborough adds that some of the farmer-ants even 5
encourage their aphids to produce more honey-dew than normally would be the case, by stroking them repeatedly with their antennae.1
I already have pointed out various respects in which human beings differ from all
other animals. For example, one clear expression of their separation from creatures like
dinosaurs, crocodiles, snakes, whales, koala bears, fish, etc. is the fact that archeologists
cannot reconstruct, and thereby know, the particular style of life that once belonged to
any particular human whose bodily parts they excavate, just by examining those remains
1 How long have ants been engaging in such behavior? An anonymous short article from
my newspaper (“The First Farmers” The Globe and Mail, Monday, April 07, 2008, p.L6) runs as follows:
“Long, long ago—millions of years before the Sumerians and Ur people of
the Fertile Crescent discovered agriculture—a tribe of clever ants
practiced a highly sophisticated form of farming, and their evolutionary
descendants are still at it,” David Perlman of the San Francisco Chronical
writes. “Those ants were the world’s first farmers, harvesting leaves from
trees and bushes, chopping the leaves into nutritious pulp, feeding the pulp
to nourish their cultivated crops of fungus, and harvesting the fungus to
feed themselves. It’s the oldest example of agriculture in the world by far,
and entomologists at the Smithsonian Institution have now constructed an
evolutionary tree to reveal that the very first ancestral ant farmers emerged
in the world some 50 million years ago.” 6
themselves.2 Accordingly, anthropologists not only need to examine the remains of human bodies, but also any physical artifacts they find in the same area as those remains, because those artifacts act as “extensions” of the bodies of the humans who made them.3
Furthermore, archeologists look for evidence of domesticated plants, animals, and fungi in the vicinity of the human skeletons they excavate, because creatures of those sorts are
2 Consider the following passage from the last part of Ernest Hemingway’s novel, The
Old Man and the Sea:
He could not talk to the fish anymore because the fish had been
ruined too badly. Then something came into his head. “Half-fish,”
he said. “Fish that you were. I am sorry that I went too far out. I
ruined us both. But we have killed many sharks, you and I, and
ruined many others. How many did you ever kill, old fish? You do
not have that spear on your head for nothing.” He liked to think of
the fish and what he could do to a shark if he were swimming free.
3 Paleoanthropologists sometimes wishfully dream of finding the undisturbed remains of
a whole tribe of Upper Paleolithic or Neolithic humans, whose members were making
and employing artifacts of many different sorts, until the moment when all of them
suddenly were smothered by a massive mudslide. (They imagine this hypothetical event
as analogous to the time when ash and lava spewing from the volcano Vesuvius quickly
covered—and thereby preserved—the Roman towns of Pompey and Herculaneum in the
year A.D.79). But so far at least, that dream has not proved to be anything more than an idle hope. 7
“once living artifacts” that those past humans created by gathering or capturing, and then
selectively breeding, their wild progenitors.
During the last three centuries or so, experts have amassed a group of interesting facts about changes that take place, at fairly predictable rates over time, in domesticated
plants, animals, and fungi, as compared with their wild ancestors. Let me mention three
examples. First, for still unknown reasons, the cores of the horns of semi-domesticated
goats tend to be almond shaped in cross section, while the cross sections of the horns of
goats that have descended from many generations of domesticates are flat on one side;
and the horns of goats that are products of even longer periods of domestication have
cross sections that are kidney-shaped. Second, the bones of all domesticated animals, as
compared with those of their wild relatives, tend to become progressively less dense as
those animals pass through succeeding generations. Finally, the size of domesticated
animals also tends to change in certain ways. As a general rule, whenever animals smaller
than a chicken or rabbit become domesticated, they become larger as compared with their
wild relations, while those that originally were larger than a chicken become smaller.4
Thus, by paying attention to such matters, archeologists examining the remains of animals of other species found in the same area as human remains, can determine
4 Similar changes also often happen when animals become marooned on small, isolated
islands. Some experts argue that this pattern of bodily changes occurs because it is part of
the animals’ adaptive response to the limited supply of food available on such islands.
See for example, Wong, 2005, p.59. 8
whether those animals were domesticated, and if they were, for approximately how long
their ancestors had been domesticated before them.5
It might seem easier to understand how past humans learned to begin planting and
harvesting useful food plants like emmer wheat, or edible fungi like Portobello
mushrooms, than to see how they started to domesticate animals. For example, imagine a
group of early humans living in the Fertile Crescent (e.g. in a place that now is part of present-day Iraq) who used bone sickles with flint edges to gather a supply of grain from
a ripe stand of wild wheat, into a pottery vessel. But on the way home, one of them
accidentally spilled the vessel’s contents in a place where it was not possible to recover
most of the spilled grains. A month or so later, people who happened to be passing the
place where the spill occurred, were surprised to see a new, thick stand of wheat growing
there, where there had been nothing before. As a result of that incident, the whole tribe
might conclude that (depending on the time of year, the amount of rainfall, etc.) they
vastly could increase their supply of wheat grains, by planting grains they already had
gathered in nearby plots of good soil, and then returning to the same plots later to harvest the new wheat that had grown from the planted seeds. By contrast, how could any similarly accidental occurrence have given humans the idea that they somehow could induce or persuade, either carnivorous animals with whom they once had competed for food and living space, or herbivorous animals they previously had hunted and killed as prey, to put aside their natural fear and loathing of humans, and live with them in a peaceful arrangement of coexistence?
5 A simple and clear—but not current—account of these topics appears in Chapter 4 of
Leonard et al., 1973. See especially, pp.81-4. 9
All the scientific accounts of the beginning of domestication known to me (e.g., the one proposed by Jared Diamond in his book, 1999) assume that the ancient people who first domesticated the plants and animals that have become familiar to us today
(wheat, barley, rice; dogs, sheep, cows, pigs, horses, etc.), thought, reasoned, and motivated themselves in essentially the same way as farmers, cultivators, and breeders do at the present time. One reason theorists might have for making this assumption is that they believe humans’ most centrally important property is their ability to speak in a syntactically organized fashion, and therefore they conclude that every fully developed human should have a sufficient grasp of language to allow him or her to solve problems by “talking to himself.” However, I am skeptical of this idea, since it apparently involves the “Hobbsean” notion that the proper way for us to discover how our ancestors behaved and thought is imaginatively to transport ourselves back in time to what we conceive of as an earlier stage of history, and then ask what we would have said, done, and concluded in those same circumstances. But there is little justification for supposing that—at the time the first domestication of some species of animals took place—our forebears employed their innately given senses, memory, reasoning facilities, and the empirical experience they gained from both observations and trial and error, in the same ways as people do now.
Let me now begin to bring this introductory section of the chapter to a close, by making several comments about what seems to me to be the relation between the topics of domestication on one side and that of language on the other. First, even though I agree with those theorists who say the ability to employ and understand language is one of humans’ most centrally important properties, I do not consider it a good idea to approach 10 the topic of language directly, by discussing it in terms of introspective experiences we have whenever we speak. The reason for this is that introspection is not a good means of getting accurate information about what language is and how it works. For example, the following statements of Derek Bickerton (1990, p.5) strike me as sensible and correct:
Language is, of all our mental capacities, the deepest below the threshold
of our awareness, the least accessible to the rationalizing mind. We can
hardly recall a time when we were without it, still less how we came by it.
When we could first frame a thought, it was there. It is like a sheet of
transparent glass through which every conceivable object in the world
seems clearly visible to us. We find it hard to believe that if the sheet were
removed, those objects and that world would no longer exist in the way
that we have come to know them.
Second, I also agree with people (e.g. Richard Leakey, 1994, p.119) who say our ability to use language is directly related to the fact that we have brains three times the size of our closest evolutionary relations, the African great apes. But (contrary to the opinions of Leakey and Chomsky), I do not believe language is just a side consequence of our having brains of a certain sort, or that sophisticated, syntactical language rapidly came into existence simply because our brains’ development crossed some biological threshold. I also reject Leakey’s claim that a long evolutionary process, beginning with the earliest member of our genus Homo habilis, in which the brains of our ancestors gradually became larger and more powerful (see 1994, Chapter 7) was sufficient to bring language into existence. In my view, no matter whether our brains developed quickly or slowly, in a way that was irregular and jerky or smooth and gradual, biological facts of 11
this sort are not sufficient to give us reliable information about what language is. Instead,
a more insightful means of understanding language is to speculate—analogously to the case of hummingbirds discussed at the beginning of this book—about the adaptive or ecological niche that our ancestors discovered and learned to exploit, which caused their brains to become larger, in such a way as to allow humans to occupy that niche. Let me make the same point in slightly different terms as follows. An important question that theorists who concern themselves with language need to answer, but in my opinion have not yet succeeded in doing so, is this: What was the ecological niche that some past, now unknown humans first noticed, and then found a way of exploiting, which enabled those people to begin developing language?
Third, I have argued that the niche just mentioned—the one that provided the context for the human brain to grow and refigure itself so as to provide us with an opportunity to acquire syntactical language, was more social and cultural than biological in character. To give a sense of what this means, let me mention a discovery recent experimental psychologists have made about the way children learn the meanings of words. Chomsky’s account of language dictates that, soon after the birth of every undamaged human child, the child’s physical constitution leads him or her to begin
“tinkering” with sounds he considers to be meaningful, or at least potentially meaningful.
That tinkering then brings him either to acquire the language or languages he hears adults speaking around him, or alternatively (in cases where the child does not hear any speech from adults), it causes him, perhaps in association with other children, to devise a new language never spoken on Earth before. However, this idea is difficult to reconcile with the experimental finding that no human can learn the meaning of an unfamiliar word 12
(arguably the most basic and important thing involved in acquiring a language), unless he or she has some idea of that to which the person he hears pronouncing the word is paying attention.
For example, Ulric Neisser says (Johnson and Erneling, 1997, p.254):
Infants do not acquire language continuously, whenever adults happen to
use it around them. They can learn the meanings of words only when they
actually know what an adult is talking about. In early life these are the
occasions when child and mother are both attending to the same object (or
expecting/ thinking of the same event), and each of them knows that the
other one is attending in this way. . . . Thus, the acquisition of language
depends on social as well as ecological perception.
Again, Jerry Bruner makes a similar point as follows (Johnson and Erneling, pp.282-3):
Intersubjective meaning making . . . is an elaborated expression of our
recognition of the mental processes of our conspecifics. I can tell you
autobiographically that among my own research studies of the last decade,
the one that most knocked me for a loop was finding that young infants
followed an adult’s gaze direction in search of an object of attention, and
when they failed to fined one, looked back at the adult to recheck on gaze
direction—a study with Scaife (1975). Then Anat Ninio and I (1978)
discovered that infants grasped the distinction between given and new for
labels, signaled by the mother’s use of rising intonation for new and
unsettled matters (“What’s TIup that?”), versus falling intonation for
already negotiated labels (“What’s TIdown that?”). Let me briefly note in 13
passing that intersubjective meaning-making is the more interesting for its
lack of precise verifiability. It depends enormously on contextual
interpretation and negotiation. This may explain why Anglo-American
philosophical theories of meaning, so reliant on verificationist notions of
reference and sense, have paid so little attention to it.
In summary, then, it is necessary to ask two questions about the theory of language proposed by people like Chomsky and Leakey. (1) Are those theorists justified in claiming that language has “strangely unnatural properties”? (2) What do they think is
the proper scientific method for helping us understand and make sense of those
properties? In my opinion, Chomskeans are better at dealing with the first of these
questions than with the second. That is, even if they can give plausible arguments in
favor of the idea that many of the properties of language are exceptional, compared with
properties of most of the other things that exist in nature, what they say about the
scientific methods appropriate for studying language’s properties strikes me as mistaken.
More especially, Chomsky supposes the methods of the natural and physical sciences are
the only means of finding “real” answers to questions of any and every type. But this is a
wrong in my view, because it creates a bias that has led him to overlook the contributions
society and culture, in addition to humans’ biologically given nature, have made towards
determining what language is and how we are able to obtain it.
I shall argue in this chapter for the following two propositions. (i) Humans’
domestication of the first of the non-human animals with which they became associated
(namely, dogs), probably came before humans were able to speak (and a fortiori, before
they could speak in a sophisticated and syntactical manner). Furthermore, I shall try to 14
show that (ii) the domestication of those animals acted as a model and guide for the
distinctive forms of thinking—including linguistic thinking—that humans have
developed since that time. Thus instead of assuming, as Diamond does, that the first
humans who domesticated animals possessed approximately the same level of linguistic
competence (and therefore also competence in thinking) as people do today, I shall
defend the idea that humans, without the aid of sophisticated language, originally may
have got the idea of how to domesticate animals from observing certain things about
those animals themselves.
3.2 Two Clues from Early Hominid History about the Background of the Nature we have Now: (A) the Biological Isolation of Homo Erectus, and (B) the “Pit of Bones” in Spain
So far in this book, I nearly always have used the words “humans” and “human beings”
to refer to people like us—i.e. modern members of the species Homo sapiens. But a
stricter and more correct understanding of those terms would extend their reference
beyond our species, to include all the other species—each one now presumably extinct—
which together with our own, make up the whole primate genus called the hominids (i.e.,
roughly speaking, primates who were both two legged, and capable of making relatively sophisticated tools). We have no good reason to suppose that any of our hominid ancestors or relations ever managed to domesticate creatures of other species.
Nevertheless, certain things happened to some of those earlier hominids that might have
“set the stage” for their successors to be able to do this. More concretely, I now shall try
to give further substance to remarks with which I ended the previous section, by talking 15
about certain past events that helped prepare the way for homo sapiens like ourselves to
begin thinking and acting in the ways we do now.
Although I do not claim to be an expert in archeology and paleontology, I propose
to say a few things in this section, about two fairly early species of hominids. The first of
those species is the one to which we now give the name Homo erectus, and the second is the ancestors of the European Neanderthals (whose particular species-name is unknown
to me) whose bodily remains were discovered in a place now informally known as the
“pit of bones” in Spain (or Sima de los Huesos in Spanish).
Scholars believe that Homo erectus occupied a pivotal place in the history of our
genus for at least two, presumably connected reasons. The first reason is that this species
apparently lived for a much longer time than any other member of the hominid genus,
including (so far) our own species. According to recent estimates, it survived in one or
another form for about a million years—and, since the whole of the genus has existed for
only a bit more than 2 million years, this amounts to roughly half of that time.
Furthermore, it apparently is true to say that Homo erectus eventually became the only
surviving species of the hominids, so it was necessary for all the new species that were to
constitute the next generation of that genus to arise from it.6
6 It is possible to infer these points from historical diagrams or “maps” like the ones that
appear, for example, in Leakey, 1994, p.33; Tattersall, 1998, p.185; Wong, 2005, p.65;
Zimmer, 2005, p.41; Wong and Deak, 2009, pp.61-3. However, recent reports of the
discovery of 13 thousand year old remains of three-foot high, stone tool making hominids
in Flores Island in Indonesia, and of similar, 1.75 million year old creatures that might be
of the same species (but which so far have not been found to be accompanied with stone 16
What led this species to become biologically isolated in the way just described?
The answer—as well as the second of the two reasons experts have for believing Homo
erectus has a special place in our genus—is that, roughly two hundred thousand years
after it first came into existence, some of its members went through a dramatic change in
their thought and behavior. The change to which I refer is that those humans became able
to visualize the general form that a stone tool would take, before they created it. For instance, Ian Tattersall says (1998, pp.138-9):
A couple of hundred thousand years after fossils of Homo ergaster [an
early form of Homo erectus] show up, . . . we . . . see a remarkable
cultural innovation in the archaeological record. Up to that time (about 1.5
myr [million years] ago), stone tools had been of the simple kind that had
been made for the previous million years or so, in which the main aim had
probably been to achieve a particular attribute (a sharp cutting edge) rather
than a specific shape. Suddenly, however, a new kind of tool was on the
scene: the Acheulean hand ax and associated tool types, which were
obviously made to a standardized pattern that existed in the toolmaker’s
mind before the toolmaking process began. Hand axes are large, flattish,
teardrop-shaped implements that were carefully fashioned on both sides to
achieve a symmetrical shape; and because of the multifarious uses to
which they were evidently put, they have been described as “the Swiss
Army Knife of the Paleolithic.”
tools) in Dmanisi, Georgia show that the isolation of Homo erectus could not have been
more than a relative matter. 17
What causes particular living creatures (or series of such creatures) to change
their biological characteristics? Charles Darwin believed natural selection was that which
forced almost all groups of closely related organisms to modify their physical properties through time, in a way that was both constant and gradual. According to him, for example, if there was a group of animals that human observers would call “lions,” which became separated from the great majority of other lions for a relatively long period, and furthermore if during that same time they were subjected to different adaptive conditions than the ones that applied to most other lions, then that group might change in ways that would lead later people to speak of them as the different species (or at least sub-species) of “tigers.”7 By contrast, in the last part of the twentieth century a pair of invertebrate paleontologists, Steven Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge, concluded on the basis of their respective investigations of land snails and trilobites, that almost all change in animals was a result of speciation (i.e. different separate species replacing one another), rather than of single individuals or species of individuals gradually changing their properties.
7 We usually think of lions and tigers as separate species; but under certain conditions,
they can interbreed and produce healthy offspring. On this subject, see Wilson 1992,
p.39. Lions also can interbreed with leopards. For instance, on page 16 of an old
children’s book that my grown daughters once read, and which is now being enjoyed by
my two year old granddaughter, there is a photograph of a product of such a union—a
“leopon”—which has both a lion’s mane and a leopard’s spots. See Editors of the How
and Why Library, 1964-76. 18
(See the article written by these paleontologists, 1972.)8 Furthermore, in a manner consistent with that idea, Gould claimed that our own species had not changed in any biological respects for a very long time (at least for the last 50,000 to 40,000 years). Thus according to him, everything humans had accomplished since that time was achieved with the help of culture and civilization, instead of originating from various changes in their bodies.
I do not think either Darwin’s or Gould’s view can provide us with a good explanation of what happened in the case of erectus, since neither of those theories is suited to account for the wholesale nature of the change that took place in that species. To be more explicit, Darwin’s view cannot do this because the only concern of natural selection, as he conceived of it, is with simple survival; and because of that, it always operates in ways that are disjointed, piecemeal, and opportunistic rather than organized and systematic. However, the mental transformation we now associate with erectus was not piecemeal, as shown by the fact that this transformation became the foundation of a whole new dimension of behavior and thought that changed our entire genus.
In recent years, some theorists have criticized people like Gould for supposing that the evolution of our species ever stopped. Thus, consider some excerpts from a
8 The following sentences occur in Gould’s paper, 1980c, p.183: “Eldredge and I believe that speciation is responsible for almost all evolutionary change. Moreover, the way in which it occurs virtually guarantees that sudden appearance and stasis shall dominate the fossil record.” 19
newspaper report by Lynda Hurst (2008) about scientific evidence that supports this criticism:9
Mankind’s earliest ancestors split from the forerunners of today’s
chimpanzees about 6 million years ago. Roughly 2 million years ago, the
predecessors of modern humans began the long trek out of Africa and into
the rest of the world.
About 150,000 years ago, we appeared, modern humans. Some
100,00010 years later, our brains made a stunning leap forward, developing
complex language and abstract symbols. We had begun the journey to
civilization.
At that point, the evolutionary process, having sufficiently ensured
humans’ survival as a species, basically stopped, slowing to a glacial pace.
Or so it was thought.
By the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, for instance.
In an essay published in 2000, he wrote, “there’s been no biological
change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture
and civilization we’ve built with the same body and brain.”
Noted British geneticist Steve Jones broadly agreed, but dated the
evolutionary slowdown much later, with the rise of agriculture at the end
of the Ice Age 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.
When humans made the transition from hunting-gathering to
raising crops and domesticating animals, the move led to dietary changes
9 Also see McAuliffe, 2009. 10 I have taken the liberty of correcting this number, as it appeared in Hurst’s article. 20
and to settled habitats in specific regions. Combined, they ignited a surge
in human numbers.
Far from slowing down, it appears that, when there were enough
people to, in effect, work with, the process of evolution rapidly began to
accelerate.
Even without modern-day knowledge of genes, Charles Darwin
wrote in his revolutionary The Origin of Species that in animal breeding,
herd size “is of the highest importance for success” because large
populations have more genetic variation. The same turns out to be true for
us.
Since the advent of agriculture, the human population has grown
steadily from about 5 million in 1 A.D. (it’s 6.5 billion today). But as
people migrated to different geographic regions, they had to adapt to a
variety of conditions and pressures.
One example cited by [a new study by John Hawks et al.] is
lactase, the gene that helps humans digest milk but which, for most of the
planet’s population, switches off in adulthood. At some time in the past
few thousand years, northern European dairy farmers—living with weaker
sunlight therefore less vitamin D exposure—developed a mutation that lets
them tolerate health-giving milk throughout their lives.
I see no reason to disagree with this criticism of the views of individuals like
Gould and Steve Jones. (Also see Ward, 2009.) But that criticism does not shed light on 21
the question of why a Gould-like picture of evolution is not suited to account for changes
like the one introduced by erectus. As mentioned before, my own answer to this question
is that accounts proposed by Gould and similar thinkers (including Darwin) cannot make
sense of what happened in the case of erectus, because they assume that all changes in
animals are, or are summaries of, detailed changes in those animals’ biological
characteristics. But the change in erectus was not an accidental, cumulative result of
smaller changes of that sort. Instead, it was general, systematic, and foundational in
nature, because it was motivated by something.
Some biologists (e.g. Wilson, 1992, p.201) suppose in a fairly casual manner that all the niches contained in nature already are filled. But this obviously is false, in view of previously noted cases like the long empty bat niche, and the bee-like niche for birds, which certain ancestors of the humming birds discovered and then filled. Thus, I believe the best way to make sense of the systematic change erectus inaugurated is to describe it as a discovery of a new adaptive niche.11 Erectus was the first hominid species—in fact,
the first species of any kind—to move into a new, more complex and effective style of
life based on the reflective practice of looking ahead. Because members of Homo erectus
adopted that way of thinking and of making a living, other, then existing species of
hominids eventually found it impossible to compete with them, so that these last
mentioned species became extinct. To adopt a metaphor from mechanics, the reason all
the other hominid species living at the same time went out of existence was that erectus
11 An alternative way of speaking—advantageous for some purposes—is to describe it as
a particularization, deepening, and improvement of the more general niche earlier
hominids already had occupied. 22
had “ratcheted up” the standard of what it meant to operate as a competent hominid. A
still simpler way of describing that new standard is to say that erectus had got the idea of
putting an increased amount of “room” between a thinker on one side, and the objects of his or her thoughts on the other.
Let me now change the focus of our discussion to a more recent example that is more specific than the broad instance just described. Most experts say that early hominids mostly lived under the sky and stars, and only occasionally—and for short periods—took refuge in caves. Nevertheless, because caves usually provide a better environment for the preservation of bones than the open air, a large majority of the ancient human remains we now possess have come from caves. In 1976, archeologists working in a cave in Spain were lucky enough to stumble on an unusually rich collection of human remains that once
had belonged to some of the forebears of the Neanderthals. In fact, this area now has
yielded more than 2000 humans fossils, in spite of the fact that workers so far only have excavated limited parts of it, and to a very shallow depth. The Spanish archeologist, Juan
Luis Arsuaga, sums up its significance in the following words (2002, p.222):
No other archeological site has produced such a wealth of fossils of the
genus Homo that are older than the modern human burial sites of the late
Upper Paleolithic.
One of the most interesting facts about the thirty-two separate human beings so far recognized in the pit of bones is that they all fall into a comparatively narrow range of ages and physical conditions. Almost all the bodies are of individuals in their prime years
(there are very few old people or children) and there also are no bodies of people whose bones show that they were deformed or otherwise handicapped in life. According to some 23 archeologists, the most plausible means of explaining this pattern among the remains is to say there must have been a series of ecological crises (floods, storms, drought, etc.), which drove these people to come to that area on an emergency basis. Again, Juan Luis
Arsuaga describes the situation as follows (2002, pp.230-2):
While widespread epidemics like the plagues of medieval Europe would
not have been possible in the period of Sima de los Huesos, a contagious
disease could have affected one or more small, human groups. But the age
profile of our thirty-two individuals at Sima de los Huesos discounts that
hypothesis. In two modern and therefore well-documented epidemics of
cholera and smallpox, most of the dead were under ten years old, forty-
five percent in the first case and ninety percent in the second. Epidemic
disease generally kills more young children than adolescents and young
adults, but it is precisely the latter two groups that predominate at Sima de
los Huesos.
Jean-Pierre Bocquet-Appel and I are thinking of another kind of
catastrophe, an ecological crisis. Life in the natural world does not lack
alarming circumstances. In fact it is anything but stable. Animal and plant
communities are subject to cyclical changes in the physical environment.
These are generally minor, but from time to time there are long periods of
unusual heat, drought, or several years running of particularly long and
cold winters. In exceptional circumstances, these crises may be more
severe or protracted. Not long ago we had a series of dry years in Spain
that raised serious concern. Animal populations are very sensitive to these 24 environmental fluctuations. Their numbers dwindle in challenging times only to surge in periods of abundance. Corresponding increases and decreases in predator and prey populations have been recognized since the first days of ecology as a scientific discipline. In a severe crisis, plants, herbivores, and carnivores all die in the affected region, as do humans.
Ethnographic studies of modern hunter-gatherer populations have demonstrated that these calamities bring them great suffering. A nonproductive economy is dependent upon the availability of needed resources in the environment, so its practitioners must adapt to and endure whatever conditions may present themselves.
But human groups do not wait passively for such crises to pass.
They take off in search of better circumstances. The weakest members fall by the wayside: children, the aged, the sick, the disabled. Ultimately there is an age-based selection process, since robustness corresponds to adolescence and young adulthood. This may have occurred 300,000 years ago on the Meseta and possibly also in the Ebro depression and in other nearby regions of the peninsular interior. When human groups set out for more favorable areas, one of the places they took refuge was in the Sierra de Atapuerca, an environment privileged by the particular ecological and geographical characteristics that I described earlier. The fossil beds found in several of its caves testify to a continuous human presence for at least the last million years. The strongest individuals reached this mountain refuge after a difficult journey, leaving many fallen comrades along the 25
way. Once they arrived, their suffering continued for a time, or perhaps
many individuals arrived in such a debilitated state that they just did not
last much longer. In either case, many more died. The lucky survivors
sought an isolated spot in which to deposit the cadavers of their deceased
and thus protect them from the depredations of carrion eaters. They found
a spacious cave with only one, very narrow mouth for ingress, which
admitted virtually no light. Because of its difficult access and its lack of
light, the cave had never been occupied by humans, although bears used it
year after year for hibernation. In one corner not far from the entrance,
there was a mysterious vertical shaft almost forty-six feet deep, although
its bottom could not be discerned from above. It was here that they let
drop the bodies of their departed in what was, as far as available evidence
tells us, the first human funerary activity. The ecological crisis passed.
Animal and human populations recovered. Life went on as it had for ages
in the lands of the peninsular interior. But in Burgos, there was a cave that
contained the remains of at least thirty-two humans, who lived 300,000
years ago. At some point the entrance to the cave was blocked by natural
causes. Bears no longer entered it for their winter hibernation. In fact,
nobody visited the Sima de los Huesos again until it was rediscovered by
humans in the twentieth century. (Italics added.)
This second case strikes me as being still another, in some ways surprising, expression (a further “ratcheting up”) of the same niche that erectus previously had 26 entered.12 The motivating idea of that niche—and therefore also, what I think is the basic mark that separates humans on one side from non-human creatures on the other—is that of contemplating one’s environment in a non-immediate fashion. In other words, what now makes humans different from all the other creatures on Earth is that they have learned the “trick” of putting space between themselves and the objects of their thinking, in such a way as to allow them to envisage what is likely to happen before it happens.13
3.3 Entrapment vs. Attraction: What did the First Domestic Animals have to be like, for them to “Tame Themselves”?
12 I assume these remains come from a period later than the time when Homo erectus was the only species of hominid, since I have committed myself to the idea that the
Neanderthals and their predecessors were descendents of the members of Homo erectus who lived during the time of their exclusiveness.
13 Hurst says most biologists refuse—presumably for political reasons—to speculate about the future of the human race, as we know it today. Nevertheless, in view of the fact that our own species also has become biologically isolated in its genus, in approximately the same fashion as erectus once was, I propose (bravely but perhaps also foolishly) that we should wonder whether the previous career of erectus might have been a “trial run” for the future of our species as well. In other words, my admittedly non-professional opinion about this matter is that the increased rate of evolutionary mutation our species now is experiencing someday might lead to a whole new set of hominid species evolving out of present-day Homo sapiens. 27
Having discussed introductory matters in the preceding two sections, we now are ready to come to grips with the main concern of this chapter—a historical consideration of the domestication of animals. There are at least two possible approaches investigators can take with respect to this subject. The first, more popular one is to ask what characteristics certain animals must have had, in order for them to be domesticated by humans. The second, less familiar approach is to ask what changes must have taken place in humans themselves, for them to become able to domesticate animals. I propose to talk about the first of these approaches in this section, and then switch, in the chapter’s next and last section, to consideration of the second.
A quasi-popular book I read many years ago—which first got me interested in the subject of domestication (Leonard et al., 1973)—posed the question of what the first species of animals was that humans domesticated. Since the authors of that book had a strong desire to follow a strictly scientific procedure, they based their proposed answer on the oldest remains (bones) of various candidate animals, which were known at the time the book was written. This led them to conclude that the sheep had been the first domesticated animal, and the dog had been second, because the oldest sheep remains
(found at Zawi Chemi Chanidar in Iraq) were dated at 8500 B.C., while the oldest dog remains (found at Jaguar Cave in Idaho) were dated at 8400 B.C. (Ibid., p.77.)14
14 Although I do not propose to talk about the case of sheep here, archeologists have uncovered still older remains of dogs associated with humans, since the publication of that book. For example, in an article by Karen Lange (2002, p.4) a picture appears of the excavated bones of a puppy buried in a human grave in Israel about 12,000 years ago. 28
But this procedure was neither sensible nor sound. That point becomes clear when we reflect that (a) preserved bones more than 12,000 years old are quite scarce, and finding them is largely a matter of luck, and (b) in addition to evidence associated with bodily remains, we have a great deal of indirect evidence that supports the idea that dogs probably were domesticated a very long time before sheep were. For example, consider the following paragraph from a popular article about dogs (Phillips, 2002, p.15):
Roddy MacDiarmid, 57, lifelong shepherd and son of a shepherd, surveys
the Scottish Highlands from a ridge overlooking Loch Fyne and the little
valley town of Cairndow. On one hand lies the estate of John Noble,
where MacDiarmid has worked much of his life, on the other the estate of
the Duke of Argyll. Black-faced lambs and ewes by the hundreds dot the
green hillsides below. His Border collies, Mirk and Dot, trot faithfully
behind. It’s familiar turf. “Everywhere you see,” says MacDiarmid,
sweeping his shepherd’s crook in an all-encompassing arc, “I have
gathered sheep. And I can tell you this: You cannot gather sheep from
these hills without dogs. Never could and never will; never, never, ever!”
Another piece of indirect evidence that dogs were domesticated by at least 60,000 years ago is the presence today of “re-wilded” dogs (dingos) in Australia. Dingos are placental mammals of the kind that are native to Africa and Eurasia, and not marsupial mammals of the sort that developed in Australia. Thus, how did they manage to get to that isolated continent? Most experts believe the only way that could have happened is that their ancestors were domesticated dogs that arrived on rafts from Asia, along with
Australia’s first human settlers, roughly 60,000 years ago. 29
Dogs are not now, and never were in the past, primary sources of food for
humans. Instead of sources of meat, it was natural for them to act as guard animals and as
hunting companions. Only later, after the Neolithic era had begun, did they also become
helpers for herders and farmers. In any case, I am going to assume in the rest of this chapter that dogs (wolves), rather than sheep, or animals of any other type, were the first
domesticated animals; and I shall pose the question of what enabled humans first to tame,
and then also to domesticate them.15
Lange says (op. cit., p.4):
Scientists know the process [of domesticating dogs from wolves] was
under way by about 14,000 years ago but do not agree on why. Some
argue that humans adopted wolf pups and that natural selection favored
those less aggressive and better at begging for food. Others say dogs
domesticated themselves by adapting to a new niche—human refuse
dumps. Scavenging canids that were less likely to flee from people
survived in this niche, and succeeding generations became increasingly
tame. According to biologists Raymond Coppinger: “All that was selected
for was that one trait—the ability to eat in proximity to people.” At the
molecular level not much changed at all: The DNA makeup of wolves and
dogs is almost identical.
15 To tame an animal is simply to calm its fears and make it willing to live peaceably and
in close proximity with humans. To domesticate it is to do all of that and, in addition, to
control its food, living conditions, and breeding, so as eventually to influence its genetic
make-up. (See Diamond, 1999, p.159.) 30
Of the two alternatives just mentioned, I do not consider the first one (adopting wolf cubs) to be either a sensible or an adequate answer, since it presupposes precisely the point that needs to be explained. That is, this alternative assumes that some of our human ancestors got the idea of “mothering” members of another species, or persuading those animals to live with humans in close and affectionate circumstances (which no
other humans ever had done before); but it fails to say how and why the people in
question succeeded in getting that idea. The second alternative (wolves domesticated
themselves) strikes me as the more plausible one. Admittedly, however, there is at least
one problem with it. The problem is this: Along with our ancestors, relatively advanced
hominids of other species also lived in the same areas at the same time (Neanderthals in
Europe and the Middle East; a late version of Erectus in East Asia). It presumably is the
case that those other hominids created refuse heaps of their own. Furthermore, these
heaps also must have attracted scavenging wolves, in the same way as the garbage
associated with members of our species. If one reason for the fact that Homo sapiens
survived, but the other two hominid species just mentioned did not, was that our
ancestors succeeded in domesticating wolves/dogs, but Neanderthals and Erectus did not,
then what is it that accounts for this difference?
In his book, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1999, pp.168-73), Jared Diamond lists six
properties an animal must have in order for that animal to be “domesticable.” These are
(i) it must not be too finicky in its food preferences to recommend itself as a farm animal;
(ii) it must grow quickly enough to make it useful for farmers to raise it; (iii) it must have
the ability to breed in captivity; (iv) it must not be physically dangerous or have a nasty
disposition; (v) it must not have a tendency to panic; and (vi) it must have a hierarchical 31 social structure that humans can exploit in order to assume a position of authority over it, by taking over the position of the wild “alpha animal.” However, I want to put the following question to Diamond: Since the wolves that came to the garbage heaps of the
Neanderthals and of erectus presumably had virtually the same characteristics as those that came to the garbage heaps created by homo sapiens, why did only members of the second group become domesticated? In my view, this question shows that Diamond has left out something important from his account of domestication—namely, that in addition to the above list of six properties that made the domestication of a species of animals possible, there also must have been a certain attitude that belonged to that species, involving the particular way in which those animals proposed to relate themselves to humans.
The attitude just mentioned is one that wolves had (and were able to have) towards sapiens, but which they did not have toward Neanderthals or the members of the species Homo erectus. People sometimes say that Neanderthals evidently conceived of themselves in a somewhat different manner from other creatures, and that this is shown by their practice of burying dead conspecifics, and by their care for sick and disabled members of their group. I think this idea is correct. That is, I believe those behaviors were a sign that Neanderthal humans had traveled at least part of the distance that eventually would have given them a power to domesticate other animals. Nevertheless, it does not seem to me that Neanderthals thought of themselves as different enough from the rest of living things, for them to be able to domesticate some of their fellow creatures.
On the other hand, I already have suggested that some of our own ancestors had moved into a potentially revolutionary situation, by virtue of their having traveled further along 32
the erectus-initiated road of separating and dissociating themselves from their
environment, than any of the other species of hominids.
How did Neanderthals and late members of the species Homo erectus react to
wolves? There are several possibilities. They might have had a fear of wolves that they never were able to conquer. Or they might have felt a certain sort of anger and irritation towards those animals that they never learned to overcome. Or they might have had a haughty distain for them that never disappeared. By contrast, imagine a situation in
which, although our forebears started out with one or more of those attitudes towards
wolves at first, their attitude changed later (at least in the case of some sapiens), and was
replaced by something like compassion and curiosity. The wolves/dogs noticed this
tolerance and curiosity among certain sapiens, and decided to take advantage of it. In
other words, wolves now began to see sapiens as presenting them with a new ecological
opportunity that they had not encountered before; and then they began to exploit that
opportunity. The niche they detected was not just based on a pre-existing similarity
between human societies on one side and wolf packs on the other, but rather on various
particular ways in which the wolves saw, heard, smelled, and felt certain sapiens acting.
It is wrong to think of wolves as being, or as ever having been, “natural slaves”
that were ripe and ready for human exploitation. Rather they are now, and always have
been in the past, creatures that are self-sufficient and proudly independent. Accordingly,
various different groups of wolves probably made both of two opposite responses to early
humans—some conceiving of themselves as in competition with the humans, and others
coming to tolerate, work with, and exploit humans for their own advantage. At the beginning, it might have been weaker, less adjusted, or outcast wolves that were more 33
likely to become domesticates of humans than those that were stronger, more confident,
more successful, and more self-reliant. But even if that situation existed at first, it is
likely that things changed later. For example, I read somewhere that sheep farmers in
Northern Ontario tried many different strategies to protect their herds from wolves, but
nothing worked until they happened to light on the idea of “fighting fire with fire.” In other words, they learned that the only effective response to the wolves’ depredations was to challenge them with domesticated sheepdogs.
Historically speaking, one of the two ways in which wolves related themselves to humans turned out to be far more successful than the other. At the present time, wolves
(in the form of dogs) have become—like chickens—one of the most numerous, diverse, widespread, and securely established species on Earth. Contrast the principal response these animals have to humans, with the attitude towards humans typically taken by crows. Although crows are also a successful, resourceful, and intelligent species, neither humans on their side, nor crows on theirs, have been able to find (or to accept) any realistic ways in which their two species might cooperate for their mutual benefit. Thus year after year—especially in winter, when the crows congregate in enormous flocks or
“roosts”—the rancorous, wasteful, and ultimately fruitless battle between these tragically star-crossed species continues.
Consider some excerpts from another story in my newspaper (Dube, 2007):
Every day, the city of Chatham collects garbage from a different
neighbourhood. And somehow, every day, the crows know exactly where
to go. 34
They wait patiently on rooftops and tree branches as the sun rises.
When the trash goes out, the carnage begins. Crows descend upon bulging
plastic bags, disembowel them in search of food, and gleefully scatter the
contents across front lawns.
Professional crow-chaser Ulrich Watermann just laughs and shakes
his head as he watches the birds.
“People,” he says, “are incredibly stupid.”
Crows, on the other hand, are smart—smart enough to memorize
garbage routes and a lot more. Humans, with our big brains and opposable thumbs, should theoretically be able to outwit them. Yet fat crows and messy lawns remain common sights, not just in this southern Ontario town, but in crow-plagued cities from Burnaby, B.C. to Charlottetown. . . .
The battle between birds and humans has spawned a cottage industry of professionals such as Mr. Watermann, whose bag of tricks includes pyrotechnics, lasers, recorded distress calls, birds of prey and wooden noisemakers.
He constantly changes his mode of attack, hoping to annoy the crows so much that they leave.
If the birds flee to a neighbouring town, he’ll be happy to help them too—for a fee. Chatham pays Mr. Watermann about $32,000 a year.
Lean and dressed in black, with glittering blue eyes and a weathered face, Mr. Watermann could pass for an overgrown crow himself. Like most people who study crows, he’s grown to admire them. 35
When hunters fired shotguns at the Chatham crows, he says, the
birds figured out exactly how high to fly to escape the pellet range. When
city workers made nightly rounds to disturb them, the crows learned that
the workers clocked out at 11 p.m., and simply waited until 11:01 to head
into town for the night.
“They are highly intelligent as a single bird. Then they come by
the hundreds of thousands, and they all learn from each other. If that one
makes a mistake,” he says, pointing to a crow regarding him suspiciously
from a wire, “the next one doesn’t make it.” . . . .
Smart crows also make great video. One BBC clip on YouTube
shows crows dropping nuts onto a busy road to be run over and cracked
open. Then they wait for the crosswalk signal to fly down and retrieve
their treats in safety.
One YouTube commenter wrote in response: “If they had hands
like us humens [sic], they would take over the world and enslave us!”16
16 A related point, recently mentioned in my newspaper, is described in the following short article quoted from Reuters and BBC News (The Globe and Mail Thursday, August
21, 2008, p.L6:
Magpies [another corvid species closely related to crows] can recognize
themselves in a mirror, German scientists have found—the first time self-
recognition has been observed in a non-mammal. In one test, researchers
from Goethe University in Frankfort placed yellow and red stickers on
five magpies, in positions where they could only be seen in a mirror. On 36
What moral are we entitled to draw from all this? It is that Diamond and like- minded theorists fail to take account of the fact that an attitude that some types of non- human animals take towards humans, and other species do not, also is an important factor in determining whether or not those animals can be domesticated. How is it appropriate to describe that attitude? A name we might give it is: “An openness and willingness towards making arrangements of reciprocity with creatures of other species.”
The basic reason crows cannot be domesticated, is that they are, by nature, far more interested in competing with humans, on humans’ own level, than in accepting a more or less subservient, but nevertheless complementary and mutually useful position with respect to them. The last point I want make in this section is that—with respect to the topic of domestication—humans themselves are more similar to crows than they are like wolves and dogs, because they think about such matters in a crow-like fashion. It is a familiar fact that some people repeatedly have tried to domesticate various groups of their fellow species members, for their own purposes, as opposed to the purposes of the would- be domesticated humans themselves. For example, the ancient institution of slavery is a prominent expression of attempts of this sort. But it gradually has become clear to everyone involved in these matters that the whole idea of humans being domesticated by other humans is unstable and unsustainable, in addition to being immoral, wrong, and unjust. The suggestion I want to make here is that slavery is an institution that is in basic conflict with the human nature that all of us share, since it is a social arrangement that neither the supposed slaves nor the attempted slave masters are able to find natural.
seeing their reflections, the birds tried to remove the stickers with their
claws and beaks. 37
3.4 What Changes had to occur in the Cultural Life of Humans, before the Domestication of Animals could take place?
Did our ancestors only gain the power to tame and/or domesticate animals, at the time
(approximately 60,000 to 30,000 years ago) when, in the view of many anthropologists,
they also obtained the ability to speak a relatively advanced form of language? As I intend to explain in more detail in the next chapter, many present-day anthropologists believe the invention of syntactical language was the factor that initiated the special
advance in human thinking we now refer to as the Upper Paleolithic Revolution (UPR).
But before discussing that subject, I consider it a good idea to ask the following question:
Was our ancestors’ ability to domesticate animals just one more part of that same general
intellectual advance; or had they already acquired various parts or aspects of the ability to
domesticate animals before the time of the UPR? I believe the correct answer is that our
forebears already had succeeded in domesticating at least the first few species of non-
human animals, before the time of the UPR; and this domestication of animals was one of
the factors that then helped them also to go on to acquire speech.
The following hypothetical story shows how this might have happened. It is a
familiar idea, as expressed by traditional sayings like “Curiosity killed a cat” that, in the
context of practical life, being curious is often something that turns out to be an expensive luxury, a distraction, and even in some cases a danger. The curiosity some ancient members of our species had about the wolves that visited their garbage heaps also as dangerous to them. But in spite of that, it later proved to be an important step they took in the direction of organizing their lives in a new and much more effective way. The new 38
type of thinking and behaving about which I now am speaking (which we might call
“theoretical life”) is almost always risky and dangerously impractical at first. But
eventually—at least in certain cases—it can prove to be useful after all.
Imagine a group of non-language-using sapiens living more than 60,000 years
ago, whose garbage attracted wolves. It is plausible to assume that the great majority of
the members of that group of humans were sufficiently wise and sensible to stay as far
away from those unpredictable scavengers as they could. But some of them—those who happened to be a bit braver than the rest—tried to drive the wolves away, as a means of
lessening the danger to the humans of the tribe, which was posed by the nearby presence
of wolves. Furthermore, some other humans, who were braver still, tried to kill at least a
few of the wolves, in order to discourage other wolves from coming near their settlement.
And finally, there also was a special type of bravery that was shown only by a very small
number of relatively young and foolish members of the band, which took an entirely
different form. These last individuals had a desire to engage in the daredevil activity of
facing down wolves at close range.17 However, when some of them finally got up the
nerve to do this, they were surprised to find (as discussed in the previous section) that
some of the wolves were less shy and less aggressive than they expected them to be.
Thus, these people gradually came to be more relaxed around the wolves just mentioned,
and eventually did not bother to bring along weapons whenever they interacted with
those animals. Finally, one or two of the sapiens succeeded in feeding a few of these
wolves by hand, and then also succeeded in touching the wolves with their hands. This
turned out to be the start of something important, because it eventually led to a
17 This is similar to a sort of behavior we often observe in crows. 39
partnership of mutual trust and interdependence between humans and wolves, which gave
both these species a greatly increased power over their environment and their
competitors, and gave both of them a relatively better chance to survive and thrive.
As noted in the previous section, wolves are clever and resourceful animals with a
talent for recognizing opportunities. The wolves saw an opportunity in the sapiens we just
have been describing, which they had not seen in the Neanderthals, or in members of the
species Homo erectus or, for that matter, in any other band of sapiens. That opportunity
took the form of those particular hominids developing a kind of flexibility of thought and
behavior, which we might describe as “self-conscious.” As a result of that flexibility,
even though the people in question had no good or practical reasons for approaching
wolves in the first place, they eventually found excellent and very practical reasons for
accepting and cultivating the company of such animals later. The point I now want to
emphasize is this: Those humans did not act the way they did because they were
prompted to do so by the nature they had inherited from their ancestors. That is, none of
their acquired ways of acting counted as natural in the biological sense of this word.
Instead, what they did was based on a once merely dormant, but now actively recognized
and exploited ability to put aside quite a few of their inherited inclinations, in favor of a
“second nature” they slowly had begun to fashion for themselves.
The Belgian anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, once made the remark that
primitive humans did not only consider animals and plants good to eat (“bonnes à
manger”), but also good to think with (“bonnes à penser”)—see Wiseman, 1997, p.54.
He rejected the utilitarian notion that had been affirmed by the earlier anthropologist,
Bronislaw Malinowski, that the thinking of all humans living in relatively non-developed 40
societies was completely dominated by their basic needs of life so that, for example, they
only had knowledge about the species of plants that they had found to be edible. Instead
of that, Lévi-Strauss claimed that all human beings everywhere and at all times thought
about the world in basically the same fashion, since all of them, including those living in
undeveloped and pre-scientific communities, were both motivated and fitted to obtain
disinterested, objective knowledge about the objects and creatures around them, for that
knowledge’s own sake. Admittedly, Lévi-Strauss believed primitive people used a
different means to obtain objective knowledge about things in the world around them,
from that employed by the members of more developed societies. Primitives regularly
think about themselves and the social groups to which they and their associates belong, in
terms of totem animals, plants or, more rarely, totem natural phenomena like lightning
(see ibid., p.36). But according to Lévi-Strauss, totemism of that sort does not amount to
something that is merely mythical and mystical. Instead, it deserves to be understood as a
practical and relatively objective means these people use to deal with the world in which
they live. Thus, suppose the totem animal assigned to one clan of primitive humans is the
jaguar, and the animal assigned to another such clan is the bear. In that case, in Lévi-
Strauss’ view, careful examination shows that those choices are neither arbitrary nor
misleading, because the relation that exists between the clans really is parallel in various respects to the relation between jaguars and bears. For instance, even though both of the clans are composed of hunters, they (like bears and jaguars) do not—and perhaps consciously do not—directly compete with one another (see ibid., p.46). 41
I do not accept the truth of everything Lévi-Strauss says about these matters.18
But in spite of that, I want to make a point that is at least similar to his views. The point is this: Once certain animals had become domesticated, it also was necessary for humans to think about (and think with) those domesticated animals in a way that was different from the way they regularly thought about wild ones. In particular, although their conception of wild animals was based on instincts they had inherited from their ancestors, the same was not true of their conception of domesticated animals. More concretely, those people felt the same fear, suspicion, haughtiness, and defensiveness towards wild wolves as their mammal, primate, and hominid forebears had felt. But when the wolves became domesticated (i.e. became dogs), they suspended those natural reactions and replaced them with other, learned reactions instead. In summary, what I am proposing is that tamed animals started to be non-instinctual objects of humans’ attention.
Thus, even if it was not necessary for our sapiens ancestors to possess speech in order for them to tame and domesticate animals (more particularly wolves), I believe that their experience of domesticating those animals prepared them to acquire language later.
One reason I have for saying this is that, when words finally did become available to the humans, they again had to learn to suspend, then also to transform, many of the simple, mammalian instincts that they had inherited from their ancestors, in order to make use of those words. Their experience of domesticating dogs gave some of the members of our species valuable practice and sophistication in controlling and re-channeling inborn
18 For example, I do not agree with the opinion expressed by Lévi-Strauss that humans
only gained the power to domesticate animals, after they had obtained the use of
language. See Wiseman, 1997, p.66. 42 reactions to various things they saw, heard, and felt. A second reason for believing that domestication prepared humans for the acquisition of language is that the wolves might have influenced humans’ cultural practices, as well as vice versa, because association with those animals in the context of stalking and hunting game encouraged humans to organize their own society in ways that were more similar to the behavior of a pack of wolves. For example, one result of this association might have been to make human society more disciplined, and more strictly hierarchical than it had been before. Linguists tell us that everything in language is organized in a strictly hierarchical manner, and that language cannot “work” in the absence of an organization of this sort. Where did this particular sort of organization come from? Part of the answer, I suggest, is that it was something we got from observing, and from working with, our first domesticated species.