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Chapter Three: Humans as Hunters: Animal Origins of Bioterrorism
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3= C H A P T E R Humans as Hunters Animal Origins of Bioterrorism Unlike the remaining living primates, man evolved as a carnivorous predator dependent on his mental and physical prowess to kill other animals for food. This entailed the development of complicated social relationships between the hunters, their prey, and competing predators. Juliet Clutton-Brock, Domestic Animals from Early Times Early hominids had little contact with animals other than themselves. The ancestors of Homo sapiens, after breaking away from other African apes approximately six million years ago, subsisted on a diet mostly of insects, fruits, and leaves and apparently did little hunting of animals. The best measure of what early hominids ate is probably what modern chimpanzees eat. Jane Goodall, who studied these animals in Tanzania, observed them eating more than fifty types of fruit, thirty types of leaves and leaf buds, blossoms, seeds, bark, nuts, ants, termites, caterpillars, honey, and larval grubs of bees, wasps, and beetles. Chimpanzees occasionally also eat birds’ eggs and meat from other animals, including baboons, monkeys, and young bushbucks or bushpigs, but these are not mainstays of their diet. Goodall estimated that one chimpanzee eats the equivalent of approximately one-half a prey animal in a one-year period, and during ten years of observation, she observed chimpanzees killing other animals only twice.1 Even when Australopithecus afarensis walked upright on the African plains approximately three million years ago, the dietary practices of early hominids had not changed much. An analysis of the teeth of “Lucy,” the beststudied member of this group, suggests she ate fruit “in quantities when it was in season, . . . a great many berries and seeds and roots and tubers, and a good = 2 3 R3186.indb 23 R3186.indb 23 11/3/04 6:44:17 AM 11/3/04 6:44:17 AM 2 4 = B e a s t s o f t h e E a r t h deal of dirt and sand along with these things.”2 These hominids undoubtedly supplemented their diet with small animals when they could catch them, but meat was not a major part of their diet. It was not until approximately one million years ago that human ancestors became accomplished hunters. By then, hominids had evolved through Homo habilis and Homo erectus, had begun using stone tools, and had domesticated fire. This last was an important antecedent for meat eating, since cooking makes meat more palatable. The importance of dietary meat also increased at this time because the climate became cooler and drier in the preglacial era. During this period, “plant foods became more sparse,” while “grazing animals on open grassy savannahs proliferated.”3 The development of language made hunting large animals easier, for it could be carried out cooperatively by groups of individuals as they communicated with one another. Evidence for a hominid shift from being primarily herbivorous to being increasingly carnivorous comes from archeological research at prehistoric living sites. Animal bones have been found with “distinctive cut-marks and hammer indentations characteristic of butchering and marrow extraction,” according to Tony McMichael’s Human Frontiers, Environments and Disease: Anthropologists think that early humans probably came to rely on meat for around one-quarter of their daily calories. Meat intake not only provided energy; it supplied the full range of amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) and some important micronutrients (such as trace elements and vitamin B12) that were deficient in a vegetarian diet. In those precarious dietary circumstances, a modest meat intake would have significantly aided survival. It would also have consolidated cooperative hunting and food sharing. . . . The evidence, while still contentious, points increasingly to a Pleistocene in which early humans became serious hunters and big meat-eaters.4 By the late Paleolithic period, humans had become highly dependent on meat for sustenance. Recent study of bone chemistry of Neanderthals “overwhelmingly points to the Neanderthals behaving as top-level carnivores, obtaining almost all of their dietary protein from animal sources; . . . protein from plants was insignificant.”5 The importance of dietary protein at this time can also be measured by the size of humans. According to experts on Paleolithic nutrition, “Homo sapiens sapiens, who enjoyed an abundance of animal protein thirty thousand years ago, were an average of six inches taller than their descendants who lived after the development of farming,” when meat consumption declined.6 Given this immense meat consumption, why didn’t Paleolithic humans all succumb to heart attacks? One reason...