have been going for Yosemite Sam in pursuit of Daffy Duck. “I mean, you people, you seem to fancy that sort of thing.”
She seemed to be calling upon centuries of cultural superiority to make her point. When she and her tribe did a-hunting go, they stood in a designated shooting area waiting for the pheasants to be released by the thousands. After the gamekeeper’s big release, the beaters would keep the pheasants flying until the affair was over. The skulking through the bushes in search of pheasants was the job of the dogs and the hirelings. This distinction between hunting and shooting is an important one. You might say that this exchange between the lady and me at least suggests, if not encapsulates, the history of hunting.
When we take a look at the lady’s ancestry, or indeed my own—I mean around two million years ago, at the time of the first true humans, Homo habilis (“handy man”), so named because these hominids had learned to use stone tools—we discover that as a species we had evolved into gatherers, scavengers, and occasional hunters. Without a hint of apology, we skulked around in the bushes looking for food. The much-debated hunting hypothesis of human origins came from scientific ruminations on the remains of these people. The theory goes that when one branch of apes learned to wield (throw, swing, carve) weapons to kill their prey, they were able to turn away from a diet of fruit and vegetation and become successful carnivores. Thus, they ceased to be apes and took the road to humanity. Hunting separated them from the lower orders of apes; hunting made them human. This theory of man as killer ape, however, has not gone uncontested over the last few decades. Indeed, as far as researchers have been able to discover, the animals these early humans ate were probably more scavenged than hunted down and killed.
If we examine the dietary evidence of hominids a mere million or so years ago, we discover that hunting for food has begun to complement scavenging as a source of food. Presumably, our Homo habilis had learned a great deal about predators during their millennia as scavengers: how to find the kill sites, when to scavenge and when not to scavenge, how to avoid the predators, and perhaps even how to defend themselves against these creatures that sometimes left their food sources unguarded. The same dietary evidence, however, indicates that plants are still the major food source for our gatherer-hunters.
By the time the skills of these hominids allowed them to take the offensive and hunt large mammals, they had evolved into bigger, stockier beings—“erectines,” as the paleoanthropologists call them. (Homo erectus is the variant we have come to know best.) The erectines, with their ever-more sophisticated stone tools, pursued the great migrations of large animals from the African continent to the Eurasian continent approximately 700,000 years ago. Like the great predator cats, they pursued elephants, hoofed animals, hippos, and smaller mammals simply because they were an abundant food source.
One of the most evolved branches deriving from the erectines was the Neanderthals, who hunted in Europe until about 35,000 years ago. They constitute the least fortunate branch of the human family (Homo sapiens neanderthalensis). They were probably not blessed with the genetic makeup to survive the last great ice age to its conclusion, and they became extinct.
Another branch of Homo sapiens emerged as the dominant species, what we, in our vanity, like to think of as the end result of erectine evolution. This emergence began somewhat before the last great ice age, perhaps as early as 140,000 years ago. These ancestors too were gatherer-hunters and are thought to be anatomically modern human beings. They are not credited with inventing fire, but their use of fire was so widespread that it came to define them as the modern humans who survived the last great ice age. They continued to evolve and flourish through the late Paleolithic age (the classic stone age) right up to the advent of agriculture.
Their period as consummate hunters reached a peak around the end of the late Paleolithic age, which saw the rise of the Cro-Magnons. They were the big-game hunters of Europe. Much like the diet of modern caribou hunters of the Canadian North, more than half of their food was meat. These ancient cold-weather survivors, the Cro-Magnons, managed to maintain populations all over Europe and northern Asia and later in North America. The quarry was large mammals—mammoths, horses, buffalo, and caribou. And as the availability of big-game animals began to diminish, the ingenuity of the hunters appears to have increased.
I am talking about the Mesolithic age, from approximately 20,000 to 9,000 bc. This is the age during which agriculture began to develop in isolated pockets around the Middle East. But until agriculture took over as the major source of food for tribal societies all over the world, including North America, hunting became increasingly high-tech. The hunters of the Mesolithic era had learned, over the millennia, to hunt in groups and to deploy weapons such as spears and, later, bows and arrows.
Hunting historians who reach the Neolithic age must surely lapse into melancholia, because they are then forced to concede that hunting for subsistence is losing its chic. Around 10,000 bc, the populations of the tribal units on several continents had grown considerably. This population growth coincided with the end of the ice age. With more mouths to feed, tribal groups turned to growing plants and corralling hitherto wild animals. The agricultural revolution took over as mercilessly as a swarm of McDonald’s franchises. Hunting and gathering could support one person per ten square miles. But the farming and animal husbandry that characterized Neolithic agriculture could support about one hundred times that many people.
With the obvious success of advanced hunting techniques, and with the disappearance of traditional habitat owing to the end of the ice age, the great mammals that had fed populations of Homo sapiens for so long went extinct. From dietary evidence gathered at tribal sites of the Neolithic age, we can see a dramatic shift from meat to wheat, barley, legumes, fruit, and nuts. For humans, the age of the Big Meat was relatively short, lasting from about 35,000 bc to perhaps as late as 10,000 bc. There were some big exceptions to this trend, Aboriginal hunters on the Great Plains and in northern Canada and Alaska being among them.
There is some strong evidence that this radical shift from meat to grains and fruit in the Near East, Western Europe, northern Asia, and scattered parts of Africa precipitated a widespread decline in human health. Communicable diseases sprang up, and with the drop in iron levels, anemia and osteoporosis proliferated. The height of early Neolithic peoples declined by about four inches from that of the hunting tribes of the late Paleolithic age, and poorer nutrition seems to be at the heart of this decline.
And so hunting, this time for smaller game animals, continued along the fringes of many tribal groups like a counterculture. In Israel, from the Hakkarmel burial sites, archaeologists have unearthed a stone-age culture from about 12,000 bc. These people, the Natufians, were hunter-gatherers until they collided with the agrarian and herding cultures. By the time of Moses, circa 1250 bc, the Natufian hunters had been wiped out.
As far as we can tell, this seems to have been the fate of most, though certainly not all, hunting cultures throughout the world. In the Near East, around 12,000 bc, hunters began to corral gazelles for later consumption. In Syria, between 11,000 and 10,000 bc, the diet radically shifted from wild gazelles to domesticated goats and sheep. By about 8500 bc, this shift was complete. Around 7000 bc, in what is now Mexico, deer hunting and seasonal plant gathering gave way to maize cultivation. In South America, evidence suggests that Andean tribes cultivated wild plants as early as 5000 bc. Agriculture spread widely after it took hold in this region, and hunter-gatherers began to trade wild meat for beans, maize, and potatoes. The spread of agriculture stopped in the far south, where growing seasons were short.
In large areas of the Near East, China, Thailand, Meso-America, and North Africa and parts of southern Africa, hunter-gatherers and agrarians managed to live side-by-side and trade wild game for plants. Whenever wild game and seasonal plants become scarce, however, hunter-gatherers inevitably would become dependent on agrarians. The agrarian cultures grow as their lands grow, and the hunter-gatherer tribes tend to shrink.
As grasses and grains began to flourish at the end of the last great ice age and
