BRIAN DEER:
NATURE'S PREY Page
4
Beside
the few dusty tracks that today cross the Serengeti,
you will sometimes see a hyena or two panting in the
heat. If you want, you can get out and pet them like
house-dogs. And they would happily rip you to shreds.
Best stay behind safety glass to coexist with wild
animals. Thank god for the automobile.
But
now try to think about Homo erectus, plodding across
the plain in bare feet. Around 2 million years ago
was the period of maximum evolutionary diversity, and
while today we have cause to fear the pack-hunting
hyena, back then there were at least six species.
While east Africa today boasts the serious presence
of three big cats - the cheetah, leopard and lion -
back then there were ten, some much bigger and uglier
than anything a zoo could contain. While the lakes
today may boast 16ft Nile Crocodiles, then there were
at least four kinds to drag you under, some of them
twice the size.
Against
such perils, hominids stood little chance once they
ventured from the trees' protection. Little chance,
that is, until what many scientists believe may have
been the real spur to humanity's leap forward. Far
from the weapon, or even the tool, being the defining
moment, if any one thing marked Dart's
"transition from Ape to Man", it wasn't
predatory aggression, but the first technology - our
ancestors' control of fire.
The
champion of this view is the archaeologist Jack
Harris, chair of the Rutgers University's
anthropology department, who has worked at sites
throughout east Africa, including Laetoli, where Mary
Leakey famously found hominid footprints. "I
have argued that the earliest human-controlled fire
was not related to cooking, but for protecting
hominids and for securing a place on the
ground," he told me. "Prior to that,
hominids spent a lot of time - certainly sleeping -
in the trees. Once they had fire, they could ward off
predators such as lions and leopards. It also allowed
them to move into new habitats in the more open parts
of the landscape."
Controversially,
Harris dates this to 1.6m years ago, much further
back than previously believed. Since the 1970s,
possible evidence has been collected from a dozen
sites, from caves at Swartkrans in southern Africa to
the desert of Middle Awash in Ethiopia. But until now
all observations have roundly been rubbished by
champions of the killer ape. They say that, until the
time of the rise of Homo sapiens, our brutish
forebears were too dumb and clumsy to accomplish such
a complicated feat.
The
site deemed proof of Harris's theory is at Koobi
Fora, near Lake Turkana in northern Kenya. On what is
now a bleak ridge of eroding sediments 20km from the
water, surrounded by a volcanic wilderness, materials
from a spot hurried over by the Leakeys more than 20
years ago have been subjected to magnetic mineralogy
tests which seem to point to an ancient campfire.
Stone implement finds and landscape surveys have
shown that this was once a living place for hominids,
beside a river lined with acacia.
Controlling
fire was a revolution: at last there was safety on
the ground. Its warmth allowed rapid migration
northwards and to higher altitudes. It provided
light, thus extending the day. And as a focal point
for sharing information, such as where berries or
nuts had been found, it was also a spur to developing
language - then still only squeaks, clicks and
grunts. For the lucky line who got the hang of it
first, these features of fire would have triggered a
massive brain-boost over those left out in the cold.
"It
is probably in this context that people started to
talk about the day's activities," Harris said of
what he believes to be humanity's most transforming
breakthrough. "And it changed the biological
clock of humans. Prior to that, humans were like
other animals, they were restricted by the daylight
hours - particularly humans, who have developed no
special adaptation to seeing at night."
Fire,
of course, might attract other hominids, but this
might not have been a problem. The revisions that the
new investigations are bringing about suggest that
strangers would more likely have sparked curiosity
and desire than any so-called killer instinct. The
latest research shows that the gene-swapping breeding
stock that led to modern humans never fell below
several thousand individuals: meaning that encounters
between different groups must have been enjoyed, as
they are among other primate species, as
opportunities to exchange DNA.
To
the chagrin of the pundits of the 1960s, the same
picture is now emerging from our cousins in the wild.
Despite reports since Goodall's stressing the common
chimp's occasional aggressiveness - including a BBC
series this summer dutifully dubbing it, as ever,
"Man's closest relative" - zoologists now
believe that it is the bonobo, the misnamed
"pygmy" chimpanzee, which has remained more
like the original stock from which Australopithecus -
and we - evolved. Only about 15,000 of these animals
remain, mostly deep in the jungle of Zaire.
Although
the bonobo's DNA shows the same differences from
humans as the common chimps's, and it is often of a
similar size (but with longer limbs and a narrower
chest), the bonobo has rarely been deemed worthy of
the discomfort of keeping a watch on its life. But
work by feisty Japanese scientists has begun to
reveal that, far from it being spiteful or brutish,
it enjoys a tranquil life: concluding even the most
mundane interactions with indiscriminate collective
sex.
"Though
there was a clear boundary between individuals of the
different groups and they were exchanging loud calls,
face to face, no battle was seen," the Japanese
team reported (with appropriate breathlessness) in Primatology
Today, after spending months waiting for two
bands, each of about three dozen bonobo, to meet for
the very first time. "After about half an hour,
a female of P group approached a female of E1 group
and they performed genito-genital rubbing. Then both
groups had a peaceful feeding and resting time."
Far
from the pulverising violence with which Kubrick's 2001
thrilled the modern public, the accumulating evidence
about our ancestors' behaviour is that the worst
hominids were most likely to do was cuddle their
rivals too hard.
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