Transcription
[Music] Oh, hi there. Thanks for tuning in. Let me tell you a story of origin, one that might change the way you think about yourself and the species that you're part of.
A starving mother huddled against a rock, trying to hide from the wind as she held her child against her breast. In the distance, she could see random figures walking up the river valley towards the pass. She had not been able to keep up with the troop that was on the move. The troop had always been on the move, only now it traveled without direction.
The dominant male had become desperate and lost. He was even more brutal and frantic than he had been in the past. He shrieked and he bit. He attacked without warning, almost demanding an act of clear defiance from one of his subordinates, a defiance that would justify a fight to the death, which would end in the inevitable cannibalization of the loser. Mothers clutch their children in fear. More than once, the hungry dominant had grabbed a stray child and devoured it. He had become obsessed with preserving his own strength and controlling his herd that was in danger of disappearing completely.
There were only a few other males now, and none of them were allowed to breed with the remaining females. In fact, every member of this troop had been sired by this old dominant or his father in the days long past. This homed troop had been much larger. From time to time, the herd had been shared with other males who were on top of the rigid hierarchy of the troop. This had ensured a certain amount of genetic diversity in the troop, but over an increasing number of generations, this did not prevent a creeping increase in inbreeding.
Once the troop had shrunk beneath a certain size, the results of incest became epidemic. Certain traits became more and more prevalent, and in most cases, the exaggerated traits and deformities made the individual members of this homed society weaker. One positive trait that this species had developed over thousands of years was not immediately visible, but it was one of the most vulnerable to the inbreeding.
These hominids did not evolve in this environment. They had migrated here in search of food. They had once been primarily vegetarians, omnivores who had wandered over Savannah Plains and large, loosely knit social groups, collecting food as individuals within the safety of their herd-like society. Before even this, they had first evolved as creatures of the jungle and had lived in trees. But when the forest shrank and the grasslands expanded, evolution and time changed the shape of these creatures, and they began to walk upright on two legs.
Their sense of smell and hearing were not as well developed as the other animals of the plains, which had evolved on an open expanse. But the eyesight of these hominids was good, and the jungle had been a stimulus-heavy environment, and as a result, they had well-developed brains. In addition, they had nimble hands that could manipulate objects.
But nourishment was always scarce for them, even though food grew in abundance all around them. They were not a grazing animal and could not exploit the plentiful grasses in the same way as the vast herds of large, four-legged ungulates. They could harvest seeds from the tops of grasses using their hands as combs, and they could dig for roots. Insects, worms, and grubs were also an important food source, rich in protein. They had also learned how to use sticks and stones as tools that could help them dig, and they passed this technology on from one generation to the other.
But as individuals, they were also easy prey for large carnivores, and often they would be picked off from the edges of the troop. There was safety in numbers, and like other grazing animals, they lived in large groups. However, when threatened by a carnivore, they could not run very fast, and they did not have horns or other evolutionary weapons at their disposal. Instead, they learned to rely on their sticks and stones.
A good stick increased the length of their arm, and when it swung, it could hit an attacker at a distance away from their vulnerable and soft bodies. The length of the stick increased the arc of their arm swing and exponentially increased the impact of each hit. In addition, stones were hard and heavy, and at close quarters, their hands could now deal bone-crushing blows. If they cooperated, a group defense was effective against a lone predator. Since the males did not carry children as they traveled, they learned to take their sticks and stones with them wherever they went, so these weapons could always be close at hand if attacked.
Their adaptive brains soon made their hands feel incomplete if they were not holding a stick or a stone. They also increasingly used their weapons as tools as they looked for food. If they put this extension of themselves down and if they lost sight of it, they would become agitated. Their brain would make them feel as if they were mothers who had lost track of their children. They would become overwhelmed with a sense of impending danger until they found their beloved weapon, and once again, as it was held in their hands, its presence would bring comfort and security.
Yet, they also learned that they could hit a threatening animal at a distance. If they threw the stick or the stone away from themselves, they became very good at hitting a moving predator at a distance. Using a stone, they could project a blow of their hand through time and space, beyond themselves. Up until this very day, the descendants of these hominids, when faced with overwhelming odds, will revert to the ultimate mass defense of collective stone throwing.
Meat, in the beginning, had only been a very occasional luxury. At times, the troop would come across the last remains of a large ungulate that had been killed by a predator. Most often, there would be little meat left amongst these scattered bones. However, this hominid was curious in nature and noticed that if a bone was cracked by a large carnivore's previous bite, it could suck the marrow out of the bone. For generations, this highly nourishing food was a favorite treat, and the inventive primate learned to smash and split bones apart by placing them on a large rock and hitting them with a handheld stone. The broken and split bones also became tools.
Meat of any kind was a food high in protein, and there was an abundance of this energy source available for predators or the scavengers that followed them. Most scavengers were skulking animals that could fly or sneak into a kill site without much danger of being caught by the larger predator. At best, a predator could only chase the irritating parasites away while it ate its fill, but eventually, it wasn't worth the bother to keep the relentless pests away, and the predator would leave the kill to them.
The hominids were far too slow and awkward a creature to fill the niche of a scavenger who could dash in for a quick bite within the regal presence of a predator. However, once the sovereign of the kill was finished and had left the remains to the onslaught of opportunistic mouths, the hominids could move in, barking and swinging their sticks, claiming the kill as their own as they pushed the other scavengers away. Over time, meat became an increasingly important food source, and as a result, the hominids became bullying creatures of sticks and stones that terrorized other scavengers.
As the hominids came to live in the shadow of their reluctant predator benefactors, there were two classes of predators these hominids came to live in association with: felines and canines. The felines tended to be massive, solitary hunters. They were ferocious and powerful. Even a large group of well-armed hominids would keep at a distance from this monstrous killer. While the aloof cats had learned that troops of these monkeys with sticks and stones were not easy prey, it did not live in fear of them. It was simply that a bony meal of a scavenger that would fight back was not worth the risk of injury. However, a freshly killed large, four-legged herbivore was worth defending, and if the two legs got too close, they were not well organized enough to deal with the full speed and momentum of charging claws and raging teeth bent on angry punishment and revengeful destruction. Even a stone's throw was too close to get to the possibility of this kind of shock and awe.
In contrast, the canines were much safer predators to associate with. They tended to be smaller, their claws could not rip you apart with one slashing stroke. They had teeth, but they could not break your back with one crunching bite. They were pack hunters, and a lone canine was no threat to a troop of hominids armed with clubs and projectiles. One-on-one, the canines may have had the advantage, but the hominid troops were larger than the canine packs, and for the moment, retaining a large social organization similar to the herbivore herd was an advantage to the strange creature.
As they added scavenged meat to their omnivorous diet, their numbers and range grew. And as their numbers grew, scavenged meat became an increasingly important food source. But as long as they were a parasite of hunters and depended on the leftovers of kills that were left behind by these carnivores, their own numbers would be limited to what the hunting animals could provide.
As the hominids became more proficient with their weapons and became more organized in their bullying tactics, they began to put pressure on the hunters at their kill sites. This meant they could push the carnivores off their kills earlier and earlier after a kill was made. But this also meant the carnivores they were depending on for food were getting less and less food to eat from each kill. A contradiction arose: since the hominids depended on the hunters to provide them with food, it meant the more successful the hunter was, the more food there would be for the hominids. In the short term, the hominids could obtain more meat by driving the hunters off of their kills earlier and earlier, but this would also result in the hunters being less able to provide for their own offspring, and this, in the long term, would lead to there being fewer hunters to provide meat for the hominids and their offspring.
[Music] Offspring. The baby continued to nurse at the breast of its ape-like mother, but her milk was gone. The mother looked up towards the pass, and now the troop was out of sight. Last night, they had heard wolves howling, and in the morning, they had instinctively begun to move in the direction of this hopeful signal. Where there were wolves, there was a chance of food.
For generations and generations, this troop had been hunters. They would track and kill their own food. Their sticks had been refined into spears, their stones were now skillfully chipped into handheld axes with sharp edges that could cut open the tough hide of their prey. But the inbreeding was taking its toll and was affecting the most important evolutionary adaptation these hominids had: their intelligence. The troop was no longer strong enough to hunt and bring down the large prey it had come to rely on as its primary food source. They had been reduced back to being scavengers.
This troop was weak and would soon die out, along with her baby. The mother continued to huddle next to the rocks, trying to hide from the wind, trying to keep her baby warm as she cradled it closer to her body with her hairy arms. She didn't want her baby to die.
The transition from scavenger to hunter was a gradual one, no doubt. As these hominid scavengers fought for domination of kill sites, they would have killed the occasional competing scavenger as they drove them away and would have added this corpse to the victory feast. In this way, they would have learned the skill of killing. However, the oversight herbivores that wandered around them in abundance were a bounty that waited to be exploited by any animal that adapted itself to the task of hunting and killing these massive beasts. Only, there already were very successful predators that evolved to fill this niche, so it was unlikely that a new carnivore would evolve out of the ranks of scavengers unless, for some reason, they had an advantage of some kind that could outperform existing carnivores. The biological innovations evolution had already placed into the system were impressive.
Also, it is unlikely that the scavenger that is dependent upon a hunter one day will the next day go into direct competition with it. It seems much more likely that a mutually beneficial relationship might be an initial step to becoming a hunter yourself, and that it would be more advantageous to begin by cooperating in some way with true carnivores or remaining a scavenger and not a true hunter yourself.
Cooperation between a scavenger and a predator is not unheard of. For example, ravens, who feed on wolf kills, will lead wolves to possible prey. A flying raven can see what wolves cannot, and by circling in the sky above, a raven can mark the position of an animal below in the hidden woods. The ability to see prey from the sky is a method of tracking unavailable to wolves, and ravens who learn the value of this then offer it in trade. In this situation of increased hunting productivity, wolves learn to watch the flight of circling ravens, and the ravens' labor is exchanged for surplus meat obtained through this cooperation.
In the same way, early hominid scavengers must have been able to read the meaning of circling ravens in the sky. Survival of the fittest does not hinge upon an individual's ability to compete. A species' ability to cooperate as individuals amongst themselves, and then with other species and the whole environment as an integral part of a complete interdependent system, is in fact the fittest way to survive. Instead of competing with a predator you are dependent on to provide you with food, the first step towards hunting yourself is to learn how to assist a predator you're dependent on and to enhance this predator-scavenger relationship. Instead of competing with your hunter provider, if you find some way to assist them in becoming more successful, you also become more successful yourself.
As you learn to work with the hunter, over time they will learn to work with you. And when this happens, it will most likely happen in association with a predator that already hunts as part of a group. If hunting for them is a group activity, it is easier for you to incorporate your additional hunting labor into their collective economic enterprise. A solitary hunter that stalks with stealth and then attacks with surprise is more difficult to cooperate with, given that much of its strategy is to remain unseen until the moment of attack. It is next to impossible to cross-species cooperate with this kind of predator because as soon as it hunts, it works to make its presence unknown, and it will be just as hidden to you as the prey you wish to assist. This predator, hunting even if you are trying to help, is just as likely to leap out of the grass and eat you as it is anybody else that it gets in its way.
Evolution has given it an aloof and independent nature that will keep it seeing you as a food source rather than a helpful friend. Cats are this kind of predator. Even domesticated cats do not hunt mice in our homes with us; they simply hunt mice in a territory they see as their own. Cats may hunt in a group of two or three, but they are not primarily pack hunters. A cat can be used to hunt, but only in the same way as the falcon that is released by its owner is a solitary search-and-destroy missile.
Furthermore, cats have only come to live in close association with man since urbanization, and previous to our living spaces becoming infested by mice and rats, it does not seem likely we would have formed a mutually beneficial relationship with the feline at any point in our prehistory. During our scavenger phase of development, felines would have been excellent providers of kill sites, but always they would be aloof superiors, and in their presence, we would tremble in fear. We did not run with the cats; we ran with the wolves. The others were out of sight.
Now, the woman was alone with her child, leaning against the rock. A few flakes of snow began to fall from the sky. The cold was penetrating into her, and soon she would have no warmth to provide her child with. She wanted to give her baby to one of the other mothers in her troop. She whimpered as she realized she should have done this when she still had the chance. Her troop was gone.
But then, as she whimpered, she heard a faint whimper that seemed to be a response to her whimpers. She whimpered again, but this time she lifted her head and made the sound a little louder. On the other side of the rock, she saw the soft gray ears of a wolf cub sticking its head out of a den that was hidden by a bush.
Today, the canine species is a common hunting companion of the human species. The dog is a canine that has evolved as a result of a long, interdependent relationship with apes. It is obvious dogs are dogs because of this long symbiotic relationship with man. Domestication is one form of relationship man forms with other animals, but this is a relatively recent form of relationship, and the canine species came to live alongside man long before man engaged in the domestication of other animals.
Early domestication most often happened as a result of a shift in the hunter-prey relationship, where we were the hunters, and we began to provide food and protection for the prey we were dependent on for our own food and clothing. Slowly, the hunter-prey relationship became the shepherd-livestock relationship, and this management of a food source led to expanded forms of animal exploitation, such as using animals as a beast of burden to provide labor, or zoo animals to provide amusement, or pets to provide unconditional love or dependency.
It may be a mistake to see the dog as just another one of many animals civilized man has come to domesticate. This assumes the dog was domesticated after man became civilized, and while it may be true to say that man domesticated the dog, it is not true to say that man domesticated the wolf. The key to understanding when we became human may be to understand when and how wolves that first associated with man eventually became dogs.
At some point in our evolution, we began to hunt in cooperation with wolves. Given that the wolf evolved as a biological hunter and we did not, it seems most likely that our co-hunter relationship with canines first began as a hunter-scavenger relationship, where we were the scavengers. Early on in our relationship with canines, we were grazing omnivores who, in evolutionary terms, were rapidly developing into hunters, and we were the ones who needed to change the most in order to survive. First, we were scavengers of kill sites, then we began to assist predators in some way as we learned to hunt in concert with them.
Did man begin as wolf's best friend? Archaeological evidence shows we have had a cooperative association with canines for at least as far back as the late Paleolithic Ice Age and the time when we were mammoth hunters. I suspect our association with the canine went back much further than this, and it is something that should begin to be looked for in the archaeological record. If dogs are dogs because they evolved in a certain direction due to a close relationship with an ape, it seems logical to assume that the direction of this ape's evolution would also be greatly affected due to its close relationship with these canines, especially if it is the ape who needs to continue to change in order to survive.
Today, we change the evolution of animals we domesticate because we, the so-called civilized ape, change who these animals are and force them to fit into a niche we have created for ourselves. Fully domesticated animals do not survive well without the care of apes. Clearly, the evolution of these animals has been altered by human intervention, and even in this case, to some small extent, our domestication of animals affects us. For example, domestication of the horse had a profound effect on human culture, but it did not change the essence of who we are. Agricultural man did not cease being agricultural man after the domestication of the horse. Even with all of our modern technology, including space travel, it does not change the fact that today we are still primarily agricultural men.
We did not teach canines how to hunt, and while today the dog can be seen as a domesticated animal, we did not domesticate the dog until after we had, in effect, first domesticated ourselves. However, our relationship with dogs and canines stretches back long before agriculture and domestication, and understanding the history and dynamics of this interspecies relationship cannot help but shed light on who we are and help explain how we became human. The story of a wolf becoming a dog is also the story of an ape becoming human.
Bred eyes looked up at the mother as the wolf cub explored a little farther around the rock. Ears perked straight up into the air as the cubs sniffed in the mother's direction. The sight of this well-fed, adventurous infant brought comfort to the starving mother. Then another wolf cub showed its face, and as it did so, it touched the first one and startled it. Both cubs darted back into their dens.
The mother then looked down at her own welp. It hung in her arms. It was still breathing, but it was limp, weak, and cold. If she couldn't hand her baby to one of the mothers of her own troop, maybe she could pass her child to the mother of these energetic cubs, so full of life, moving around the rock. She found the entrance to the wolf den. She couldn't see the cubs, but she could smell them. Inside the den, they were safe and warm, and before long, their mother would return to feed them. She put her child as far down into the wolf den as she could, and then she left the area and moved in the direction she had last seen her troop. She disappeared into the distance.
[Music]