Early Man

Anthropologists have long debated whether the first humans were peaceful vegetarians, aggressive carnivores, or opportunistic scavengers: the familiar debate whether or not humans are aggressive, and if so whether it is by nature, nurture, or both.

One reason anthropologists study isolated primitive tribes is the assumption that man’s original nature can be learned from people who are least influenced by civilization. The majority of anthropologists conclude from these studies that man is by nature gentle, shy, timid, and non-aggressive. This fits their apparently preferred model of a peaceful vegetarian ancestry for mankind and of the noble savage of whom many anthropologists and sophisticates long have been enamored. For example, Tacitus compared his fellow Roman citizens unfavorably with German barbarians. Franz Boaz founded Cultural Anthropology on similar assumptions. His students included Margaret Mead and Ashley Montagu, according to whom “…the power of instinctual drives [in humans] has gradually withered away, until man has virtually lost all his instincts…Evil is not inherent in human nature, it is learned…Aggressiveness is taught, as are all forms of violence which human beings exhibit” (Montagu, 1962).

But, “Who is going to suffer the deprivations necessary to take from the Eskimo his dinner of whale blubber and his home of ice cubes?” (Ardrey, 1965). The underlying assumption of most anthropologists may be wrong: isolated tribes may be those that were unable to defend desirable territories so have found a way to survive in areas unattractive to warlike ones. After all, some primitive tribes are incredibly violent.

Raymond Dart’s 1924 discovery of a two million year old hominid fossil skull and his follow-up announcement in 1949 that the species hunted baboons gave the debate an interesting turn.

The advocates of a peaceful vegetarian ancestry responded that if hyenas did not kill the baboons, it must have been leopards. Leopards do kill baboons but this does not disprove early man as a killer of baboons any more than the fact that cougars kill deer proves that modern hunters do not do so as well. The argument continues in the best scientific tradition, with both sides trying to refute the other. Against the considerable evidence that early hominids ate meat, many argued that early man was incapable of hunting so scavenged any meat eaten. The opponents responded that Australopithecus africanus possessed axes, saws, scrapers, poniards, digging tools and clubs, so were at least capable of hunting. In 1959, Dart found an Australopithecus skull with a jaw broken by a blow that left the same double depression found on the baboon skulls. As the individual had died of the blow (or at least before it healed), this was evidence of fighting among the Australopithecines and perhaps of murder. Scientists have since found another half-dozen skulls with similar injuries.

Pruetz and Lindshield (2011) report observing female chimpanzees in Senegal, almost on a daily basis, breaking off a tree branch, stripping it of leaves and twigs, sharpening it with their teeth, stabbing it into holes, and eating the bush babies speared.

While chimpanzee behavior today may or may not reflect primate behavior millions of years ago, Louis Leakey (1965) notes that the vast majority of fossils found associated with the camp sites of prehistoric man represent the remains of his meals, and these are primarily of bovines ten or more times the size of the hominids eating them. If early man was a scavenger, one would expect a more random and less tasty diet. The most parsimonious explanation of the facts is that man has been hunting for a very long time.

In 2001, Ahounta Djimdoumalbaye discovered a skull, two fragments of lower jaw and three teeth from five individuals of a previously unknown human ancestor in what now is Chad. Sahelanthropus tchadensis predates Dart’s Australopithecus by two million years, making it the oldest hominid known at this time. More important, both the location of the find and the mix of primitive and evolved traits play havoc with the tidy model of human origins (Wood 2002). The braincase and most of the teeth resemble chimpanzees. The nose, brow ridges, facial profile, and base of the skull match those of proto-humans who lived four million years later.

The discovery suggests that hominids were spread through Africa two million years before Australopithecus, providing the conditions for the branching off of many species (Brunet 2002, Wood 2002), and may spell the end to the long-running search for a single human ancestor and the theory that human evolution is a single file march from ape to man (Pilbeam 2003). The 2012 discovery of still another species of human in Central Asia having a mix of ape- and human-like characteristics reinforces this interpretation and, depending on the specimen’s, age may even complicate the hypothesized African origin of Man. At this writing, there are 26 distinct species of human known. It may be that some were vegetarians, some were hunters, and some were scavengers. Some may have been aggressive and some not.