Hunting ‘Man the Hunter’

For a century, this theory of human origins has died and returned. To free it from limbo, we must disentangle its many meanings

by Vivek V Venkataraman  BIO

Stone Age (c1881-85) by Viktor Vasnetsov. Courtesy Wikipedia

is assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Calgary, Canada. He is also assistant director of the Guassa Gelada Research Project in Ethiopia, and the co-founder and co-principal investigator of the Orang Asli Health and Lifeways Project in Peninsular Malaysia.

The most iconic image of human evolution comes not from science, but from cinema. In the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), apes shuffle across a desolate, windswept plain, scrounging for meagre pickings. One is mauled by a leopard. Then a large black monolith appears, whipping the apes into a frenzy and bestowing upon them a new form of intelligence. As Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra swells, one ape takes up a bone as a weapon and smashes it into a pile of bones: prey becomes predator. The ape later throws the bone into the sky and it morphs into a space satellite.

The message of Kubrick’s ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence is unmistakable. Humanity was forged by the predatory instinct. It is an evolutionary story in which modern life is traced to prehistoric hunting. This idea goes by the name ‘Man the Hunter’. In some versions of this narrative, hunting shaped not only our bodies and minds but the very structure of human society – including domestic life and gender roles. Men hunted, while women reproduced and tended the home.

It is a grand, all-encompassing theory, a vivid and morally charged vision of the Palaeolithic that lodged itself deep in popular culture. Throughout the 20th century, Man the Hunter was a story of our origins that many people took for granted. Nuclear families, breadwinning husbands, and looming violence in the Cold War era appeared to reflect the natural order of things. Variants of the idea remain pervasive today, appearing in everything from Paleo diets to online ‘manosphere’ communities.

Yet within anthropology, the idea had long faded. For me, an anthropologist who studies hunter-gatherer societies, Man the Hunter had always been little more than a background hum: it was something you knew of but didn’t take seriously. From a scientific perspective, the idea simply felt outdated – an old piece of disciplinary history, nowhere near the cutting edge.

In the past few years, however, Man the Hunter has returned as a target of critique – ‘debunked’, ‘killed’ or ‘dismantled’. Archaeological finds from the Peruvian Andes revealed women buried with hunting tools, suggesting they were big-game hunters; a cross-cultural survey found that women hunt in most contemporary hunter-gatherer societies; some researchers argued that women may be better suited than men for endurance hunting, and that sexual divisions of labour might have emerged only with the advent of farming. Yet many anthropologists reacted with scepticism – not only to the specific findings but also to the broader historical framing, especially since similar claims about the demise of Man the Hunter had appeared in previous years.

Man the Hunter bubbles up into popular consciousness every few years, in a recurring cycle. It is not just a matter of empirical science – something deeper seems to be at work. So, a few years ago, my colleagues and I began digging into the history of Man the Hunter. What we found was quite different from the story we are usually told. Debates over Man the Hunter rest on a fundamental confusion. Over the past century, the phrase has referred to three very different things: a popular myth, a scientific conference, and an empirical pattern observed among hunting and gathering societies.

These meanings were shaped in large part by two men – the dramatist Robert Ardrey and the anthropologist Sherwood Washburn – whose contrasting visions of human evolution set the terms for the debates that would follow. Conflating these meanings has allowed Man the Hunter to persist in a liminal state, hovering between myth and science in both public and scientific arenas. Until we disentangle them, the idea will continue to die – and return.

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Kubrick did not invent the story of the Dawn of Man that awed filmgoers. He was drawing on ideas that had been circulating for decades, most prominently those of the palaeoanthropologist Raymond Dart. In the mid-20th century, based on 30 years spent examining the fossils of early human ancestors known as australopiths in South Africa, Dart advanced a dramatic thesis: humans descended from bloodthirsty apes. In his 1953 article ‘The Predatory Transition from Man to Ape’, Dart wrote that ‘it was the ape-man’s instinct for violence, and his successful development of lethal weapons, that gave him his dominance in the animal world from the very beginning. Those instincts are with us today.’ To Dart, fossils were clues to epic historical dramas. And he taught his ideas with similar flair: in lectures, he would throw bones across the room, re-enacting scenes of ancient slaughter.

Dart’s ideas were controversial from the start. In 1957, Washburn published a pointed critique titled ‘Australopithecines: The Hunters or the Hunted?’ Dart had argued that the abundance of skulls in South African cave sites showed that australopiths were selective, trophy-keeping........

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