I have never hunted animals. And I used to wonder how hunters walking around lugging heavy guns could ever get close enough to their prey in order to shoot it. Most animals can easily smell/see/hear humans long before the hunters get into firing range and then they could simply run away. Meaty mammals tend to be much faster runners than humans. What I didn’t realize is that human beings are designed to walk and walk and walk until our prey is too exhausted to continue. Then we use our weapons to kill it. And then we cook it and eat it.
In Masters of the Planet, an excellent introduction to human evolution, Ian Tattersall describes how the ability to walk great distances was key to the hunting prowess of homo ergaster, “an extinct ancestral form on the evolutionary scale of the genus Homo” that “lived in eastern and southern Africa during the early Pleistocene, that is, between 1.8 million and 1.3 million years ago.” Tattersall explains that “although homo ergaster would hardly have been fast compared to four-legged predators, its newer slender hips and long legs would have made members of the species exemplary distance runners.”
This evolutionary innovation gives homo sapiens a huge advantage over our prey because, unlike humans, “most mammals do not have the capacity to shed the heat load acquired and generated during sustained activity in the tropic sun, except by pausing in the shade while it slowly dissipates, largely through panting.” That’s why hunters will eventually catch their prey. “In the heat of the day, the human ability to simply keep going would have allowed these lucky bipeds to single out, say, an antelope, and to keep chasing it, until it fell from heat prostrations” Or we can just kill it with our weapons when we get close enough.
Our ancestors made the remarkable transition from prey to predator. Human beings are designed to vanquish by walking and running after animals until we get close enough to kill them. This evolutionary history remains a major component of our collective psyche whether we like it or not. And we should never forget this, even in an age when, for most of us, meat comes from the back of the supermarket.
So, Aesop’s fable The Tortoise and the Hare, in addition to being a marvelous parable on the efficacy of slow and steady diligence, is also the true story of how Our Hunting Fathers survived. Human beings are designed to “simply keep going” and going and going.
And simply trudging along is how our species came to inhabit and dominate so much of the planet.
I’m really glad that I exist as a human being; I wouldn’t trade in this particular vehicle of consciousness for anything in the world. But our evolutionary success has had ominous ramifications for many of our fellow inhabitants of planet Earth.
As novelist Kurt Vonnegut notes, the human tendency to simply keep on walking and consuming has a dark side:
humanity itself had become an unstoppable glacier made of hot meat, which ate up everything in sight and then made love, and then doubled in size again.
Soldiers drilling, refugees fleeing, shoppers shopping, children strolling to school. Walking. It’s what we do and it’s one of the most essential things that makes us who we are.
Final word to Fats Domino:
By Richard W. Bray
Tags: Aesop, Fats Domino, I'm Walking, Ian Tattersall, Kurt Vonnegut, Masters of the Planet, Our Hunting Fathers, the Tortoise and the Hare, W.H. Auden
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