The Hunting Apes. Meat Eating and Origins of Human Behavior.

By Craig B. Stanford. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, USA, 1999, 253 pp. $24.95, hardcover. ISBN: 0-691-01160-5.

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The purported role of hunting in human evolution has waxed and waned by the decade in this century (for a review, see Matt Cartmill's A View to a Death in the Morning, Harvard University Press, 1993). And, as from the moon, the illumination has been reflected, and so, sometimes illusory. We can only infer the subsistence of our hominid ancestors, based on indirect evidence from varied sources. Here, Stanford, an anthropologist at the University of Southern California, draws on three sources: behavioural ecology of wild chimpanzees, palaeoarchaeology of extinct hominids, and ethnography of tropical foraging peoples. His thesis is clearly stated at the outset: The evolutionary origins of human intelligence lie in meat eating and especially in the cognitive capacities necessary for strategic sharing of meat.

He is strongest on the first of the three sources, having published in the 1 990s a series of articles on the carnivory of the wild chimpanzees of Gombe, Tanzania. This research culminated in his other recent book, Chimpanzee and Red Colobus: The Ecology of Predator and Prey (Harvard University Press, 1998), which, for the first time, looks at chimpanzees as predators from the point of view of their prey. His quantitative field data provide new food for thought, from correlates of hunting success to bone assemblages left after consumption. From the other two sources, Stanford synthesises, usefully and succinctly, what has been published by palaeoecologists and human evolutionary ecologists.

Clearly, Pan troglodytes has much to offer as a living, behaving proxy for an absent last common ancestor of 5-6 million years ago. Wild chimpanzee males regularly hunt (that is, stalk, pursue, subdue and kill vertebrate prey). Often, they do so socially (although the book never really tackles whether this is coincidental, coordinated, communal, or collaborative, as apparently, this gradient of social predation remains to be satisfactorily operationalised). Moreover, the. most interesting events occur after the kill, when the proceeds are dispersed non-randomly from the hunters to their companions. Notable recipients are allies, kin, and reproductive partners, who pass on the valued food to their offspring. So far, so good, in the sense that this is familiar to us humans.

But when one tries to imagine the transition from an ancestral hominoid to the earliest anatomically modern humans, complications arise. The only living apes to hunt (as defined above) are chimpanzees, and they are really arboreal monkey-catching specialists, not terrestrial small-animal-seeking generalists. Bonobos offer a vexing alternative: They relish meat, but ignore monkeys and when they pounce on cached or cryptic duikers, it is the females who control access to the prize. Which is the better model for an ancestral baseline of meat acquisition?

Stanford is right to focus on the distribution of meat, but he stops one step short. How can human intelligence and our big brains be a function of strategic meat-sharing, if chimpanzees (with their smaller brains) do it too? Indeed, Stanford's own data on smart females swapping sex for food, or Nishida's Machiavellian males swapping patronage for meat sound all too familiar. What chimpanzees do not do (but humans do) is to exchange meat for gathered foodstuffs, along lines of sexual division of labour. What chimpanzee males may do (although no one has studied it yet) is to share meat with the mothers of their common offspring. Thus meat sharing may be parental as well as mating effort.

Stanford is handicapped by some conceptual and terminological confusions that are endemic in the literature: The counterpart of herbivory (plant eating) is faunivory (animal eating), not carnivory (meat eating). Invertebrates are just as nutritious as vertebrates. Not just mammals yield meat (digestible animal tissue) but also do other classes of vertebrates. Meat yields more than protein, but plants are proteinaceous too; the real "currency" is amino acids and trace nutrients. Finally, hunting is the last resort of a faunivore; on any grounds - time, energy, risk - it would seem to be the most costly of strategies.

The author is at his bravest in revisiting the much maligned model of Man the Hunter. He is not afraid to re-assert home truths: In chimpanzees and humans, males give meat and females receive it. Meat (and honey) are the most valued, if not always valuable food items. Anyone can gather food, but males hunt for it. (In humans, women subsidise men to do so). Until we know more about bonobo faunivory as a possible alternative, we are stuck with these strikingly convergent gender dynamics in Pan troglodytes and Homo sapiens, like it or not.

In summary, Stanford has written a provocative and deft book. In telling vignettes, as well as pointed graphs, he puts new flesh on the old bones of (largely) armchair speculations. The writing style is accessibly informal and the notes and references are informative. Divining the role of hunting in hominisation will always be a matter of moon shadows, but the new data and their acute interpretation have sharpened the penumbras.

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