84 Before Agriculture
this divide. Hunter-gatherers and their shamans insist that life depends on main-
taining the right kind of relationship with the natural world, and the negotiations
necessary to sustain this relationship are difficult. The power of the shaman centres
on this difficulty. By overcoming it, the journey can be made from human to ani-
mal and back again. This is the power that comes from transformation.
When we look into the eyes of animals, be they pets or creatures that we hunt,
cows and horses on the farm, dogs in our homes, or the subjects of wildlife docu-
mentaries, we seem to see thought. Animals watch, wait, appear to ponder. They
look as if they are assessing one another’s movements in order to make sure that
their own are safe or effective. They give many signs that they are thinking.
In 1999, British television broadcast a wildlife programme made with a new
level of film technology: it had become possible to film in almost complete dark-
ness. The footage included sequences of lions stalking and killing their prey. They
moved with great stealth, peering, watching, calculating, manoeuvring. Several
individuals collaborated to approach and surround their prey; two remained still,
one continued to move closer. Then, with great skill and precision, they made their
attack. Were they thinking? Surely they must have been. To calculate in this way,
to make decisions about how best to carry out the kill, must require some form of
thought. Or is this so? It is very hard to imagine thought without language. And
these lions do not speak; they have no more than the most minimal form of vocal
communication. Their brains work without words.
This wordlessness is integral to how we see animals. It arouses in us a form of
gentle sympathy, an anthropomorphic kind of pity. It also means that, for all their
ferocious killing of weaker species, we see animals as innocent. Those lions do not
lie, because to tell a lie requires speech; they cannot be condemned for the cruelty
of their ways, because morality arises only with articulate thought, in words. The
lions show a kind of purity of judgement, rather like pure emotion. There can be
no process of the kind that depends on thinking as a silent form of speech. Lions
do not talk to themselves. When we look at them we see, rather, the strange dumb-
ness of the animal as it thinks without thoughts. We see feelings that we recognize,
of course: fear, excitement, even pride. These feelings also arouse our sympathies.
But animals are untainted by the ambiguities and distractions and complexities of
what humans know to be the heartland or even defining features of thought.
9
‘What, then, is the difference between brute and man? What is it that man can do,
and of which we find no signs, no rudiments, in the whole brute world? I answer
without hesitation: the one great barrier between the brute and man is language.’
These are the words of Max Müller, among the first theorists of language, writing
in 1875. Müller’s view has been shared by many others, including late 20th-
century scientists who have sought to identify the part of the brain where the