In 1969, George Schaller, the author of The Deer and the Tiger, a seminal
study of predator-prey relations, took a series of walks through
Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park with an anthropologist named Gordon
Lowther. While most students of early man seek to understand our
ancestors through a combination of the fossil record and comparison with
modern primates, a handful, including Schaller and Lowther, speculated
that, by observing the behavior of other cooperative predators like lions,
hyenas, and wild dogs, they might gain insights into how we evolved as
communal hunter-gatherers. Initially, the two men were focused on
hunting techniques, communications, and food sharing and so hadn’t
anticipated what ended up being a key discovery: after following one
male lion for three weeks straight, they noted that “it killed nothing but
ate seven times, either by scavenging or by joining other lions on their
kill.”^2 Their attention shifted then to scavenging behavior, leading them
to wonder whether our ancestors could have survived on leftovers alone.
Schaller and Lowther kept on walking, but this time, instead of viewing
the vast herds of zebra, wildebeest, and gazelle as meat on the hoof that
one must personally subdue, they imagined it as a movable feast, on the
crumbs of which a band of small, unarmed early hominids might feed
opportunistically—not by hunting but by gathering. They made some
illuminating discoveries. It happened to be calving season so, first, they
concentrated on calves and fawns. In the space of two hours, they spotted
eighty pounds’ worth of meat in the form of easily caught young animals
and abandoned carcasses. The next time they went out they focused on
scavenging only from existing kills, an activity that, unlike calf and fawn
hunting, could be pursued year-round. Over the course of a week, during
which they walked for twenty hours (with the aid of a car to move
between locations), they turned up nearly a thousand pounds of edible
animal parts (alive and dead). Taking into account that a) there were only
two of them, instead of an extended family or clan group, and b) this
experiment was conducted in an area where the game closely resembled
prehistoric concentrations of migratory animals, Schaller and Lowther