concluded “that under similar conditions a carnivorous hominid group
could have survived by a combination of scavenging and killing sick [and
young] animals.”^3
This approach might seem obvious now, but in the late 1960s when
these journeys took place, it was revolutionary. Because most
anthropologists and archaeologists working then were male, and because
hunting is considered to be our ancestors’ primal drama—specifically, a
man’s drama—a disproportionate amount of time, ink, and wishful
thinking has been devoted to the subject.* Enthusiasm for what came to
be known as the Hunting Hypothesis took a quantum leap in the 1960s
and 1970s when Robert Ardrey, a playwright and screenwriter with a
background in anthropology, published a series of influential books
culminating in a bestseller called The Hunting Hypothesis (1976). In
them, Ardrey popularized this volatile idea that had been circulating
among social scientists for nearly a century: that of man-as-killer-ape.
Ardrey, influenced in part by his own traumatic experiences reporting on
the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya, summed it up this way: “If among all
the members of our primate family the human being is unique, even in
our noblest aspirations, it is because we alone through untold millions of
years were continuously dependent on killing to survive.”^4
Because of the environment we evolved in, and the stresses we faced,
reasoned Ardrey, the act of hunting—killing—was central to our survival
and has made us who we are today. In his view, virtually all our defining
characteristics—from tools and language, to the division of labor
between genders and our appetite for war—find their roots in this primal
activity. The Hunting Hypothesis (also known as Killer Ape theory) was
widely accepted at the time, not least because all of its proponents had
lived through a period of unprecedented violence in the form of the
Second World War; Vietnam, too, loomed large in the Western academic
consciousness. As a result, many scholars were grappling with
fundamental questions about human nature and wondering how men in
particular had evolved into such ferocious hunter-killers. It wasn’t only
anthropologists who were trying to plumb these depths: in the early