is far less evocative, but it was gathering, carnal and otherwise, that
surely kept our ancestors alive. Describing the return of a successful
hunting party in the Kalahari Desert, the ethnographer Lorna Marshall
summed up the gatherer’s age-old dilemma: “We heard the sound of
voices in the encampment, rising in volume and pitch like the hum of
excited bees.^6 Some people ran toward the hunters ... some danced up
and down, children squealed and ran about ... I venture to say no women
have been greeted this way when they returned with vegetables.”
And yet, as counterintuitive as it may seem, the practice of gathering
may offer deeper insight into our relationships with big cats than hunting
ever could. In the course of their scavenging experiments, Schaller and
Lowther observed a phenomenon that would have had far greater
implications for early humans than chance discoveries of abandoned
meat: “All of the seven lion groups that we encountered while we were on
foot fled when we were at distances of 80 to 300 meters.”*^7 If a pride of
lions—lions—will flee at the sight of two unarmed human beings, what
would they do if approached by a party of five or ten or twenty who were
shouting, waving sticks, and throwing stones? Conceivably, such a group,
emboldened by experience and empowered by growing brains and
advancing technology, could have eaten their way across the Serengeti for
hundreds of millennia without lifting a spear. Taking this a step further,
imagine the self-concept of such creatures: barely five feet tall with
neither claws nor fangs and a clear understanding of their potential as
prey who were, nonetheless, able to intimidate and steal from the
deadliest creatures in their world more or less at will. Early humans, pre-
fire, may well have been Paleolithic Wizards of Oz—masters of illusion
and psyops who eventually, amazingly, willed their “impersonations” of
superiority into fact. If only during daylight hours.
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, the author of The Tribe of Tiger and The
Old Way, is one of a privileged few who have been able to test this theory
in situ. Thomas had the good fortune to spend extended periods of time
among the Kalahari Bushmen before Boer and Tswana farmers
subjugated and settled them. In 1950, when the Marshall family