14

When    we  look    at  nature, we  are only    looking at  the survivors.

STEPHEN BUDIANSKY,

If  a   Lion    Could   Talk^1

THE TERMS OF THE BIG CAT-PRIMATE RELATIONSHIP

HAVE BEEN amazingly consistent over time: it doesn’t matter if the
primates in question are gun-wielding tayozhniks, !Kung hunters,
preverbal australopithecines, or baboons through the ages. As far as our
immanent fear of predatory cats goes, virtually nothing has changed in
five million years beyond our techniques for managing it. Because of
this, there are striking similarities between the behavior of Trush’s
Inspection Tiger team at Markov’s cabin and that of a troop of baboons
on the African savanna: formed into defensive groups by day, both man
and monkey will travel in the open, even going so far as to confront
predatory cats. But as soon as the sun goes down, each group will retreat
to safe quarters where they huddle together until dawn.
In order to get an idea of how we coped with big cats and other
predators prior to the acquisition of tools and fire, some
paleoanthropologists have looked to savanna baboons for comparison.
One of the most diligent and respected of these researchers is the South
African paleontologist Charles K. Brain. In the course of his work
excavating hominid and animal fossils from caves in the Transvaal’s
Sterkfontein valley during the 1960s and ′70s, Brain spent time observing
a troop of cliff-dwelling baboons that lived nearby. On particularly cold
nights, the troop of about thirty baboons would retire to the caves that run
deep inside the cliffs. One night, Brain did something no modern human
had ever done: “I hid inside the cavern,” he wrote, “making my presence