A change of climate killed the great northern forests,
Forcing the manlike apes down from their trees ...
They had to go down to the earth, where green still grew
And small meats might be gleaned. But there the great
flesh-eaters,
Tiger and panther and the horrible fumbling bear and
endless wolf-packs
made life
A dream of death. Therefore man has those dreams,
And kills out of pure terror.
These lines were written more than fifty years ago by a nonscientist;
nonetheless, this secular story, combining banishment from Eden with a
traumatizing fall from arboreal grace, remains consistent with what many
paleontologists and paleobotanists believe today. Judging from
discoveries made in the Transvaal, the Olduvai Gorge, and elsewhere, we
landed hard, and there was no going back. Until about two and a half
million years ago, when the australopithecines’ successors, Homo habilis,
began using tools, we had few natural defenses beyond those we carried
in our heads: stereoscopic vision, decent hearing, a reasonably sensitive
nose, and a brain only a third the size of ours today. In other words, we
weren’t all that far ahead of baboons or chimpanzees.
Conceivably, there could have been generations—maybe thousands of
generations—of cats that taught their cubs to hunt primates. Just as the
lions Elizabeth Marshall Thomas encountered on the Kalahari appeared
to have been “acculturated” to not eating humans, the reverse is equally
possible. The most notorious modern case of inherent man-eating
occurred in the Njombe district of present-day Tanzania between 1932
and 1947. During this period, a single pride of fifteen lions killed
approximately 1,500 people before George Rushby, a legendary British
elephant-hunter-turned-game-warden, exterminated the pride, one by one.
It took him a year. “If a man-eater continues to kill and eat people for any