percentage who chose the boulder would not have escaped the lion, and to
this day, despite millions of years of natural selection, there remains that
small percentage of humans who make fatal choices.
The UCLA anthropologist Clark Barrett approached this question from
another angle and, like Coss, he sought the help of children to answer it.
It has been observed that infants as young as nine months understand the
concept of pursuit and can distinguish between the chaser and the chased.
But Barrett wanted to know at what age children were able to ascribe
motives to different animals in hypothetical situations that didn’t involve
them personally, as Coss’s lion experiment had. In other words, he
wanted to know at what age we develop a “theory of animal mind,” the
same mental tool hunters like the !Kung and the Udeghe use to anticipate
the behavior of game and avoid predators. In order to do this as
objectively as possible, Barrett assembled two groups of children aged
three to five; one group was made up of German preschoolers and the
other was composed of Shuar, a tribe of subsistence hunter-
agriculturalists from Ecuador’s Amazon basin. Needless to say, these two
groups of children had radically different cultural reference points and
experience with animals. The experiment was elegant in its simplicity.
Using a toy lion and a toy zebra, Barrett asked each child, “When the lion
sees the zebra, what does the lion want to do?”^6
The results were surprising: 75 percent of the three-year-olds in both
groups answered with some variation of “The lion wants to chase/bite/kill
the zebra.”^7 (It must be remembered that these children had only just
learned to speak and had vastly different levels of exposure to media and
information about the wider world.) When Barrett posed the same
question to the four- and five-year-olds, every single child anticipated the
predatory intentions of the lion. Barrett then took the scenario a step
further, asking, “When the lion catches the zebra, what will happen?”^8 In
this case, 100 percent of the Shuar three-year-olds answered with some
version of “The lion hurts/kills/eats the zebra.”^9 Only two thirds of the
more sheltered and media-saturated German three-year-olds gave this
answer, but when Barrett got to the four- and five-year-olds, every child