successful at noticing animals, and they did so 90 percent of the time.
When something like a wheelbarrow or even a large silo was added, only
two thirds of the students noticed. The success rate spiked when the
changes involved a human or an elephant, with 100 percent of the
participants noticing. These relative success rates held even when it came
to introducing a distant, well-camouflaged elephant or a bright red
minivan into scenes on the African savanna: fewer than three quarters of
the participants spotted the added van.
Joshua New and his colleagues published their findings in Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences, concluding that “the results herein
implicate a visual monitoring system equipped with ancestrally derived
animal-specific selection criteria.”^11 Which is to say, we seem to be
hard-wired to spot animals. “People develop phobias for spiders and
snakes and things that were ancestral threats,” Dr. New told a journalist
in 2007.^12 “It’s very infrequent to have somebody afraid of cars or
electrical outlets. Those statistically pose much more of a threat to us
than a tiger. That makes it an interesting test case as to why do tigers still
capture attention.”
Evidence suggests that the reason tigers and their kind continue to
capture our attention is because, over time, this has proven the most
effective way to prevent them from capturing us. Maybe this is why it is
impossible not to wonder what Markov and Khomenko saw and felt in
their last moments—an experience so aberrant and alien to us, and yet
strangely, deeply familiar: there is a part of us that still needs to know.
Ongoing in the debate about our origins and our nature is the question of
how we became fascinated by monsters, but only certain kinds. The
existence of this book alone is a case in point. No one would read it if it
were about a pig or a moose (or even a person) who attacked unemployed
loggers. Tigers, on the other hand, get our full attention. They strike a
deep and resonant chord within us, and one reason is because, as