1950s, at the same time Ardrey was conceptualizing his first book on the
topic, Robinson Jeffers, one of only six American poets to make the cover
of Time magazine, limned it this way:
Never blame the man: his hard-pressed^5
Ancestors formed him: the other anthropoid apes were safe
In the great southern rain-forest and hardly changed
In a million years: but the race of man was made
By shock and agony ...
... a wound was made in the brain
When life became too hard, and has never healed
It is there that they learned trembling religion and blood-
sacrifice,
It is there that they learned to butcher beasts and to slaughter
men,
And hate the worldJeffers’s original “wound,” whatever its cause, was probably not inflicted
by big cats during the Paleolithic period. As tempting as it may be to
imagine spear-wielding Stone Age hunters squaring off against saber-
toothed tigers, both parties were most likely too smart, too specialized,
and too pragmatic by then to bother with each other. That said, predation
has been a recurring theme throughout our shared time on this planet, and
the need to manage this threat, along with hunger, thirst, climate,
competition, and the perils of overland travel, has impelled us toward our
current state. Members of the evolutionary subtribe Hominina, from
whom we directly descend, have been differentiated from chimpanzees
for approximately six million years. There is no doubt that cats have been
eating us and them—at least occasionally—since our collective
beginnings.
Compared to such mythic encounters, scavenging, i.e., meat gathering,