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FEMINISTS MAY BALK, but a big reason we’ve managed to cure polio and launch rockets may hark back to the old cliché about men (or apes) bringing home the bacon, contends anthropologist Craig Stanford.
Specifically, he credits male-dominated hunting and meat-sharing patterns for developing much of humans’ sophistication – from our intellect to our economic and political systems.
“I know these ideas are politically incorrect,” says Stanford, “but you can’t get around the fact that the status given to meat is – and has been – really central in most human and primate societies. No other food commands such devotion.”
It’s not that meat, as some have argued, was nutritionally necessary for the explosion in brain size that occurred about a million years ago, Stanford argues in his new book, The Hunting Apes: Meat Eating and the Origins of Human Behavior. Nor is it that meat was such an important source of protein. (Tubers, legumes and insects collected by females actually provide more protein in primate and hunter-gatherer diets than meat captured by males.)
Rather, it was the strategic sharing of meat with fellow group members – rewarding allies and snubbing enemies – that paved the way for human intelligence.
To be a strategic meat-consumer and -sharer requires substantial cognitive abilities. “You have to begin remembering all the debts and credits of life,” Stanford says. That requires the ability to recognize others as individuals and to keep a running scorecard of relationships over months or years.
BUT WAIT, it gets juicier. If early humans behaved as their closest living relatives – chimpanzees – do today, male domination of women may actually go back more than 15 million years. (Most feminists trace male domination no farther than “historic” times.)
“That would imply an evolved Darwinian basis of patriarchal systems,” Stanford says. With this claim, he wandered into an academic jungle considerably wilder than those inhabited by chimps.
But the primatologist doesn’t come to his conclusion lightly. A protégé of chimpanzee expert and USC adjunct professor Jane Goodall, Stanford spent six years in Tanzania’s Gombe National Park tracking the hunting patterns of these apes. He found that males did more than 90 percent of hunting. Females often accompanied hunting parties but very rarely took part, perhaps for fear of putting their infant or unborn offspring at risk. When fertile females were present at a hunt, however, Stanford observed that males invariably grew bolder, charging prey they otherwise would have shunned. Afterwards, successful hunters divided the spoils to cement alliances with other males, snub rivals and control females. Sometimes, male chimps used the fresh meat to persuade females to mate with them. (If not, female and immature chimps ended up with only scraps.)
“What I saw was a shock to my values regarding a gender-balanced ethics of behavior,” Stanford writes. It isn’t pretty, but such primate behavior opens a window onto the day-to-day behavior of early man, the USC researcher believes. Indeed, modern-day human hunting and gathering societies – such as the Sharanahua of Peru’s Amazon basin – display meat consumption patterns not unlike those of the chimps.
Stanford’s approach isn’t entirely new. It flows from a school of thought dubbed the “Man the Hunter” theory, dating back to the 1960s. Giving such prominence in human evolution to a male-dominated activity, however, was reviled for years as both sexist and ignorant of the facts.
“But the central importance of meat is undeniable,” Stanford says.
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Fat Smarts?
Meat’s chief attraction to our ancestors, researcher Craig Stanford thinks, was its high content of saturated fat – a nutrient for which there was no other substitute in the forests and savannahs inhabited by early man.
Gombe chimps face the same dearth today. For three or four months of each year, Stanford says, they slowly starve. “There’s no other source of saturated fat except what they can get from meat.” Which explains the curious fact that after a kill the chimps don’t feast on the tenderest, most nutritious flesh. Instead, they go straight for the fattiest portions of their prey: the brains and bone marrow.
Meat contains no magic ingredient for cognitive development. Any fat-packed food – say, coconuts or avocados – could have done the same evolutionary trick.
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