New theory on Human origins

Brian J Ford has recently announced a new theory on the origins of human society in a lecture in Chicago. Here Professor Ford outlines the various arguments that he drew together to construct this new model

Humans as hunters is the accepted view of our origins – yet to me it leaves a loophole. Pre-humans lacked the physical strength of wild animals, yet were not yet sufficiently advanced to work out how to hunt with weapons or to make spears. What came before the hunter? How did we become Homo sapiens? This is a problem that hypothesizing can address and which science can answer.

The development of a high-powered brain places large nutritional demands upon the body. It has been scientifically argued that when pre-humans began to eat meat it drove the evolution of the large brain. Yet how could this be possible, since early humans did not then have the skills with which to make traps, arrows and spears? Until the brain was developed, the hunting skills could not have existed.  

Microscopy can offer a solution: some very early animal bones have been excavated which retain the traces of the evidence we seek. Bones have been broken apart, and the fractured edges are consistent with their being broken open for the marrow. There are microscopical marks apparent upon the surface, small scratches that were caused by the edges of sharpened stones. These are not the wounds caused by a spearhead; these are parallel, progressive indentations made by scratching at the bone – this is how meat was removed from bone, rather than the kind of marks that result from fatal stab wounds.

There are also unmistakable teeth marks. It has been concluded that these are the signs of pre-humans eating their food and biting into the bones. Primates mostly eat meat by tearing it from the bone (if you doubt this, watch someone in a restaurant eating lamb chops). Humans are unlikely to leave teeth marks on the bones of creatures they eat. Wolves, on the other hand, do. I now conclude that the earliest humans survived by eating the meat from carcasses of creatures that had been chased, hunted and brought down – by packs of wolves. Those traces of scraping marks left upon the bones of prey substantiate what I propose.

In addition to the marks on bone, there are also been finds of sharp stones associated with the act of stripping meat. These cannot be accounted for by natural phenomena – they are not fragmented stones broken by rock-falls or shattered by frost. The surface features show clearly that these stones have been chipped. The makers were early humans who were clumsily, and then with ever greater refinement, changing flinty stone from its rough, rounded appearance when found in nature into something with sharp edges – sufficient to help these pioneering people remove the last scraps of edible flesh from the bones of the prey brought down by wolves.

The stones were not sufficient for weak humans to use to hunt large animals. This was no ‘man the hunter’. It was the human scavenger.

An ape is well placed to hunt, fight and kill the prey it needs to survive. Humans are ill-equipped to capture the meat they needed to develop and move on to higher levels of mental sophistication. These early communities will have discovered how to scavenge the meat from wolves just as the brain was set for its massive increase in complexity. The need to nourish the brain led to the widespread introduction of the scavenging behavior, and the new food supply potentiated the consequent expansion in mental prowess. Each fed the other. It was the perfect synergy.

I conclude that the pre-humans were not hunters of animals. They were scavengers. They followed the packs of hunting animals that were able to bring down their prey and ate meat from creatures captured by others species. At first, for hundreds of thousands of years, they would have snatched what they could from the carcasses of creatures that had already been largely consumed by their predators. In time, acting in concert, they would have worked together to drive of the hunting animals when the bulk of the meat was still left intact for the pre-human community to consume. The last great achievement of our predecessors would have been to work together to drive away packs of hunting animals and leave the carcass for the primates to devour.

Humans and wolves would have become inexorably connected. A community of humans would inevitably come to know the behavior of their neighborhood wolf pack and it is easy to imagine how the relationship would have prospered. The benefit, for hundreds of thousands of years, would have been predominately one-sided, with humans taking meat from the prey to the detriment of the wolves they managed to repel. It cannot have been long before the wolves began a closer association, and they may have gathered close to human communities, eventually sharing the community of a cave.

Although the sole benefit that the wolves brought to their first human contacts was the possibility of obtaining meat, it cannot have been long before mutualism emerged. Modern humans keep wolves, and will demonstrate to television crews how these seemingly fearsome beasts can quickly learn to interact in a way that shows mutual respect and even affection. And this is with wild wolves – when we start to consider the influence of selective cross-breeding carried out by our earliest ancestors, new and remarkable possibilities begin to emerge.

Cultural resonances in the modern world are not hard to find. Dogs were also used as a means of transport, and to this day they remain a mainstay of the Inuit communities of the arctic. Dogs as hunters are abundant. The elk-hound was bred from wolves specifically for domestication by humans and for use in the hunting of deer. Hunting with hounds has remained to the present day in many countries; when it is outlawed on humanitarian grounds we should pause to reflect on the severing of a link with our prehistoric past.

Humans have cooperated with wolves for a million years, and our current conventions are a direct link with a past we have ignored. This was before the hunter – it was the age of the scavenger that led directly to human development.