Our fascination with and connection to animals played a critical role in human evolution, says a Penn State University paleoanthropologist.
Pat Shipman began studying the role of animals in human evolution after she realized that all over the world and in all cultures, people live side by side with animals – both as pets and in the wild.
“You don’t see a deer bringing up raccoons or a bison deciding to raise a baby wolf. No other animals take in, nurture and protect members of other species.”
But humanity does it all the time. And yet from an evolutionary point of view, it could be seen as counter-productive, said Shipman, whose ideas appear in a recent issue of Current Anthropology and a book called The Animal Connection, to be published in 2011.
As Shipman points out, it isn’t advantageous to expend energy on another animal when you should be taking care of your kin. Yet there it was, in every culture, in every country. Humans and animals seemed to live together happily.
Shipman began exploring humanity’s fascination with animals, tracing it right back to 2.6 million years ago when man developed stone tools.
It was then that “We began being very intimately involved with other species and it began to be an advantage to us to learn about them.”
Especially when it came to hunting. Suddenly mankind had a new source of food with high protein and high fat.
“Once you start being a part-time predator, you have to watch out for other carnivores because you’re competing for their food sources, and that’s dangerous,” she said. “And you want to be watching for other prey animals because that’s what you’re eating.
“So your focus now is you need to pay attention with other competitors and prey you want to eat. You need to learn where they live, how they live, in groups or in singles, their postures. . . all this information becomes crucial to your survival.”
Stone tools represented a kind of short-cut in evolution, she said. “Very few animals in the history of mammalia have changed from being an herbivore to being a predator.”
Managing all this information meant there was a need to communicate, and whether through symbols such as cave art or rudimentary language, animals were at the forefront of early man’s communication, said Shipman.
This suggests to Shipman that the information about animals was so important it actually “triggered the development of language.”
“I think the long trajectory of focusing on animals and what they did and how they did it…was all a pre-requisite to domesticating animals.”
Then 32,000 years ago the first attempt at domesticating an animal took place, with early man domesticating the wolf. It eventually became a dog.
“If you want to domesticate something like a wolf, you better know something about wolves; if you don’t they’re going to eat you or your children.”
The impetus for domesticating a wolf was for the contributions it could make to a human’s life, such as a hunting assistant or protecting the family or the place you were living, said Shipman.
“You can see there are renewable resources a live domestic wolf could offer, and so you move from this instance of domestication, where the animal becomes a living tool and provides a renewable resource, into sheep, goats, cattle. All provide renewable resources as long as they’re alive.”
But understanding animals and empathizing with them also triggered other changes in humanity’s evolution, Shipman said.
“All those things allow people to live with people. Once people have domesticated animals, they start to live in stable groups. They have fields, crops and more permanent dwellings.”
Shipman believes that mankind through evolutionary history has chosen to be “intimately involved with other species, learning about them, becoming what one anthropologist calls an ‘informavore’ or consumers of information.
“All this starts because of this peculiar thing we did when we hijacked evolution and invented stone tools rather than growing claws. It set us on a different path where we began to have so much ability to interact and understand other animals that we were able to turn other animals into a new kind of tool – a living tool.”