In sense, the hunter had to “become” his prey in order to hunt at all. The hunter had to know what the animal ate, the terrain it favored in different seasons, when it migrated and where, when it mated and gave birth, and a hundred other details. But most important of all, he has to know how to look.This “looking” encouraged the development of a certain kind of attention. The hunter “does not believe that he knows where the critical moment is going to occur,” as hunter and philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset noted in Meditations on Hunting.
He does not look tranquilly in one determined direction, sure beforehand that the game will pass in front of him. The hunter knows that he does not know what is going to happen, and this is one of the greatest attractions of his occupation. Thus he needs to prepare an attention of a different and superior style – an attention which does not consist in riveting itself on the presumed but consists precisely in not presuming anything and in avoiding inattentiveness. It is a “universal” attention, which does not inscribe itself on any point and tries to be on all points. There is a magnificent term for this, one that still conserves all its zest of vivacity and imminence: alertness. The hunter is the alert man.
“The Code of the Warrior: in History, Myth, and Everyday Life”
Was hunting, then, the key to human evolution? By the 1960s, many anthropologists seemed to think so. At a well-attended conference on the subject of Man the Hunter held at the University of Chicago in 1966, anthropologist William Laughlin claimed that “hunting is the master behavior patter of the human species.” Hunting, he said, involved much more than simply killing animals for food. It meant mastering a complex curriculum that included an intimate knowledge of land, plants, animal behavior, animal anatomy, strategy, and the skillful use of weapons. Hunting, as Laughlin said, “placed a premium upon inventiveness, upon problem solving.” In addition, it provided strong evolutionary incentives for learning, since it was dangerous and risky – it “imposed,” as Laughlin put, “a real penalty for failure to solve the problem.”
In sense, the hunter had to “become” his prey in order to hunt at all. The hunter had to know what the animal ate, the terrain it favored in different seasons, when it migrated and where, when it mated and gave birth, and a hundred other details. But most important of all, he has to know how to look.
This “looking” encouraged the development of a certain kind of attention. The hunter “does not believe that he knows where the critical moment is going to occur,” as hunter and philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset noted in Meditations on Hunting.
He does not look tranquilly in one determined direction, sure beforehand that the game will pass in front of him. The hunter knows that he does not know what is going to happen, and this is one of the greatest attractions of his occupation. Thus he needs to prepare an attention of a different and superior style – an attention which does not consist in riveting itself on the presumed but consists precisely in not presuming anything and in avoiding inattentiveness. It is a “universal” attention, which does not inscribe itself on any point and tries to be on all points. There is a magnificent term for this, one that still conserves all its zest of vivacity and imminence: alertness. The hunter is the alert man.
Hunting was a game of chance. The hunter might throw and miss, or the spear might hit but not kill, and the animal might escape, taking the spear and the hours or days of stalking with it. Or, cornered and fighting for its life, the quarry might turn and strike out with rage and fury. It was at this moment, when life faced life, that the hunter’s courage or bravery – his willingness to risk all on a throw of a spear – was called into play.
Having learned to identify with the lives of animals, and given the nearly eye-to-eye closeness necessary for killing, it is likely that hunters would also identify with the deaths of animals. The mammals killed, butchered, and eaten by human hunters were in most ways similar to human beings – indeed the red blood animals shed was indistinguishable from human blood.
Though man had become the most dangerous of predators, he was a predator who knew what he was doing. He knew, to begin with, what death was, or at the very least he knew that death was, at least since the arrival of the Neanderthals forty thousand or so years ago. An excavation at the cave of La-Chappelle-aux-Saints in France revealed tools – all of which suggest the familiar practice of supplying the dead with provisions for a journey. At Shanidar, a later Neanderthal site in a cave in what is now Turkey, pollen analysis of the soil revealed that at least eight species of brightly colored wild flowers had been laid over the body which lay on a bed of branches.
For death was, and is, the great mystery. In its simplest and most direct form, death asks, Where has the life that was present before death gone? What has become of life?
The answer, again in its simplest and most direct form, is that life has gone away; it has gone somewhere else. This held for any being with life, including the hunter’s quarry.
“Every good hunter,” says Ortega y Gasset, “is uneasy in the depth of his conscience when faced with the death he is about to inflict on the enchanted animal. He does not have the final and firm conviction that his conduct is correct. But neither, it should be understood, is he certain of the opposite.”
It is this uneasiness that is sung by the Akoa Pygmies while placing a garland around the tusks of a freshly killed elephant:
Our spear strayed from its course.
O Father Elephant!
We didn’t mean to kill you,
We didn’t mean to hurt you,
O Father Elephant!
It wasn’t the warrior who took your life,
Your hour had come,
Don’t come back to trample down our huts…
Don’t be angry with us.
From now on your life will be better,
You live in the land of the Spirits,
Our fathers will go with you to renew their bond,
You live in the land of the Spirits.
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