Human beings, unlike any other creature, are intimately tied in with many other animal species, either by keeping them as companions or raising them as livestock. Americans alone spend over four billion dollars a year caring for pets, and more American households keep pets than have children. The human-animal connection is clearly deep and ancient, and as Penn State paleoanthropologist Pat Shipman argues in a paper in Current Anthropology, this connection may have actually shaped human evolution, not only in the sense of revolutionizing food production, but also by allowing geographic expansion, extending tool use, and encouraging symbolic communication.
Tool Use and Wild Game
Humans' earliest relationship with other animals, of course, was likely that of prey, and perhaps occasionally as predator or scavenger. Even in these earliest times, any observation of animal behavior would have benefited early humans as they worked to avoid being eaten.
But beginning around 2.6 million years ago, with the onset of tool use, the equation was altered. Humans were no longer defenseless; with the use of stone-tipped spears and controlled fire they could protect themselves fairly effectively, bring down animals larger than themselves for food, and process carcasses to obtain maximum nutrition. This revolution caused massive changes, allowing populations to expand geographically in order to follow game. The extra caloric value provided by meat may have also spurred brain growth and consequently higher intelligence.
Animals as Symbolic Triggers
In her paper, Shipman points out that the earliest discovered symbolic representations made by ancient humans — cave paintings in France and Germany dated to about 40,000 years ago — overwhelmingly portray animals, particularly horses, mammoths, and lions. Owing to the proportion of animal depictions — as compared to the number of depictions of other things, including landscapes, dwellings, or even other humans — Shipman hypothesizes that animals must have been the focus of nearly all important communication between early humans. She further argues that the need to communicate about animals — their behavior, location, and so on — may have been a major factor in the development and refinement of human symbolic language.
Animal Domestication: Living Tools
The earliest known domesticate was a dog; man's best friend has a history stretching back nearly 32,000 years. It is believed that dogs were domesticated from wild wolf stock as a way for early humans to compete with other predators; Shipman observes that humans did not need to evolve sharp teeth, claws, or a superior sense of smell if they had dogs to do the work for them. In this way, companion animals became extensions of human ingenuity, "living tools" that could compensate for attributes that humans lacked.
Though animals were of course domesticated for meat and milk, some less obvious advantages to keeping companion animals included use of manure as fuel or building material, use of animal hair for clothing or rope, protection from predators or rival humans, elimination of pests, and rapid transport. Clearly the symbiotic relationship between early humans and their animal counterparts allowed for enormous upheavals in human evolution, including the Neolithic Revolution, and possibly paved the way toward modernity.
Source
- Shipman, Pat. "The Animal Connection and Human Evolution." Current Anthropology 51.4 (2010): 1-21. Academia.edu, Aug. 2010. Web. 7 June 2011.
Jenny Ashford - Jenny Ashford is a writer and graphic artist from central Florida. Her main area of interest in her Suite 101 articles is science, with a ...
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