The Tiger

by John Vaillant

And yet, as counterintuitive as it may seem, the practice of gathering may offer deeper insight into our relationships with big cats than hunting ever could. In the course of their scavenging experiments, Schaller and Lowther observed a phenomenon that would have had far greater implications for early humans than chance discoveries of abandoned meat: “All of the seven lion groups that we encountered while we were on foot fled when we were at distances of 80 to 300 meters.”§ If a pride of lions—lions—will flee at the sight of two unarmed human beings, what would they do if approached by a party of five or ten or twenty who were shouting, waving sticks, and throwing stones? Conceivably, such a group, emboldened by experience and empowered by growing brains and advancing technology, could have eaten their way across the Serengeti for hundreds of millennia without lifting a spear. Taking this a step further, imagine the self-concept of such creatures: barely five feet tall with neither claws nor fangs and a clear understanding of their potential as prey who were, nonetheless, able to intimidate and steal from the deadliest creatures in their world more or less at will. Early humans, pre-fire, may well have been Paleolithic Wizards of Oz—masters of illusion and psyops who eventually, amazingly, willed their “impersonations” of superiority into fact. If only during daylight hours.