The Tiger

by John Vaillant

Schaller and Lowther kept on walking, but this time, instead of viewing the vast herds of zebra, wildebeest, and gazelle as meat on the hoof that one must personally subdue, they imagined it as a movable feast, on the crumbs of which a band of small, unarmed early hominids might feed opportunistically—not by hunting but by gathering. They made some illuminating discoveries. It happened to be calving season so, first, they concentrated on calves and fawns. In the space of two hours, they spotted eighty pounds’ worth of meat in the form of easily caught young animals and abandoned carcasses. The next time they went out they focused on scavenging only from existing kills, an activity that, unlike calf and fawn hunting, could be pursued year-round. Over the course of a week, during which they walked for twenty hours (with the aid of a car to move between locations), they turned up nearly a thousand pounds of edible animal parts (alive and dead). Taking into account that a) there were only two of them, instead of an extended family or clan group, and b) this experiment was conducted in an area where the game closely resembled prehistoric concentrations of migratory animals, Schaller and Lowther concluded “that under similar conditions a carnivorous hominid group could have survived by a combination of scavenging and killing sick [and young] animals.”