Wild Thing, I Think I Love You: The Importance of Animals in Human Evolution: A Comment

on Shipman
Author(s): Patricia A. Helvenston and Derek Hodgson
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 52, No. 3 (June 2011), p. 433
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological
Research
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/659842 .
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Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 3, June 2011
Discussions
Wild Thing, I Think I Love You
The Importance of Animals in Human
Evolution: A Comment on Shipman
Patricia A. Helvenston and Derek Hodgson
1407 North Aztec Street, Flagstaff, Arizona 86001, U.S.A.
(patscholar@aol.com)/University of York, Heslington, York
Y0105DD, United Kingdom. 19 IX 10
We couldn’t agree more with Pat Shipman about the impor-
tance of the complex human relationship with animals for
the evolution of all concerned as outlined in her paper pub-
lished in Current Anthropology (Shipman 2010). For those
equally impressed with her paper, we would like to point out
that we published a similar paper in Rock Art Research (Hel-
venston and Hodgson 2006). Our paper has been widely cited
in the literature, and we considered a number of different
data sets to arrive at many of the same conclusions. Readers
who found Shipman’s paper compelling may wish to consult
ours as it provides additional data from different interdisci-
plinary fields to confirm her hypotheses.
In brief, like Shipman, we considered early hominin tool
use and hunting, of both larger and smaller animals, as of
key importance. This is because of the very complex predator
and prey relationships with which the primate order had co-
evolved over some 50 million years, from very primitive pro-
simians who hunted insects and small animals, much as prim-
itive tarsiers do today. Although gorillas consume mostly plant
foods, as do chimpanzees, who hunt meat only occasionally,
and largely as a means to increase status or gain access to
females in heat, meat consumption is a deep primate imper-
䉷 2011 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.
All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2011/5203-0005$10.00 DOI: 10.1086/
659842
433
ative. Like Shipman, we believe that increased meat eating,
as proposed by the expensive tissue hypothesis and enhanced
by the use of tools, was a major factor in primate evolution
from about 2 million years ago.
We devoted much of the paper to a consideration of various
hunting techniques such as deception of predator and prey
that required advanced cognitive abilities in order to suc-
cessfully avoid predation or yield a successful kill. We also
considered the neuropsychological developments as mani-
fested by the comparative primate and human brain struc-
tures, such as the visual system, the limbic system, the py-
ramidal motor system, and the frontal lobes, that enabled
such complex behavior to be successfully executed. We posited
a series of developments from hunting skills and rituals that
could have led eventually to the representation of animals like
those in the Paleolithic cave paintings in Europe, as well as
to the worship of animals, early religious beliefs, and symbolic
behavior, all involving a high degree of knowledge of animal
behavior. In discussing these issues, we presented data on very
early artistic developments, rock art depictions of animals and
hunting from around the world, and known hunting tech-
niques used by modern day hunters and gatherers, along with
some of their myths and rituals concerning animals. This
overwhelming database confirmed the importance of the deep
evolutionary relationship between humans and animals. In
short, Shipman’s paper confirms ours and vice versa.
References Cited
Hodgson, Derek, and Patricia A. Helvenston. The emergence of the
representation of animals in palaeoart: insights from evolution and
the cognitive, limbic and visual systems of the human brain. Rock
Art Research 23(1):3–39.
Shipman, Pat. 2010. The animal connection and human evolution.
Current Anthropology 51(4):519–538.