Dear HCN,
I should like to respond
to Paul Quinnett’s letter (HCN, 1/18/99) in which he says he is
unaware of any science that can demonstrate hunters are
“subconsciously killing other male humans because of competition
for females.”
There are numerous scientific
publications dealing with the issue of hunting and personal
aggression, but one will suffice. Primate scientist Robert Jay
Russell’s classic book, The Lemurs’ Legacy, The Evolution of Power,
Sex, and Love, (Tarcher/Putman 1993), defines our social beginnings
through early primate research (c. 45 million years ago). The
scientific process of cladistics enables Russell to document that
warfare and hunting evolved as a mechanism to displace
inter-societal male-to-male violence for estrus females. Russell
ends his discourse with the statement, “Hunting (by humans) almost
certainly evolved in the first place to redirect male aggression
and to socially bond overly competitive males, not to provide a
steady supply of food.”
As for Aimee Rathburn’s
letter in which she describes herself as “an avid hunter,” it is
worth mentioning that hunting (and warfare) are the realm of the
male. Anthropologists study primitive societies partially to reveal
human behavioral patterns uncluttered by the complexities of modern
societies. In all cases of hunter-gatherer societies, from the
Amazon to New Guinea to Africa, the division of labor in regard to
hunting is as definitive as a human behavior gets – hunting is
performed by the males.
In First World
societies, it is not uncommon to find females accompanying their
male companions hunting. That, I submit, is not an innate behavior;
she just wants to be with him.
Another type of
female hunting is when a sonless hunting father coerces his
adolescent daughter into participating in the activity. That is
like putting the proverbial square peg in a round hole – it doesn’t
work in the long term. For a female to hunt for the joy of killing,
like a male, would suggest a significant abnormality to the
behavioral constant.
Much of our behavior is
inherited in our primate genes and that behavior is there to help
us survive, based on the previous trials of evolution. We know in
evolutionary psychology that many of the decisions people think
they make are not really personal decisions. The decisions were
made before they were born – they were genetically predetermined to
fit behavioral patterns founded on millions of years of evolution.
They think they are thinking, but in many aspects they are not,
it’s instinct.
Modern science is beginning to
explain the bases of human aggression, and it is exposing that
violence against humans by humans is intertwined with violence
against animals by humans. The current series of chimpanzee studies
now going on in Zaire is addressing the topic. I predict new
discoveries will soon be made that will change the way society
views hunting, and it will not be a favorable
one.
Marc
Gaede
Pasadena,
California
Marc Gaede has been
teaching paleoanthropology for the last 10 years at the Art Center
College of Design.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Murder, hunting and macho men.
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