Tracks and Shadows by Harry W. Greene

Author:Harry W. Greene
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520232754
Publisher: University of California Press

Philippine Negritos with freshly killed reticulated python, twenty-three feet long and twenty-six inches in circumference, at the headwaters of the Koso River in the Sierra Madre, Aurora Province, Luzon, June 9, 1970. (Photo: T. & J. Headland)

Slow-moving, heavy-bodied snakes depend on camouflage and active defense to avoid enemies, rather than crawling away. Once discovered, giant serpents are easily killed with simple weapons, and not surprisingly (because snakes don’t have toxic flesh), people turn the tables and eat them too. Tom observed that the Agta routinely hunted and consumed Philippine deer, Philippine warty pigs, long-tailed macaques, and reticulated pythons, but not other snakes or domestic pigs. All adults had probably killed at least one python, and occasionally they encountered large ones. The two hunters in the photograph skinned and butchered that snake in less than an hour; assuming that 33 percent of her mass was usable, they thus obtained about fifty-five pounds of meat for their group. Other Agta discovered a thirty-two-pound wild pig in the stomach of a twenty-one-foot python they killed.

Tom’s Agta were not in a general sense “primitive,” but his data provide a rare estimate of predation risk for hunter-gatherers and refute a widespread misconception. Herpetologists had often claimed that snakes don’t eat humans, but after all, indigenous people in Africa, Asia, and South America are usually smaller than Western scientists. At 60 percent of a retic’s weight, a hundred-pound Agta man would not be heavy, especially for a serpent whose prey includes 130-pound pigs. Moreover, the eighteen unsuccessful attacks and six fatalities amount to a traumatic incident in the group every year or two, and deaths would have been more common a few centuries ago, before the advent of metal weaponry. If python predation approached the incidence of unsuccessful attacks on Agta, it would have exceeded the 8 percent of all male deaths that forest-dwelling Paraguayan Aché incur from jaguars.34

Anthropologists have long argued that predators influenced human evolution, and some recently discovered australopithecine bones bear tooth marks from crocodiles and mammalian carnivores.35 As for snakes, although their few fossilized stomach contents haven’t included primates, Tom’s data on hunter-gatherers similar in size to Lucy and her kin are unequivocal. Pythons frequently attacked Negritos, and vice versa; moreover, because big snakes observably ate deer, pigs, and monkeys, the humans would have regarded them not just as predators and prey, but also as competitors. Until recently, the Agta’s lives were indeed complicated by multifaceted, dangerous ecological relationships with giant serpents. Moreover, as we have seen, other primates prey upon and are killed by snakes—over its lifetime an individual retic might well eat tree-shrews, tarsiers, macaques, gibbons, and people—all consistent with the notion that a shared ancient heritage has inspired our dueling attitudes toward limbless reptiles.

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