Ishmael Book 2. The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit [1996] by Daniel Quinn

Author:Daniel Quinn [Quinn, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bantam Books [hc, pbk]
Published: 1996-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

The first thing: reading the signs

"Very impressive," I said.

"Very unimpressive, believe me, compared to what a real tracker could do, but good enough for our purpose. There are several things I want you to see from this. The first thing is this: Chimpanzees make and use tools, so tool-making and tool-using are not uniquely human, but the reading I've just done here is uniquely human. Of course what I've done so far is only a sample of the hunting process. It's like a still from a motion picture, which can suggest a mood and a theme but can't convey the process of the film, which is intrinsically motion. At any moment during the hunt, the hunter is considering these questions: What was the animal doing when it made this track? How long ago was it here? Which way was it heading? How fast was it going? How far away will it be by now?--keeping in mind the season, the time of day, the temperature, the condition of the ground, the nature of the terrain, and of course the typical behavior of the animal being tracked and other animals in the neighborhood as well.

"Here's a small example. One day an anthropologist was tagging along with a !Kung hunter in the Kalihari. Around noon they abandoned one hunt as hopeless and started looking around for something else to go after. Soon they came across a gemsbok track the hunter judged to be just a couple hours old. After half an hour of tracking, however, the hunter called it off. He explained that the track hadn't been made that morning after all, pointing out as proof a gemsbok hoofprint with a mouse track running [Page 82] across it. Since mice are nocturnal, the gemsbok track had to have been made during the night. In other words, this particular gemsbok was long gone."

"Yes, I see."

"Now, this isn't a feat of observation and ratiocination that's going to win that !Kung hunter a Nobel prize, but it's a feat that is light-years beyond anything our nearest primate kin is capable of. An ape with the right sort of training may persuade you that it's doing what we do when we talk, but no ape with any amount of training will ever persuade you that it's doing what this !Kung hunter was doing when he tracked the gemsbok."

"I'm sure you're right."

"This is what I'm proposing here, Jared: We didn't cross the line when we started using tools, we crossed the line when we became hunters. Our nonhuman ancestors were tool-makers and -users [sic] but they weren't hunters, because they didn't have the mental equipment to be hunters. In other words, we became human by hunting--and of course we became hunters by becoming human. And, by the way, hunting is not an exclusively male activity among aboriginal peoples of today, so there's no reason to suppose it was an exclusively male activity among our earliest human ancestors."

"Excuse me--I hope this won't sound like an inquisitorial question--but it sounds like you're saying that we hunted before we were hunters.

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