Evolution

A man was approaching. He was tall, more heavily muscled than the rest, with a powerful, abnormally prominent browridge. This man, Brow, was dominant right now, the boss man in the tight, competitive world of the males. And he had a dead animal draped across his shoulder, a young eland.

The eight other adult men in the band began dutifully to whoop and yell, and they ran down the rocky slope. They slapped Brow on the back, stroked the eland respectfully, and ran and capered, kicking up a spectacular cloud of dust that hung, glowing, in the light of the descending sun. Together they hauled the eland up the slope and hurled it to the ground. The older children ran to see the eland, and began competing for its meat. The Brat was amongst them, but he was weaker even than others younger than himself, and he was easily pushed aside. Far could see a snapped-off wooden spear buried in the animal’s chest. That was how Brow had killed his prey, probably after an ambush, and perhaps he had left the spear in there to show how he had achieved this feat.

Brow, meanwhile, had sprouted an impressive erection. The women, including Calm, Far’s mother, made subtle signs of availability — a crooked hand here, thighs smoothly parting there.

Far, neither woman nor child, hung back from the rest. She nibbled on a root and waited as events unfolded.

Some of the adults had brought volcanic pebbles from the nearby stream. Now men and women began briskly to knap the pebbles, their hands working rapidly, their fingers exploring the stone. The tools emerged from the stone without real conscious effort — this was a skill that was already ancient, embedded in a self-contained section of a rigidly divided mind — and within a few minutes they had fashioned crude but serviceable choppers and cutting flakes. As quickly as each tool was finished its manufacturer fell on the eland.

The skin was sliced open from anus to throat, and pulled briskly off the carcass. The hide was discarded; nobody had thought up a use for animal skins, not yet. Now the carcass was briskly butchered, with the fine stone blades slicing into joints to separate the limbs from the body, through the rib cage to expose the soft, warm organs within, and then into the meat itself to separate it from the bone.

It was a fast, efficient, almost bloodless affair, a skillful butchering born of generations of ancestral learning. But the butchers did not work together. Though they deferred to Brow, allowing him to take the prime cuts and to extract the heart and liver, they competed as they scavenged the corpse, grunting and prodding at each other. Despite the tools in their hands, they worked at the eland like a pack of wolves.

Few of the women fought for the meat. Their unglamorous scavenging in the acacia grove and elsewhere had been successful today, and their bellies, and those of their children, were already full of figs, grewia berries, grass shoots, roots — fruits abundant in these dry lands that did not require much preparation before eating.

When most of the meat had been taken from the eland’s bones, the bargaining began in earnest. Brow stalked among the men with a blade in one hand and a mighty slab of haunch in the other. He sliced off chunks of the meat and handed them to some of the men — and not to others, who turned away as if it were unimportant, but who would later try to snatch bits of the best meat from the rest. It was all part of the endless politicking of the men.

Then Brow walked among the women, handing out bits of meat like a visiting king. When he reached Calm, he paused, his erection proud, and sliced off a large and succulent slab of eland haunch. Sighing, she accepted it. She ate some of it quickly, then put the rest to one side, close to her infant, who was asleep in a nest of dead grass. Then she lay on her back and opened her thighs, and held up her arms to accept Brow.

Brow hadn’t gone hunting primarily to bring food to his people. Large game provided maybe only a tenth of the group’s intake; the vast majority of it came from the plants, nuts, insects, and small game foraged by the women and older children as much as by the men. Large game was a useful emergency food supply in hard times — drought or flood, perhaps, or in tough winters. But hunting was useful to the hunter in a whole range of ways. With his eland meat Brow was able to reinforce his political position among the men — and buy access to the women, which was ultimately the only purpose of his endless battle for dominance.