In recent years, there has been a fierce controversy about the role of hunting in early human society. There has been a tendency to play down the role of hunting, insisting more on the role of food gathering and scavenging. While this question is still not decisively resolved, it is difficult not to share Leakey’s view that the argument against the hunter-gatherer model of early human society has gone too far. It is also interesting to note the way in which these controversies tend to reflect certain prejudices or social pressures and fads that have nothing whatsoever to do with the issues at stake.

In the early years of the 20th century, the idealist standpoint predominated. Mankind became human thanks to the brain, with its higher thoughts, which propelled all development. Later, the view of “Man the Toolmaker” re-emerged, although in a rather idealised version, in which tools, but not weapons, were said to be the motor-force of evolution. The terrible events of the Second World War then produced a reaction against this, in the form of the theory of “Man the Killer Ape,” put forward “possibly because it seemed to explain (or even excuse) the horrible events of the war,” as Leakey shrewdly remarks

In the 1960s, there was a great interest in the !Kung San – the incorrectly named “Bushmen” of the Kalahari desert, a group of people living in apparent harmony with their natural environment, and exploiting it in complex ways. This fitted in well with the growing interest in environmental issues in Western society. In 1966, however, the idea of “Man the Hunter” re-emerged strongly at a major anthropological conference in Chicago. This, however, fell foul of the supporters of “Women’s Liberation”, in the 1970s. Since hunting is usually seen as a male activity, it was assumed – quite unjustifiably – that to accept it would be somehow to downgrade the role of women in early society. The powerful feminist lobby put forward the hypothesis of “Woman the Gatherer”, in which it was argued that the gathering of food, mainly plants, which could be shared, was the basis on which a complex human society evolved.

The central role of women in early society is undeniable, and was clearly explained by Engels in his classic work The Origins of the Family, Private Property and State. However, it is a serious error to read into the record of the past conceptions – or, still worse, prejudices – derived from present-day society. The cause of the emancipation of women will not be advanced a single step by attempting to make the reality of history fit into a pattern which appeals to certain current fashions but is devoid of any real content. We do not make the future of humanity any more hopeful by painting the past in rosier colours. Nor will we encourage people to become vegetarians by denying the fundamental role played by meat eating, hunting, yes, and even cannibalism, in developing the human brain.

With all respect to the vegetarians, it has to be recognised that man did not come into existence without a flesh diet, and if the latter, among all peoples known to us, has led to cannibalism at some time or another (the forefathers of the Berliners, the Weletabians or Wilzians, used to eat their parents as late as the tenth century), that is of no consequence to us today.[43]

Similarly, a division of labour must have existed between men and women in the earliest human societies. The mistake, however, is to confuse the division of labour in early society, where neither private property nor the family as we know it today existed, with inequality and the oppression of women in modern class society. In the majority of existing hunter-gatherer societies known to anthropologists, the elements of a division of labour exists, in which the men hunt and the women gather plants for food.

“The camp is a place of intense social interaction, and a place where food is shared”; comments Leakey, “when meat is available, this sharing often involves elaborate ritual, which is governed by strict social rules.”

There is good reason to suppose that a similar situation existed in early human society. Instead of the caricature of Social Darwinism, which attempts to extrapolate the laws of the capitalist jungle to cover the whole of human history and prehistory, all the available evidence indicates that the entire basis of early human society was co-operation, collective activity, and sharing. Glynn Isaac of Harvard University made a significant advance in anthropological thinking in a major article published in Scientific American in 1978. Isaac’s food sharing hypothesis emphasises the social impact of collective food gathering and sharing. In a 1982 speech on the centenary of Darwin’s death, he said: “The adoption of food-sharing would have favoured the development of language, social reciprocity and the intellect.” In his latest book, The Making of Mankind, Richard Leakey wrote that “the food-sharing hypothesis is a strong candidate for explaining what set early humans on the road to modern man.”

The last two million years have been characterised by a unique climate cycle. Long periods of intense cooling and glacier advances have been interrupted by short periods of rising temperatures and glacial retreat. Ice ages have an average duration of 100,000 years, whereas the interglacial periods last for approximately 10,000. Under these extreme conditions, mammals were compelled to develop more advanced forms or to disappear. Out of a total of 119 mammalian species living in Europe and Asia two million years ago, only nine still survive. The big majority of the rest either developed as more advanced species, or disappeared. Once again, birth and death are inseparably linked in the contradictory, bitter-sweet, dialectical process of evolution.

The last ice age gave way to a new inter-glacial period, which has lasted until the present, but will eventually come to an end. Homo erectus gave way to a more advanced hominid – Homo sapiens – about 500,000 years ago. The human race (Homo sapiens sapiens) represents one evolutionary line from Homo sapiens, branching off about 100,000 years ago. The other line – Homo sapiens neanderthalensis – either disappeared or was absorbed around 40,000 years ago. Thus, the human race developed during a period characterised by intense cooling. These conditions represented a severe struggle for survival. However, there were other periods in which conditions improved, stimulating massive growth and waves of human migration. The age of humankind begins to dawn.

  1. Engels, F. The Dialectics of Nature, p. 237.