The transcendence of the sacred game that made us
A reflection on the origin of man and the future of hunting
Once upon a time, a couple of billion years or so to be more specific, single-celled organisms were swimming around in the primordial soup that made up the living world of then. One day, one such single-celled organism got it into its head to sit (of course, this is a gross oversimplification; they did not have heads, and sitting implies haunches or buttocks, which, of course single, cell organisms are lacking) on another smaller organism and suck the unfortunate fellow in through its cell wall.
It worked; the smaller organism melted, the bigger was satiated, and predation was inaugurated. From then, the sacred game[1] between predator and prey was on. Humans have played both roles, but primarily, we have been predators. Hunting has played an essential role in shaping us into who we are today. Billions of years after the first single-celled organism swallowed a fellow microorganism; we feel the urge to pursue and capture. Long before we were us, we were hunters. Can that continue?
As a lifelong hunter who, for the last five years, has spent my time in strategic foresight focusing on the futures of food, forestry, and other aspects of the landscape, I have noticed the absence of hunting as a part of visions of our food futures. In most visions, scenarios, or trend reports about the future of our food system, the hunter has no place. In the few cases I've seen hunting mentioned, it is a form of alternative land use. Besides my personal bias in the question, I find this shift away from the self-image of man the hunter interesting from a human nature point of view. The root of the shift away from hunting is, of course, obvious: few rely on hunting for sustenance, and for the urban majority, hunting is something that is happening out in the periphery, both literally and culturally figuratively.
Bigger stronger faster
From an evolutionary standpoint, pursuing prey and avoiding predators drove evolution in the direction we know it. Through chasing and escaping, organisms exert evolutionary pressure on each other. As a child, I remember learning about the cheetah and gazelle racing each other to become astounding sprinters. But, as the story about the single cell organism I started this essay with, the mutual pressure to adapt goes back much further than that. It might even have been hunting that took us from microorganisms to macroorganisms.
Just as "becoming faster" is a good strategy for predator and prey, another is increasing size. Prey grow to avoid and defend themselves, and predators grow to take down larger prey. One way to grow is to go from single to multicellular. Although multicellularity seems to have arisen at several times and places, there are examples of simple single-celled organisms that, by aggregating into multicellularity, as slime molds still do, can accumulate enough enzymes to degrade other microorganisms in ways that would otherwise be impossible[2].
Thus, in a world without hunting as a fundamental condition, neither you, me, nor anything else as we know it would exist. We may not even have had multicellular organisms. Indeed, most creatures would also be microscopic and slow. Being big is only a point if it is to be too large to avoid being eaten or doing the eating. We would see a very different result if we played with the idea of starting over in a world where evolution works without predation.
Paleobiologist Stefan Bengston imagines such a theoretical world without predation as a world of primary energy producers, perhaps joined by composters living off their organic remains. It wouldn't be a world of agile cats, fast deer, or cunning foxes. Adaption in such a world is all about digestion effectiveness and photosynthesis, which doesn't necessarily favor the big guy. A paradise where no one eats anyone else would be a world of algae and bacteria. It would be slow and sun-worshipping, fundamentally different from the melee we call nature.
Big brain monkeys, knocking mooses
So, hunting predates humankind. It is part of the conditions that, however, we feel about it, were on stage when we entered and have shaped us as a species long before we became bipedal hominids. But humans are not just actors on a stage where the hunt is a prop. Despite our ability to survive as omnivores, we are very much hunters ourselves. The importance of hunting is evident in the remains of cultures that depended on their prey for survival. It has provided food and clothing and formed the basis of trade. It is, therefore, not surprising that hunting has featured prominently in stories, norms, and mythologies. For example, what Swedish archeology writer Jonathan Lindström has called the 6000-year-old carvings of the "Moose Knockers" at Nämforsen show how the moose and salmon interweave with mythological and cosmological motifs. Perhaps, I wonder, the stories were about the great moose mother that gives life to both humans and animals.
We can hardly overestimate the historical evolutional importance of hunting. It may even be why we humans are the species we are. Through access to high-energy, high-protein diets in the form of meat and animal fats, we became more intelligent, and more complex societies built around things like reason and morality emerged - both required to continue the flow of calories reliably. According to this way of thinking, we would not be an intelligent monkey that sometimes chose to become a hunter. Instead, we are clever monkeys because we need to become hunters.
In Sweden, where I reside, unforgiving weather causes people to starve and freeze to death for much of the year; hunting was one of the few viable strategies for survival. The early settlers in Scandinavia were hunters and fishermen, a strategy that periodically fared better than crop growers and livestock keepers[3]. During a colder period over 5000 years ago, many Scandinavians abandoned early attempts at farming. What remained were the moose and seal hunters, who were not affected in the same way by the change in climate. So, for long, it must have looked unclear that farming was necessarily the better strategy for survival up north. However, pointing to the historical success of hunting is still an understatement of its importance. Its effect on us may have been more fundamental and ancient than what is captured by the archaeological record.
Morality as a necessity, not a luxury
Because hunting predates humans, early hominids needed to successfully navigate the role of hunter and prey to the other large predators. Based on paleontological research, we have reason to associate the transition to savanna-dwelling bipeds with the fact that hunting prey became a more critical survival strategy. As early as two million years ago, early humans organized purposeful hunts in the eastern parts of the African continent, deliberately selecting the animals they wanted to kill[4]. As some suggest, these early hunters were also wise and moral beings. Similar to us nowadays, at least some of us.
So why are we social and moral animals? One conception is that morality and cooperation are high in a hierarchy of needs that only well-off societies and individuals can afford. The idea is that for those living in a state of nature, the law of the jungle prevails, and morality takes a back seat. But it seems that this is a misconception of the same kind that has long led to Darwin's theory being misrepresented as 'survival of the strongest" rather than 'survival of the best adapted" (at least, this has been a common way of expressing it in Swedish). Several contemporary evolutionary scientists have linked our moral capacity precisely to our ability to adapt by cooperating for the group's survival. According to this way of thinking, morality would not be a "luxury" but rather the foundation of our survival as a species.
Therefore, it is inaccurate to say that ethics are deeply personal. Yes, our ethics and morals concern who we are as people. But that doesn't mean it's an individual's business. Although we experience morality internally, it plays out in the external world. The basic fact that humans are social beings and have an instinct for morality is connected. Our morality determines how we act; to act is to cause consequences, which affects us and others. Ethics are, therefore, personal, but they are also social.
Thus, one way to explain morality that does not depend on a god or other supernatural reason is to link our capacity for moral reasoning to evolutionary advantages. The ability to cooperate, aided by reason and morality, made us better hunters[5]. Groups that didn't distribute prey fairly and where members were driven only by short-term selfishness performed worse than societies where hunters distributed prey to the whole group according to a principle that most people could perceive as fair. Sensitivity to injustice might have been a evolutionary advantage at the group level.
Evolutionary scientist Miki Ben-Dor and colleagues at Tel Aviv University hypothesize that transitioning from large, slow prey to smaller, fast prey due to a loss of megafauna created an evolutionary pressure to become more intelligent and capable of more advanced social systems. The logic is quite simple. Hunting methods for taking down large prey are straightforward - animals such as elephants or buffaloes stand their ground at sounds or movements because their size can often deter an attacker (remember, getting big is an excellent strategy to avoid getting eaten).
If you are the biggest, it doesn't make sense to run before you've decided it's a predator worth running away from (A fact exploited by the traditional Swedish way to hunt moose by using a dog to make the moose stand its ground so the hunter gets the opportunity to take a shot). But hunting nervous animals such as small deer or hares is more demanding. Especially if you don't want to waste more energy in the hunt than their leaner bodies yield, sustaining these smaller animals was simply more challenging, and the more competent, more cooperative groups of people would have benefited.
Michael Tomaselli, a researcher in evolutionary anthropology at the Max Planck Institute, also argues for similar ideas when he suggests that the human instinct for morality may have evolved as an adaptation to our ancestors adapting to harsher conditions. A sense of justice became essential to keep a group together and organized to succeed in the complex hunting and killing of large prey. An understanding of morality would not only have made our groups more stable but also made us better hunters. Perhaps the story echoes into the present day, where fair distribution of meat and opportunity is important business (at least in every hunting party I know of).
Steven Pinker also highlights this formative power of hunting in the introduction to his book Rationality (2021). In it, he devotes parts to recounting how the hunter-gatherer people "san" exhibit a fully developed "scientific" and rational method in their persecution hunt. Pinker's point is that logical thinking is not a recent and "Western" invention but a foundation for how humans have become what we are today[6].
Louis Liebenbergh, the scientist behind the studies that Pinker uses as his example, suggests that hunting has been a fundamental driver of what now is our scientific ability - reinforcing our physiological advantages with mental tools that allow us to utilize them. By being exceptional trackers with the ability to reason and draw conclusions from empirical evidence, our common ancestors could benefit from our ability to run long distances on two legs. The ability to track became particularly important when smaller prey were on the menu. They leave less apparent tracks and place greater demands on the ability to speculate about where prey might be moving and which of several tracks are worth following.[7]
So maybe we should be thankful for hunting for our complex social structure, sense of morality, and our big brain. The massive brain that allows us to think abstractly and reason rationally also enables us to, as Christer Sturmark describes it: "transcend biology" [8]. That is, to act morally not only for biological or impulses but also based on reason. Without hunting, we would never have acquired the brain capacity or the rational tools to think outside our instincts.
Good bye Diana, and thank you for the brain
Life, as we know it today, is the result of us as a species laboriously learning to reason not only from what is beneficial for our physical needs but also from a moral standpoint about what is right, given rational arguments based on moral convictions. That I can write this and that I am interested in reflecting on ethics and morality could, according to this chain of thought, be traced back to our history as hunters and the fact that predation is a fundamental "game" that drives evolution forward. The eventual transcendence of biology as a consequence of hunting is a remarkable insight, at least for a hunter. But it is not obvious what we should do with such an insight. Does it say something important about the role of hunting today, or is it more of a curious story to use around the dinner table?
One way to discuss this around a dinner table would be to imagine for a moment that there is a goddess of the hunt who, throughout history, has rewarded good hunters with more sense, better character, and the ability to cooperate with both other hunters and the society they are part of. In recent history, we have used these blessings to become less dependent on the deity who bestowed them on us. Of course, thankfulness to Diana or some other goddess of the hunt is only a way to paint a symbolic picture and perhaps only suited for light-hearted talk over a meal. We owe nothing to 'hunting' more than 'waste management' or 'central heating.'
But, it is interesting that one of the fundamental evolutionary forces that shaped the human condition has been phased out over the years, turning from a crucial function to a leisure interest. For those who desire to keep hunting, it also becomes a call for reflection on the future. If it is so that hunting makes us the thinking beings we are, even responsible for our rational faculties, then over millions of years, it has undermined itself. With our ability to transcend biological and evolutionary limitations and think morally, we can question our natural behaviors. A fundamental characteristic of us as moral beings is that we do not equate what we usually do with what we must do in the future. It is in our nature to question even what we have the most nostalgic attachment to.
The question is, what will the role of hunting be in the future? From being central to our survival, very few people today depend on game meat for their calories. While hunting does make some imprint in the economic sector, it is a small niche. For example, A Canadian study found that 2018 hunting contributed about $4 billion to GDP[9] in an economy whose total GDP that year was about $1800 billion[10]. This was the economic importance of hunting in one of the largest hunting nations in the world. In a society that measure success in GDP, we no longer need hunting. But what then?
Despite its economic insignificance, hunting is both loved and questioned. I suspect that it is because hunting is such an ancient heritage that does not quite fit into important narratives about man and the hypermodern world that it continues to be in the spotlight. The query I cannot escape is that if hunting has been so crucial in developing the qualities we have built our society and prosperity - cooperation, morality, and rationality, can hunting continue to have a place even when we do not need it for survival?
So, although hunting has been with us through the years, it cannot and should not be taken for granted in the future. It needs to be defended and anchored in our moral consciousness. Hunting needs to find a place in a world where we do not need it for our immediate survival. While the impulse from biology might prevail, hunting must be coupled with reasonable justification. But I would like, more than finding a place to hunt that can be tolerated, pursuing the possibility to envision a future where hunting is not only tolerated but useful in navigating our world. Pursuing that trail to its end must be a topic for another day. My best guess of where to start is in examining our relation to nature and the landscape. Hunting transforms us from consumer and spectator to active participant. Which I do think is much needed for a species tinkering with the deepest parts of biology at the same time as we are considering leaving the planet.
With this essay, I hope to have provoked some interest in hunting and its future. This essay is my first on the subject of hunting in English. Based in Sweden, I'm a lifelong hunter and a futures and foresight consultant by trade, taking a particular interest in man's relation to technology and ecology.
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Thumbnail showing some of the petroglyphs at Nämforsen Sweden, image ufrom Sendelbach, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
[1] Expression borrowed from David Peterson's foreword to the anthology "Hunting Philosophy for Everyone" 2007, Wiley Blackwell Publishing
[2] https://www.nrm.se/download/18.4e32c81078a8d9249800021552/Bengtson2002predation.pdf
[3] Jonathan Lindström "Sveriges långa historia" 2022, Norstedts förlag
[4]https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/38174/chapter-abstract/333035277?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false
[5] https://sverigesradio.se/avsnitt/moralen-ar-en-evolutionar-framgangssaga.
[6] Steven Pinker "Rationality", 2021 Fri Tanke Förlag
[7] https://archive.cybertracker.org/downloads/tracking/Liebenberg-2013-The-Origin-of-Science.pdf
[8] Sturmark and Hofstader, The Art of Clear Thinking 2021, Fri Tanke Förlag
[9] https://www.ofah.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Economic-Footprint-Analysis-of-AHTS.pdf
[10] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/CAN/canada/gdp-gross-domestic-product