The Nomadic Alternative – Page 10

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such unnatural aberrations, he too must persuade them to run away.

“Puny technologically backward groups”, Dr. Freeman has called such people, “living under the dominance of alien, powerful and overtly aggressive societies.” Submission is essential for their survival, and of their own volition, they have placed themselves at the bottom of the human pecking order. Now in the case of the Bushmen Dr. Freeman’s outburst bears no relation to the facts.

Their technology is perfectly adequate to the problems it is called upon to solve. The Bushmen are happy with their lot; their chief horrors are cannibalism and incest, their chief pleasures food and sex, and they consider their ‘aggressive’ neighbours incompetent hooligans.

The flaw in human nature, the ethological argument continues, came about when men started eating meat. The ‘professional’ carnivores, wolves or lions, know instinctively when to stop fighting. The loser emits signals of defeat which inhibit further violence.

But, armed with an artificial weapon or fang of his own making, the semi-vegetarian human beast fails to recognize the white flags of truce. He skirmishes and gores till the rival lies dead at his feet.

We have no inhibitions to halt the overkill. Konrad Lorenz writes, “Whatever his norms of social behaviour may have been, they were bound to be thrown off gear with the invention of weapons.” Worse, man’s appetite for meat gave him an appetite for human meat. Consequently, any imposed sanction against this biological abnormality must be hailed as a moral advance.

The Ritual consumption of the Body and Blood of Our Lord – plus an infinity of cannibal tales scattered throughout the world’s literature – is proof of the enduring fascination of eating human meat. About forty years ago the excavators of a cave near Pekin unearthed the dwelling place of a very early variety of man, whom they called Sinanthropus, and who is thought to have lived about half a million years ago. At the back of the cave lay the remains of about forty individuals, but only their skulls and limb bones.

More conspicuous, holes had been gouged out with stone cutting