The Nomadic Alternative – Page 244

In our primaeval environment, our ancestors were encircled by the Things that went Bump in the Night. Undefended except by their numbers - and they were few enough - they huddled together at night for warmth and protection. They strained their ears to the noises of animals in the bush, coming nearer or moving off. There were lions and leopards, elephants and hyenas, and a host of unimaginable horrors that snarl at us from manuals of Palaeozoology but which Evolution has seen fit to retire. In the lean season the people were at their weakest and the animals their most hungry. And if contemporary Bedouin call the lean season the 'Time of the Beasts', at the time of the great Pleistocene beasts our ancestors were least in a position to protect themselves. A cave was often more dangerous than the open plain; and unlike the apes and monkeys, they could not as a group take refuge in the trees. If a bush fire or flash flood struck, an animal bared its teeth or a snake hissed, mothers made a quick grab for their children, children flew to their mothers as if magnetized, and the group ran off for safety.

The early hunters lived out a Manichæan drama between the forces of Light and Movement and the forces of Sloth and Destruction. The passage of the seasons brought times of hunger, but these were predictable. Their encyclopaedic knowledge of natural history, and their omnivorous diet made them confident they would never actually starve to death. But survival was always a matter of chance. The unseen danger was never predictable. They walked life's journey in the shadow of death, where the horrors of Hell filled the hours of Darkness.

Fortunately for them - and for us or we should not be here - the carnivores on the whole are cowards and lazy. They attack only if ravenous or attacked themselves. A cohesive group of any fairly large species deters them from action. Instead they lurk in the shadows waiting to pick up stragglers. A child that strayed from the mother and couldn't run back to her was a dead child. Hence the life-preserving function of the attachment bond between them.