Ehrenreich - Deadly powers: animal predators and the mythic imagination

Praise for Deadly Powers

While mythological studies routinely look back to ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, or Greece, this author pushes back to the Pleistocene. There, he suggests, as Homo sapiens developed and experienced their impotence before carnivorous beasts up to two tons in mass, fear was of course the primary response. As language developed, primordial storytelling flourished, and eventually myth. This is a strongly researched, insightful volume treating themes from across the world.

William G. Doty, professor emeritus, University of Alabama
and author of Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals
and several other books in the field

Living as many of us do in safe, modern surroundings, it's easy for us to forget how large predators have loomed over human lives during most of our species' history on earth. In Deadly Powers, Paul Trout brings together science and art to remind us how important predators have been in shaping our literatures, our imaginations, and even our minds. If you've ever wondered why you can't get enough of zombies, werewolves, and aliens, this is the book for you.

Clark Barrett, associate professor of anthropology,
University of California, Los Angeles

Published 2011 by Prometheus Books

Deadly Powers: Animal Predators and the Mythic Imagination. Copyright 2011 by Paul A. Trout. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Cover illustration Hercules and the Hydra of Lerne by Gustave Moreau
used by permission of Bridgeman Art Library/SuperStock
Cover design by Nicole Sommer-Lecht

Inquiries should be addressed to

Prometheus Books

59 John Glenn Drive

Amherst, New York 142282119

VOICE: 7166910133

FAX: 7166910137

WWW.PROMETHEUSBOOKS.COM

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Trout, Paul A., 1940

Deadly powers : animal predators and the mythic imagination / by Paul A. Trout.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 9781616145019 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 9781616145026 (ebook)

1. AnimalsFolklore. 2. AnimalsMythology. 3. Predatory animalsFolklore.

4. Predatory animalsMythology I. Title.

GR705.T762011

398.24'5dc23

2011028692

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

T his book is the most ambitious survey to date of the relationship between humans and the wild carnivores that preyed on them as long as Homo sapiens, or our hominid ancestors, have existed. I first started thinking about animal predation on humans while researching my 1998 book Blood Rites: On the Origins and History of the Passions of War, and argued in that book that, in many ways, especially those involving the use of violence, human nature has been shaped by our long, terrifying history as the prey of creatures far bigger, faster, and better armed in the tooth-and-claw department than our distant ancestors were. In Deadly Powers, Paul Trout goes over some of the same groundwith generous acknowledgments of my work, I should notebut he has far more material to work with and takes it in some novel directions.

He begins with a bracing catalog of some of the more formidable creatures our Stone Age ancestors had to contend with. There were far bigger cats than we can imagine today, such as the New World sabertooth tiger, which sported ten-inch long tusks and weighed over 750 pounds, twice the weight of African lions today. Bears were another problem, especially the now-extinct American short-faced bear, which was eleven feet tall when it stood on two legs. Human residents of Paleolithic Egypt had to worry about snakes up to 65 feet long weighing in at about 800 pounds, and early Australians faced Megalania, a 30-foot-long, 2,000-pound carnivorous lizard. As for the canids that today are increasingly employed as therapy dogs, Trout reminds us that hunting in packs, they were as dangerous as any single big cat. He supplements this nightmare bestiary with archaeological evidence for predation on early humanshominid skulls pierced by holes spaced at the exact distance between the teeth of Pleistocene leopards, for examplewhich were at first mistakenly attributed to intra-hominid homicide.

But for all we know, early humans may have been an especially delectable carnivore snack. Trout reports that in many African myths, humans are casually referred to as the meat without hair.

The reasons to think that early humans were preyed upon have mounted over the years. Wild primates, including our close relatives the chimpanzees, are preyed upon today, as proved by the presence of their DNA in the scat of leopards and lions. It is now widely accepted that the exigencies of predation are a major factor in making us, like most other primates, social animals, whose ultimate reason to stick together is for mutual defense. An individual is more likely to survive in a noisy, fast-moving group than as a solitary creature in the wild, which is why, for example, fish swim in schools. In addition, group living offers opportunities for more aggressive forms of collective defense: Monkeys may mob a predator; young baboon males sometimes sacrifice their lives in an effort to drive a predator away from the females and young.

While some scientists have, like Leakey, been queasy about predation on humans, classicists, folklorists, and the like can hardly ignore it. If there is one central human mythological theme, from Gilgamesh to Beowulf, it is of the human-eating creature that ravages the countryside until someonehero or godsuccessfully confronts it. The predator in these stories is often dismissed as a symbol for some entirely human fantasy or preoccupation. But as Trout argues, human storytelling, and hence literature, grew out of encounters with real animal predators and served as a means of fear management as well as a means to ready the group for future encounters. Lions, for example, were a real and widespread threat to humans into historical times. When the Achaean heroes weren't fighting Trojans, Homer tells us that they were tasked with trying to keep their kingdoms lion free. Tigers took a huge toll on humans in India well into the nineteenth century, leaving large swaths of the subcontinent uninhabitable for humans, and they still do in the Sundarbans, where every village has its tiger widows. In Eurasia, wolves not only preyed on travelers but threatened rural villagers well into the eighteenth century.

Deadly Powers does not skimp on the horrors of being eaten alive. Sometimes predation is a silent affair, as when a giant snake swallows a victima child, for examplewhole. But predators may emit terrifying soundsthe roars of big cats, the growls of wolves or hyenas, the sonic shrills of attacking raptorsfor the apparent purpose of causing their prey to freeze. As for the prey, Trout tells us, Some of them snort, some bellow, some bray, some screech, some bleat, some shriek, some scream, some squeal, and some wail, as they protest being clawed, bitten, eviscerated, and dismembered. Surviving conspecifics may find few fragments of the victim left to mourn, or they may find too many. Trout reports that one of the most horrifying collections of stomach contents taken from an African crocodile included eleven heavy brass arm rings, three wire armlets, wire anklets, a necklace, fourteen human arm and leg bones, and three human spinal columns. And, he reminds us, the ultimate humiliation, referred to in myth after myth, is to be eaten and then passed out as excrement.