ABSTRACT

Robert Ardrey's hunting hypothesis was based more on a pessimistic view of modern humans and Christian paradigms of "original sin" than on fossil evidence. Fossil evidence speaks louder than any number of reconstructions based on pure speculation. Man the Hunter theories fall short in the critical examination of the fossil evidence. The view of Man the Hunter, provided mainly by a few chimpanzee researchers, is based on hypothesized analogies between one group of chimpanzees and humans. Nineteenth-century concepts of "cultural survivals" were employed to prop up the Man the Hunter archetype. Words with loaded meaning for humans—war; rape, and genocide, to name a few—must be used with extreme caution when referring to the activities of non-human species. The Paleolithic cave paintings in Europe also depicted a metaphysical connection between humans and hunting. Modern humans, especially in Western cultures, think of themselves as meat-eaters.