Barbara J. King

I love that rush of wow! that comes with discovering an exciting journal article about animals, and animal-human bonding.

This week, in reading Pennsylvania State University anthropologist Pat Shipman’s latest work, I got just such a rush. In the August issue of Current Anthropology, Shipman argues that, in addition to the making and using of tools; symbolic behavior including language; and the domestication of other animals, we humans are defined also by what she terms “the animal connection.”

The urge to connect with and care for other species, Shipman writes, “is universal among humans, is capable of powerfully transforming behavior, and is absent or extremely rare among other species.”

The central testable hypothesis at the heart of Shipman’s article is that “human adaptive changes were causally linked to the animal connection.” It all began 2.6 million years ago when our ancestors first processed animal carcasses with stone tools. These early humans would have focused “on the behavior of prey (in order to obtain more food) and that of predators (in order to minimize interference competition),” Shipman writes.

The next stage kicks at around 200,000 years ago when Homo sapiens emerged, and embraces the time period of first art. Here Shipman brings into nice juxtaposition the ancient artists’ proficiency at rendering animals in gorgeous detail and their distinct indifference to landscapes, mountains, water sources, shelters, humans, plants, nuts, fruits, berries, tubers, and even certain animal species (birds and reptiles) as subjects.

Around 40,000 years ago, the next stage begins, and it is characterized by the domestication of animals. Shipman rightly recognizes the “reciprocal” nature of the animal-human transformations that emerged during early domestication, and links them aptly with the tool-making and information-gathering aspects of the two earlier stages.

I have a few quibbles with Shipman’s views:

*To conclude as Shipman does that “animals in experimental situations are capable of fairly sophisticated communication” undersells some superb science on complex communication by wild and captive primates, elephants, and cetaceans.

*The 2.6 million year old start date for the animal connection is arguable. In negotiating African ecosystems that teemed with predators, wouldn’t keen attention to, and tracking of, animals by human ancestors have been adaptive even earlier?

*Mounting evidence suggests that animals played an important role in humans’ emerging spiritual life, for instance in art and burials. At the least, it’s a solid hypothesis deserving of mention.

*I would succumb to academic ego to wish that my work on ape communication, the evolution of human symbolic behavior, or animal-human bonding had been cited by Shipman, but significant omissions do occur in the anthropology of animal-human relating, including works by Tim Ingold and Molly Mullin.

*I know exactly what Shipman means—and doesn’t mean-- when she writes, “Domestic animals are another kind of extra-somatic adaptation or tool that expands the resources humans can exploit.” Still, given current horrors of humans’ treatment of other animals, I blanched a bit at those words tool and exploit.

These suggestions are meant as friendly amendments. Shipman has brought brilliant focus to the long evolutionary history of the animal-human bond, and takes it to a new level by identifying a suite of adaptive human behaviors linked to it.

The Current Anthropology article offers a neat step forward in theorizing about the evolution of human behavior. Sometime in early 2011, Pat Shipman’s book about the animal connection will be published. I plan to be one of its first readers.