The Hunting Apes

This volume attempts to answer the question: what makes humans unique? According to the author, the answer lies in the desire for meat, the eating of meat, the hunting of meat and the sharing of meat. The text takes the form of an extended essay on human origins.

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What makes humans unique? What makes us the most successful animal species inhabiting the Earth today? Most scientist agree that the key to our success is the unusually large size of our brains. Our large brains gave us our exceptional thinking capacity and led to humans' other distinctive characteristics, including advanced communication, tool use, and walking on two legs. Or was it the other way around? Did the challenges faced by early humans push the species toward communication, tool use and walking and, in doing so, drive the evolutionary engine toward a large brain? In this text, author Craig Stanford presents an alternative to this puzzling question. According to him, what make humans unique is meat. Or, rather, the desire for meat, the eating of meat, the hunting of meat and the sharing of meat. Stanford argues that the skills developed and required for successful hunting and especially the sharing of meat spurred the explosion of human brain size over the past 200,000 years.
He then turns his attention to the ways meat is shared within primate and human societies to argue that this all-important activity has had profound effects on basic social structures that are still f