Sir Edwin Henry Landseer and the Myth of Man's Dominion

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Isaac van Amburgh and his Animals (detail): Sir Edwin Henry Landseer (1803-1872), 1839 (Royal Collection, Windsor)

All sciences are odd in some way, but paleoanthropology is one of the oddest. The other sciences that try to reconstruct the past -- geology, cosmology, evolutionary biology -- seek regularities or laws that may tell us what to expect in the future. Paleoanthropology doesn't, and by rights can't. As far as we know, human beings are the only intelligent animals in the universe. Our origins and history are therefore unique; and you can't uncover any laws by studying a phenomenon that has only one instance. People who study human origins sometimes claim that their investigations will shed new light on human nature and so help us understand ourselves and predict our future. But this is wishful thinking. A thing is what it is, no matter how it got that way; and human appetites and impulses are what they are, no matter where or what we came from. Knowing their history adds nothing. If it were proved tomorrow that people evolved from cottontails instead of apes, we should still prefer bananas to clover as an ingredient in pie.

We care about our origins for reasons that have nothing to do with their negligible implications for social practice or theoretical science. At bottom, these reasons are religious or ideological. How we got here may not tell us anything about who we are, but it has a lot to do with what we think about ourselves and our place in the universe.

The opposite is also true. What we think about our place in the universe affects what we are prepared to believe about human origins. For instance, Fundamentalists see the universe as a stage built for presenting the melodrama of human history -- and so they refuse to look at the evidence that the star actor has been offstage for 99.99 percent of the play so far.

Falcon: Sir Edwin Henry Landseer (1803-1872), 1837

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As late as 1946, the great American paleoanthropologist W. W. Howells could write that hunting "may not be of any great significance" in human evolution. But by the early 1960s, it was generally agreed that nothing else was half so significant. "Whether we love hunting or hate it," wrote the ethologist Valerius Geist in 1975, "eulogize its blinding passion or condemn it, hunting was the force that shaped our bodies, moulded our souls and honed our minds."

These are strong words; but hunting is a topic that stirs strong emotions nowadays. For many modern hunters, it is a quasi-religious experience that is intrinsically good and uplifting (Geist, an enthusiastic hunter, describes it as "an intercourse with nature"). Others regard hunting as flatly evil: deplorable in itself and bound up with a perverse itch to slay that gets expressed in murder and warfare, as well as blood sports. Neither of these attitudes is very old. Throughout most of Western history, hunting has been more prosaically viewed as a source of cheap (and generally illegal) meat for the poor and of innocent amusement for the gentry. In European literature before the nineteenth century, the huntsman is typically a carefree, enviable figure with a touch of Robin Hood about him; it is the butcher, not the hunter, whose name is synonymous with bloody violence.

In the mid-1800s, the currents of Romanticism tore the stereotype of the Jolly Huntsman apart into two contrasting images: one pretty, the other nasty. The pretty image assimilates the hunter to Rousseau's Noble Savage and casts him as a mystic seeking oneness with nature in the wilderness. It goes back at least to Cooper's Deerslayer stories, and a debased version of it is familiar to us all from the hokum surrounding frontiersmen like Daniel Boone. The nasty image is of greater interest, because it shows up as part of a new set of attitudes toward animals and nature.

Hawking: Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, 1832 (private collection)

Organized opposition to hunting can be traced back to the Puritan religious movement. Puritans on both sides of the Atlantic denounced cruelty to animals, not exactly as a sin but rather as an imprudent indulgence that encouraged cruelty toward people. (As Macaulay quipped, Puritans hated bearbaiting less for the pain it gave the bear than for the pleasure it gave the spectators.) Similarly, hunting was seen as a bloodthirsty amusement conducive to murder.

The focus of such sentiments began to shift to the animal itself in the mid-1700s, as the Cartesian barrier between man and animal crumbled under the surge of Romanticism. "As they [animals] partake of some measure in our nature," Rousseau wrote, "they ought to partake of natural right. "Every animal is an end in itself," declared Goethe.

But before the Victorian era, it was rare to find animals personalized as animals and opened up to human empathy. From the outset, the new tendency was associated with ambivalence about hunting.

The Arab Tent: Sir Edwin Henry Landseer (1803-1872), 1839 (Royal Collection, Windsor)

The first signs of this show up in the art galleries during the 1840s. Hunting scenes in eighteenth-century European art had generally been mere excuses for painting still lifes of dead game or portraits of the rich on horseback. But in the work of Victorian painters like Landseer and Courbet, the focus shifted to the suffering of the quarry: writhing otters impaled on spears; exhausted foxes screaming in terror at the advancing hunt; and red deer by the metric ton, dying or stiffening in death with their pointed faces frozen in masks of noble agony. At least some of these works were intended to stir feelings of pity and indignation at man's treatment of wild animals. Such feelings could be wrung from an audience of unprecedented size, as new printing techniques allowed every middle-class Victorian family to hang chromolithographs and steel engravings of Landseer's pictures in the parlor as household icons.

Deer and Deer Hounds in a Mountain Torrent: Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, 1832 (Tate Britain)

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As mammals go, human beings are peculiarly slow and defenseless. Language and weapons make us terrible adversaries, but we don't have them by instinct; we have to be nursed, guarded and schooled by our elders through a painfully long infancy. From Anaximander on down, everyone who has tried to cook up a naturalistic account of our origins has stumbled over this fact. If the first humans sprang into being full-blown, who taught them to speak and make tools and feed themselves? If they evolved out of more typical beasts, why did they lose the swiftness and natural strength that help such beasts survive? This problem was thrown in Darwin's face by the Duke of Argyll, who wrote that "the human frame has diverged from the structure of brutes, in the direction of greater helplessness... a divergence which of all others it is most impossible to ascribe to mere natural selection."

Isaac van Amburgh and his Animals: Sir Edwin Henry Landseer (1803-1872), 1839 (Royal Collection, Windsor)

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A myth, says my dictionary, is a real or fictional story that embodies the cultural ideals of a people or expresses deep, commonly felt emotions. By this definition, myths are generally good things -- and the origin stories that paleoanthropologists tell are necessarily myths. They are myths whether they are true of not, because they embody a fundamental cultural theme: they define and explain the critical differences between human beings and beasts. Whatever such stories single out as important factors in our origins become important parts of our self-image. Conversely, such stories won't be listened to unless they account for the human particularities that we think are crucial markers of humanity. They will be listened to most carefully when they echo other themes from the culture of their time.

The hunting hypothesis -- the myth of Man the Killer Ape -- captures a deeply felt perception of human beings and their technology as antagonists of life. Whether or not the the hypothesis fails, the underlying perception is correct: Homo sapiens is a real threat to life on Earth. Probably any intelligent animals would be, no matter how herbivorous. Intelligence, at least of the human sort, involves making internal models of the world and acting on them. When they diverge far enough from reality, they become madness. Science is cumulative; every year, we know more and can do more than the year before. At present, we can barely manage to destroy ourselves, but as we learn more about the workings of life and the universe it will become steadily easier and cheaper to sterilize the planet. Madness isn't cumulative -- in the long run, it always runs afoul of reality -- but it has proved successful in the short run. So long as cumulative knowledge remains at the service of specific madness, it seems inevitable that in the near geological future -- say, within 50,000 years -- life on this planet will be extinguished. Whether terrestrial life will ultimately survive probably depends on how soon we establish it elsewhere and how vigilant we are in the meantime.


Matt Cartmill: edited excerpts from"Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad": Man's Place (if Any) in Nature, in Natural History, Volume 92, issue 11, 1983

Van Amburgh and his Big Cats: Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, 1879, after a painting in the collection of the Duke of Wellington (published in London Art Journal, 1879)

Low Life: Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, 1829 (private collection, London)

Original Sin

The man-brained and man-handed ground-ape, physically

The most repulsive of all hot-blooded animals

Up to that time of the world: they had dug a pitfall

And caught a mammoth, but how could their sticks and stones

Reach the life in that hide? They danced around the pit, shrieking

With ape excitement, flinging sharp flints in vain, and the stench of their bodies

Stained the white air of dawn; but presently one of them

Remembered the yellow dancer, wood-eating fire

That guards the cave-mouth: he ran and fetched him, and others

Gathered sticks at the wood’s edge; they made a blaze

And pushed it into the pit, and they fed it high, around the mired sides

Of their huge prey. They watched the long hairy trunk

Waver over the stifle trumpeting pain,

And they were happy.

.........................Meanwhile the intense color and nobility of sunrise,

Rose and gold and amber, flowed up the sky. Wet rocks were shining, a little wind

Stirred the leaves of the forest and the marsh flag-flowers; the soft valley between the low hills

Became as beautiful as the sky; while in its midst, hour after hour, the happy hunters

Roasted their living meat slowly to death.

...................................................These are the people.

This is the human dawn. As for me, I would rather

Be a worm in a wild apple than a son of man.

But we are what we are, and we might remember

Not to hate any person, for all are vicious;

And not be astonished at any evil, all are deserved;

And not fear death; it is the only way to be cleansed.

Robinson Jeffers, from Original Sin, 1938, in The Double Axe and Other Poems, 1948

The Random Shot: Sir Edwin Henry Landseer (1802-1873), 1848 (Bury Art Gallery and Museum, Lancashire)