The Story of B

by Daniel Quinn

  “This is what I mean by abundance, Jared: Even among these apparently negligible mites, no two have ever been made alike in all the mighty universe, and not one of them has ever been made with less care than a neutron star or a galactic cluster. The brain in that precious human head of yours is not more wonderful than one of those mites.”

  “I know it,” I found myself saying.

  “Would the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God have sent his only-begotten son to save those beetles and their household mites, Jared?”

  “No.”

  “But the god of this place has as great a care for them as for any other creature in the world. This is why I knew you could benefit from seeing those beetles yesterday. Those beetles are a manifestation of the gods’ unending abundance and a sign to be read by those who have eyes to read. I wanted you to see how the gods lavish care without stint on every thing: no less upon a beetle whose supreme achievement is burying a mouse than upon the brain of Einstein, no less upon a mite whose favorite dish is a fly’s egg than upon the eye of Michelangelo.”

  “I do see—or I’m beginning to.”

  “Where are we going to find this god, Louis?”

  Since she’d called me by my own name just a minute before, I was momentarily flummoxed by her reverting to Louis. As time went on, I saw that she could address me either way without derailing her train of thought. Sometimes her message was specifically for Louis (and for me incidentally), sometimes it was specifically for me (and for Louis incidentally), and sometimes, I suppose, it was for both of us equally. In any case, my answer to this particular question was a blank look.

  “I’m not asking you to make a leap here, Jared. I’ve already told you where we’re going to find this god … but I’ll come back to it later. We’ve got plenty of other things to talk about. You and I, Jared, always come back to vision. Louis and I always come back to the meaning of death.

  “Every creature born in the living community belongs to that community. I mean it belongs in the sense that your skin or your nervous system belongs to you. The mouse we saw didn’t just ‘live in’ the park community, the way you might live in an apartment in Chicago or Fresno. Every molecule in the mouse’s body was drawn from this community and eventually had be returned to this community. It would be legitimate to say that this mouse was an expression of this community the way Leonardo da Vinci was an expression of Renaissance Italy.

  “The individual lives in dynamic tension with the community, withdrawing to burrow, hive, nest, lodge, or den for safety’s sake but never totally self-sufficient there, always compelled to return and make itself available, as this mouse did. This tension is a phrase of the law, inspiring the trapdoor spider to seal its burrow like a bank vault and inspiring the spider wasp to become a safebreaker.

  “Nothing in the community lives in isolation from the rest, not even the queens of the social insects. Nothing lives only in itself, needing nothing from the community. Nothing lives only for itself, owing nothing to the community. Nothing is untouchable or untouched. Every life is on loan from the community from birth and without fail is paid back to the community in death. The community is a web of life, and every strand of the web is a path to all the other strands. Nothing is exempt or excused. Nothing is special. Nothing lives on a strand by itself, unconnected to the rest. As you saw yesterday, nothing is wasted, not a drop of water or a molecule of protein—or the egg of a fly. This is the sweetness and the miracle of it all, Jared. Everything that lives is food for another. Everything that feeds is ultimately itself fed upon or in death returns its substance to the community.”

  She paused and gave me a look, which I took and gave back.

  “Every strand of the web is a path to all the other strands. Does that make sense to you?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Where will we find the god of this place?”

  I blinked at that and croaked feebly, “This place?”

  “This place right here, Jared.”

  This was not a question I could handle, so I just goggled at her.

  “Ten thousand years ago, this region was the home of a Mesolithic people whose name we’ll never know. Dig in the ground and you’ll find their hand axes and spearheads. These were Leavers, of course—animists—and they knew where to find the god of this place. The god of this place is here, Jared. They didn’t look in the sky or on Mount Olympus. They looked here, where we’re sitting.”

  I nodded. That was the most I was up for at this point.

  “Here,” she said again, this time patting the ground in front of us.

  “Okay.”

  “Now I want you to look.”

  I shook my head—just a little, just enough to say no, no thanks, I think I’ll pass on this one.

  “Come on,” she commanded, and stretched out belly-down in the dust. Not happily, I followed suit.

  In the center of the web

  “Here is where you’ll learn everything,” she said. “Here is where it all comes together. This is the center of the web, where past, present, and future are joined and where the human mind was born. I want you to look. Don’t tell me again that you’re not Natty Bumppo. I heard you the first time. You don’t have to understand what you see but you must at least make an effort to see what you see.

  “A few decades ago, at a time when Lamarckian notions were still occasionally offered as science, it was popularly theorized that what stimulated the primate brain to grow to human size was our ancestors’ mentally huffing and puffing to invent tools. This is of course what you’d expect in a culture like ours that equates advancement with tool use.”

  I grunted, to let her know I was still awake.

  “The fact is, however, that the human breakthrough wasn’t associated with any tool-making breakthrough. But it was associated with a different sort of breakthrough, a breakthrough as crucial to human development as the breakthrough to language. Any idea what I might be referring to?”

  “No, none.”

  “I’m not surprised. This breakthrough isn’t acknowledged in the Taker version of the human story—isn’t even mentioned, since it adds nothing to the glory of the Takers. This is the breakthrough that decisively signaled the acquisition of a uniquely human lifestyle, a lifestyle critically dependent on intelligence. This is the breakthrough that decisively separated us from the apes. Still no ideas?”

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  “You evidently don’t remember discussing this with Charles on the train back from Stuttgart. You couldn’t imagine what our ancient ancestors might have achieved during the first three million years of human life, and he tried to show you that what they achieved was a fully human lifestyle.”

  “Yes, I remember now. That conversation got rather … overwhelmed by events.”

  “Travel among the gorillas and the chimpanzees and the orangutans, and you will be—or should be—struck by the fact that their lifestyle is nothing remotely like the lifestyle associated with even the earliest humans. The earliest humans, unlike those from whom they descended, were hunter-gatherers. Throughout the rest of the primate order, all are merely gatherers—foragers. They will and do kill for food, opportunistically, but none live as hunters. Among the primates only humans are hunters, because among the primates only humans have the biological equipment to make hunting a mainstay of life—and that equipment is strictly intellectual. Humans could only succeed at hunting one way. They couldn’t succeed the eagle’s way or the cheetah’s way or the spider’s way. These were out of reach. They found their own way to succeed—a way that was out of reach of any other species on earth. Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you, Jared? We didn’t become human banging rocks together. We became human reading the tale of events written here—here in the hand of the god.”

  She opened her hand, palm up, to show me what she meant.

  “I’m not an expert tracker, Jared, not by any means. Natives of this region—any of those Mesolithic hunters I mentioned earlier—wou
ld be able to tell you about things that had happened here days ago. Literally every slightest mark you see in the dust here is the record of an event, even if it’s only the track of a windblown leaf. They’d be able to identify every creature that left a mark here in the recent past, and they’d be able to tell you when it was here and what it was doing, whether it was hurrying or moseying, looking for something to eat or trying to get back home.

  “I picked this spot to settle in, because I could see that something had happened here that I could probably figure out. I don’t mean that some great melodrama was played out here, just something. Do you see this curving line of tracks here? They look like they might have been made by pressing an outsize zipper in the dirt.”

  “Yeah, I see them, now that you point them out.”

  “This is the track of a beetle, I haven’t the least idea what species. Obviously a hefty fellow. The spoor is pretty fresh, not more than a few hours old. You can see where it crosses an older track here, the track of a squirrel.”

  “Surprisingly enough I do see it.”

  “Okay. Here comes the exciting part. The beetle is tooling along minding its own business, when suddenly from over here to the left a mouse leaps onto the scene to have a go at the beetle. You can see here, the way the tracks are bunched, that the mouse isn’t just strolling, it’s leaping. If we were in the United States, I’d say it was a chipmunk, but I don’t know what this might be, so I’ll call it a mouse. Anyway, the mouse grabs the beetle, and here you can see the marks where they scuffle.”

  “Yes, I see them.”

  “Now the mouse tracks continue off to the right—and the beetle tracks are seen no more. So what’s written here is that the mouse has snaffled itself a beetle snack.”

  We got ourselves back up into a sitting position.

  The first thing: reading the signs

  “Very impressive,” I said.

  “Very wwimpressive, believe me, compared to what a real tracker could do, but good enough for our purpose. There are several things I want you to see from this. The first thing is this: Chimpanzees make and use tools, so tool-making and tool-using are not uniquely human, but the reading I’ve just done here is uniquely human. Of course what I’ve done so far is only a sample of the hunting process. It’s like a still from a motion picture, which can suggest a mood and a theme but can’t convey the process of the film, which is intrinsically motion. At any moment during the hunt, the hunter is considering these questions: What was the animal doing when it made this track? How long ago was it here? Which way was it heading? How fast was it going? How far away will it be by now?—keeping in mind the season, the time of day, the temperature, the condition of the ground, the nature of the terrain, and of course the typical behavior of the animal being tracked and other animals in the neighborhood as well.

  “Here’s a small example. One day an anthropologist was tagging along with a !Kung hunter in the Kalihari. Around noon they abandoned one hunt as hopeless and started looking around for something else to go after. Soon they came across a gemsbok track the hunter judged to be just a couple hours old. After half an hour of tracking, however, the hunter called it off. He explained that the track hadn’t been made that morning after all, pointing out as proof a gemsbok hoofprint with a mouse track running across it. Since mice are nocturnal, the gemsbok track had to have been made during the night. In other words, this particular gemsbok was long gone.”

  “Yes, I see.”

  “Now, this isn’t a feat of observation and ratiocination that’s going to win that !Kung hunter a Nobel prize, but it’s a feat that is light-years beyond anything our nearest primate kin is capable of. An ape with the right sort of training may persuade you that it’s doing what we do when we talk, but no ape with any amount of training will ever persuade you that it’s doing what this !Kung hunter was doing when he tracked the gemsbok.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.”

  “This is what I’m proposing here, Jared: We didn’t cross the line when we started using tools, we crossed the line when we became hunters. Our nonhuman ancestors were tool-makers and -users but they weren’t hunters, because they didn’t have the mental equipment to be hunters. In other words, we became human by hunting—and of course we became hunters by becoming human. And, by the way, hunting is not an exclusively male activity among aboriginal peoples of today, so there’s no reason to suppose it was an exclusively male activity among our earliest human ancestors.”

  “Excuse me—I hope this won’t sound like an inquisitorial question—but it sounds like you’re saying that we hunted before we were hunters. How can you hunt before you’re a hunter?”

  “How can you fly before you’re a flier, Jared?”

  “I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”

  “The same question has to be resolved for every evolutionary development. Here’s the classic challenge: If the eye developed gradually, then it was useless till it was all complete and functional, and being useless, it conferred no benefit on its owner—so why did it evolve at all? The answer is that something less than an eye is useful to its owner. Any sensory tissue, no matter how primitive, is better than none. No matter how the eye began, it gave its owner a slight edge. The same is true of a behavior like hunting. Even the most primitive tracking ability will give you a slight edge over those who don’t have it—and any slight edge tends to increase your representation in the gene pool. As the hunters’ representation in the gene pool increases, the behavior spreads, and in each generation the best hunters—even if they’re well below modern standards—will have an edge and will tend to be better represented in the gene pool. In other words, hunting ability—which in humans doesn’t mean speed or power but rather intelligence—was the vector for natural selection in the case of human evolution. Intelligence of a human order wasn’t just a lucky accident; it didn’t evolve just so we could have beautiful thoughts.”

  “It seems like language would have had a role in all this.”

  “Of course it did. I told you we became human when we developed a new lifestyle. Nonhuman primates make their living by foraging, but foraging doesn’t require much communication. A band of primates can settle into an area and begin foraging without any planning or coordination or cooperation or allotment of tasks. They just move in, and everybody starts munching. But this sort of behavior won’t work for primate hunters. You can’t just move in and have everybody start hunting. Hunting teamwork is what pays off—but in primates no hunting teamwork is genetically wired in, the way it is with wolves or hyenas. In primates, hunting teamwork can only come about through communication.”

  “So you’re saying language developed as an adjunct to hunting.”

  “Language developed because it conferred advantages. It didn’t have to confer only one advantage. Language ability made you valuable as a hunting partner—therefore it also made you valuable as a mate. Language ability meant you were both more likely to survive and more likely to reproduce.”

  “It seems to me that language and hunting developed reciprocally, then. And if that’s the case, then we became human not just by hunting but by hunting and talking.”

  B nodded. “You’re not contradicting me, though you seem to think you are. You’re just anticipating me. I can’t say everything at once.”

  For some reason, this comment struck me as funny, especially when I imagined myself responding to it with: “Well, why not?” For a moment I thought I’d be able to hold it in and suppress it, but my central nervous system had other ideas, and I started sniggering, then I started chuckling, then I started snorting, then I started guffawing—and it was at this point that B decided to join in, and we laughed ourselves good and silly for about two minutes.

  We both ended up gasping for breath and grinning foolishly, with tears running down our faces, and for a split second she had something in her eye that made me think she almost mistook me for a fellow human being. Then we both took a deep, shuddery breath, got a grip on our e
motions, and went back to work.

  The “hunting gene”

  Again she patted the ground in front of us. “I said there were several things I wanted you to take from this demonstration. The first is that we became human by reading the signs—and of course by talking. We didn’t become human by banging on rocks or by making up sonnets. Intelligence invited us to explore a new lifestyle, based on hunting and foraging rather than just foraging alone. This new lifestyle demanded—and rewarded—new forms of communication and cooperation.

  “Here is the second thing I want you to take from this demonstration. There will inevitably be people who imagine that I’m offering a rationale for ‘human violence.’ Nothing could be further from my mind. In the first place, no special rationale is needed for humans, because humans are not remarkably or unusually violent—outside of our own culture, which represents a tiny, tiny fraction of humanity. Outside of our culture, humans are violent in the same circumstances that other species are typically violent—in establishing and defending territory. This has nothing—literally nothing—to do with political boundaries. Germany isn’t a territory in a biological sense. The connection between political territoriality and biological territoriality is purely metaphorical. Do you know what I mean by that?”

  “I haven’t the foggiest idea.”

  “Maybe we can get to it later. Just at the moment I want to make sure you see that, outside of this one deranged culture of ours, we humans are not more violent than other species—and it wasn’t hunting that made us as violent as we are. Our foraging ancestors were just as violent. Nonhunters are just as violent. Vegetarian species are just as violent. Nor are we the only species whose members visit violence on each other. Nothing could be further from the truth. Aside from predation, virtually all violence observed in the biological community is intraspecies violence. I can’t explain everything here all at once, so you’ll have to follow up on this on your own if you’re interested.