'Hunting' Review: The Meat of the Story

A detail from a seventh-century B.C. relief depicting the lion hunt of Ashurbanipal. Alamy Brian Fagan, who died last year at the age of 88, was a well-known archaeologist with an unusual knack for making science accessible to the general public. A professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, he wrote or edited nearly 50 books and worked on documentaries for PBS, Time-Life and the BBC. In "Hunting: The Pursuit That Shaped Humanity," he offers a comprehensive, authoritative history tracing hunting's influence on culture and society through the ages. Here's the thing. Fagan never hunted. He didn't want to. The one time he was expected to shoot a kudu (a species of antelope from eastern and southern Africa), he deliberately missed. What's more, the book wasn't even his idea. Yale University approached him. Throughout, he seems almost willfully incurious about why people hunt. He doesn't condemn the pursuit outright, but you can feel him biting his tongue. "Recreational hunting is seemingly in decline," he writes, "but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Why does one have to kill one's quarry to enjoy it?" Michael Pollan, the author of "The Omnivore's Dilemma" (2006), suggests that the moral complexity of killing for food can force hunters to confront the reality of eating meat. "The fact that you cannot come out of hunting feeling unambiguously good about it," Mr. Pollan once wrote in an essay, "is perhaps what should commend the practice" to meat eaters. This is an avenue that Fagan leaves completely unexplored. Hunting almost certainly began in East Africa, with our ancient ancestors scavenging the kills of other predators. (Archaeologists call this "confrontational scavenging" because sooner or later the hyenas will show up.) Marks made by cutting and percussion appear on animal bones found in Ethiopia dating back some 3.4 million years. Meat and marrow, Fagan points out, were never the main event but an occasional supplement to a diet of plants and other collectible foods. The three "catalysts" leading to hunting, Fagan observes, begin with developing an intimate knowledge of the prey and the crucial skill of stalking; butchering and sharing meat forced us to become more social animals; the ability to make and use primitive weapons, beginning with the stone choppers that are the forerunners of today's rifles, furthered the practice. But stalking -- the ability to get within a spear thrust of prey -- remained the essence of hunting right up into historical times. Stalking requires repeated experience and endless patience. An unsuccessful stalk is pure frustration, while a successful one is often the most thrilling and memorable aspect of a hunt. Neanderthals, our closest extinct ancestors, were expert hunters. Wooden spears and throwing sticks found in Schoningen, Germany, date from some 300,000 years ago. They are from 7 to 8 feet long, made from carefully selected 50-to-60-year-old pine and spruce trees felled in early summer; tests of replica spears have suggested a range of about 38 yards. A 120,000-year-old deer skeleton, also discovered in Germany, shows a spear wound where the pelvic bone was thinnest, suggesting that the hunter knew exactly where to aim. Such hunting was an extremely risky business: The pelvic wound suggests that the hunter may have been directly beneath his prey, thrusting upward. Long before the birth of Christ, royal hunts were a universally recognized way for a king to manifest his courage and fitness to rule. The Assyrians were the first to turn royal hunting into a formal event; a relief in the British Museum depicts King Ashurbanipal, from the seventh century B.C., almost casually dispatching a lion, as one would expect of someone favored by the gods. Over time, royal hunts became enormous productions in China, India, the Middle East and Europe. Enormous ring hunts depended on hemming in the prey and driving it into an ever-tightening circle, ensuring abundant kills for the king and a memorable spectacle for onlookers. "One 13th-century Persian ruler assembled 12,000 horsemen and 4,000 people on foot for one of his hunts," Fagan tells us. In 1683 Shah Sulayman of Persia staged a hunt that reportedly required 80,000 beaters and lasted from early May to July. The ring itself might start out many miles in diameter. Genghis Khan held a major hunt each year in which the ring was gradually "reduced" to about 3½ miles wide, "a viable size," we are told, "for a successful hunt." Hunting was so widespread that it amounted to an international language; it became a way for nobles to connect with rulers and rulers with one another. Louis XIV staged lavish hunts at Versailles -- which itself had started as a modest hunting lodge -- complete with courtesans, orchestras and elaborate carriages. Royal hunts served to exercise a kingdom's military and occasionally as springboards to war. They also lent themselves to political intrigue. A king, Fagan writes, might easily "suffer a carefully staged accidental fall from his horse, a tragically misfired arrow, or a gash from a wild boar's tusk." In A.D. 168, a Chinese ruler was murdered when his uncle shot him with an arrow. "A later report noted laconically" that the uncle "made himself king." Royals were serious about keeping game to themselves and protecting their property. William the Conqueror, who took over 20 small towns in the south of England to create a hunting preserve in the New Forest, decreed that "whosoever slew a hart, or a hind, should be deprived of his eyesight." An eighth-century Germanic law stipulated that anyone who stole a hawk must "let the hawk in question eat six ounces of meat [placed] on his testicles." As a broad history of the pursuit around the world, "Hunting" succeeds in guiding the reader through various contexts without oversimplifying them. This is no small accomplishment and would have tripped up a lesser writer. Fagan's wide scope naturally comes at the expense of some depth, and the author remains stubbornly aloof from the behavior he describes. The book ends with Fagan questioning the appeal of hunting across the millennia and sidestepping an answer. "Do we hunt for the same reason birds sing -- a combination of utility and deeply evolved satisfaction? Is it simply wired into us genetically? We don't know."