The Animal Kingdom's Primal Call

“Animate

 

By Michael Bond

 

Pegasus, 304 pages, $32

 

Human domestication has shaped animals, but the evolutionary river flows both ways. Animals have also shaped us, notably our minds. In "Animate," Michael Bond takes readers back 15,000 years to a time when the lives of our ancestors were dominated by wild animals in a way unrecognizable to most people today.

 

Mr. Bond depicts daily existence for early humans in Europe during the Ice Age: "They compete for food with cave lions, wolves and leopards, for sleeping space with bears and spotted hyenas. They are accustomed to the taste of reindeer and horse and spend a good deal of their time hunting them. They encounter regularly the woolly rhinoceros with its giant head slung low to the grass." At great peril they sometimes hunt the mammoth for its meat and its large bones and tusks. "For humans of the Ice Age," Mr. Bond writes, "wild animals are part of everything they know."

 

A former editor at New Scientist, Mr. Bond explores the many ways in which animals have shaped human psychology. "Our fellow creatures have infiltrated the circuits of our brain and the fabric of our culture," he writes. "Thoughts of animals are as much a part of our inheritance as the DNA we share with them." He shows how the neural architecture of the amygdala (the seat of intense emotions) and the visual cortex (which processes sensory input) gives rise to love and fear of certain animals. There is also the phenomenon of pareidolia, the tendency to see images of animals, religious figures and other beings in clouds or pieces of toast.

 

Mr. Bond guides readers through ancient depictions of animals, including the gorgeous array of prehistoric cave paintings, with their mixture of dangerous predators and powerful herbivores. Such images testify to the salience of animals to our predecessors, and these renderings remain psychologically compelling to modern viewers. "Visitors to Les Combarelles, Rouffignac, Lascaux and the other caves are often profoundly moved by what they find," he writes. "Confronted with the artworks in the place where they were made, it is customary to try to reach out, across an ocean of time, to the people who brought them into being, who, safe to assume in the habit of all artists, were expressing something that mattered to them, and that might matter to us."

 

Animals figure prominently in children's books and adult dreams. We even see them in the stars. Among our hunter-gatherer ancestors, natural selection probably favored those most attuned to animals and disfavored those who were unaware. "An intuitive emotional reaction to the slightest possibility of an animal," Mr. Bond writes, "would have considerably increased their chances of survival." He also reports that animals are among the most common responses to Rorschach inkblots.

 

For thousands of years, Mr. Bond observes, thinkers have policed the animal-human boundary, seeking to keep both sides separate and establish humans as overlords of the natural world. Aristotle developed the idea of a chain of being in which he ranked humans above animals. Rene Descartes was convinced that animals were mere automatons, without thoughts or even the ability to feel pain (he vivisected dogs, ignoring their screams). Others maintained that animals were rational creatures. "No truth appears to me more evident," David Hume declared in 1739, "than that beasts are endowed with thought and reason as well as men."

 

"Animate" includes a fascinating chapter on clinical lycanthropy, a psychiatric condition in which the sufferer believes that he or she is an animal. "In most instances," Mr. Bond writes, "the change animal is a wolf, though the medical literature contains reports of people transmuting into dogs, cats, bulls, tigers, bees, birds, frogs, gerbils, horses, hyenas, snakes, sharks, crocodiles, wild boar and even a rhinoceros." According to the biblical Book of Daniel, King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylonia spent seven years in the wilderness eating grass and behaving like an ox.

 

Mr. Bond also explores how researchers are able to interpret the "language" of certain animals, notably the different barks and whines of dogs and the songs and calls of birds. To some degree, an animal-to-human translator resides within our brains, another echo of the influence of animals on the human mind. Similarly suggestive are the effectiveness of animal-assisted therapies and the frequency of animals in psychedelic-induced visions.

 

In the modern world, Mr. Bond writes, "we have become, perhaps, too human: too certain of our own reality, too wrapped up in our mythology of exceptionalism. Somewhere along the way, we have forgotten how to be animal." As Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli says to his animal friends in "The Jungle Book" (1894), "we be of one blood, ye and I."

 

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Mr. Barash is an evolutionary biologist and professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Washington. His latest book is "The Soul Delusion."” [1]

 

1. REVIEW --- Books: The Animal Kingdom's Primal Call. Barash, David P.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 03 Oct 2026: C9.