Name highly intelligent social species that organize as groups and cooperate to protect three successive generations in extended families and clans (one key aspect being nurturing fathers in addition to nurturing mothers). Humans and wolves come to mind. But isn't even more fascinating that these two species should be so intimately involved with each other since the start of 'human civilization'?
The wolf becomes the enemy of humans once humans are with wolf-dogs. The wolf represents a social top-of-the-food chain cooperative hunter who is still in the niche we have aimed to monopolize for ourselves (throwing the scraps to our wolf-dogs) but stands off and away from human civilization. Regardless of chromosomes and theories of co-evolution, it's hard to argue against the profundity of human-animal social cooperation in the case of these species: wolf-dogs (we become transgenerational hunters, manipulators and masters of huge herds of herbivores), the 'house' cat (we can store huge amounts of grain, at least in dry climates like Egypt, Mesopotamia), and the horse (look how quickly the Mongols and the Lakota Sioux organized themselves once they had the horses). How can you care what your ancestors knew and wanted to pass on to you if you don't give a toss about your own grandparents? Wolves and humans do. In areas of Central Asia, there is still this stand-off between humans and wolves. Wolf packs know not to prey on the humans' herds (managed with wolf-dogs). Central Asians do not attempt to hunt down wolves in order to eliminate them from their herding/grazing territory. The only wolf that preys on humans' herds is the occasional 'lone wolf' that can not join a pack or form a new one with a mate. This lone wolf will be hunted down and killed. One method is to use trained eagles who literally trail the lone wolf from the air until it is exhausted and then they kill it. I wonder if this is one of the reasons why the eagle became such a revered animal among North American tribes (I don't know enough about animal husbandry amongst these peoples, but the Incans were great domesticators of herbivores). I am also thinking that the ancients had hunches about social human-wolf origins. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_children_in_mythology_and_fiction In mythology and ancient literature Enkidu, raised by unspecified beasts, becomes the friend of the hero Gilgamesh. (see also Epic of Gilgamesh) The brothers Romulus and Remus, raised by a wolf, become the founders of Rome. In Turkic mythology, the female wolf Asena finds an injured child following a devastating battle and nurses him back to health. He subsequently impregnates her, and she gives birth to ten half-wolf, half-human boys. Of these, Ashina becomes their leader and founder of the clan that ruled the Göktürks and other Turkic nomadic empires.[2][3] The legend has parallels with folktales of other Turkic peoples, for instance, the Uyghurs. In Ibn Tufail's Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, Hayy is raised by a gazelle on a desert island and becomes an autodidactic philosopher. In Ibn al-Nafis' Theologus Autodidactus, Kamil is also raised by animals on a deserted island, and becomes an autodidactic scientist and theologian. [edit] In modern prose An early modern example of a feral child comes from Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. His protagonist, Mowgli, is raised by wolves and becomes the ruler of the jungle. Tarzan, raised by apes, has become an iconic hero of novels, comic strips, and motion pictures. Peter Pan, created by J. M. Barrie, is a boy who fled to the magical Neverland and refused to grow up. Shasta of the Wolves (1919) by Olaf Baker, in which a Native American boy is raised by a wolfpack in the Pacific Northwest. Jungle Born (1924) by John Eyton, in which a boy raised by apes in northern India inadvertently saves a teenage girl from her abusive father. The theme of young adolescent runaways seeking shelter with wild animals and learning their ways is seen in novels such as the Newbery Medal-winning novel Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George. Jane Yolen's Passager (1996), the first of the Young Merlin trilogy of short novels, depicts a slightly more realistic view of such childhood. Abandoned in a Welsh forest at the age of seven years, the boy who will become Merlin lives in the forest for a year nearly as well as its natives, until a falconer who is used to domesticating animals captures him and begins the long and difficult task of educating him in human behavior. In Karen Hesse's The Music of Dolphins, a young girl called Mila is found after having been raised by dolphins for over a decade. In the book, Mila is taken to a clinic with other undomesticated human young, none of whom adapt to main-stream humanity as easily as she does. At the end of the book, Mila returns to the dolphin pod, showing her rejection of human society. In the series starting with Through Wolf's Eyes by author Jane Lindskold, a young girl's family and colony are killed by a fire, and she is the only survivor. She is then taken in by the "Royal Wolves" who speak their own language with gestures and signals. Because Firekeeper had already learned a human language before going to live with the wolves, she was able to return to human society and became a valuable asset to the royalty, but she found that humans were not as noble as the wolves she loved as family. It is her greatest wish to become a wolf herself and leave the humans behind again. In Robert A. Heinlein's novel Stranger in a Strange Land, Valentine Michael Smith is a human raised by Martians on Mars, as he returns to Earth in early adulthood. The novel explores his interaction with — and eventual transformation of — human culture. In Boris and Arkady Strugatsky's novel The Little One (also known as Space Mowgly), a human from Earth, Piere Semyonov, has been raised by an alien non-humanoid civilization after his parents' spaceship crashed onto an uncharted planet. After his discovery by the Terran scientists, several attempts to integrate him back to human society were undertaken, but all were in vain. Ursula K. Le Guin's Hugo-winning short story "The Ones Who Walk Away >From Omelas" tells of the title community, a beautiful, happy and prosperous city that nevertheless exists only as long as, somewhere within, a child is kept in conditions of appalling physical and psychological neglect. World War Z by Max Brooks contain many references to feral children - in this case, children who were separated from normal humanity at some point during the zombie war, and were forced to live in the wild, contending not just with the problems of survival but also the hazard posed by the walking dead. The novel suggests they formed a kind of rudimentary social or "pack" structure with basic tool-using abilities, and in most cases were capable of being slowly rehabilitated. In the 2006 book Dogboy by Victor Kelleher, a young boy is abandoned at birth by his mother and is raised by a half domestic dog in a litter of puppies. He is later bought back to a nearby human settlement by the dog, searching for a home with her owner once again, and her only surviving pup but is rejected as an abomination. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
