Radical thinking about the relationships among human, hyena, and lion

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Before reading this Post, please watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gKUSvmxRs4. Dear reader, which emotions does this footage evoke?

Homo sapiens has been competing as a ‘top predator’ with the lion (Panthera leo) and the spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta) for hundreds of thousands of years.

Therefore, our emotional reactions to these animals may be ‘hard-wired’ into us, as follows.
 
We find adults of the lion appealing and empathetic. Even more remarkably, we find infants of this species downright attractive.

This is surprising, because the lion has always been one of our enemies, an animal capable of killing (and even eating) us. I have often wondered, how is it possible - assuming that the principle of natural selection applies - for humans to feel so loving towards the infants of an ancestral enemy?

To this we can add: how is it possible to love the babies so much of a species that was our guild-member, and thus competitor for big game?

We love, and identify with, the lion, a species with which we co-evolved from the start. What might make more sense would be an inimical relationship, whether as its competitor or as its victim (I hesitate to say prey, because I doubt that the lion enjoys eating humans).
 
Our attitude to the spotted hyena is remarkably different.

As in the case of the lion, we evolved deeply with Crocuta crocuta. This continued, in the same times and places, right into our period of being modern, pale-skinned Caucasians and East Asians, in the last tens of thousands of years in Europe and China.

This historical coincidence corresponds with the lion. But, by contrast, our instinctive reaction to this hyena is, more or less, one of loathing.

I suspect that virtually everyone, including carnivore-loving naturalists, finds adults of the spotted hyena emotionally repulsive at some level (https://wildestofficial.com/wildlife/the-ugly-five-animals-of-africa/ and https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/n-old-ugly-hyena-1978372043), relative to the lion.

I feel ambivalence towards infants of the spotted hyena, which can have appealing eyes, close-up. However, I perceive that even these infants, which are black and rather pugilistic-looking, are not as appealing as the infants of the lion are.
 
It is possible that a generalised love of infants is extremely deep in us, owing to some kind of ancestral parental instinct. This may extend even to the infants of our enemies.

So, let us consider only adults.
 
We have evolved with both lion and spotted hyena, and we have had much to fear from both. So, it is unsurprising that we still loathe the hyena. What is surprising is that we love the lion, and almost never find its appearance repulsive.
 
Innorder to explain this anomaly, I venture a thought so radical that it may elicit skepticism from many naturalists. But, does anyone have a better explanation?
 
What if the lion was not, during our evolution, actually much of an enemy to us?

What if it did not like to eat us owing to our unappetising taste, and what if the real relationship was overall beneficial to us?

What I am thinking of here: the lion is happy to eat lean meat, which we do not prefer, because we are relatively dependent on fat.

However, the lion tends to leave the marrow and brains, which is the fatty part we like. So we evolved exploiting lion kills for their marrow. In that sense, we ‘liked’ the lion, and profited by its predatory activities.

The basic idea here is that we are not actually deeply competitive with the lion. Sure, both we and the lion were top predators, but we were as much commensal with the lion as competitive with it.
 
Turning to the spotted hyena: both the enmity and the competition run deeper.

This hyena readily ate us, teeth and all (because it happily accepts carrion). Furthermore, it is just as keen on the marrow as we are, and is equipped to pip us to the post with its bone-crushing premolars.

Can anyone think of the slightest benefit that early humans could have derived from the spotted hyena? How could we possibly have been commensal with it?
 
The idea is that, because we are so deeply inimical with the spotted hyena, loathing it (at least in adult form) has been 'hard-wired' into us, by natural selection.

This antipathy goes to the extent that we do not even want to think about this species.

Which is why, although the spotted hyena is deeply European, and is part of not only modern human history, but even White European history, few people realise this. Even when they learn the fact, they hardly pass it on. That the spotted hyena was recently indigenous to Europe came as a surprise to every member of the audience in a public lecture I presented recently - despite having been established as a scientific fact for more than half a century.

(Here is a reference to the fact that very same species of spotted hyena, Crocuta crocuta, occurred in China until as recently as seven thousand years ago: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/259251189_Pleistocene_Chinese_cave_hyenas_and_the_recent_Eurasian_history_of_the_spotted_hyena_Crocuta_crocuta.)
 
My rationale goes as follows.

In guilds of carnivores, it is normal for there to be lethal enmity, of a sort not seen among coexisting herbivores. However, carnivores do not usually eat other, like-size, carnivores, after killing them in jealous anger.

In the case of the lion we are as much commensal as competitive, making this species, overall, a benefactor to us. This mitigated the enmity, and our capacity to defend ourselves with weapons aided a balance of power.

In the case of the spotted hyena, the relationship differs from the normal one of 'carnivore-hates-carnivore'. This is because this hyena will not only kill us in anger (which is normal among carnivorous species), but will cheerfully eat us as well, dead or alive, and pre- or post-burial, if already dead from other causes.

And w.r.t. our predatory preferences, the spotted hyena really is our competitor, a dangerous nuisance that tends to get to the marrow before us.

Furthermore, it was possible for humans to limit the population of the spotted hyena, even prehistorically, when our weapons were primitive. This is because hyenids are less fecund than felids such as the lion, and we could kill infants in their burrows.

It is partly in the light of this exacerbated/aggravated enmity that I have found so surprising the affection established with hand-reared individuals of the spotted hyena by Kevin Richardson, in South Africa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Richardson_(zookeeper)).

Publicado el julio 20, 2022 03:45 MAÑANA por milewski