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1986

Hunting and the Evolution of Human Intelligence: An Alternative

View
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone

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Recommended Citation
Sheets-Johnstone, M. (1986). Hunting and the evolution of human intelligence: an alternative view. The
Midwest Quarterly, 28(1): 9-35.

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Hunting and the Evolution
of Human Intelligence:
An Alternative View
MAXINE SHEETS-JOHNSTONE

T HE COMMON NOTION of thinking and doing

construes them as antithetical activities, and
moreover esteems thinking to be a uniquely human
capacity. The net effect is to enshrine intelligence in
the brain—the human brain. What I want to show in
this paper is that intelligence does not reside at such a
doubly exclusive address: it resides in living bodies,
human and nonhuman. Otherwise stated, the purpose
is to show that the light-bulb theory, as it might be
called, is erroneous; while the common notion re-
quires a deus ex machina origin of thinking in the
evolutionary world, the paleoanthropological case
study presented here will show existential analyses to
support evolutionary continuities. Let me set the
stage for this alternative understanding of intelligence
by clarifying quite briefly the sense in which pa-
leoanthropological reconstructions are hermeneutical
and illustrating the way in which they fall short of a
complete hermeneutical account.
Thomas Kuhn brought to forceful awareness the fact
that the normal practice of any science is hermeneu-
tical. That is, whatever the data, interpretation is the
mainstay of the enterprise and the pivotal point in the
production of new knowledge. But in paleoanthropo-
logy, where it is a question of bones, of disconnected
and/or isolated fragments of data, something more is
needed in the way of interpretation to begin with. As I
have elsewhere demonstrated, it is not simply a mat-

(9)
10 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

ter of interpreting bones in respect to age, taxon, and

the like. This interpretation is only the prelude of the
hermeneutical enterprise. Interpretation at this point
places the fossil specimens in evolutionary time but it
does not illuminate their living reality. The next in-
terpretive step i^ to transform the bones into a text to
be read and interpreted in the same way that an old
manuscript or an old monument might be read and
interpreted. As Ricoeur has suggested, "The human
sciences may be said to be hermeneutical . . .
inasmuch as their object displays some of the features
constitutive of a text as text" (259).
Only when fleshed out and made to stand on their
own do fossil bones take on animate meanings and
find their ultimate interpretation within evolutionary
history. In the hands of paleoanthropologists, how-
ever, fossil bones habitually fall short of their exis-
tential meanings. In other words, the hermeneutical
enterprise peculiar to paleoanthropology is not fully
recognized or carried out, and it is not carried out
precisely in the sense that the sensory-kinetic world
lay which bones become flesh—or behaviors become
living realities—is not re-created. The data used by
the paleoanthropologist to assess early hominid in-
telligence, for example, center on fossil specimens in
the form of brain endocasts and on certain behavioral
analogies. The analogies are used heuristically, the
rationale being that the life of ancient hominid crea-
tures resembles in one way and another the life of
present-day social carnivores, the life of present-day
nonhuman primates, and the life of present-day
hunter-gatherer societies. Brain endocasts, for their
part, are associated with brain size, which in turn is
consistently associated with intelligence even though
the correlation between brain size and intelligence is
not consistent, e.g., both Neanderthal and dolphin
cranial capacity are larger than that of present-day
 BRAIN AND BODY 11

humans. Nevertheless in view of the fact that ho-

minids progressively came to have bigger brains than
their evolutionary cousins, the nonhuman primates,
bigger brains are consistently equated with the ca-
pacity to handle more and more complex information.
In effect, intelligence is spoken of mainly in terms of
mental properties. While it might in rare instances be
tied explicitly to perception, and in even rarer in-
stances tied implicitly to action, language and think-
ing appear to be its closest and most dearly cherished
kin, these latter accomplishments being taken of
course as wholly mental phenomena and preemin-
ently, if not exclusively, human achievements.
Now a paradoxical and key shortcoming of the
above viewpoint is that the story of the evolution of
intelligence remains at a general and abstract level; it
is not rooted in the actual sensory-kinetic world in
which long-ago evolutionary creatures lived their
lives. In order to shed light on the evolution of ho-
minid intelligence, it is not mere behavior which
must be coaxed out of some old hominid bones; it is
experience, which means in part an understanding of
the way in which the world appeared to early hominid
creatures. Hence the need for a deeper hermeneutics.
To understand the sensory-kinetic ground upon
which a creature differentiates and recognizes things
and attributes of things in its world is to understand
the species-specific meanings—the existential signi-
fications—which anchor its conjectured behaviors.
Meanings engendered in experience are indeed the
very ground of any conjectures about behaviors in the
first place, whether those behaviors have to do with
eating, mating, hunting, or whatever. It is vital to
uncover this primordial, nonverbal stratum of mean-
ing in order to re-create early hominid life and, in
turn, gain a just understanding of the evolution of
hominid intelligence.
12 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

An uncovering of existential significations in hunt-

ing behavior will flesh out and thereby exemplify the
hermeneutical dimension lacking in paleoanthropo-
logical accounts. This elucidation of meanings will
bear forcefully and directly upon an understanding of
the evolution of hominid intelligence insofar as the
latter is consistently pictured as seminal and as de-
velopmentally tied to early hominid hunting behav-
ior. Itinerant examinations of the implications of these
meanings in respect to chess-playing—typically con-
sidered a wholly mental undertaking—and to danc-
ing—typically considered a wholly bodily undertak-
ing—will furthermore shed light on present-day
assumptions about intelligence. The procedure will
be to summarize first, and in the briefest terms, the
dominant themes in paleoanthropological accounts of
hunting and then to probe a specific account for its
existential significations.
Hunting: A Paleoanthropological Case Study
Early hominid hunting is typically defined in terms
of what it required as well as what it accomplished.
Thus it is discussed in terms of technology, coopera-
tion, sharing, communication, a sexual division of
labor, the having of a base camp, knowledge of a
wider territory and of the habits of a variety of an-
imals. Only when an actual analogy to present-day
nonhuman and human hunting behaviors is made,
however, do existential significations begin to show
through the behavioral characteristic being discussed.
The significations are apparent, for example, in the
statement that "wolves and wild dogs have a sharp
eye for spotting the more vulnerable member of a
herd"; that animals depend on "important intentional
clues by watching one another"; and that hunters
place "a great premium on quietness" (Leakey and
Levin, 154-55). From definition as a form of behavior.
 BRAIN AND BODY 13

hunting becomes a real-life existential event in which

certain powers of physiognomic awareness and a cer-
tain domain of kinetic possibilities emerge. In short, a
certain sensory-kinetic world comes to life.
Concrete aspects of this existential reality can be
uncovered by taking up the behavioral account of
hunting offered by two zoologists, Peters and Mech,
in their article "Behavioral and Intellectual Adapta-
tions of Selected Mammalian Predators to the Prob-
lem of Hunting Large Animals." Through an inves-
tigation of what they designate as "behavioral
solutions to the problems of detection, apprehension
and use of large prey" (279), Peters and Mech want to
show the relationship between a hunting way of life
and the development of intelligence in hominids.
Specifically, their purpose is to examine particular
adaptive behaviors common to present-day nonhu-
man hunting animals and to show how "increased
degrees" of these adaptive behaviors fostered human
intelligence. They identify the behavioral solutions in
terms of four behavioral traits: persistence, coopera-
tion, strategy, and cognitive mapping,* each of which
is taken as being "of significant value to any organism
dependent on the capture of large prey" (280).
Persistence: While Peters and Mech acknowledge the
claim of other zoologists that persistence in early
hominids "selected for increased attention span lead-
ing to an expansion of the brain which resulted in the
emergency of genus Homo" (296), they do not see the
trait as necessary to the evolutionary success of early
hominid hunters. Although they end by dismissing it
as a factor, we will examine it briefly in order to bring
out a fundamental and widespread belief about in-
A modest conceptual disorder should he noted: cofiuitive inappiufi is listed as a
hehavioral trait when, as will he evident, it is conceived and treated as a ljrain
product.
14 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

telligence, one which assumes and maintains an evo-

lutionary human/nonhuman discontinuity.
In zoological research, bodily activities of nonhu-
man animals are not considered to be anything more
than a behavioral substrate of intelligence. Thus per-
sistence in wolves, for example, is never spoken of in
terms of attention span, let alone an increased atten-
tion span; it is spoken of only in terms of certain
bodily doings—keeping up a chase at full speed, for
instance, for twenty minutes. In effect, that a wolf
persists in doing something is not itself a sign of
intelligence; only what is taken as a mental product of
some kind—an increased attention span—is a mark of
intelligence. The reasoning is roughly as follows:
1) Intelligence is not a bodily phenomenon but
may be fostered by bodily activities.
2) Persistence is just such a bodily activity—a trait
which may contribute significantly to the be-
havioral substrate of intelligence.
3) To evolve intellectually, hominids evolved
"progressively higher degrees" of e.g., persis-
tence; that is, they evolved "an increased atten-
tion span" (Peters and Mech, 296, 297).
4) Behavioral traits such as persistence are there-
fore not of themselves signs of intelligence in the
nonhuman animal world; they are merely bodily
doings.
In this line of reasoning, a metamorphosis takes
place in the behavioral trait between the second and
third postulates. A quantitative shift gives way to a
qualitative difference in kind. In this way it is possi-
ble to avoid suggesting that nonhuman animals are
intelligent, or if they are, that their intelligence is the
same in kind as that of humans and that intelligence is
in any way a bodily phenomenon. In effect, evolu-
 BRAIN AND BODY 15

tionary continuities are resolutely and soundly

blocked.
An interesting implication of this line of thinking
becomes evident when a different-in-kind nonhuman
animal intelligence is granted rather than no intelli-
gence at all. The implication can be traced out by
asking whether the persistence of a dancer toward
mastery of a plie sequence signifies a human or a
nonhuman intelligence. If the former, what are the
higher degrees of persistence to be attributed to the
dancer? What is different about a wolf persisting in a
run for twenty minutes and a dancer's persisting in a
plie sequence for twenty minutes? Since both are,
from the postulate point of view, wholly and simply
bodily doings, both would seem to engender the same
kind of intelligence. In short, the dancer's intelli-
gence appears to be on a par with the wolfs.
While there does not seem to be good reason for
finding the similarity disturbing, there are good rea-
sons for finding disturbing the idea that the intelli-
gence in question is discontinuous with, and of a
lower order than, another kind of intelligence la-
belled "human," or "properly human." If we in fact
look at the actual p h e n o m e n a themselves—the
twenty-minute run and the twenty-minute plie se-
quence—it is certainly apparent that in each, judg-
ments are being made, decisions are being taken,
controls are being exercised, and so on, all in the
name of certain noticings, certain awarenesses of a
particular happening-in-process. Whatever the en-
deavor, an intelligent persistence would seem indeed
to be first and foremost a bodily intelligence in that it
is not a blind persistence. It is alive with meanings
and it is kept alive by meanings, all of which are
generated by a sensory-kinetic grasp of the situation at
hand. The moment those meanings are acknowledged
and taken into account—whether a matter of direc-
16 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

tional configurations, positional changes, temporal

patterns, or tensional shifts—it is apparent not only
that more is going on than might meet a behaviorist's
or human supremacist's eye, but that more must be
taken into account in any serious and complete ap-
praisal of a creature's intelligence—whether wolf or
dancer. It might even be added that a chess-player's
persistence is intelligent not because of an attention
span of a certain length but because of a sensory-ki-
netic perspicuity which grounds the very possibility
of a steadfast and unwavering attack.
The rectitude and implications of the double-faced
belief—that nonhuman animal behaviors are nothing
but bodily doings and that bodily doings cannot be
characterized as intelligent—will be thematic impli-
citly and explicitly throughout the uncovering of ex-
istential significations of each of the other behavioral
traits. Of these remaining traits, there is virtual una-
nimity of opinion: cooperation, strategy, and cognitive
mapping, are each considered bonafide cornerstones
of hominid intelligence. In what follows, the proce-
dure will be to examine three existential significa-
tions in respect to each trait, to show that a full-bodied
nonhuman intelligence is evident in every case, and,
in effect, to show that evolutionary continuities may
be validated existentially.
Cooperation: What does it mean for a group of preda-
tors to be able to detect suitable prey out of a milling
mass of animals or to test a herd by rushing it? It
means that physiognomic powers of perception are
honed to a rich and fine acuity. The predatory animals
read individual and mass movements of the prey
animals, not as symbols but as existential events.
They read each other's movements in like manner.
Animals engaged in a hunt are in fact thinking in
movement in the sense of putting together a kinetic
 BRAIN AND BODY 17

drama, forging it out of the very sinew and stride of

their being. Physiognomic perception is a fundamen-
tal structure of this thoughtful drama. Group-hunting
predators are attentive to and understand straight off
certain behaviors as certain states of affairs—e.g.,
"that animal is vulnerable"—or as certain actions or
possibilities of action—e.g., "my colleague over there
is now going to rush the herd from the side and I will
balance his efforts by changing the direction of my
rush also." Cooperation in this sense is grounded in
being attentive and in noticing. Without a quintes-
sential awareness ofthe direction, rhythm, and flow of
individual and mass movements by prey and fellow
predator alike, there could be no concerted action
toward picking out a suitable prey. To cooperate in
hunting is to notice and to understand these move-
ments—these comportments—as lines of force, as
potential increases in vulnerability, and the like.
Moreover it is to understand these comportments
straightaway. It is not a question of an animal's won-
dering: "What did that mean?" or "I wonder what he
meant by that. . . ." There is an immediacy of
meaning which bespeaks a ready and sharp intelli-
gence not to be confounded either with stimulus-
response models of behavior or with an intelligence
devoid of thought, i.e., a Piagetian sensori-motor in-
telligence.
There is a reverse side of this capacity to think in
movement. It is not only physiognomic, it is kinetic;
there are meanings in the flesh as well as ofthe flesh.
Indeed, the drama is nothing other than a continuous
unfolding of these meanings. But there is not a per-
ception, and then a movement which answers it, then
another perception, and so on. Readings of qualitative
nuances are coextensive with the creating and shap-
ing ofthe ongoing scene itself. In other words, there is
a simultaneous immediacy of physiognomic and ki-
18 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

netic meanings: the animal is finely attuned to the

situation at hand, and at the same time finely tuning
the situation at hand. These are not two different
meaningful "acts." If they were, the hunt would lit-
erally dis-integiate. Rather than an ongoing drama
being created and lived out moment by moment,
there would be a series of startings and stoppings in
which beginnings and endings would have to be
artificially and arbitrarily assigned.
A hunt is quite obviously not such a series of dis-
crete, externally connected events. Neither is it a
segmented series of active and reflective moments
with animals removing themselves from the hunt from
time to time in order to ponder the erstwhile ongoing
goings-on: if it were, there would be no hunt but
perhaps something akin to a football game. Viewed
kinetically, a hunt is a flow of internally linked events
which are anchored in a constantly unfolding present
toward an undetermined future. Because the situation
is dynamic, in perpetual flux, what needs to be done is
constantly being re-defined by the qualitative sum of
all individual actions and maneuvers. From this per-
spective, to cooperate is to see shifting spatial rela-
tions, to see vulnerabilities, to see moving lines of
force, and simultaneously to see, in both a global and
individual sense, what needs to be done.
There is a deeper aspect of this capacity to think in
movement which undergirds the very possibility of
cooperating. To cooperate is already to be an individ-
ual among other individuals; it is to have an interan-
imate world. To cooperate is thus a social gesture, a
reciprocal acknowledgement of Otherness which an-
chors the very possibility of being perceptually at-
tuned to, and of kinetically tuning, a global situation
at hand. This coming together toward a mutually
chosen end might be described in Sartrean terms as
one's being for others as one is for oneself; a choosing
 BRAIN AND BODY 19

for one's good and at the same time a choice for the
good ofthe other; a balancing of one's own autonomy,
and at the same time, a full recognition of the auton-
omy of the other. Balancing and choosing in this way
are not abstract reflective maneuvers but actively
lived-through structures ofthe hunt itself in the form
of judgments, discriminations, and actions. They are
palpable forms of intelligence which are grounded in
the having of an interanimate world. There could,
after all, be no 'common good' unless there were in
the first place communal ways in which animals share
a certain viewpoint upon, and motivation toward a
world. It is precisely this communality which Leakey
points toward when he writes of the importance of
"intentional clues" (155) among social carnivores.
These clues have barely been acknowledged much
less seriously taken up and analyzed. They may in-
deed lie beyond the reach of human understanding
since humans do not and/or cannot notice what a
nonhuman animal notices: as Thomas Nagel pointed
out in a well-known article, they are unable to articu-
late its perceptions. Yet although humans may fail to
accede in any actual lived-through sense to the com-
munality of a particular nonhuman animal world, they
cannot thereby ignore or dismiss it. To do so can
result in precipitous and skewed judgments concern-
ing the nature of nonhuman animal intelligence.
The hazard and even folly of the latter judgments
can be sharply illustrated in the following manner.
Cooperation in humans can in some basic instances
be capsulated by the notion of "playing by the rules,"
a practice which obviously presupposes the funda-
mental existential reality of an interanimate world. To
play by the rules in a chess game, for example, is to
cooperate in observing certain codes ol conduct rela-
tive both to one's opponent and to each of the pieces
of the game. Playing by the rules is not, however, a
20 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

human invention. It is as much in evidence in the play

of nonhuman animals as it is in their ritual battles,
perhaps most conspicuously in the finale of these
battles when the submissive gesture of the one animal
is not violated by the other. If it is argued that higher
degrees of cooperation are present in human interac-
tions—for example, that the rules of chess are more
complicated than those of nonhuman animal play or
ritual battles—one would be hard put to reconcile that
claim with the following report by Teleki in 1974
("Chimpanzee Subsistence Technology") which,
though it does not deal with cooperation or playing by
the rules, does deal both with a kind of hunt and with
precipitous human estimations of nonhuman and
human animal intelligence.
Having repeatedly observed individuals approach a mound,
make a rapid visual scan of the surface while standing on or
beside it, and reach decisively out—with a high degree of
accuracy—to uncover a tunnel, I was soon impressed by the
apparent ease with which tunnels could be located. In at-
tempting to learn the technique, I applied several experi-
mental procedures: examining in minute detail all crack pat-
terns, protuberances, depressions and other 'topographic'
features in the clay. But, after weeks of futile searching for the
essential clue, I had to resort to scraping sound surfaces with a
jacknife until a tunnel wis inadvertently exposed. My inabil-
ity to find any physical features which could serve as visual
clues eventually led me to realize that chimpanzees may
possess knowledge far beyond my expectations.
Teleki, a widely known and respected primate
anthropologist, spent almost two years studying
chimpanzees in Gombe National Park in Tanzania.
The quoted passage appears in his discussion of the
ability of chimpanzees to locate termite tunnels. It
demonstrates clearly that there is more to nonhuman
animal intelligence than meets a naive (or arrogant)
human eye, and that a good deal needs to be learned
 BRAIN AND BODY 21

about nonhuman animals before pronouncing judg-

ment on their intelligence.
Under- and over-estimations of intelligence—so
called lower and higher degrees of cooperation—
aside, the sense of communality which underlies co-
operation and which makes hunting possible,
whether in terms of a communally maintained silence
or of a communally centered attention on a commun-
ally chosen prey, bespeaks a nonverbal understanding
of I and Other as individually potent forces in a global
drama. Short of an understanding of these interani-
mate dynamics, one hunting animal could hardly co-
operate with another.
Strategy: At least one well-known study by Menzel
has shown chimpanzees to use a deceptive strategy
similar to that of the lioness who, as Peters and Mech
describe her, pretended after a kill as if nothing had
happened so that her take would not have to be shared
with others. To deceive a fellow creature is to know
what one's fellow creature would normally do given a
certain situation. It is to know not in words but in
one's bones how to manipulate another's behavior for
one's own end. This knowledge grows spontaneously,
but only because, as a certain kind of creature in the
world, an animal—whether human or nonhuman—
notices certain things and not others. In short, every
creature lives in a species-specific sensory-kinetic
world. A striking example will elaborate this fact.
What is remarkable about the Clever Hans affair in
the context of strategic deception is not that the horse.
Clever Hans, unwittingly fooled his keeper for so long
into thinking that he. Clever Hans, could add and
subtract, but that he. Clever Hans, put two and two
together in the way that he did. This feat is not
remarked upon at all. Yet it tells so much about the
very core of all animal behavior—human and nonhu-
22 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

man; namely, physiognomic perception, a matter for

Clever Hans of perceiving a slight raising of eyebrows
and a slight bending ofthe trunk of his keeper. Now it
does not matter if Clever Hans did not willfully de-
ceive his fellow creature but only wanted to continue
getting sugar lumps. What matters is that deception
occurred because Clever Hans noticed certain rela-
tionships. No one taught him to do this. He used his
native powers of physiognomic perception and ar-
rived at certain meanings. Precisely because he led all
who witnessed his considerable feat to misconstrue
his behavior, was his putting two and two together not
as intelligent as the genuine act of adding?
There is a further aspect of deception in the case of
the hunting lioness in that physiognomic knowledge
is used by choice toward a certain end. To deceive in
the way the lioness deceived is to know that to behave
in a certain manner is to appear in a certain way, and
by so appearing, to precipitate certain behaviors in
others. By the same token, to choose how one will
appear is to choose among possible courses of action.
Thinking here is thus a judgment-mediated anticipa-
tion: if I act in a certain way, so also will my fellow
creatures. The thinking is manifest in an intentional
act. In fact, the lioness who looks around casually as
though nothing has happened is like the chess player
who willfully dissembles after his/her move. By eye
movements, gaze, and/or posture, the player attempts
to keep actual ends and concerns from view.
The second aspect of strategy to be singled out
concerns the practice of aiming charges ahead of run-
ning prey. While anticipation is acknowledged to be a
factor here, it is spoken of only abstractly as an ability
to plan for and/or expect certain outcomes. The ques-
tion is, what does anticipation mean in existential
terms? It means that there is a general, but not im-
precise, knowledge an animal has about the way in
 RRAIN AND BODY 23

which creatures in its environment behave and may

be expected to behave. More specifically, it means
knowledge of one's fellow creatures as moving lines
of force and of oneself as a moving line of force. To
bring these lines of force into coincidence with one
another is in fact the very essence of the hunt, its
raison d'etre, and it obviously requires thinking. To
anticipate a future in terms oi moving lines of force is
to think concretely in kinetic terms and in so doing to
wield a concrete power of intelligence. This con-
cretely realized power is as apparent in chess as it is
in hunting. Indeed it is not amiss at all to speak of
aiming charges ahead in respect to chess. To think in
movement toward a future moment is in both cases to
have a sense of the power of movement—in potential
as well as actual terms, that is, as possible or present
lines of force which can meet, and in such a way that
one line can cancel out the other.
Finally, a third aspect of strategy may be unco-
vered. When a lioness waits in ambush for a prey in
order to take it by surprise, or when any creature
stalks another with the same visible intent, a nonver-
bal judgment-mediated anticipation and choice are
being articulated in the flesh: if I do thus and so, then
that creature will do thus and so. Further, a choice
among .possible actions is apparent, the choice here
being to dissemble: to pretend not to be where one is,
to pretend not to be doing what one is doing, to give
the appearance of having no ill intentions, and the
like—all to the end that the prey is taken by surprise.
What is striking over and above the anticipation and
the choosing is the intentional core of surprise itself.
Like cooperation, surprise entails an acknowledge-
ment of an Other, a recognition of another creature as
an individual leading its own life, as being vulnerable
in certain ways, and so on. But more than this, sur-
prise is the creation of a certain kind of world, one in
24 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

which sound and silence have value, and in which the

visuality of movement and of oneself as a visual forrh
have value too. In short, surprise necessitates the
creation of a certain sensory-kinetic world, one in
which quietness and visual stillness are paramount. A
creature which would take another by surprise must
therefore transform its native vocal and kinetic pro-
clivities. Thus it is that chimpanzees which are nor-
mally quite vocal become silent and remain so until
the prey is captured or the hunt is aborted; that social
carnivores, whose success also depends upon noticing
"intentional clues," refrain from vocalizing at all,
"any vocalization being a potential giveaway when
prey is being stalked"; and that "contemporary
[human] hunters place a great premium on quietness
throughout an excursion, even while the prey has not
yet been sighted" (Leakey and Lewin, 155). No mat-
ter what species the hunter, to surprise is uniformly to
make oneself a certain kind of creature, and in the
process to create a certain kind of world replete with
certain meanings. It is, at the same time, to know the
poifer of the unexpected in the world of living beings.
This knowledge is not in any sense a rote—or what
some might call "an instinctual"—knowledge. As
Peters and Mech point out, "neither occupation nor
attention to alertness are employed stereotypically,
and stalks often fail when lionesses do not use these
techniques" (291). It is thus not a matter of built-in
behavior patterns but of intelligence in the sense of
having learned—or not learned—the value of certain
strategies. Quietness and visual stillness are mean-
ings which are learned and which are brought into the
world by the hunting animal itself.
A particular implication of these existential signifi-
cations of strategy merits attention. Deception, kinetic
planning, and surprise all bespeak an intentionality.
The implication of their presence in hunting can be
 BRAIN AND BODY 25

stated in the form of a thesis, namely, that any hunting

animal capable of creating meanings is intelligent. To
the immediate follow-up question. Where is the di-
viding line: which are those who can and those who
cannot?, one might best answer with Husserl: "to the
things themselves."
An illustration of this approach may be had by
considering what is going on in the course of a dance
technique class. What meanings are being created in
learning a new plie sequence, for example? A dancer
might say that meanings are being created only at the
point where thinking in movement is a matter of
kinesthetic rather than visual noticings and movings.
Where the would-be dancer is caught up in the visu-
ality of movement as a technique to be learned,
meanings are not yet created insofar as they do not yet
emanate from a self-generated flow of movement.
Instead they are being appropriated: they are an-
chored in replication—in the precision of certain vis-
ually specified and foreordained placements, for ex-
ample, or in the punctuality of certain visually
specified arrivals at certain foreordained points. What
is to be distinguished is thus the capacity to replicate
certain gestures and in turn arrive at preeminently
visual meanings, from the power to create certain
gestures and with them, preeminently kinesthetic
meanings. In other words, a mimetic intelligence can
be distinguished from a kinesthetic intelligence; ap-
propriated meanings can be distinguished from self-
generated ones. The distinctions are akin to the dif-
ference in behaviors of two species of wasps whose
sequential behavioral preparations on behalf of their
soon-to-be offspring were consistently interrupted by
an experimental procedure. In one species of wasp,
the sequence of behaviors was recommenced each
time from the very beginning, no matter when or
where the sequence was interrupted. In the other
26 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

species of wasp, the sequence of behaviors changed.

This species eventually altered its behavior in light of
the changing conditions in which it found itself. It
was not replicating a certain sequence of behaviors
but was listening to what was actually going on, so to
speak. It aimed toward orchestrating a whole, gearing
the actualities of its preparations to the situation at
hand. Analogously, one might say that in replicating
gestures, the dancer is moving through a form; in
creating kinesthetic meanings, the form is moving
through her. Clearly there is a difference between
going through visually anchored motions—or pre-
packaged behavioral repertoires—and living in the
flow of movement—or in the immediacy of the situa-
tion—itself. The difference would seem to lie in the
presence of an autonomous intelligence at work.
Cognitive Mapping: What does it mean to conclude
that certain "insightful" behaviors by wolves, such as
taking shortcuts to eliminate a bend in the road, pre-
clude "any explanation other than that the wolves
knew where they were going?" (Peters and Mech,
293). Why would anyone doubt in the first place that
hunting wolves—or migratory birds, for that matter—
know where they are going? Why would anyone think
them spatial dull-wits? Perhaps it is a matter of our
being spatial dull-wits were we to find ourselves on
an open tundra—or sea; perhaps it is for our benefit
that cognitive maps are introduced and reified. In
order to get at existential significations, a summary
exposition and critique of cognitive mapping is
needed and this because, as noted earlier, cognitive
mapping is not actually a behavioral trait; it is con-
ceived and treated as an activity of certain brains—
bird brains, turtle brains, and bee brains as well as
wolf and early hominid brains. The most expedient
way to begin is by summarizing O'Keefe and Nadel's
 BRAIN AND BODY 27

precis of their recent, highly applauded book. The

Hippocampus as a Gognitive Map, which appeared in
The Brain and Behavioral Sciences.
Though cognitive maps are theorized as con-
structed and stored in the brain and though they are at
times reified literally beyond belief—of which more
later—O'Keefe and Nadel emphasize the fact that
they are built up through the animal's actually moving
in, and exploring a given terrain. There thus seems to
be a sizeable inconsistency insofar as O'Keefe and
Nadel postulate two separate spatial systems—one of
which is cognitive and one of which is not. On the one
hand there is what they call egocentric space, the
matrix of which is the body; and on the other hand,
there is what they call nonegocentric or absolute
space, the matrix of which is the brain. The inconsis-
tency lies in the fact that if a cognitive map is defined
as the brain's nonegocentric way of organizing "sen-
sory inputs" (O'Keefe and Nadel, 488), then, quite
apart from the fact that "sensory inputs" are neces-
sarily egocentric in the most fundamental sense, why
would the brain have to enlist an egocentric body to
move it around in order to gain ideas of the distance
between these inputs, for example, or of their direc-
tional relationships? The answer of course is that the
brain is powerless to supply spatial vectors. Knowl-
edge of spatial relationships depends upon noticing
and moving. Paying attention to the way things look,
smell, feel, and sound, necessarily figures in the fore-
front if an animal finds and knows its way about
effectively and efficiently. Being able to think in
these terms would seem in an evolutionary sense, part
and parcel of all successful anirriate existence. But
furthermore, knowledge of spatial relationships is
fundamentally a matter oi thinking in m,ovement. This
means that, if there is such a thing as a cognitive map,
sensing and moving are inextricably bound: sensory
28 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

inputs by themselves are meaningless. In fact from

the viewpoint of neuroanatomy, sensory events are
structurally as well as functionally thoroughly inter-
laced with motor events.
Thus if the world is alive with spatial meanings
peculiar to the lifestyle of different animal species,
then whatever may be a particular brain's equipment,
those meanings are as inscribed in the animal's sens-
ings as they are called forth by them; and they are as
ingrained in the animal's movements as they are
created by them. In other words, as Merleau-Ponty
said, albeit in a different context, there are many ways
to be a body. Whatever might be the virtues of a
postulated entity such as a cognitive map, its funda-
mental basis in experience cannot be perfunctorily
recognized, then passed over, which is simply another
way of saying that the living body is at the origin of all
spatial knowledge.
Now although living bodies are clearly Darwinian
bodies, i.e., the kind of bodies Darwin observed and
wrote about, and not the once-removed-from-life
bodies typical of today's zoology, they are not com-
monly admitted into accounts of the evolution of
human intelligence. Thus when Peters and Mech ask
how early hominids could have competed for large
live prey with other meat-eating species, they answer
that the hominids evolved intellectually. In their
scenario, the living body is taken as a token adaptive
gesture, a necessary but intellectually inconsequen-
tial epiphenomenon of cortical evolution. It is this
conceptual view which is the basis of the postulate
system enumerated earlier; it is this view which
allows Peters and Mech to write, "What is tool-using
but the ability to see how an object can be employed
in a strategic manner? Toolmaking would require just
a second similar insightful step, plus the physical
ability in the form of digits with high manipulability"
 BRAIN AND BODY 29

(297). One can barely refrain from asking. Is that

really all? In the first case just a matter of seeing and
in the latter just a little pianistic nimbleness in the
way of fingers; just a brain with two orbs and a few
workable digits thrown in? But wait a moment. Where
in this scenario is the body which knows a potential
tool when it sifts through and feels a cluster of stones?
Where are the hands and fingers which discriminate
pointedness from bluntness and smoothness from
jaggedness? Where is the thinking body which runs
with, and wields tools and in so doing tests and proves
their efficacy? Where, in brief, is the living body, the
Darwinian animal, the flesh and blood creature in
such a scenario? This body or animal or creature is not
a brain hooked up to a manipulable "mechanism."
Neither is it a brain's way of gadding about. The
thinking body has a brain, but in the same way that it
has nerves and knees; everything works in this body;
everything enters into its sensient-kinetic life. The
model of a disembodied spatial intelligence runs
counter to experience, which shows that if cognitive
maps there be, they are a brain's possibility only
because they are grounded in the existential reality of
a living body.
Now if spatial cognitions first of all bespeak a living
body, they also bespeak a brain whose products can-
not be reified in place of a living body. Reification
ultimately fails for two reasons which may be briefly
set forth as follows.
It has been a precept of the brain sciences for over
100 years that certain cortical areas are responsible for
certain abilities and that lesions at particular sites
produce certain behavioral deficits. The theory is
borne out by the fact that a lesion in Broca's area
results in labored speech and articulatory difficulties
while a lesion in Wernicke's area results in utterances
which are syntactically correct but semantically pe-
30 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

culiar or nonsensical. What is queer, however, is that

in normal persons, stimulation of Broca's area does
not produce unlabored, well-articulated speech, but
only cries, vocalizations having no resemblance to
speech. Reification fails in the first place because no
electrical stimulation of the brain has ever given rise
to a word. What is at stake is thus the credibility of the
assumption that a certain place in the brain is respon-
sible for a certain behavior. When stimulated in the
purportedly appropriate place, the brain is utterly
speechless. The hub ofthe problem is that if cortical
lesions are the means by which abnormalities in
function are cortically localized, there is no concrete
evidence, but only an assumption, that normality of
function is the result of no cortical lesions in the
specified area. That assumption has in fact been rec-
ognized by some brain neuroanatomists as absurd and
in need of corrections: "Consider the brain structure
named the subthalamic necleus," write two such sci-
entists. "Its destruction in the human brain leads to
the motor dysfunction known as hemiballism, in
which the patient uncontrollably makes motions that
resemble the throwing of a ball. Is the normal func-
tion of the intact subthalamic nucleus therefore the
suppression of motions resembling the throwing of a
ball? Of course not; the condition represents only the
action of a central nervous system unbalanced by the
absence of a subthalamic nucleus" (Nauta and Feir-
tag, 88). Thus, while hippocampal lesions produced in
rats, rabbits, and cats result in faulty or deficient
spatial behavior, that is, in faulty cognitive maps ac-
cording to the theory, it is erroneous to conclude that
an intact hippocampus produces intact cognitive
maps.
The second reason why reification fails is because it
flies in the face ol actual experience. Reification is
perhajjs at its most unbelievable extreme in the lbl-
 BRAIN AND BODY 31

lowing passage by O'Keefe and Nadel: "If an animal

is hungry," they write, "the map of the environment
in which it finds itself can be consulted to see if there
is a representation of food there. If there is, then the
map can be used to generate a motor programme
which will take the animal from its current position in
the map to the location containing food" (490). Aside
from the very difficult notion that the animal itself is
"in the map" rather than the real world, it is difficult
to imagine an animal trying to satisfy its hunger by
consulting a map to see if food is located on it. One
need only ask whether a sniffing animal is sniffing at a
map in its brain and turning its head this way and that
to contemplate representations of the world in its
brain or sniffing and pondering the world directly.
Surely it locates its food not on a map but in the real
world—and just as surely it feels its hunger pangs
directly and does not consult a map to find out where
they are. Specific areas of the brain undoubtedly
modulate certain behaviors but it is a mistake to reify
these modulations, make them into actual things
which a brain produces and which the living animal
whose brain it is, consults—or rather, which some
other portion of its brain consults. Such reification
mixes first and third person worlds in such a way as to
confound understanding of either a living body or a
brain. Of course by making cognitive maps a product
of brain activity, spatial intelligence is virtually un-
contaminated by the body. One might almost say that,
being nonegocentric, it is virtually uncontaminated
by the animal itself But of course just as there can be
no spatial intelligence without a living subject, so
there can be no spatial intelligence without a world.
Brain products do not have a world; only a living body
has a world. Hence if there is such a thing as spatial
intelligence in the form of cognitive maps, that in-
32 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

telligence and those maps could only be generated

within the context of a subject/world relationship.
The uncovering of these two existential significa-
tions leads directly to a third which might be formu-
lated in the form of a question. Is the term cognitive
mapping simply a dressed-up way of talking about the
mundane-sounding reality of kinesthetic memory—or
more generally, of sensory-kinetic memory? If a wolf
can travel five miles to the site of a kill made several
days previously, surely it can do so because it has
been there before and because it remembers being
there before. Why would the sensory-kinetic memory
of that lived-through experience be ignored or min-
imized? The answer would seem again to be a matter
of enshrining the brain, of making intelligence a
unique biological endowment untainted by a body;
Yet clearly, whatever brain structures might modulate
the spatial aspects of experience, knowledge of a
terrain exists and endures not because a brain has
been there but because the animal itself has been
there in person—or in animal. A cognitive map allows
the transposition of a living reality into an objective,
third-person account of reality, but at the expense of
straining empirical fact and of skewing the concept of
intelligence in the process. Basically it would seem to
be a question of where one puts memory: if it is the
animal who remembers, then memory is anchored in a
living sensory-kinetic awareness; if it is the brain that
remembers, then memory is anchored in an hyposta-
tized map.
There is no reason of covirse why a sensory-kinetic
memory could not be conceptualized and even par-
tially explained in terms of a cognitive map, provided
that the map was understood as the work of a living
body in the context of a real world. An understanding
of this cognitive map would in fact mean an under-
standing of how sensory-kinetic powers and sensiti-
 BRAIN AND BODY 33

vities ground spatial intelligence. Such an account

would not necessarily omit reference to a brain insofar
as from a neuroanatomical viewpoint, a brain is nei-
ther more nor less than a certain body in face of a
certain world. Understanding that body/world rela-
tionship would seem to be equivalent to understand-
ing at the deepest possible level what a brain is all
about. Actually, that understanding is not far removed
from the long-held thesis of Roger Sperry, the brain
specialist whose work is at the cornerstone of right
and left hemispheric differentiations. On the basis of
his experimental work over many years, and taking
into account evolutionary changes in cortical struc-
tures, Sperry conceives of the brain as an organ of and
for movement. In contrast to O'Keefe and Nadel's
thesis that there is a spatial system "which has the
properties of the Kantian, apriori, absolute sys-
tem . . . [and which] is not tied to the body but
provides the organism with a maplike representation
which acts as a framework for organizing its sensory
inputs (488), Sperry would undoubtedly urge with
Evart, another brain neurophysiologist whose work
conceptually parallels his own, that "understanding of
the human nervous system, even its most complex
intellectual functions, may be enriched if the opera-
tion of the brain is analyzed in terms of its motor
output rather than in terms of its sensory input"
(Evart, 103).
Throughout the long tradition of emphasis on sen-
sory input, the tendency has been to suppoit the
light-bulb theory mentioned at the beginning of this
paper: a body is only a token arrangement of sensory
receptors in the service of a causa sui intelligent
brain. Yet it must be said too that in existential terms,
there is no input and no output ])ut only sensing-
moving creatures wliose intelligence is not enshrined
in a brain of whatever size, l)ut deployed in tlie world.
34 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

The trick is to understand in each case a certain form

of intelligence as a certain domain of sensory-kinetic
powers alive in the world. Only through such under-
standings can the evolution of hominid intelligence
achieve a living significance and be fully compre-
hended. Indeed, an understanding of the hunting
lifestyle of our long-ago ancestors would be immea-
surably enriched if cooperation, strategy, and cogni-
tive mapping, were not treated simply as behavioral
traits whose "extended development into intelli-
gence'' (Peters and Mech, 296) separates us from all
other creatures, but if their existential significations
were recognized and in turn, their differential modes
of expression across the animal kingdom were as-
sayed. By pursuing this alternative view of intelli-
gence, we might eventually come to a just assessment
of the evolutionary residues and uniquenesses of
human intelligence.
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