Modern attitudes about hyenas

Accounts of hyenas in the modern popular press and folk culture are often peppered with negative connotations: cowardly, ugly, fearsome, sneaky, foul, thieving, dirty, repulsive, hermaphroditic, cannibalistic, night-stalkers, and so on. There can be little doubt that the modern human attitude about hyenas leans toward its possessing a repulsive, monstrous, and evil character. It should be noted, however, that not all field workers would completely agree. Owens and Owens (1984) discuss and illustrate friendly interactions they had with some Kalahari hyenas.

Among other carnivores, the lion is viewed as noble, proud, distinguished. Wolves share these subjective qualities, as do most other large carnivores. Nevertheless, as Hans Kruuk (2002:64) notes:

The spotted hyaena is, despite its reputation, a large, wolf-like predator, often hunting the African plains and even the forests in packs... they have a considerable crime record... hyenas are also killers of people... .In Malawi... they killed and ate 27 people over 5 years. Many... of the victims were children.

L. van der Post (1961:119) noted that Bushmen have an expression that is used when a person is undergoing some manner of deep personal disaster. It places hyenas in a negative light: “The time of the hyaena is upon her [or him].”

What might have been the attitude about hyenas among late Pleistocene Siberian peoples? Since there seems to be no Siberian archaeological carved bone or stone depictions or rock art of hyenas, one might infer that not creating images of them - as was done for prehistoric birds, mammoths, bison, rhinoceros, fish, and various herbivores in Upper Paleolithic Europe - means they were unimportant in the lives of Pleistocene Siberians. Jacobson (2005) has found rock art depictions of large late Pleistocene animals in the Altai Mountains of Siberia and Mongolia, so rock art existed in our study area. On the other hand, hyenas might have been as feared and reviled then as they are today in Africa. Depicting them might have been considered foolhardy and dangerous in the animistic world view of the past. Accepting for the moment that ethnographic analogy is the best way to estimate the Paleolithic attitude about hyenas, a few accounts from Africa, where humans and hyenas still co-exist, provide insight into what might have been an uncomfortable psychological human-hyena relationship in the past.

In van der Post’s (1961:219) recounting of Bushman myths about animals, most creatures are looked upon quite favorably. However, not so for carrion eaters such as hyenas, jackals, and crows:

The choice of the hyaena as villain-in-chief is another example of this inborn regard for exact truth which characterized the first man of Africa. The hyena emerges out of its hole only in the hours of darkness. Although an animal of great strength and powerful jaws, it kills only the weak and prefers to live on the courage, initiative and labour of others, scrounging what it can of the remains of the lion’s or leopard’s banquet. For the Bushman it was the most clearly accredited representative of the power of darkness and principality of evil. Many a time, as I have listened to its wail alone in the night, miles from shelter and the sound of other men, I have thought of it as the cry of the damned and been troubled with emotions so far out of the range of my awareness that I cannot shape or name them.

Hans Kruuk (2002:186-189) discusses carnivores in a cultural context. He proposes that hyenas are more often associated with witchcraft than any other animal in Africa:

The animal involved in witchcraft more than any other is the spotted hyena, a species which generally is utterly loathed throughout the continent. . . . This loathing goes beyond feelings based on mere ecological competition: it may well be that a primitive fear is involved, arising from the knowledge that hyenas are the living “mausoleum of the dead”, as someone described them. Aren’t the animals’ weird laughing noises and its slinking nocturnal movements around one’s house (often followed by some disaster to the occupants) almost proof that in some devilish way it is under control of supernatural powers? . . . Everybody is aware that people known to be witches ride hyenas at night (that is why hyenas’ backs are sloping), laughing madly, while casting their spells on other people.

In a brilliant book-length review of human attitudes about big predators extracted fTom scientific, literary, and mythological sources, David Quammen (2003:133) sums up humanity’s universal reaction to predator corpse-eating:

Bury the corpse, cremate it, put it up on a platform to be picked clean by birds, pile rocks over it... even cook it and eat it yourselves... but by all means don’t leave it to be gnawed at by leopards or hyenas.

Long before fire, cave art, and the two-million-year-old manufactured protective culture that distinguishes the hominid lineage, there was real danger - one common danger being large predatory carnivores. As Quammen (2003:329) poignantly remarks:

We’ll never know whether [our early ancestors’] fear of big-toothed felines was acute, reverentially muted, or dulled into routine amid a welter of other dangers. . . death by predation must have seemed ordinary. No one had escaped the awareness of being eaten.

Later in human evolution that biological awareness must have been reinforced each generation by story-telling elders, who themselves were living proof of the value of their words, however phrased. Group membership provides protection to the individual. Children must have been educated in the basic survival law dealing with large carnivores - stay close to the group, do not wander off alone, stay away from the meat-eaters. Today, for most children, the predators are human, and the edict is: stay away from strangers.

Abhorrence must have been heightened for hyenas if in ancient times, as today, they entered camps at night and dragged away helpless young or elderly victims. The entry of predatory hyenas into late Pleistocene camps of sleeping Siberian people likely meant an easy meal, until the domestication of the dog, whose keen senses of smell and sound would have made them superb sentinals. The evolution of weapons and counter-weapons took a quantum leap with the beginning of domestication of the wolf more than 30 000 years ago, the directly carbon-14 dated age of the Razboinich’ya dog.

In a stunningly simple discussion of ecological tropic levels, Quammen (2003:75) describes the essence of that concept, with its energy transfer in efficiencies and losses from the ultimate sunlight energy capture by plant photosynthesis through plant-eating rodents and herbivores, and eventually to the precariously perched carnivores at the top of the pyramid. Quammen concludes: “Big fierce animals are inherently rare.” This is certainly the case for living Siberian carnivores, whose lives are lived out mainly in a solitary fashion. Block the sunlight, and the tropic pyramid collapses from the bottom up. Add another large carnivore (efficient modern humans) and the pyramid collapses from the top down. Even the Pleistocene hyena and wolf packs must have been widely spaced across the Siberian landscape. However, they, like humans, hunted in groups. The more eyes, ears, and noses there are surveying the landscape for prey, the greater are the chances for discovery. While descriptions of African hyena dining seem frenzied, even hazardous to ears and snouts, the benefits of the cooperative hunting pack surely reduced the risks of being a luckless solitary predator. But adding modern humans to the mix of predators at a time of severe climate change must have resulted in deadly competition. While we do not know the precise sequence of events, we do know the outcome - humans survived into the Siberian Holocene, whereas some of the four-footed carnivores did not. Because there are few species of large terrestrial carnivores left in the world, inferences about their behavior, particularly that of hyenas, in late Pleistocene Siberia, will have to depend largely on analogies from living hyenas. Very large carnivores such as cave lions, cave bears, and cave hyenas became extinct before the end of the Pleistocene. These terminal Pleistocene extinctions apparently occurred all over Siberia in conjunction with megafaunal extinctions. Tatiana Krakhmalnaya (1999) has inventoried these creatures’ similar extinction in the Ukraine, whereas in Siberia carnivores such as wolves, bears (Ursus arctos), and others did not go extinct. At first glance this would seem to be a simple case of extinction related to a disappearing food supply - that is, the megafauna. However, judging from the species found in Razboinich’ya Cave, the hyenas were subsisting on a wide range of game animals, so while the megafaunal extinction may well have reduced their prospective food supply, it seems unlikely that conditions reached the point of widespread starvation or infertility. However, the problem may not have been quantitative; rather, it might have been qualitative. Live prey with little fat and stressed by nutritional, epidemiological, and physiological factors may have been like an interior Native Alaskan winter problem: eating fat-poor hares and muskrats often led to starvation.

The large predator-large prey co-extinctions are not the only co-occurrences in late Pleistocene Siberia. There is the appearance of the Upper Paleolithic tool tradition and associated artistic expressions, both linked with anatomically modern humans. While the Mousterian folk may have had a long but shaky co-existence with the large Siberian carnivores, the latter may have been no match for the better-equipped modern humans, both the European Cro-Magnons and their Far Eastern counterparts. Is it just a coincidence that hyenas, which had occupied Eurasia since at least the Miocene, should cease to exist throughout most of their northern range following the appearance of anatomically modern humans in Eurasia? Moreover, there is an inverse relationship between hyena presence and the occurrence of human remains. Later in this chapter we explore some taphonomic and taxonomic issues involving late Pleistocene Siberian human remains.