Читать книгу The Women’s History of the World - Rosalind Miles - Страница 12

On the contrary, the whole purpose of group organization was to ensure that primitive man did not have to face and do battle with his prey. The first humans, as Shackley shows, worked together to avoid this, ‘driving animals over cliffs to their deaths (as certainly happened at the Upper Paleolithic site of Solutre) or using fire to stampede them into boggy ground (the method used at Torralba and Ambrona)’.³² Cro-Magnon cave paintings from the Dordogne region of France vividly depict a mammoth impaled on stakes in a pit, a practice known worldwide. This method of hunting did not even involve killing, as the animal could be left to die. Most forms of hunting did not in fact involve direct aggression, personal combat or a struggle to the death, but involved preying on slow-moving creatures like turtles, on wounded or sick animals, on females about to give birth or on carcasses killed and abandoned by other, fiercer predators.