Deadly Powers

July 25, 2011
A former associate professor of English at Montana State University, Trout travels two million years into the past to a time when humankind's ancestors were prey, and returns with a provocative theory: our prehistoric ancestors turned to mythmaking as a survival strategy in the face of the constant threat of Pleistocene predators. He notes that scholars have previously regarded myths from a psychological perspective, "as if the mammals, raptors, and reptiles found throughout mythology never existed anywhere but in the human imagination.â Well before the development of language, such stories could have been acted out as warnings, and one chapter examines the possibility, theorized by others, that women, with vocalizations and "baby talk,â could have played a leading role in the emergence of language. From the Hawaiian shark-man to the giant Aboriginal rainbow snake, monsters prowl Trout's mythic landscape, which Ehrenreich calls "the most ambitious survey to date of the relationship between humans and the wild carnivores that preyed on them as long as Homo sapiens, or our hominid ancestors, have existed.â Today, we are still obsessed with nonhuman predators, as indicated in a closing cinematic survey from Jaws to Jurassic Park. Trout's conclusions are necessarily speculative but also compelling.