How the Feeble Human Biped Came to Dominate the Natural World

One scene above all others from the BBC’s 2011 series Human Planet demonstrates how humans have come to dominate the natural world. In the film, three members of the Dorobo people of Kenya, a client tribe of the better-known Maasai, intimidate and steal meat from a pride of fifteen lions gorging on the corpse of a wildebeest. After stalking up unseen to within fifty yards, the three men suddenly stand up straight and march shoulder to shoulder directly toward the corpse. Startled, the lions scatter and retreat, like cats being chased from a bird they had just caught, and crouch at a distance, growling in the long grass.

When the three men reach the wildebeest, two stand sentry, while with his knife the third swiftly slices through the skin, muscles, and ligaments of the animal’s hip and pulls away a whole haunch of meat from the corpse. Within seconds, before the lions can decide what to do, the men are striding away again with their trophy; they have stolen enough meat for a feast without any of the danger or bother of a hunt. And later that evening they light a fire and cook the meat, gorging on the soft flesh and bone marrow.

To urban people from the developed north, used to a sheltered life in “civilization,” the brazenness of this daylight robbery seems almost suicidal. How could a few weak primates intimidate a far greater number of the world’s most feared predator? The men should be no match for lions, who could easily outpace them and could, being far stronger, wrestle them to the ground and dispatch them with a single bite to the neck. The physical superiority of lions over humans has been demonstrated throughout human history—the Romans even exploited it for entertainment. In one of their cruelest forms of punishment, damnatio ad bestias (condemnation to beasts), they threw convicted criminals—most notoriously Christians—to the lions. In front of crowds of thousands of spectators in amphitheaters such as the Colosseum in Rome, the condemned people met an inevitable and painful death.

Rather than being the feeble wimps we portray ourselves as, who have to make up for our inferior physiques with superior intelligence and cunning, we have long been the bullies of the natural world.

The truth is, though, that ever since the advent of farming, we have tended to exaggerate the threat posed to us by large predators such as big cats, wolves, and bears. Over thousands of years of history, our propaganda has repeatedly sought to portray ourselves as the plucky underdogs, surviving against huge physical odds by marshaling our intelligence and native cunning against the brute forces of nature. Folktales are filled with people fighting to survive in forests, steppes, and deserts, and evading and outwitting the wild beasts that dwell within them. So when we venture into the wilderness, we do so with trepidation and we take a whole host of precautions. We keep predators away during the day by traveling in groups, maintaining constant vigilance, and employing firearms, while in the darkness of the night, we cower together around our campfires.

But in fact wild animals fear human beings much more than we do them, and indeed they fear us more than they do even the fiercest of predators. For instance, recent research by Liana Zanette of Western University, London, Ontario, and colleagues has shown that tape recordings of human voices startle a whole host of large African mammals, from warthogs to giraffes. The voices create almost double the effect on animals as the roars of lions. Indeed, lions themselves retreat when they hear human voices, and the reasons why lions fear humans are not hard to find. The success of the Dorobo raid on the lions’ kill was possible because humans have consistently defeated lions over the long history of conflict between our two species on the East African plains.

The pastoralist Maasai people, for instance, who also live in the region, have successfully been vying for supremacy with lions for hundreds of years. Armed with just simple wooden fighting sticks and short wooden spears, they can protect their herds of cattle from predation. And they don’t just defend themselves and their cattle passively; they frequently take the fight to the lions and kill them. Until recently a successful solo lion hunt was a rite of passage for Maasai boys. Lions in the region had every reason to fear people, who could dispatch them with their handheld weapons and bows and arrows long before the advent of European big game hunters equipped with rifles.

The dominance of humans over lions was also exploited by the Romans themselves for another of their “entertainments,” the venatio or wildbeast hunt. In these unedifying spectacles, the lion was just one of a host of large creatures, from wolves to giraffes, that were released into an amphitheater to be hunted down by specialist gladiators known as bestiarii. Being trained in combat, and armed with swords, spears, and bows and arrows, the gladiators were able to turn the tables on the wild beasts; the result was another predictable slaughter, in this case of the animals.

The demand for such entertainments and the Romans’ efficiency at procuring and transporting wild animals to Rome was so high that they effectively wiped out the wildlife of North Africa where they sourced them. That the Romans were able to maintain a constant supply of wild beasts to their capital also shows how they dominated the whole of the North African landscape. Their engineering expertise had enabled them to build an empire controlling the entire Mediterranean region, feeding the huge city of Rome with cereals grown over vast swathes of farmland in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya. Their huge grain ships and extensive system of roads were not surpassed in size or sophistication until well into the eighteenth century.

But perhaps the most impressive aspect of the Dorobo video was that it could be made at all and be distributed to millions of people worldwide. To shoot the video, the film crew had to fly by jet plane from Europe to Africa, travel around the plains of the Maasai Mara in four-wheel-drive Land Cruisers, and use sophisticated cameras made on the other side of the world to record the hunt and the Dorobos’ subsequent feast. And once the crew had flown home again, they had to edit the film with sophisticated computer software and distribute it by broadcasting it as electromagnetic waves through the ether, or streaming it across the wires of the internet. Finally, the viewers had to pick it up on equally complex TV receivers, home computers, or mobile phones. All of these stages required a global infrastructure, huge technical expertise, and vast amounts of energy. We could see what happens in the wilds halfway around the world only because of our modern industrialized society.

And our dominance over the natural world is now more or less universal. Today humans are spread over every continent except Antarctica, and we have modified the world’s surface beyond recognition. We have cleared over 40 percent of the habitable land for our agriculture, and we manage over half of the 31 percent of land that is still covered by forests. Our domestic animals outnumber wild beasts by a ratio of fifteen to one, and 26 percent of species of large mammals are threatened with extinction. And even before the advent of agriculture, humans helped eliminate large animals all over the globe: mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses from Europe and Asia; horses and mastodons from North America; giant ground sloths and armadillos from South America; and giant wombats and giant kangaroos from Australia.

The reasons for this domination are simple. Rather than being the feeble wimps we portray ourselves as, who have to make up for our inferior physiques with superior intelligence and cunning, we have long been the bullies of the natural world. In some ways we are actually physically the most powerful animals on the planet. Using the simplest of tools—sticks and stones—we can hit harder, throw farther, and cut deeper and cleaner than any other animal, giving us unprecedented abilities as scavengers and predators of animals, and as harvesters of plants. We can kill animals even at a distance, efficiently skin and dismember them. We can cut down and uproot plants; crack open their nuts and grind down their seeds; strip their leaves and separate and spin their fibers. We can fell trees and carve wood. We can build fires and cook food. We can clear forests, till the soil, and mine the rocks.

In other words, even using just our muscles we can engineer almost all aspects of our environment. It is our ability to marshal our physical power to produce energy and to concentrate it using our tools that first enabled us to remake the world for our own convenience. And in the last few thousand years we have even learned how to use our tools to co-opt power from other sources: from wood and charcoal; from draft animals; from water, wind, and the sun; and most recently from fossil fuels and atomic nuclei.

It may seem surprising to attempt to understand the progress of such complex organisms as human beings simply by examining our physical relationship with the world around us. Most other human histories have tended to concentrate on the finer aspects of the mind and the rise of culture. However, this physical perspective makes sense of human history in a way that no other viewpoint achieves. It allows us to understand why it was a primate that gained world dominance rather than any other type of animal. And it allows us to integrate the roles of the many other factors that anthropologists and historians have implicated in our rise to dominance: human bipedalism; the evolution of our opposable thumb; our development of stone tools; the growth in our brain size; our increased sociality and lengthened adolescence; the rise of agriculture; the inventions of metallurgy and machinery; and the harnessing of fossil fuels, steam, hydraulics, and electricity. To me the engineering approach also seems to be the most logical one.

After all, the only way we can interact with the world around us is by converting energy from one form into another, and to do it at a reasonable rate: in other words, to do anything we need to generate, transmit, and apply power. And though we often think of ourselves as purely intellectual beings, quite separate from the natural world, we are still animals and, like all other organisms, are subject to the laws of physics and natural selection.

Though we often think of ourselves as purely intellectual beings, quite separate from the natural world, we are still animals and, like all other organisms, are subject to the laws of physics and natural selection.

One reason I can tell this story now is that we have a better understanding than ever before about how the human body works. Over the last half century, the science of comparative biomechanics, in which I have been involved for over forty years, has been remarkably successful in explaining the design and function of animals and plants—how they stand up, walk, run, climb, jump, eat, and how this has affected the evolution of their bodies and minds. For instance my friend Peter Lucas has used the science of fracture mechanics to explain why mammals have such varied designs of teeth.

In recent years, anthropologists and primatologists have also started to investigate the evolution of the human body, and the development of our tools, in much the same way. Medical researchers and sports scientists have also been investigating the mechanics of human movement for just as long, though for reasons of their own, and they have studied humans in isolation from research on other animals. In their definition biomechanics refers exclusively to humans. Fortunately, though, anthropologists take a broader view and are realizing that it is time to integrate our knowledge of human motion into evolutionary studies, so we can better understand how human beings emerged from our ape ancestors.

Meanwhile, over the last fifty years primatologists have also made important discoveries about how our primate relatives construct their sophisticated sleeping nests, and how they make and use mechanical tools such as probes, levers, spears, and digging sticks. These findings invalidate many of the old assumptions about how humans evolved. In particular they destroy the concept of “man the toolmaker.” We now need a new narrative to explain instead how humans capitalized on and improved our tools—how we became better engineers—and so shed light on how humans evolved into scavengers and hunters.

Anthropologists and historians alike are also starting to reassess the causes and effects of the emergence of farming. They used to assume that settling down to grow cereals and keep animals was a key advance in human progress. Recently, however, historians such as James C. Scott and Yuval Noah Harari have characterized farming as a misstep that condemned our ancestors to lives of drudgery and privation. It is time to examine these competing narratives in a quantitative way to work out why after the last ice age people in different parts of the globe adopted such different ways of life as hunter-gatherers, herders, horticulturalists, and cereal farmers. Despite what we are invariably told, cereal farming is not the best way of making a living at all, but it did stimulate farmers to become better engineers: to domesticate and harness draft animals, to develop metallurgy and devise machinery. In so doing it sparked a technological revolution that led to the invention of wheeled vehicles and plank ships and resulted in the advent of large states and empires, changing patterns of supremacy across Eurasia, and leading to the ultimate triumph of the Old World over the New.

Nowadays, we also have the benefits of fifty years of research into the archaeology of the industrial world. It is time to rescue industrial archaeology from its neglected silo among engineers and men in boilersuits to demonstrate the crucial importance of engineering in the formation of our modern world. It is time to investigate why it happened when and where it did, and how engineering advances led us to increase our power and use more and more energy. These insights allow us to understand how industrialization shaped modern history, and how it led to urbanization, the transformation of the countryside, and to globalization.

And since all engineering involves destruction, it is time to investigate the increasingly dramatic effects of human power on the horrors of war and on the health of our planet. Understanding our past and present may help us plan a sustainable future.

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From The Powerful Primate: How Controlling Energy Enabled Us to Build Civilization by Roland Ennos. Copyright © 2026. Available from Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.