Book Review: Among the Bone Eaters

Among the Bone Eaters: Encounters with Hyenas in Harar

by Marcus Baynes-Rock

Penn State Press, 2015

At the beginning of his new and instantly classic book Among the Bone Eaters, scientist and animal behaviorist Marcus Baynes-Rock addresses head-on the obstacles he faces in writing a sympathetic account of that “loathed, vilified, feared, derided, persecuted, and, where people have the wherewithal, eradicated” animal, the spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta). “Hyenas are the old enemy,” he writes. “Both of our species bear the marks of millions of years of hyena predation on humans and conflict over resources. There are some unsettled scores scratched in the backs of our respective psyches.”

Those scratched-in old scores might arise from the fact that for millions of years, primitive humans and primitive hyenas had mainly one relationship: the eaten and the eaters. And since hyenas are such thoroughly successful scavengers that they famously eat even the bones (it's easy to spot their droppings on the plains, since they're chalky white), that relationship has had very practical effects on the archaeological record of the human species:

Indeed, the efficiency with which hyenas demolish carcasses is a major reason why fossil evidence of the origins of our species is so scarce on the ground. Were it not for the bone-crushing capabilities of hyenas, skeletal evidence of human evolution would be everywhere. Instead, much of the story of human origins and human/hyena coexistence has been consumed, leaving only tantalizing traces of clues. Here, a collection of teeth that survived an ancient hyena's digestive juices; there, footprints in cemented volcanic dust were hominins and hyenas crossed paths.

Given such a fraught relationship, the situation Baynes-Rock encounters when he visits the Ethiopian city of Harar, a location famous, among other things, for the fact that the Harari allow hyenas to roam the dump and the city's streets at night, scooping up every last scrap of even vaguely organic garbage and cleaning up offal faster, more thoroughly, and far less messily than even a wake of vultures. The Harari even feed scraps of meat to these hyenas, and the hyenas themselves, though not precisely tame, have mostly learned to override the instinctive wariness they feel around humans (the volume, very prettily produced by Penn State Press, includes photos of Baynes-Rock cuddling with the creatures). Our intrepid author makes himself known to the people of Harar, and a large part of the charm of Among the Bone Eaters comes from its loving portrait of the town and its natives, the ancient culture of the place and its odd jostling of 20th century and 2nd century. Through conversations with the Harari, Baynes-Rock learns the fuller version of the place hyenas occupy in popular folklore.He mixes this ethnological information with copious amounts of information about hyenas themselves, including the clarification of a mistake countless tourists to Africa make every day during safari season:

At this point I should clear up a common misconception. A hyena is not a kind of dog. Take a close look at a hyena and you'll see how very undoglike they really are. They have long whiskers fanning out from their snouts and curvy back legs that are quite catlike. This is because they're more closely related to cats than to dogs and even more closely related to mongooses. Hyenas look superficially like dogs owing to their adaptation to open-country predation and their heavy reliance on smell and hearing. This is what we call convergent evolution.

It's also what we call creepy evolution, as anybody who's ever been up close to hyenas can attest. They're bizarre Pleistocene holdovers, with lunging, leering necks and faces, hunched shoulders, sloping hindquarters, piddling little hind legs, a wavering, drunken gait, and worst of all, a cacophony of absurd vocalizations that have to be heard to be believed and once heard can't be forgotten. And equally bizarre is the sight of them skulking and bobbing along the narrow streets under Harar's erratic nighttime street lighting - purposeful, unafraid, going about their business almost unremarked by either the Harari or their domesticated dogs (the dogs of a visitor, say a hypothetical jury of head-tilted beagles, might have looked on with appalled indignation). It's a remarkable and very old symbiosis, and it's never had a better accounting than the one Baynes-Rock gives it here. Among the Bone Eaters isn't precisely a natural history of the spotted hyena, nor is it precisely an ethnography of the Harari. Instead, it's an utterly remarkable combination of the two, a portrait of a human community forging a working relationship with Africa's second-largest carnivore.