The Moment Dogs Made Us Human

Keda (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and his wolf (Chuck, a Czechoslovakian Vicak) in Alpha

The movie Alpha begins with its principal character Keda’s (Kodi Smit-McPhee) funeral. After a mishandled moment in a bison hunt, Keda gets flung from a cliff and trapped on a ledge overlooking a ravine, dazed and senseless; his tribe mistakes him for dead, and his father builds him a ritual cairn. He passes through the ceremonies of death, which probably makes this the first of the remarkably literal moments of heroic journey in this movie.

Director Albert Hughes sets this story in “Europe, 20,000 years ago,” a convenient time for historical dramas, since there’s remarkably little history available. We know humans existed, because we’ve recovered bones and rudimentary tool heads, but no known documents, textiles, or complete settlements exist. This lets Hughes liberally combine influences of Tibetan, Inuit, Siberian, and other cultures, to create a hybrid that exists somewhere in the mists of human subconscious, unburdened by boring old facts.

The Hero’s Journey has existed, as a philosophical concept, since at least the 19th Century, but is probably best known from Joseph Campbell. It postulates the idea that mythological experiences share a similar structure, which reflects the human experience across cultures. The hero, who both represents everybody and mentors humankind, passes outside civilization, wanders the wilderness, and returns home transformed, ready to teach us. Think the temptations of Christ, or Buddha’s long journey to enlightenment.

For Keda, this journey is unusually literal. Abandoned by his people, ritually dead and buried, he goes outside civilization because civilization has walked away from him. In a world with only the most rudimentary technologies, Keda cannot survive alone. But early on, he proves himself soft-hearted, unable to kill an already subdued boar, even for food. So when he wounds a wolf that tries to kill him, Keda still cannot leave this predator to die.

Hughes utilizes this preconscious environment well. His Ice Age hunters have elaborate systems of ritual, but no particular religion. Other than occasional references to ancestor worship, the people’s rituals are remarkably utilitarian. Keda and the other youth undergoing manhood rites have tattoos placed on their hands and arms, but these aren’t totems of glyphs; they’re maps to navigate the steppes by the stars. The people’s cairns aren’t holy sites, they’re signposts back to the village.

Kodi Smit-McPhee as Keda in Alpha

Keda nurses his wolf to health, thinking they’ll achieve some ill-defined truce, until it returns to its pack. The idea of humans and wolves working together apparently never crosses his mind. Keda lives in a world where humans use animals for their parts: flesh for meat, skin for textile, bone for tools. But apparently no human has ever decided to cooperate with another species. In Keda’s world, human tribes collaborate peacefully, but not other species.

This movie rejects Thomas Hobbes’ interpretation of human motivations. Life among the people is not “nasty, brutish, and short,” nor is it a “war of all against all.” The movie’s opening scene depicts a bison hunt performed with military precision… until Keda’s accident. In Keda’s world, humans work together. So when he, abandoned by his people, meets a wolf abandoned by its pack, the transition to cooperation requires little leap. Humans are primed to collaborate.

This is a remarkably optimistic interpretation of humanity. We’ve become accustomed to the Ayn Randian interpretation of humanity as essentially competitive, of life as an essentially savage zero-sum game. We construe war, distrust, and advantage-seeking as innately human; think Arnold Schwarzenegger in T-2, intoning dolefully how it’s in human nature to destroy ourselves. Albert Hughes dares reject this, instead believing, as an increasing cohort of sociologists do, that early human survival necessarily required open-hearted cooperation.

From this environment, Keda ventures forth. He’s learned to trust other people; but part of his adulthood rituals also involve surviving a good pummeling, since life outside the village is frightening and painful. Humans we trust, nature we fear. We depend upon animals, but we don’t share with them; that belongs only to humans. But Keda, scorned for soft-heartedness, sees in animals the qualities we trust in humans. Keda sees animals as souls like his.

This openness allows him to do something no human before him has ever accomplished: work equally with animals. His alliance with his wolf comes because he takes natural human cooperation and extends it to all species. And when they return from his journey in the wilderness, becoming, in the people’s eyes, alive again, he’s prepared to lead humanity to its next stage. Keda isn’t exactly a prophet, but he’s truly a teacher of his people.