The ancient zeds lacked any zombie culture, though they did exhibit primitive communal dynamics, assembling into hordes, also known as mobs or zombie walks, to hunt down their elusive prey. With relatively few humans to feed on, the ancient zeds were often on the brink of severe decomposition. Once massed together, early Zombo sapiens would rely heavily on the newly reanimated to sniff out hidden human flesh. If a human victim was located, the new recruits’ screams and moans would shatter the stale air and stimulate the starved pack to close in on the bewildered human. Flesh proportions would have to be shared.
Not only was Zombo sapiens’ existence a constant struggle for survival, but also the ancient strain of the z-virus was weak by today’s standards. For both these reasons, our earliest ancestors succeeded in infesting only a minuscule portion of the human population.
Soon, however, populations of Homo sapiens and Zombo sapiens were both on the rise, and it became more difficult to coexist. Uninfected humans invented stone tools, including blunt weapons, and embraced pointlessly aggressive behavioral patterns. Armed and dangerous, the living were now killing zombies for pleasure, a murderous pursuit that previewed humankind’s bloody future.
With an undead genocide underway, the zeds were forced to evolve in order to survive. They developed a persistent hunger for brains that transcended their basic need for nourishment. Other evolutionary adaptations also occurred: increased adrenaline production, and changes in the positioning of the larynx and hyoid bone that improved their projectile vomiting abilities.
With the zeds bullied into aggressiveness, zombie attacks began to rise during the Middle Paleolithic Age, about 150,000 years ago. Our ancestors began to experiment with nocturnal hunting; they could more easily locate breathing humans in the dark, while the defending breathers found it more difficult to see clearly and defend themselves. Soon, with an estimated world population of around 4,000 living and 400 undead, humans were on the brink of extinction. Unfortunately, ancient zombies lacked the ambition to finish the job, a pesky trait many of us suffer from to this day.
The living, on the other hand, took action to ensure their own survival. Around 40,000 B.C., they began to migrate away from zombie-infested territories. Armed with hunting spears and food rations, they divided into three tribes and set off in different directions, thus beginning the exodus from Africa. Hungry and pissed off, the undead straggled behind, feasting on the weak.
The first human tribe set out north, along the Nile River, then navigated into southern Asia. The zombie horde kept pace, shadowing the living, until their sluggish eating habits created an unbridgeable distance between them and their remaining enemies. The humans had outmaneuvered the flesh hunters, and the zombie horde’s fate is unrecorded.
The second tribe crossed the Red Sea, which at that time was 230 feet lower than its present level. Once across the strait, the living continued marching east toward the coastal regions of what is now India. Trying to contain the humans, the zombies pushed them to the Beringia land bridge, which connected Asia to present-day North America. Unfortunately, the pursuers were ill prepared to cross the thousand-mile ice-covered tundra; the freezing conditions rendered their undead bodies useless (see “Cold,” page 62), and they were ultimately lost to the elements. It is assumed that the humans survived and completed their journey into North America.
It wasn’t until the third tribe migrated that we achieve a feasting victory. This last tribe of breathers headed south, not realizing their journey would come to abrupt stop at the coast. Quickly outnumbered by the pursuing undead (Go, zed, go!), the tribe was overtaken and hunted to extinction.
With these three great migrations, the z-virus was out, spread globally. Further outbreaks could now strike any time, anywhere.
The birth of an everlasting name! Although humankind had whispered warnings about the undead menace for thousands of centuries, it wasn’t until relatively recently that they granted us recognition in the form of our own name: zombie. The term was coined in the 16th century A.D. by a bunch of tasty Central and West African slaves. Kidnapped from Africa by transatlantic slave traders, these displaced tribesmen were soon confronted with a number of hardships waiting in the New World, including our rambunctious company.
Exhausted from hours in the hot cotton, coffee, and tobacco fields of Haiti, the slaves became easy targets, and our Caribbean ancestors stealthily gobbled them down under cover of darkness. Because the torture of slaves was a regular occurrence, our victims’ screams of pain were completely ignored, and our night hunting continued unopposed—until, during one attack, we got a little sloppy.
It appears that a lone slave survived to witness our undead, cannibalistic feeding habits. Our secret was out, and we noticed that slaves began to travel in groups with farm tools as makeshift weapons for protection. These groups were often a mix of West and Central African people who spoke a variety of native languages. Those who spoke Kimbundu, coming out of Angola, called us nzumbe or nzambi, a word that means “spirit of a dead person.” People from the Congo spoke Bantu and called us zondi, a word that means “ghost” or “soul of a dead person.” It wasn’t long before these displaced people combined the words into zombie (ZOM-bee), which would enter the English lexicon in 1871.
As for the slaveholders, at first they assumed that the tales of undead attackers were just myths, products of the slaves’ voodoo religion. They misdiagnosed our killings as animal attacks. But there were no major predators in Haiti (crocodiles and iguanas were quickly exonerated), and of course devoured human carcasses began to turn up, surrounded by our stumbling humanoid footprints. Slave owners eventually decided that the myths must be true—and that voodoo itself was to blame for the attacks. They quickly forbade the public practice of the religion, forced voodoo practitioners to convert to Catholicism, and accused voodoo priests and priestesses of witch-craft, but the attacks did not cease. And the slaves, who knew their religion was not to blame for our eating habits, continued to secretly practice voodoo to preserve their culture. This is why today we are often associated with voodoo.
Of course, even the slaves’ understanding of our nature was horribly inaccurate. To suggest that we are merely the spirits of dead humans—it’s an insult! It wasn’t until the mid-1900s that the breathers fully understood our dreaded behavior and constructed a new, more accurate definition of the term zombie: an undead body that feeds on the living. That’s us!