Hunters: 0 Gatherers: 1
Submitted by vicky on Tuesday, 07 January 2003 Page Views: 955
DiscoveriesHunting skills may not after all have triggered the tremendous burst of human evolution at the beginning of the ice ages nearly two million years ago. Instead of man the hunter, the driving force behind this evolutionary surge may have been woman the gatherer, with both mother and grandmother playing a vital role.For 40 years, anthropologists have leaned toward the notion that rich, nourishing meat - brought home by hunters and shared out - played a crucial role in human origins. This would explain why evolution selected for larger, smarter hunters with lighter jaws and teeth: precisely the changes seen as Homo erectus arose in eastern Africa.
The hunter-driven scenario also included the formation of nuclear family groups, in which men hunted while women gathered plants and cared for their children, thus kicking off humans' social evolution as well.
But this picture may be wrong on several counts. To begin with, early men probably were not bringing meat home to the family. Most evidence of hunting by early African Homo erectus comes from archaeological sites containing both animal bones and primitive stone tools. But most of these lie next to rivers, the kind of predator-filled habitat that today's Hadza hunter-gatherers in Tanzania call a "city of lions".
"They're certainly not places where early humans were spending the night," says James O'Connell, an anthropologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. O'Connell is lead author of a critique of the hunting hypothesis published in the latest issue of the Journal of Human Evolution (vol 43, p 831).
More: New Scientist
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