Prometheus 6: A long held suspicion supported

September 16, 2003

A long held suspicion supported

Professor DeLong is discussing Professor Timothy White, an expert on African plains apes whom I've never heard of…but that's like the fifth time I've written that in the last week, so it's obviously not a negative mark on his professional reputation.

Sometimes something I'm reading brings me to a screeching halt, and it's not always predictable. When I read:

Of course, he could not answer the question everybody wanted to know the answer to: when over the past six million years did our ancestors change from being African plains ape--a smarter plains-dwelling version of chimpanzee--into people?

I startled myself with the thought, "What makes you think we ever did?"

But that has nothing to do with my long held suspicion. We humans glorified our ancestors as the great hunter apes when I was young, and that made as much sense to me as Tyranosaurus Rex being a great hunter. Those atrophied arms made it more likely that the beast was a scavenger (as a palentologist once said on PBS, you try catching a chicken with your mouth). Human behavior always struck me more like that of a scavenger and hoarder than a hunter.

Lo, in response to the question unanswered question came this:

The second was a speculation that perhaps the key moment came 1.8 million years ago accompanied by a short description of a dig in ex-Soviet Georgia: a carnivore cave filled with bones in which some of the bones have been marked by proto-human stone tools, and in which there are lots of small palm-sized basalt rocks that are not from the neighborhood. The belief is that the proto-humans threw the rocks to drive the carnivores from their lair, and then took and scavenged their kills. That's pretty gutsy. And once we had made the transition to this kind of pack super-hyena--an animal that can take and guard whatever carcasses it wants--we were on the way.

Gutsy? Yeah…and far more in keeping with my view of humanity.

Posted by P6 at September 16, 2003 09:22 PM | Trackback URL: http://www.prometheus6.org/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1674

Comments

Actually, there is an overwhelming amount of archaeological evidence to support the claim that from at least 500,000 years ago, we were primarily hunters rather than scavengers, and hunters of big game to boot.

The same is even more true of the Neandertals we ended up outcompeting; they seem to have eaten nothing but meat. We know this not just from the tools they used and the camps they left behind, but also from the wear patterns on their teeth and the chemical composition of their bones.

"Man the big-game hunter" may not have been true 1.8 million years ago, but it has certainly been true for a very long time now.

Posted by at September 17, 2003 11:37 AM

That's it, take all the fun out. :-)

I know that's true. We've been great hunters within recorded history. And of course hunters sometimes scavenge, and vice versa.

But I seriously believe the scavenger traits outweigh the hunter traits in humans.

Posted by at September 17, 2003 03:22 PM