This directly contradicted Wynne-Edwards’ (1965) argument that selection at the level of the group or population was required to account for “regulation” in animal numbers. Clutch sizes that left the most descendants maximized neither number nor survivorship per hatchling. Lack (1954) had previously demonstrated otherwise by accumulating evidence of the tradeoffs that birds faced between offspring quantity and quality: more hatchlings allowed less food for each less food lowered chick survivorship. Wynne-Edwards assumed that selection on individuals would always maximize fertility rates. Tinbergen (1965) had identified the fundamental error of VC Wynne-Edwards’ (1962, 1965) influential group selection arguments that benefits to the group or population must generally override natural selection on individuals. The value of observation techniques and hypothesis testing in ethology prompted him to apply the same approach to studying child development ( Blurton Jones 1972, 1975). NBJ had started out as a student of bird behavior in Zoology at Oxford with Niko Tinbergen where David Lack’s influence was pervasive. NBJ aimed to further evaluate and refine the backload model he had built with Richard Sibly to explain the four year birth intervals that Nancy Howell observed among foraging !Kung mothers at Dobe ( Blurton Jones and Sibly 1978).
We each had different research priorities when Hawkes and O’Connell accepted Blurton Jones’s invitation to join him in what became the Utah/UCLA Hadza project. Common interest in the promise of those tools stimulated our collaboration and shaped the lessons we have learned over the past forty years. The three of us were strongly influenced by the findings and arguments in hunter-gatherer studies crystalized in the Man the Hunter volume and also by the developing tools in sociobiology/behavioral ecology. Robert MacArthur and Eric Pianka’s (1966) paper “On optimal use of a patchy environment” showed the power of simple economics to explain why natural selection resulted in animal foraging strategies that adjusted to local ecology. George Williams’ (1966) book Adaptation and Natural selection: A critique of some current biological thought was a cogent call to evolutionary biologists about taking natural selection seriously and using it to develop and apply theoretical tools to explore and explain variation within and among populations and between species.
FORAGER PUZZLES 372 HOW TO
For many, the question wasn’t whether observations of modern foragers are relevant to understanding the past, but how to use them.Īlthough the focus of the symposium was explicitly evolutionary, the conference volume did not hint at a revolution in animal behavior and ecology that was stirring at the time ( Parker 2006). Participants recognized the errors of previous scholars who had tried to equate particular modern human populations with those that left specific archaeological records dated to the Pleistocene. In spite of the exponential increase in what we’ve learned about the topic over the past six decades, many of the issues under debate at that conference remain contentious today.
Fossil taxa must fit between modern humans and our living evolutionary cousins and space between continually shrinks as the more we know about their social behavior the more like us they seem.Īs discussions in Man the Hunter show, participant opinion was complex and divided about whether any particular observations of hunter-gatherers in one time and place could do more than expand the descriptive record of human experience.
In addition there are more fossils assigned to our human radiation, different from us and from each other. Chimpanzees have more recent common ancestors with us than they do with gorillas and gorillas are closer to us than to orangutans. Genetic evidence shows how close we are to the great apes, drawing them into our hominid family with genus Homo and genus Pan closest evolutionary cousins. Now, sixty years later, much more is known about the phylogeny of Homo sapiens.
It brought together ethnographers, archaeologists, and biological anthropologists interested in observations of contemporary and recent hunter-gatherers as a possible window onto the vast stretch of human experience before people depended on domesticated resources - the context in which our species evolved. Man the Hunter ( Lee and DeVore 1968) reported the proceedings of a 1966 symposium that was a benchmark in hunter-gatherer studies.
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