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.

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.

Memory Hunter by Frank Morin