The Origin of Humankind by Richard Leakey Page A

hair was tangled, their mouths, frothed with excitement, and their expression was wild, startled and distrustful. They possessed hardly any arts, and like wild animals lived on what they could catch.
    The conviction that hunting was central to our evolution, and the conflation of our ancestors’ way of life with that of surviving technologically primitive people, imprinted itself firmly on anthropological thought. In a thoughtful essay on this issue, the biologist Timothy Perper and the anthropologist Carmel Schrire, both at Rutgers University, put it succinctly: “The hunting model assumes that hunting and meat-eating triggered human evolution and propelled man to the creature he is today.” According to this model, the activity shaped our ancestors in three ways, explain Perper and Schrire, “affecting the psychological, social, and territorial behavior of early man.” In a classic 1963 paper on the topic, the South African anthropologist John Robinson expressed the measure of import the science accorded to hunting in human prehistory:
    [T]he incorporation of meat-eating in the diet seems to me to have been an evolutionary change of enormous importance which opened up a vast new evolutionary field. The change, in my opinion, ranks in evolutionary importance with the origin of mammals—perhaps more appropriately with the origin of tetrapods. With the relatively great expansion of intelligence and culture it introduced a new dimension and a new evolutionary mechanism into the evolutionary picture, which at best are only palely foreshadowed in other animals.
    Our assumed hunting heritage took on mythic aspects, too, becoming equivalent to the original sin of Adam and Eve, who had to leave Paradise after eating of the forbidden fruit. “In the hunting model, man ate meat in order to survive in the harsh savanna, and by virtue of this strategy became the animal whose subsequent history is etched in a medium of violence, conquest, and bloodshed,” observe Perper and Schrire. This was the theme taken up by Raymond Dart in some of his writings in the 1950s and, more popularly, by Robert Ardrey. “Not in innocence, and not in Asia, was mankind born,” is the famous opening to Ardrey’s 1971 book African Genesis . The image proved to be powerful in the minds of both the public and the profession. And, as we shall see, image has been important in the way the archeological record has been interpreted in this respect.
    A 1966 conference on “Man the Hunter” at the University of Chicago was a landmark in the development of anthropological thinking about the role of hunting in our evolution. The conference was important for several reasons, not least for its recognition that the gathering of plant foods provided the major supply of calories for most hunter-gatherer societies. And, just as Darwin had done almost a century earlier, the conference equated what we know of the lifeways of modern hunter-gatherers with the behavior patterns of our earliest ancestors. As a result, apparent evidence of meat-eating in the prehistoric record—in the form of accumulations of stone tools and animal bones—had a clear implication, as my friend and colleague the Harvard University archeologist Glynn Isaac observed: “Having, as it were, followed an apparently uninterrupted trail of stone and bone refuse back through the Pleistocene it seemed natural ... to treat these accumulations of artifacts and faunal remains as being ‘fossil home base sites.’” In other words, our ancestors were considered to have lived as modern hunter-gatherers do, albeit in a more primitive form.
    Isaac promulgated a significant advance in anthropological thinking with his food-sharing hypothesis, which he published in a major article in Scientific American in 1978. In it he shifted the emphasis away from hunting per se as the force that shaped human behavior and toward the impact of the collaborative acquisition and sharing of food. “The adoption of