Is the Savannah Theory really dead yet?
- From: richardparker01@xxxxxxxxx
- Date: 11 Aug 2005 09:56:30 -0700
Su Solomon wrote:
> The 'Savannah Theory' lives only in the archives of the aquatic ones.
Martha Tappen's paper 'Deconstructing the Serengeti' - part of Bunn et
al's "Meat-Eating and the Fossil Record' was very kindly mailed to me
by a group member with no personal axes to grind.
Quotes:
"The "savanna hypothesis," with us since the time of Dart (1925), has
been the most influential theory in paleoanthropology.
....Nearly every major hypothesis of the origins of bipedalism in some
way incorporates the idea of dry habitats replacing wetter ones.
Recently it has become popular to critique the hypothesis (e.g.,
Cerling 1992: Clarke and Tobias 1995; Berger and Tobias 1996),
justified by a weakening of the dichotomy of
rainforest-ape/savanna-hominid (McGrew et al. 1981; Moore 1996).
....The savanna hypothesis has been linked to ideas of the origins of
meat-eating. After all, savannas have less fruit than forests, and
hominids would have had to change their diets in response. Independent
of this, early australopithecines may be expected to eat meat at least
to the degree that living chimpanzees do (by argument from phylogeny
and parsimony), and taphonomists need to continue to search to
see if any evidence of that survives (e.g., Pickering and Wallis 1997;
Plummer and Stanford 2(XX); Tappen and Wrangham in press). Here I would
like to distinguish between this more general "savanna hypothesis" and
the "Serengeti hypothesis" as the early hominid "Environment of
Evolutionary Adaptiveness" (EEA).
....The savanna hypothesis in paleoanthropology has been much more
specific than a vision of the effects of hominids leaving the forest
for the savanna and the logical outcome of that; in reality, it has
usually been what I call the "Serengeti hypothesis".
....One critique of the influential Wenner-Gren " Man the Hunter"
conference was that the bushmen of the Kalahari became the
quintessential model for Paleolithic foragers, despite much evidence
for variation in environments, material culture, and social systems in
hunter-gatherers. In a similar way, the Serengeti has become the
quintessential savanna in which we evolved, despite much evidence of
variation in modern savannas and climate fluctuations in the past.
....The predominance of the Serengeti model cannot be understated, and
it has penetrated a variety of subfields. Evolutionary psychologists
have often incorporated it as the model for the "Environment of
Evolutionary Adaptiveness" where we evolved (see Foley 1995/96 for
review). The EEA is modeled to involve a particular social environment
(much like that of extant hunter-gatherers) and also particular
habitats: "If we assume that the evolution of our species includes the
development of psychological mechanisms that aid adaptive response to
the environment, then savanna-like habitats should generate positive
response in people, much as the "right" habitat motivates exploration
and settling behaviors in other species" (Orians and Heerwagen 1992:
556).
....So we are not only from the savanna, we should "feel good" about the
savanna, too. But not just the savanna, high-quality savanna: "We have
been testing people's response to tree shapes and have found that tree
shapes characteristic of high-quality savanna are preferred over those
found in lower-quality savanna" (p. 559). Our very psychology has been
shaped by savannas such as the Serengeti, no matter what part of the
world we come from.
[This paragraph must have been the very nearest she could get to
ridicule in an academic paper].
Because Olduvai is located near the Serengeti does not mean we
evolved in the Serengeti, yet often we treat as if it is the sacred
spot where we evolved.
The expansion of the known geographic range of australopithecines to
include Chad (Brunei et al. 1995) is clear evidence that early hominids
were not severely restricted geographically and in fact may be
characterized as cosmopolitan."
Later, she goes on to conclude:
"Scavenging opportunities are too unpredictable and rare to be a highly
ranked food item for early hominids because deliberate search for them
has a high rate of failure." - with detailed fieldwork to back up her
ideas.
"According to the encounter rate of this study, this late-access
scavenging would yield about 215 calories a day in marrow and brains"
This is NOT a wet-ape vs dry ape question - Marc and Algis - if you
find something to argue about, please take it off onto another thread
altogether.
I hope it's the kind of question 'conventional' PAs could discuss
without the fear of getting drowned.
regards
Richard
.
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