The Hunting Apes:
Meat-eating, meat-sharing,
and the roots of human social cognition
A Presentation by Craig B. Stanford
Associate Professor of Anthropology
Co-Director, Jane Goodall Research Center
University of Southern California
Friday, April 16, 1999 at 12:30pm - 2:00pm
Anthropology, HSSB 2001A
Abstract
Meat-eating is widely regarded by human evolutionary scholars as a central
behavior in the emergence of humanity. Past paradigms (notably Man the
Hunter of the 1960s) have attributed the rise of the human intellect to
cognitive attributes needed for cooperative hunting. This model is widely
discredited today. In this talk I argue that the evidence from great ape
meat-eating behavior, from human forager data, and from the fossil record
all point to the paramount importance of meat-eating, but especially meat-sharing
, as the fundamental dietary/behavioral shift that placed a premium on
social intelligence for the control and manipulative distribution of this
key nutritional resource. Those who control key resources control others
who need it; I argue that an important element of the evolution of patriarchal
human societies has been the role of meat as such a controllable resource.
Speaker
Craig Stanford
is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Southern California
and Co-Director of the Jane Goodall Research Institute there. He is a primate
behavioral ecologist whose main research interests have been the ecology
of primate social systems and the use of primate models in reconstructing
early human behavior. From 1990-95 he studied chimpanzee hunting behavior
in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, and since 1996 he has directed the Bwindi-Impenetrable
Great Ape Project in Uganda. He is the author of 60 scholarly publications,
including the books, The Capped Langur in Bangladesh: Behavioral Ecology
and Reproductive Tactics, Chimpanzee and Red Colobus: The
Ecology of Predator and Prey (1998, Harvard University Press) and The
Hunting Apes (1999, Princeton University Press).
Craig Stanford web page: http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~stanford/bigape.html
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