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... (Richard Potts). Others, seeking out modern day analogues of ancient hunter-gathers, went to Botswana to observe the! Kung San (R. B. Lee, I.
Door, J. E. Yellow). One apostate (Tim White) defected to the home base of Donald Johanson. In general, no surprises emerged from the new work. (Sept 1992) However, in his 1982 dissertation, Potts developed an independent critique of the home base idea. Many of the animal bones at Type C sites, he noticed, showed signs of carnivore-inflicted damage.
Evidently hominids and felines maintained an interest in the same food material; this "competitive milieu surrounding animal tissues" had probably "restricted" hominids from enjoying the sites for long. "The focusing of social life (in the sense of a hunter-gather home base) at these areas of bone and artifact accumulation was probably not a strategy adopted by the Olduvai hominids. " (Potts 1988: 253 - 4) Potts suggested that Level I Olduvai inhabitants (Homo habits, presumably) had established caches of stone throughout their foraging range, to which animal remains could be brought for processing. These were not home bases per se, but may have served as a step towards such hundreds of thousands years later. At the time however, they were only intended for short term use, as a place where bones could be broken up and subsequently discarded. The accumulation of faunal remains over long periods of time created deposits that came to be interpreted as home bases. True home bases would be identified by the controlled use of fire, extensive processing of animal remains, and animal remains that showed modification only by hominids. Effectively, this postpones home bases to roughly 500, 000 years ago or even later. (Potts 1988: 291) Binford was pleased to see new thinking, but noted (correctly, in my opinion) that "It is a classic post hoc accommodative argument" which could not be tested because it was designed to fit all the available evidence. (Binford 1985: 313) A more serious challenge to the home base idea emerges from the 1993 paper of Nicola Stern, who argues that the archaeological record is a "palimpsest" of debris accumulated over tens of thousands of years.
Patches of artifacts and faunal remains, in her view, are simply thicker assemblages of the same stones and bones -- the scatter -- that rest at sites less interesting to archaeologists. There is no special significance to Type C sites or any other; they are not records of particular events, but merely places where chance happened to preserve more objects, and much of what archaeologists think they perceive in the record is incorrect. (Stern 1993) This idea has not been greeted with enthusiasm; comments on her article variously argued that the record was not as imprecise as she claimed, and that various middle range methods -- - actualistic studies or "off site archaeology" -- would come to the aid of future archaeologists. Since Stern's research began as off site archaeology at Koobi Fora, this assurance has to be wondered at. Scavenging Defeats the Homebase Hypothesis Meanwhile, according to Binford, Glynn Isaac was still telling "just so" stories. And childish ones at that, about "a kind of middle-class genteel proto-human who shared his food, took care of his family, and was on his way to being emotionally and intellectually human. " (Binford 1981: 295) In Binford's view of the data, hominids were the scavengers which came last to the feast, even behind the ants, and used casually found stones to break open marrow bones. There were no base camps.
There was no evidence of food sharing. Even evidence of purposeful tool making was suspect before Homo erectus arose. Later on in his career, Binford decided that there was no reliable evidence for big game hunting until after the advent of modern humans; as predators Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis were no more to be feared in the field than a troop of modern cub scouts -- which apparently they sometimes resembled. (Binford 1984, 1986) Given this degree of doubt, it is not surprising that Binford was equally unimpressed by the work of Isaac's students and associates. Potts, Shipman, Bunn, Behrensmeyer, Walker, Leakey's young and old -- all had failed to be sufficiently stern and analytical. True, they'd learned over the years to speak soberly of proto-human scavenging rather than big game hunting and of the need for middle range theories and "actualistic" experiments. They had swiped -- without attribution, of course -- the best of his ideas.
But they had not truly repented. With the partial exception of Potts, they still found home bases and tool making in the data. They saw the behavior of modern Kalahari bushmen re-enacted in the Pleistocene dust. They all had disgusting book contracts and speaking roles in PBS specials. There wasn't a vegetarian among them. Which is snide.
Reviewing his contributions, Binford had undoubtedly been correct in calling for more objective examination of the evidence and for studies of the processes which had created the archaeological record. He had put his principles into practice by studying hunting and settlement patterns among the Nunamuit Eskimos and his prediction that lower Pleistocene hominids were more scavengers than hunters has achieved the status of conquering orthodoxy. A cynic could argue his predictions owed as much to guess as theory but he had been right about as often as wrong -- which was a respectable batting average. And at the end, he had even beaten an admission out of Glynn Isaac that food-transport was not necessarily proof of food sharing and that "the hypotheses about early hominid behavior I have advanced in previous papers made the early hominids seem too human. " Henceforth, the term "home base" would be shunned in favor of "central-place- foraging. " (Isaac 1983) But even in defeat, the points Isaac had made in 1972 held. Archaeological data from the far ends of the Old Stone Age is sparse, is incomplete, and is potentially misleading; most of it hasn't been known very long, and there aren't that many people to evaluate it. It is simply not realistic to ask that it all be analyzed as rigorously as late 20 th century census statistics.
Moreover, most humans now live in urban environments. We do not live in splendid isolation and scatter when we hear the leopard's cough. We are possessed of families and kin. We place communal meals and gatherings at the center of our social life. We are the product of greatly enlarged human gathering points. The home base is part of our heritage and the point at which it or "central place foraging" began to shape our existence still needs to be identified.
If not the Lower Paleolithic, when? Bibliography: Andrew, Robert 1976, The Hunting Hypothesis, New York, Bantam Binford, Lewis R. 1981, Bones: Ancient Men and Modern Myths, New York, Academic Press -- - 1984. Faunal Remains from Klasies River Mouth, New York, Academic Press. -- - 1985, "Human ancestors: changing views of their behavior, " in Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, vol. 4, pp 292 - 327. Reprinted in Debating Archaeology, New York, Academic Press, 1989. -- - 1986, "The Hunting Hypothesis, Archaeological Methods, and the Past, " American Association of Physical Anthropologists Annual Luncheon Address, Apr 1986, pp 1 - 9, Yearbook of Physical Anthropology vol 30 (1987) Reprinted in Debating Archaeology, New York, Academic Press, 1989.
Campbell, Bernard 1966, Human Evolution: An Introduction to Man's Adaptations, Chicago, Aldine Day, Michael H. 1986, Guide to Fossil Man, 4 th Edition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press Goodall, Jane. 1986, The Chimpanzees of Game: Patterns of Behavior, Cambridge, Harvard University Press Isaac, Glynn Ll. 1972, "Early phases of human behavior: models in Lower Paleolithic archaeology, " in Models in Archaeology, David Clark (ed. ) pp 167 - 200. London, Methuen & Company, 1972. -- - 1978, "The food-sharing behavior of protohuman hominids, " in The Archaeology of Human Origins: Papers by Glynn Isaac, Barbara Isaac (ed. ) pp 289 - 311. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989. (orig in Scientific American, vol. 238 (4), pp 90 - 108) -- - 1983, "Bones in contention: competing explanations for the juxtaposition of Early Pleistocene artifacts and faunal remains, " in The Archaeology of Human Origins: Papers by Glynn Isaac, Barbara Isaac (ed. ) pp 325 - 335. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Isaac, Glynn Ll. and John W. K. Harris. 1978, "Archaeology, " in Koobi Fora Research Project, volume 1, The Fossil Hominids and an Introduction to their Context, 1968 - 1974, Maeve Leakey and Richard Leakey (eds. ), pp 47 - 76. Oxford, Clarendon Press.
Potts, Richard 1988, Early Hominid Activities at Olduvai, New York, Aldine de Gruyter. Sept, Jeanne 1992, "Archaeological evidence and ecological perspectives for reconstructing early hominid subsistence behavior, " in Archaeological Method and Theory, vol 4. , pp 1 - 56. Stern, Nicola 1993, "The structure of the Lower Pleistocene archaeological record: a case study from the Koobi Fora formation, " in Current Anthropology, vol. 34, pp 201 - 225. Tanner, Nancy M. 1981, On Becoming Human, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
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