Social Behavior of Early Hominins

Abstract

Interest in the evolution of human behavior has always featured large in evolutionary biology, challenging the imaginations not just of paleoanthropologists and archeologists, but also of virtually any scientific discipline that touches on human evolution. It certainly has sparked the popular imagination for more than a century, inspiring books and films; pop culture theories; and of course skepticism, doubt, and even hostility. Ever since the first hominin fossils were found, it seems to have been almost irresistible to engage in speculation about the behavior of our ancestors and close relatives, and the exercise continues to the present. For example, Dart (1957) notably emphasized a predilection to violence and power associated with carnivory in the “osteodontokeratic” culture of South African australopithecines. Campbell (1971) takes as a given that human behavior evolved from a chimpanzee-like social system. Washburn and Lancaster (1968) emphasize the role of “Man the Hunter” in the social evolution of hominins. In contrast, Tanner (1987) emphasized the role of gathering in social evolution. Lovejoy (1981) emphasized male provisioning of females in the development of pair-bonds. Wrangham et al. (1999) emphasize the role of cooking in the transformation from an-ape-like to human-like social system. I could go on for pages listing papers offering an enormous variety of models and hypotheses based on an equally wide variety of evidences. Perhaps because it is so easy to tell stories about human behavior, it is easy to dismiss hypotheses about hominin behavior as unsupportable assertion, steeped in preconceptions and cultural bias, and lacking in any real scientific merit. But over the years, the fossil record of human evolution has grown substantially, including not just fossil hominins but a treasure trove of environmental and ecological data. At the same time, behavioral ecology, especially of primates, has built a tremendous body of knowledge about the evolutionary and ecological basis of behavior that has provided extraordinary insight into human behavior. The combination of progress in these disciplines is allowing more and more systematic and scientific approaches to Int J Primatol (2012) 33:1247–1250 DOI 10.1007/s10764-012-9641-0