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The Evolution of Human Hunting The Evolution of Human Hunting Edited IJy Matthe. H. Nlteckl Ind Dorl. V. Nlteckl Field Museum of Natural History Chicago, Illinois PLENUM PRESS • NEW YORK AND LONDON Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Spring Systematics Symposium (9th: 1986: Chicago, III.) The evolution of human hunting / edited by Matthew H. Nitecki and Doris V. Nitecki. p. cm. "Proceedings of the Field Museum of Natural History Ninth Annual Spring Systematics Symposium on the Evolution of Human Hunting, held May 10, 1986, in Chicago, Illinois." Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 978-1-4684-8835-7 ISBN 978-1-4684-8833-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-4684-8833-3 1. Hunting. Primitive-Congresses. I. Nitecki, Matthew H. II. Nitecki, Doris V. III. Title. GT5820.S97 1986 639'.1'0901-dc19 87-34302 CIP Proceedings of the Field Museum of Natural History Ninth Annual Spring Systematics Symposium on the Evolution of Human Hunting, held May 10, 1986, in Chicago, Illinois © 1987 Plenum Press, New York Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1987 A Division of Plenum Publishing Corporation 233 Spring Street, New York, N.Y. 10013 All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher Preface The successful early adaptations of man involve a complex interplay of biological and cultural factors. There is a rapidly growing number of paleontologists and paleoanthropologists who are concerned with hominid foraging and the evolution of hunting. New techniques of paleoanthropology and taphonomy, and new information on human remains are added to the traditional approaches to the study of past human hunting and other foraging behavior. There is also a resurgence of interest in the early peopling of the New World. The present book is the result of the Ninth Annual Spring Systematics Symposium, on the Evolution of Human Hunting, held on May 10, 1986, in the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. We are grateful to the NSF (grant no. BNS 8519960) for partial financial support in arranging the symposium. In preparation of this volume we have received assistance from many people, particularly the reviewers of individual chapters; it is impossible to name them all. We must however single out Drs. Richard G. Klein and Glen H. Cole for their encouragement at various stages of preparation of the symposium and this volume, and for being a help to the anthropological knowledge. Zbigniew Jastrzebski assisted with the figures and Paul K. Johnson diligently typed the camera-ready copy, and patiently coordinated the endless book-making chores. Matthew H. Nitecki Doris V. Nitecki v Contents The idea of human hunting 1 Matthew H Nitecki Reconstructing how early people exploited animals: problems and prospects 11 Richard G. Klein Were there elephant hunters at Torralba? 47 Lewis R Binford Bodies, brawn, brains and noses: human ancestors and human predation 107 Erik Trinkaus Hunting in late Upper Paleolithic Western Europe 147 Lawrence Guy Straus Prehistoric, plains-mountain, large-mammal, communal hunting strategies 177 George C. Frison Analysis of kill-butchery bonebeds and interpretation of Paleoindian hunting 225 Lawrence C. Todd The Pleistocene archaeology of Beringia 267 Richard E. Morlan Mastodont procurement by Paleoindians of the Great Lakes region: hunting or scavenging? 309 Daniel C. Fisher Taphonomy and hunting 423 Anna K Behrensmeyer VB Contents viii Contributors 451 Index 453 The Idea of Human Hunting Matthew H. Nitecki Department of Geology Field Museum of Natural History Chicago, Illinois Paleontology in the broadest sense is the study of the history of life, and paleoanthropology is the part of this history that deals with man. Like all historical scientists, paleontologists and paleoanthropologists assume that this history consists of individual events joined together into the Great Chain of Events leading to the present. They believe that history is thus directional, continuous and composed of identifiable minor events eventually transformable into the major events such as mass extinctions, biotic crises, origins of hunting and origins of agriculture. These significant events are interpreted and become powerful concepts in the development of scientific thought. The essential feature of all historical sciences is, of course, time. Time is a measure of events that can be arranged in sequence and that can be interpreted segmentally or as discrete phenomena. The frequency of identical events is measured by the relative distances between these events on the time scale. The faster the occurrence of events, the shorter is the interval of time, and fewer events imply a longer time span. Thus the continuous or discontinuous appearance of events is decoded. The sequence of events is read from the stratigraphic superposition of fossil data. Human hunting is one such sequence of human behavior that we desire to place in a time series. However, we know little about this sequence. Did it start suddenly at an identifiable time or are there no measurable "hunting events" on that time 1 2 Matthew H. Nitecki scale? Once hunting started did it soon become universal and involve mass hunts, and hence may not be easily recognized in the fossil record? Or was the development of hunting gradual and thus with obscure beginnings? Anthropological events are grouped into the relatively short, agriculturo technological period, and into the immeasurably (in the anthropological sense of lack of events) long and excavatable part of the pre- or nonagricultural period. It is in this latter, longer era that hunter-gatherer, forager and scavenger periods began. It is perhaps the inevitable nature of the fossil record that the oldest events are rare and farther apart, while the most recent are abundant and therefore close together. This always gives us the impression that events accelerate and are characterized by geometric progression, or that they grow exponentially. All such exponential curves suggest the sudden explosion of events. What is also always associated with events that occur geometrically in time is that they not only increase geometrically in numbers, but also in rate. Thus we see the evidence of late Pleistocene hunting almost as an explosion in the pattern of human behavior. We are here concerned with hunting as procurement of animals only. We are not concerned whether there may have been other functions to hunting, and we are assuming that hunting was a reflection of the need for securing meat, skin, sinew, bone, and marrow. When hunting started depends on what is really meant by hunting. If all people prior to the domestication of plants and animals are considered hunters (and gatherers) then, of course, man has been a hunter since the beginning. If, on the other hand, hunting is defined as the sole means of securing proteins, then the claim that the pre-agricultural humans were hunters must become a matter of inference. The fossil evidence is poor. If man were a solitary hunter, little evidence of his activity would have been preserved. The monkey shot from the tree, or the arrow with which it was shot, are unlikely subjects for fossilization, or for taphonomic analysis of hunting. If man gathered shellfish, eggs, or creepers and crawlers, he was not a hunter. It is only the highly organized, communal enterprise of stalking with specialized tools, and the concomitant accumulation of large amounts of bone that may The Idea of Human Hunting 3 provide good evidence for the evolution of hunting. Contributions by Klein and by Binford ask for sound proof that Homo erectus, 400,000 B.P., was a hunter. Both authors are concerned with the archeological data, and show that there is no solid evidence to support the existence of hunting at the important site at Torralba, and that therefore the hunting practices of H erectus, if demonstrable at all, were very feeble. How many such sites were in reality water laid and not accumulated by man? Would not entire carcasses float down and accumulate? Richard Klein is an eminent anthropologist and biologist at the University of Chicago, and an author of numerous books and articles on early man and how he gained subsistence. Here he argues that human ancestors more than four million years ago were probably not carnivorous, but that the much later historic hunting-gathering societies depended heavily on meat procurement. Klein questions what was in between these still unresolved events. It is possible that the improvement in technology of meat procurement was gradual and progressively more efficient with the evolution of human behavior. It is also possible that between 100,000 and 40,000 B.P. big game hunting occurred suddenly with the emergence of modern man. It is also possible that scavenging lasted a long time; but likewise it is also possible that hunting has a long history. However, there is good evidence of human involvement with bone accumulations in the late ~leistocene, and at about 40,000 B.P. there is a major advancement in human hunting. Binford uses statistical methods to show that the romantic view, that pre-H sapiens sapiens were mighty hunters, is an exaggeration. Lewis Binford, a distinguished professor at the University of New Mexico represents a subfield of anthropology, which he, more than most specialists, has done his best, with marked success, to change. In the past, it had been generally accepted that man before H erectus was a marginal scavenger. Binford, as others in this volume, now argues that this is also true for H erectus. Hominids were not successful hunters as late as 400,000 years ago. To us, nonanthropologists, it seems unlikely that early man was herbivorous. It is possible, however, that the ancestors of man were herbivorous, insectivorous, or omnivorous. For the herbivore to become a meat
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