ABSTRACT
I think it is safe to say that during the latter years of the 1970s there developed in paleoanthropology a kind of “consensus” view of our hominid ancestors. This view was largely developed by Glynn Isaac (1971, 1978a, 1978b, 1983c), then of the University of California at Berkeley, and popularized in many articles and in several books aimed at lay audiences authored or coauthored by Richard Leakey (Leakey and Lewin 1977, 1978; Leakey 1981). Fundamental to this construction of our ancient past was the view that early man was a hunter. It was admitted that the early beginnings of mankind were impoverished relative to the achievements of later men, nevertheless, the history of the emergence of our modern condition was thought to be a story of progress. It was a history of gradual and accretional accomplishment, given the original presence of certain fundamental “human” characteristics. Isaac argued in a seemingly convincing manner that, at the very dawn of our appearance as tool-using hominids, “men” were hunters living in social groups characterized by a male-female division of labor. The products of the hunt were returned to sleeping places (home bases) in which altruistic sharing took place among adults as well as provisioning of children. Crucial to this construction of early man’s lifeway was Isaac’s belief that food sharing was a major conditioner for many of the “essentially” human characteristics that he believed to have been already present at roughly the Plio-Pleistocene boundary (Isaac 1971, 1976, 1978a, 1978b; Isaac and Crader 1981). Food sharing thus was believed to have set the stage for much of the progressive emergence that seemed to characterize the later evolution of mankind.
