The Hunting Apes. Meat Eating And The Origins Of Humanbehavior - Hardcover

Stanford, Craig-Britton

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691011605 ISBN 13: 9780691011608

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

What makes humans unique? What makes us the most successful animal species inhabiting the Earth today? Most scientist agree that the key to our success is the unusually large size of our brains. Our large brains gave us our exceptional thinking capacity and led to humans' other distinctive characteristics, including advanced communication, tool use, and walking on two legs. Or was it the other way around? Did the challenges faced by early humans push the species toward communication, tool use and walking and, in doing so, drive the evolutionary engine toward a large brain? In this text, author Craig Stanford presents an alternative to this puzzling question. According to him, what make humans unique is meat. Or, rather, the desire for meat, the eating of meat, the hunting of meat and the sharing of meat. Stanford argues that the skills developed and required for successful hunting and especially the sharing of meat spurred the explosion of human brain size over the past 200,000 years. He then turns his attention to the ways meat is shared within primate and human societies to argue that this all-important activity has had profound effects on basic social structures that are still f

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Craig B. Stanford, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Southern California, has conducted field studies of apes and monkeys in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. He is the author of the recent book Chimpanzee and Red Colobus.

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"The 'Man the Hunter' model of the 1960s was simultaneously one of the most influential and reviled of ideas about human origins. It fell easy victim to numerous criticisms (drawn especially from work on chimpanzees), and dropped from favor during the 1970s. There was, however, a baby in that bath and Stanford has rescued it, dried it off, and refined it with volumes of new data and theory. The result is a sophisticated and provocative synthesis of ëMan the Hunterí and chimpanzee behavioral ecology."--Jim Moore, University of California, San Diego

"Stanford's essay neatly captures the powerful role that hunting has played in human evolution and in the minds of evolutionists."--Richard Wrangham, Harvard University, author ofDemonic Males: Apes and the Originis of Human Violence

Aus dem Klappentext

"The 'Man the Hunter' model of the 1960s was simultaneously one of the most influential and reviled of ideas about human origins. It fell easy victim to numerous criticisms (drawn especially from work on chimpanzees), and dropped from favor during the 1970s. There was, however, a baby in that bath and Stanford has rescued it, dried it off, and refined it with volumes of new data and theory. The result is a sophisticated and provocative synthesis of Man the Hunterí and chimpanzee behavioral ecology."--Jim Moore, University of California, San Diego

"Stanford's essay neatly captures the powerful role that hunting has played in human evolution and in the minds of evolutionists."--Richard Wrangham, Harvard University, author of Demonic Males: Apes and the Originis of Human Violence

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1999
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691011605
• ISBN 13: 9780691011608
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 253
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar