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Preface
- University Press of Colorado
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vii Preface As soon as some ancient member in the great series of the Primates came to be less arboreal, owing to a change in its manner of procuring subsistence, or to some change in the surrounding conditions, its habitual manner of progression would have been modified: and thus it would have been rendered more strictly quadrupedal or bipedal. —Charles Darwin, 1871 For the production of man a different apprenticeship was needed to sharpen the wits and quicken the higher manifestations of intellect—a more open veldt country where competition was keener between swiftness and stealth, and where adroitness of thinking and movement played a preponderating role in the preservation of the species. —Raymond Dart, 1925 Our intellectual forebears explicitly grounded their notions of human origins in the ecological realm. Our understanding of human evolution has no doubt advanced since those times. We certainly know more about early hominin biology, diversity, and distributions through time and space. We also have a broadly informed sense of the plants and animals that populated the ancient landscapes on which our ancestors roamed, and a profoundly better notion of the environmental and climatic change they faced. We even have a steadily increasing understanding of the causal mechanisms behind such changes. preface viii We have advanced less, however, in our understanding of how these disparate elements can be distilled to produce a coherent story of hominin evolution ; and although this is at least partly a failure of theory, it is also the inevitable result of the often cloudy, controversial, and contradictory evidence that forms the pediment on which our evolutionary scenarios are built. If Hutchinson is correct in asserting that ecology is the theater in which the evolutionary play takes place, early hominin actors are shadowy, or worse, peripatetic figures. Major questions abound. Was Ardipithecus ramidus a forest creature or a denizen of wooded grasslands? Was Australopithecus afarensis an ecological generalist or a specialist limited to narrow microhabitats on otherwise diverse landscapes? Was Paranthropus boisei a frugivorous hard-object feeder or an amiable muncher of sedges and grasses? The answers to these questions lie to a large extent on which ecological data-sets we principally value, how we read them, and how they speak to one another. And while we have moved a long way in this regard, we still have a long way to go. In fact, for all of the recent developments in this field, it would probably be safe to say that we are less collectively confident of the ecological underpinnings of human evolution than we were twenty years ago,which is remarkable given the new tools at our disposal and the undiminished pace of fossil discovery. Who could have dreamed that this wealth of information would produce so little persistent light? It was such concerns that led us to organize a workshop in October 2004 that brought together twelve researchers with varied interests including hominin paleontology, archaeology, primatology, paleoclimatology, sedimentology, and geochemistry to discuss the state of knowledge in their specialized subfields and in hominin paleoecology on the whole. After two days of convivial and stimulating discussion two things were clear. First, recent advances in the field and the lab were not only bettering our understanding of human evolution but potentially transforming it; and second, communicating the finer details of this research had become distressingly complex, given the increasing specialization of our individual fields of endeavor. And if communicating such knowledge proved difficult among a group of professionals,how much worse would it be to disseminate to a broader audience of graduate students, advanced undergraduates , and the interested public? It was with the idea of confronting this burgeoning Babel that this volume was conceived. This is not a collection of specialized papers that recapitulate or expand upon presentations from the meeting. Rather, we tried to devise a book that would not only provide a good working knowledge of early hominin paleoecology, but would also provide a solid grounding in the sundry ways we [18.118.95.171] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 20:02 GMT) preface ix construct such knowledge. We leave it to the reader to judge the degree to which this approach has been a success. The book is divided into three sections: climate and environment (with a particular focus on the latter), adaptation and behavior, and modern analogs and models. The methods discussed in each represent only a portion of those employed by students of human evolution,although they are among those most frequently encountered in the literature...