Primate subsistence patterns: Collector-predators and gatherer-hunters

Abstract Hominization via predation has become a pervasive anthropological theme in recent years. Indeed, the assumption that hunting behavior originated within the primate phylogenetic sequence as a “human” subsistence pattern has generated numerous subsidiary hypotheses about how secondary traits were initiated, propagated or enhanced when a terrestrial, savanna-dwelling, meat-eating hominid line emerged from an arboreal, forest-dwelling, plant-eating ancestral stock. New field evidence on the behavioral and organizational features of subsistence in nonhuman and human primates now provides the basis for reconsidering these views. Many monkey, ape and human populations no longer seem to fit the stereotyped images sketched in past decades, when little or no comparative information was available to anthropologists. The discrepancy between the old concepts and new facts is particularly evident in Sub-Saharan Africa, where numerous primate taxa have been studied in climatically and biotically similar zones. In this region alone, more than 364 cases of predation, involving 22 different species of mammalian prey, have been recorded among at least 10 supposedly “vegetarian” baboon and chimpanzee populations dispersed between Ethiopia and South Africa. Furthermore, many of the human populations living within this same region—such as the Mbuti pygmies, the Hadza and the Kalahari bushmen—have been characterized as “hunters” but actually subsist for the most part on foods other than meat. These basic facts about collector-predator and Gatherer-hunter subsistence patterns are a mere beginning, however, for popular conceptions of primate lifestyles are eroding swiftly along many axes of investigation. It is becoming clear, for instance, that many primates—from prosimians to humans—are actually omnivores even though anthropologists have persistently miscast them as frugivores or carnivores. This false dichotomization of nonhuman versus human diets has led to a series of equally erroneous dichotomies in nonhuman versus human behavior. Thus, the possession of culture, technology, language and other similarly amorphous traits, many of which were in fact derived from this presumed shift in subsistence, have become entrenched as concepts of human uniqueness. In recent years, however, many new discoveries in primatology, and in ethnography and archeology, have weakened the theoretical structure to which “man-the-hunter” has been pinned. It is probable that savanna-dwelling, tool-using, seed-eating, scavenging and other independent schemes can now be replaced by a single, much simpler model wherein subsistence shifts among both nonhuman and human primates are perceived as smooth transitions within a graded continuum of evolution. Thus, the central objective of this report is to show that the subsistence activities of several extant cercopithecid, pongid and hominid populations in Africa can be arranged along an integrated spectrum which reflects gradual processes in the evolution of primate behavior and organization. This spectrum serves as the crux for a unifying model of behavioral evolution, and can in turn be broken down into a linked series of subsidiary models which elucidate specific aspects of primate prehistory.