> I recommend Craig Stanford's book, _The Hunting Apes_.
> 
> Todd Moody
> [log in to unmask]
> 

I've read some of it and was impressed at how effectively he skewered some
of the arguments of the politically correct anti-hunter overreaction. Thanks
for the reference, Todd. It's available online at
http://press.princeton.edu/books/stanford/. 

Stanford's field observations confirm those of Jane Goodall regarding the
surprising frequency and social importance of hunting among chimpanzees and
other primates. He discusses hunting and meat eating by chimpanzees,
baboons, and capuchin monkeys. 

The debate about whether meat eating was the main factor in human brain
enlargement is still unsettled, but Stanford adds a worthy contribution to
the debate, though I think he overreaches at times and the book could stand
some more editing. The work of Goodall and Stanford reveals the idea that
Australopithecines couldn't hunt to be farcical given that chimpanzees,
baboons and capuchin monkeys do.

There is also archaeological evidence to support the view that the ancestors
of modern humans hunted. For example, Paleoanthropologist Alan Walker,
"together with Richard Leakey and Kamoya Kimeu, discovered the
1.6-million-year-old fossil skeleton of a teenage male Homo erectus or Homo
ergaster that was named the Nariokotome Boy and Turkana Boy. According to
Walker and other scientists, the fossil reveals an intensely social 11- or
12-year-old hunter. 

The pelvic structure of Homo ergaster and Homo erectus skeletons is
"narrower than in modern Homo sapiens, meaning that Homo ergaster and Homo
erectus in both Africa and Asia had a greater ability to run. Their running
techniques may have been equivalent to a modern day race track athlete. This
hints that the species lived a harsh and demanding lifestyle; most
importantly they must have been accomplished hunters rather than scavengers
such as Homo habilis." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkana_boy)

Some relevant excerpts from The Hunting Apes:

> We know today that the cumulative amount of meat [hunted by 
> chimpanzees] can be quite high because of the tendency for chimpanzees 
> to capture several monkeys in a single hunt.

> Meat eating, tool use, and large relative brain size therefore occur 
> in two distantly related primate groups-apes and New World monkeys-and 
> meat eating and related behaviors are also known in an Old World 
> monkey, the baboon. Is this a random evolutionary convergence, or has 
> natural selection driven the coevolution of these traits? These 
> animals are exemplars of how effective nonhuman primates can be as 
> hunters. They are just three of two hundred primate species, so one 
> might argue that meat eating was not a fundamental factor in the rise 
> of the human species. The coincidence of traits among these species, 
> however, is striking.

> The depiction of early humans as weaklings is also odd considering 
> that we do not see [smaller primates] in this light.... Even when 
> chimpanzees travel on the ground, they are hardly defenseless, mobbing 
> dangerous animals such as leopards and driving them away through joint 
> effort. Our ancestors may not have had huge canines, but they 
> certainly may have been highly efficient killers and predators. During 
> the years I conducted research at Gombe there was one elderly male 
> chimpanzee, Evered, who was an accomplished hunter even though in his 
> last years he had lost the muscle tone needed for treetop agility as 
> well as nearly all of his teeth! Even modern people who lack 
> anatomical adaptations to tree living but who live in forested 
> environments have a tree-climbing ability far beyond that of anyone 
> raised in Western society. Neither chimpanzees nor humans have any 
> anatomical traits that specifically adapt them to a predatory way of 
> life. Instead, both use their ability to hunt socially and 
> cooperatively to compensate for a lack of such adaptations.

> In the reaction to Man the Hunter, the fact was lost that while meat 
> may not be the valuable food resource it had been assumed to be, it is 
> nevertheless the most valued food resource in most human groups, 
> including among foraging [hunter-gatherer] people.

> ... based on the behavior of chimpanzees, hominids ate meat much more
> frequently and at an earlier stage in their evolution than is commonly
thought.