Defense Strategies in Early Human Evolution
How did our distant ancestors defend themselves from lethal African predators after they moved from the trees to the ground and started sleeping in the open?Strangely, this important question of human evolutionary history has been largely ignored by scholars. For Charles Darwin, humans did not need to defend themselves from predators, as they evolved via sexual selection in a predator-free environment; For Raymond Dart human ancestors were ruthless killers and cannibals, the apex predators of their entire environment, so the need for a defense from predators seemed irrelevant; Charles Brain proposed that, on the contrary, our ancestors were weak prey species, vulnerable to a large number of predators in Africa. Contemporary scholars mostly argue over two paradigms: (1) our ancestors were big game hunter-gatherers (partly modified Dart’s “Killer Ape” hypothesis), and (2) our ancestors were fearless aggressive scavengers (this idea was developed within the “new archaeology” paradigm of the 1980s, but the questions like how our ancestors managed to take kill away from powerful African predators and sleep on the ground at night, still remain open).On June 23-26, 2023, an international muti-disciplinary conference “Defense Strategies in Early Human Evolution” took place at the Jim Corbett International Research Centre at the Grigol Robakidze University, Tbilisi, Georgia. The conference brought together behavioural ecologists, primatologists, biologists, cognitivists, philosophers, evolutionary musicologists, and conservationists, who were discussing various issues of this vast topic. The book that you hold in your hands is the result of this meeting.
