Darwin/Taphonomy

Darwin's conception of early prehistoric humans as confident, clever hunter-gatherers has long dominated anthropology. His theory has been reinforced by an accident of history: the human fossil record has been found largely in reverse order. Remains of humans' most recent forebears, who lived 35,000 to 100,000 years ago, were discovered in 1856; in which their environments differ from prehistoric ones (for example, in containing fewer large animal predators).

Recent intellectual developments, such as the new field of taphonomy, have called into question the traditional hypothesis that early hominids outsmarted the predators with whom they competed for meat and that they mastered their world through hunting. Taphonomy investigates the transformation of skeletal remains into fossil—it asks, for example, whether bone piles whether hyenas' teeth scar animal bones differently than do human tools.

Taphonomy has been utilized by some researchers in studying a group of animal fossils, hominid fossils, and stone tools that were almost two million years old. By comparing the microscopic features of linear grooves on the fossilized animal bones with similar grooves on modern bones, the researchers found that cut marks made joints and that the toothmarks of animal carnivores often underlay rather than overlay the cut marks.

The researchers hypothesized from this evidence that early hominids were scavengers of meat left from carnivore kills, rather than hunters of live prey. From patterns of wear on fossilized hominid teeth, the researchers further deduced that early hominids, like other scavengers, ate fruit primarily and meat only occasionally. Early hominids could have hominids who often perched in trees and who foraged and scavenged alone or in small groups.