There is a fully-funded PhD position at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology to pursue dissertation research among the Mayangna of Nicaragua, expanding a longitudinal study of subsistence strategies and behavioral ecology. Please share the posting!
www.eva.mpg.de/career/posit...
1. In this paper, we included this word cloud of the top 200 words in the volume Man the Hunter. A reader wondered how could the top 200 words in a book with the title "Man the Hunter" include "woman" but not "man"? Doh!
🧪 #rstats #BioAnth #AcademicSky 🧵
ok here's the answer: they only do invited commentaries.
however, if people are interested in contributing, they should reach out.
the handling editor at EHB is Aaron Lukaszewski: aalukas.1859@gmail.com
Thanks Pat! Good points
I really enjoyed this paper. I wish more people wrote these kinds of intellectual histories of complex debates quoting both sides in their own words. Bravo!
That said, I have two issues I'd love to see discussed in the promised commentaries:
i'm not sure, let me find out!
Our review of the import of the Man the Hunter conference and volume, which contrary to recent media coverage actually expressed diverse views on hunter-gatherers and inspired decades of research, is now published 🧪 #BioAnth
authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...
I’m happy to announce that our paper "The Meanings and Dividends of Man the Hunter" has now been published in Evolution and Human Behavior.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
"Man the Hunter" is often conflated with Dart's "killer ape theory"; A pity because, though imperfect, the MTH conference was a departure from previous Hobbesian colonial Hunter-Gatherer narratives.
In this new Target Article we map out some of that intellectual history.
@edhagen.net @lcdrgeordi.bsky.social @dstibbardhawkes.bsky.social @rayhames.bsky.social @sheinalew.bsky.social @haneuljang.bsky.social @lukeglowacki.bsky.social @kstark8.bsky.social @zhgarfield.com
Thanks to the many co-authors on this piece (shout-outs below) and to a number of colleagues for critical feedback. We looking forward to further constructive engagement on this topic.
One historical contingency that has led to much confusion was Sherwood Washburn's decision to call the famous conference Man the Hunter. This was against the pleading of Richard Lee and others.
The conference was progressive in many ways, but the title is stuck in the past.
One common error is to equate Washburn and Lancaster's chapter (The Evolution of Hunting) at the Man the Hunter conference with the entire volume.
We show this is a mistake: there was tremendous viewpoint diversity at the conference, and their chapter was not presented at the conference.
We show that this doesn't exist in any unified sense. The history is messy and diverse. Let's get specific on the exact models we're critiquing.
So how should we talk about Man the Hunter? Our primary suggestion is this: Let's avoid critiquing a 'general' Man the Hunter paradigm.
We also review how the study of contemporary hunter-gatherers have added to our knowledge of human evolution. Briefly, HGs have been a critical source of information when considered with care and skepticism.
Some great plots here made by @edhagen.net
The scientific study of hunter-gatherers has long been at odds with the vision presented by Dart and Ardrey. There was mutual disdain between these thinkers. Thus, we should not casually conflate them.
There is no basis for equating Dart and Ardrey and the Killer Ape Theory with the Man the Hunter conference of 1966, or with human behavioral ecology, as has been common in the recent literature.
In this paper, we tackle the intellectual history of this concept and its various meanings.
We distinguish between popular versions of this idea (Dart and Ardrey and the Killer Ape) and more scientific ones, showing that there was little intellectual interaction between these strands of thought.
I’m happy to announce that our paper "The Meanings and Dividends of Man the Hunter" has now been published in Evolution and Human Behavior.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Priceless interview for all anthropologists and fieldworkers. Thank you, @ilarimakela.bsky.social & RB Lee!!
Lee’s discussions on establishing new field sites closely parallel my experiences in the Omo in Ethiopia with the @omovalleyresearchproject.org
Basketball legend Michael Jordan dressed in a suit and holding a Nike Air Jordan athletic shoe
I've been using this image for years to illustrate prestige bias in my lecture on cultural evolution, assuming everyone would recognize him. This year I asked the class if they knew who this was, and the only student who did was the one black student. He was shocked that no one else did. 🧪 #BioAnth
Women’s mental health: current status and evolutionary perspectives by Carol Worthman | Evolutionary Human Sciences | Cambridge Core - www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
New episode (1218), with Dr. Edward Hagen. We discuss whether sex is binary, the distinction between sex and gender, and more. #Anthropology #Biology #Science
YouTube: youtu.be/DjIqDREBOqI
Podcast: bit.ly/4avxMHW
Top panel: My plot of US adult female and male height distributions, which are much narrower, and overlap less than in the figure from Fuentes, which is in the bottom panel.
1. After I posted my critical review of @anthrofuentes.bsky.social Sex is a Spectrum, a colleague pointed out that his figure of adult heights by sex (bottom panel👇) can't be right: there aren't that many US adults shorter than 4' or taller than 7'
Turns out Fuentes' data are made up 🧪 #BioAnth 🧵
ABSTRACT The extended evolutionary synthesis (EES) is a school of thought that maintains that genetic determination and natural selection are over-emphasized in the study of evolution at the expense of non-genetic inheritance and processes of evolution beyond selection. Its proponents call for the de-emphasis of genetics and the adoption of a broader model of inheritance that includes cultural and epigenetic transgenerational effects and strong adaptive phenotypic plasticity. Presenting itself as a radical alternative to what it claims is a rigid and ossified theoretical orthodoxy, the EES has lately gained considerable traction among scholars of human evolution, and a distinct sub-branch of the EES unique to the biological anthropological study of human evolution has emerged (the EES in human evolution). To date, however, no direct comparison between the EES in human evolution and other contemporary evolutionary approaches has been attempted to evaluate whether the EES in human evolution affords researchers an edge in articulating good questions and structuring research programs to answer them. After reviewing the landscape of evolutionary theory, we evaluate whether the EES in human evolution is capable of delivering the processually pluralistic vision of evolution it has long promised and whether it brings something that the decades-long ongoing synthesis (OS) of evolutionary theory since the modern synthesis does not. We then conduct a head-to-head comparison to evaluate the relative explanatory efficacy of the EES and our preferred OS theoretical framework on several issues of human morphological evolution. We demonstrate that evolutionary perspectives as drawn from the OS have a much more clarifying effect on the investigation of human evolution than their EES-based competitor. Far from being a radical extension of evolutionary thought, the EES in human evolution offers little more than another idiom in which to tell adaptationist stories and triumphalist narr…
A much-needed critique of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) as applied to human evolution, by @evoroseman.bsky.social and Ben Auerbach (2026).
Evolving a Field: Can Evolutionary Theory Provide What the Study of Human Evolution Requires? 🧪 #BioAnth
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
The International Society for Hunter-Gatherer Research are delighted to announce that CHAGS 14 will take place in Belém, Brazil Mon 12 - Fri 16 July 2027. Events/trips immediately before/afterwards.
Tx to hosts: Goeldi Museum & Federal Univ. of Pará. More details to follow.
Please share widely!
A new podcast interview by @ilarimakela.bsky.social with Richard B. Lee about Man the Hunter! Should be fascinating.
onhumans.substack.com/p/the-origin...
As we've argued in a recent preprint, Ardrey might have benefited from paying more heed to the anthropologists.
osf.io/preprints/os...
