(uplifting music)
- [Narrator] We are the paradoxical ape.
Bipedal, naked.
Large-brained.
Long the master of fire, tools and language.
But still trying to understand ourselves.
Aware that death is inevitable,
yet filled with optimism.
We grow up slowly.
We hand down knowledge.
We empathize and deceive.
We shape the future from our
shared understanding of the past.
CARTA brings together experts from diverse disciplines
to exchange insights on who we are, and how we got here.
An exploration made possible
by the generosity of humans like you.
(bright music)
(cheerful music)
- Good afternoon, and welcome
to this CARTA symposium on hunting.
My name is Pascal Gagneux.
I'm the Associate Director of CARTA.
Among the oldest questions humans have asked themselves are,
who are we, what are we doing here,
where did we come from, how did we get here,
and where are we going.
Anthropogeny focuses on two of these questions,
namely, where did we come from, and how did we get here.
It brings together a variety of disciplines,
because we believe that understanding human origins
is only possible at the intersection
between the social and the natural sciences,
with help from computing sciences and various disciplines.
It's a question that's so big that no single
discipline will be able to answer it.
This symposium is sponsored by CARTA,
the Center for Academic Research
and Training in Anthropogeny.
The scientific quest to understand human origins.
CARTA is a interdisciplinary enterprise
that brings together people from UCSD
and the Salk Institute, and people across the mesa.
It is co-directed by Ajit Varki,
Margaret Schoeninger and Fred Gage.
And I do what I can to help.
We want to say very special thanks to our major sponsor,
The G. Harold and Leila Y. Mathers Foundation of New York,
that have in many ways made everything possible we've done,
and continue to help us a lot.
We also would like to especially thank Annette Merle-Smith,
who is here today, for her huge help
in supporting the Graduate Specialization in Anthropogeny.
A one of a kind program that brings together
graduate students from different disciplines,
eight different grad programs at UCSD,
to try to talk to each other and navigate
this question of where do we come from,
what are human origins.
And we want also to extend thanks
to the many people who have supported the establishment
of the James Handelman Endowment
for the Exploration of Anthropogeny,
in an effort to endow CARTA, and indefinitely
to continue this symposia.
We have the nagging feeling that we're not
quite done understanding human origins.
Many people have stepped forward and helped,
and we hope very much that many of you will join.
We also want to say a special thanks
to Elizabeth Lancaster and Eli Shefter,
for subscribing the Closed Captioning.
And all of you who have helped us by supporting CARTA.
This would not be possible without CARTA staff.
Ingrid Benirschke, Rachel Emens, Kate Kaya,
Linda Nelson, and Jesse Robie that you will see today.
Kate is not here, she is manning the computers
and helping with the webcast.
And also the UCSD-TV cast, Rich Wargo,
Matt Alioto, Marci Bretts and Jacob Parker.
Finally we would like to thank Kent Schnoeker, in the back,
who is in charge of the recording
and the projection, and Michael Jeffs.
And of course, I wouldn't end without thanking
Ed Siegel for the wonderful welcoming music.
So with no further ado, I welcome you,
and I hope you will enjoy a lot
of new knowledge and insight into hunting.
And I pass over to our chair, Richard Wrangham.
(audience applauds)
- Thank you, Pascal.
And thank you to CARTA.
It's wonderful to have a symposium here,
on a problem that is a wonderful meld of interests,
if you happen to be someone who is interested
in both chimpanzees and in humans.
What we're dealing with here is ultimately
a hypothesis that has been of huge impact,
in terms of anthropology in general, actually.
When Washburn and Lancaster produced this,
this notion that the intellect, interests,
emotions and basic social life
all are evolutionary products of the hunting adaptation,
that may have been a slight exaggeration,
but it nevertheless remains true today
that a tremendous amount of the way in which
our own adaptations have evolved are seen
as going on through lives of hunters and gatherers.
And of course, hunters and gatherers very much
are thought of in terms of the hunting adaptation.
The particular time when this
received bigger stimulus than any,
perhaps, was on the occasion of the Man
the Hunter symposium in Chicago,
that led to a famous book.
And it's worth noting that this had
scholars all across anthropology,
from archeologists and biological anthropologists,
to social anthropologists like Marshall Sahlins there.
And even though it sounds appallingly sexist
to think of man the hunter as being
the origin of so many of our adaptations,
it's worth remembering that out of that symposium,
came for the first time the appreciation
that foraging by females might be,
well, at least as important as hunting.
So that was '68, '66, and it was happening
at a time when people have just started to realize
that thanks to Jane Goodall's work
starting in the early 1960s,
that chimpanzees, astonishingly, were hunters
in a somewhat human-like style.
With the males being more engaged in hunting,
and all of these fascinating associated
features such as food sharing.
And the pattern of the development of interest in hunting
is therefore taken both chimps and humans side by side,
and you might think that all the interesting
questions have now been answered.
But a few months ago,
Jim Moore and Ian Gilby were talking together
about the fact that even such a question
as why is it that chimpanzees in some populations
hunt a lot more than others, had not really been answered.
And out of their conversations, they realized
there were a whole slew of problems.
What exactly is the reason that chimps or humans hunt?
And in both cases, we've got the question
is it really for nutritional benefits,
or are they showing off in some way.
And by the way, if it is nutritional benefits,
what are the nutritional benefits?
And are they consistent in different contexts?
It's still really an unresolved question.
We still know rather little about the degree
to which hunting is beneficial at the individual level,
or how much cooperation is needed for it.
Only recently has much attention
been paid to hunting by females.
So this core question for anthropology
50 years ago still remains very much
unexplored, or underexplored.
And of course, it ultimately relates
to the origins of human hunting.
So the classic kind of meat-eating hypothesis is this.
That in the Pleiocene, the australopithecines
were not probably eating very much meat.
But, chimpanzee-like style, they did hunt.
And then that gave rise to more meat-eating,
in the habilene phase.
And then meat-eating became really critical.
But we can dissect that and start asking
are all of the questions I've just been addressing
and more about why this happened,
and ultimately, what its consequences were.
So we're not gonna be talking today about the consequences,
we're gonna be talking more about
why it happens and how it happens.
And in thinking about where we come from,
in relationship to where our hunter-gatherer past took us,
then we're gonna be taking a third party as well,
and bring chimps in, to help us on that journey.
(audience applauds)
(bright music)