Man the Hunter (MTH) was a conference held at UChicago in April 1966. It gave rise to modern hunter-gatherer studies, but it has not been without controversy. To learn more about the history of MTH, I interviewed co-editor Richard B. Lee: https://t.co/fxGq9i1HTJ 🧵 below

My review of Sex is a Spectrum by Agustín Fuentes:

"The tl;dr of my review is that he doesn’t deliver a new narrative, nor any theoretical or conceptual insights or advances beyond 'everything about humans is a supercomplicated blend of biology and culture.'"

Very elegant study in @ScienceMagazine by @LukeFannin05 @DominyNathaniel @vivek_vasi @ChalachewMS and others demonstrating behavioral changes preceded morphological ones in primate feeding on graminoid plants

We find evidence for behavioral drive in the hominin fossil record. Changes in graminivorous behavior preceded corresponding changes in dental morphology by 700,000 yrs

Behavior drives morphological change during human evolution Our new article is out in @ScienceMagazine today https://t.co/20no7rEX7y

From our new preprint on physical activity (PA) and cardiometabolic health among the Orang Asli of Peninsular Malaysia. An extreme lifestyle gradient results in drastic variation in PA, w/ esp notable age-related declines in PA with urbanization https://t.co/QURsKe0kGf

Check out our new preprint! We ask: how does urbanization impact cardiometabolic health among Orang Asli and Turkana? https://t.co/66DFJE0hej "We find that age effects on cardiometabolic health are highly modifiable by lifestyle..."

Our new preprint looks at how early life environments shape cardiometabolic health among Orang Asli https://t.co/GVMhHtiEUI "We find support for the Developmental Constraints model but not the Predictive Adaptive Response model in explaining adult cardiometabolic health"

Really looking forward to this conversation on Friday May 23 with @David_S_Wilson If you've ever wondered what hunter-gatherers can tell us about the evolution of democracy, please join us! https://t.co/IwH0ZKRGl3

Tomorrow (Tues May 20) I'll be giving an online talk to the Radical Anthropology Group on our new preprint about the Meaning of Man the Hunter. All are welcome! 130pm EST ZOOM only ZOOM ID 384 186 2174 passcode Wawilak https://t.co/79yMCBZ5wt

This preprint isn’t a defense of any of the meanings of Man the Hunter. It’s a call for clarity. Man the Hunter can and should be critiqued, but being specific will help to achieve more productive dialogue and science communication.

These disparate histories led us to distinguish between different meanings of Man the Hunter, each of which has a unique legacy.

At the MTH conference, Dart and Ardrey were hardly mentioned, and when they were, it was dismissively. Edmund Leach said Ardrey’s books were ‘best left along altogether.’

Anthropologists were equally dismissive of Dart and Ardrey. Sherwood Washburn, Berkeley professor and author of the ‘new physical anthropology’, was one of the earliest critics of Dart’s Killer Ape Theory. He said Ardrey was a ‘popularizer of data he does not understand.’

Ardrey was dismissive of contemporary HG's (‘human evolution’s losers’), and thought they added little to our understanding of prehistory. He also dismissed the insights of the MTH conference, like Lee’s work on the importance of women’s gathering.

By the way, in 1971, Ardrey and Louis Leakey held a dialogue at Caltech. You can find the full transcript here: https://t.co/kT5kOXsxw2 Leakey thought Ardrey was going too far on humanity’s violent origins.

These meanings are often confused. But there was little dialogue between popular writers (like Robert Ardrey and Desmond Morris) and professional anthropologists. Ardrey was motivated by Raymond Dart’s theories, combined with the work of ethologists like Konrad Lorenz.

Background: our preprint argues that there are different meanings of Man the Hunter. See abstract.

Our team recently took a deep dive into the history of Man the Hunter. Preprint: https://t.co/JmykD4Y0r4 I learned some very surprising things about interactions between popular writers and practicing anthropologists. 🧵 below

This new podcast featuring @padillaccc and Karen Kramer is nicely done - a balanced perspective grounded in the history of anthropology and the ethnography of hunter-gatherer societies. We need more sci comm like this! https://t.co/88AxCZpNim