THE FUTURE OF THE PAST by Alison

When AnthroNotes began publishing in 1979, what we knew about human evolution and how we studied it differed significantly from today. Field research among wild populations of great apes by Jane Goodall (chimpanzees), Dian Fossey (mountain gorillas), and Birute Galdikas (orangutans) had provided exciting new data for modeling the likely capabilities of our earliest ancestors. Ecologically focused field studies of living huntergatherer populations such as the Ju/’oansi in southern Africa, the Mbuti in the eastern Congo basin, the Hadza in northern Tanzania, and other groups throughout the tropical and sub-tropical world provided new ideas about how ancestral hunter-gatherers might have lived – using a mobile life style without domestic animals. Social systems were fluid. Nourishing toddlers in the absence of domestic animal milk and soft vegetable foods required mothers and infants to stay in close contact throughout the day and night. Vegetable foods were more important than meat in the diet; women brought in more calories than men did through a daily foraging round; and long-distance exchange networks alleviated the ever-present risk of starvation when local resources failed.