Chimps refute chauvinists

Scan page 13

425+6/RI.CC HO CHOa EVP 50(90) 11/5 (ab'CVa cz) (3*YVx1003456de 8 (2"+8)X= VBax-36x(267 lIr)" (BCVE6Y)" -(HLVxp+86 265XXAECZBK V267725W+pl36.0"

SCIENCE +2)600778424 9**54+«"Vx(ZX112 .NH'VE+P (x+R"C? A RECENT article in the Guardian about the discovery of direct evidence of meat-eating by hominids (human-like creatures) of 2 million years ago in East Africa, claimed that feminists would be upset because this discovery touched on "a highly sensitive and emotional" argument about hominid diet and the organisation • of early society. So what's it all about?

The traditional view that the development of cooperative hunting groups of males was decisive in the development of tools (weapons), language (to coordinate the hunt) and society (the hunting group plus their "dependents").

However, there is no evidence for this whatsoever.

True, in nearly all hunting societies today, it is the men who hunt (though in a few like the Agta of the Philippines, women also hunt - our traditional anthropologists have no explanation for this).

Also, our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, sometimes hunt, and it is the males who do this.

But there is no evidence that tools were first invented for hunting - to the contrary, as we shall see later.

Es. mination of male supremacist "Just so" stories by feminists. has revealed the emperor in a state of undress. In most modern hunter-gatherer societies, the gathering of vegetable, fruit and nuts by women and children is more important than the provision of meat by the men.

As Richard Leakey pointed out in a recent episode of The Making of Mankind, the women of the Kung bushpeople of Southern Africa gather mure than enough food to satisfy the needs of both sexes. The men seem to go hunting because they enjoy it and their contribution to the diet is seen as a luxury (the equivalent of earning "pin-money"?)

Using arguments like this, feminists have claimed that early humans were predominantly vegetarian and that women were the main (or at least equal) breadwinners. It seems to me that this is a "highly sensitive and emotional" argument -for male chauvinists who resent the toppling of MAN from his pedestal of breadwinner, protector and originator of civilisation.

Now Glynn Isaac, professor of anthropology in San Francisco, has discovered evidence of tool marks on animal bones in East African fossil deposits. Aha! Man the hunter! The feminists are wrong!

But unfortunately for the male chauvinists, it has not been denied that some hunting went on - the question is how important was it in determining the organisation of society? After all, chimps also hunt but they are a mainly vegetarian species.

Perhaps we can get some clues about our own past by considering some recent research on chimps, who after all have very similar genes to us (99% identical). It seems that their behaviour and abilities are quite similar to ours.

Thus, chimps can learn a sign language and even invent new words (including swear-words) in it. At least one chimp has been shown to be able to count up to four and recognise proportions of ¼, ½, ¾, They display Les awareness - unlike any other species but ourselves and orang-utans, they will recognise mirror reflections of themselves. In the wild, chimps use a variety of tools, throwing sticks at their enemies, using them as whips, levers, tooth-picks and probes to get termites out of nests.

They use larger sticks and-stones as hammers, chewed up leaves as sponges and whole leaves as toilet paper!

Now researchers in chimp behaviour (Christopher and Hedwige Boesch of Zurich) in the Ivory coast have found a particularly complex type of tool use.

The local chimps like to eat coula and panda nuts, but first they have to break the hard shells with a wooden or stone hammer.

Coula nuts may be collected in the trees and then broken on the ground, or the Chimp may take a hammer into the trees, collect some nuts and then find a flat branch for an anvil. Here, it performs a complicated juggling trick so it can crack and eat each nut, without dropping the hammer or the other nuts (presumably this is to avoid having to share its nuts).

Panda nuts are harder and have to be cracked on the ground with a stone first with powerful strokes to break the shell and then accurate hits to get the kernels out intact. Now, while opening coula nuts on the ground is done by both sexes, the more complex tasks of cracking coula nuts in the trees or cracking panda nuts are performed almost entirely by females:

So, female chimps are the innovators in tooluse.

If early humans developed similarly to chimps, then females may well have supplied the brains, by inventing new tools. Little consolation for the sensitive and emotional male chauvinist.

Scan page 14

no.81