Early hominid hunting and scavenging: A zooarcheological review

Abstract Before the early 1980s, the prevailing orthodoxy in paleoanthropology considered Early Stone Age archeological sites in East Africa to represent a primitive form of hominid campsites. The faunal evidence preserved in these sites was viewed as the refuse of carcass meals provided by hominid males in a social system presumptively characterized by sexual division of labor. This interpretation of early hominid life ways, commonly known as the “Home Base” or “Food Sharing” model, was developed most fully by Glynn Isaac. 1–4 As Bunn and Stanford 5 emphasized, this model was greatly influenced by a paradigm that coalesced between 1966 and 1968, referred to as “Man the Hunter.” 6