INTRODUCTION TO ARCHAEOLOGY Nancy White - Touro Institute

Where is Koobi Fora and what is the evidence there?
In Kenya, eastern Africa, where hominid remains,
animal bones, and tools and stone fragments are
arranged in enough proximity to suggest living floors
where groups of early humans gathered. Today other
Leakeys work there, first Louis and Mary’s son
Richard and now his wife Maeve, and the hominid
fossil discoveries are still coming.
How old are the first hominids, and what do these
small archaeological traces tell us about them? The
Oldowan tools now have been pushed back to 2.5
million years ago, and the footprints are fully a million
years older. Without straying too far from
archaeology, we can examine all the glamour of
paleoanthropology and see again how the viewpoints
of the investigator influence the interpretation. Many
popular accounts of hominid discoveries include the
soap opera details of the investigators’ lives—who disagrees with whom and who was sleeping
with whom and how this influenced what got funded or published. Examples are Ancestral
Passions (Morrell 1995), the story of the Leakey family and its discoveries, and Lucy: the
Beginnings of Humankind (Johanson and Edey 1981), by Don Johanson, who is coming to speak
on our campus this fall. There are many other popular accounts, and they do explain the science
fairly well. Some even demonstrate the importance of archaeology in understanding how our
earliest human-like ancestors lived. Johanson’s later book, Lucy’s Child (Johanson and Shreeve
1989), includes a chapter telling how he brought some famous archaeologists such as Lewis
Binford out to East Africa to help understand the landscape archaeology of early hominid
adaptations.
How do archaeologists evaluate entire landscapes in which people lived? They look for the
available resources, whether stone for tools, other raw materials, animals and plants for food, or
other environmental variables that might influence communication and travel and social aspects
of life.
How can we reconstruct the life of the earliest human ancestors, and what are alternative
viewpoints? Beyond which hominid was an evolutionary dead end and which gave rise to our
genus and eventually our own species (physical anthropology debates which change yearly with
each new discovery and pronouncement), there is great controversy on how they lived. Here is
where some archaeology, including social reconstruction, is useful. Dart’s original interpretation
portrayed our earliest ancestors as clever hunters who frequently killed for a living. The “Man
the Hunter” model was popular into the 1960s, and was thought to explain humans’ rapid
evolution, especially ever-increasing brain size. The need to plan and hunt and survive, as well as
the efficient nutritional package provided by meat, was supposed to have been the driving force
in human biological evolution. But studies of modern and historic hunter-gatherers began to
show that most such peoples ate predominantly plants, often gathered by women, since meat is
much harder to come by (it runs away, while plants do not!). The male bias and the meat bias