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Paleolithic Home Bases Essay, Research Paper

Paleolithic Home Bases: Recent Archaeological History

Glynn Isaac Defines “the Homebase Hypothesis”

It has been argued since Darwin’s day that the great apes were man’s nearest living relatives, and as evidence emerged during the late 1960’s of the hunting propensities and simple tool use of chimpanzees (Goodall 1986), anthropologists found more and more reason to presume similarity of behavior between modern (e.g., Pan troglodytes or Pan panicus) and ancient varieties of hominids (Tanner 1981).

Still, modern humans are not chimps. Substantial differences of behavior exist between the great apes and hominids, and it was the late Glynn Isaac’s notion that these differences began early in our history.

Specifically, he noted that the modern human “habitually carries tools, food and other possessions either with his arms or in containers,” communicates with other humans by a spoken language, that the acquisition and sharing of food is “a corporate responsibility,” that modern human hunter-gathers conduct their foraging operations in the vicinity of communal gathering places or “home bases,” and that humans seek to acquire high-protein foodstuffs by hunting or fishing. None of these are common behavior among the apes or are practiced to the extent that they are among Homo sapiens sapiens. (Isaac 1978)

He also noted tool use both for gathering foods and for processing them for consumption, and different modes of social behavior, including long term pairing bonds (”marriage”) between male and female humans and complex rules of kinship and interpersonal behavior.

Many or all of these differences, Isaac felt, analyzing the archaeological data– primarily broken stones and bones and geological reconstructions of ancient landscapes– had been established at some point between 2.5 and 1.5 million years BP. Moreover, rather than being incidental, they were part of “a novel adaptive strategy” which led to modern Homo sapiens.

Earlier researchers had attempted to establish sequences for the appearance of modern human characteristics– movement to the savanna, bipedalism, tool use, hunting, brain enlargement, etc. (e.g., Campbell 1966) To Isaac, these “simple additive models” were untenable since some of the behavior to be accounted for was already present if only in primitive form in the repertoire of wild chimpanzees. As early as 1971, he argued in favor of integrated models.

“Integrated growth is a better analogue than chain reaction. Thus I would favor models involving concurrent development with mutual reinforcement of adaptive advantages by matching changes in all components, and from this stance I would argue that hunting, food sharing, division of labor, pair bonding, and operation from a home base or camp, form a functional complex, the components of which are more likely to have developed in concert than in succession. It is easy to see that tools, language, and social cooperation would fit into the functional complex as well, and very likely had equally long development histories within the overall system.” (Isaac 1972)

Isaac’s intuition was probably reinforced by his Ph. D. research at Olorgesaile, a Homo erectus site in Kenya. Olorgesaile, dated to between 900,000 and 400,000 years ago, almost certainly did function as a home base (Potts 1988:292). Moreover, it was discovered and first excavated by Louis and Mary Leakey, who saw evidence of home bases (”living floors”) at a number of hominid-formed sites in East Africa, including some in Olduvai Gorge. No doubt this common-sense interpretation, which in some respects goes back as far as 1933 to Solly Zuckerman (Potts 1988:251), had rubbed off on Isaac, but he had also become convinced that lower Paleolithic artifact assemblages were peculiarly difficult to interpret because of low sample densities which produced erratic and potentially misleading data. Discussing this in his 1972 paper, he went on to suggest that paleoarchaeologists were best employed searching “for regularities in the data that are indicative of widespread states and or major evolutionary trends,” and that “the study of occupation sites and their contents seems more promising than preoccupation merely with artifact assemblages.” (Isaac 1972:200)

He predicted a shift towards behavioral models.

Lewis Binford’s Initial Criticisms

In 1977 Isaac published a monograph on Olorgesailie. Lewis R. Binford, reviewing it that year in the Journal of Anthropological Research, was critical, later saying, “While Isaac was an innovator in considering the integrity of deposits yielding traces of early man, he never questioned that the associations among the items found in such modified deposits were all indicative of hominid behavior. He simply accepted the conventional ‘wisdom’ that they were present because hominids had caused the association.” (Binford, 1985:301)

The part of conventional wisdom that most annoyed Binford was evidently what another author called “the hunting hypothesis” (Ardrey 1976). Already skeptical about Neandertal’s abilities as a hunter, Binford was quite as willing to throw cold water on any too- human proclivity of Homo erectus, and firmly convinced that archaeological data would support him. As soon as reliable data and methods for interpreting it appeared, of course. His review called for a “frontal attack” on tool-fauna associations in the Lower Paleolithic.

The Koobi Fora “Homebases”

Meanwhile, that frontal attack was going on in East Africa, much of it under Isaac’s direction at the Koobi Fora research project, of which he had been co-leader (with Richard Leakey) since 1970. There seems to have been a graduate student uncovered with each and every artifact, and many of them produced

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