Thomas Plummer: Queens College Department of Anthropology, member of CUNY graduate faculty and New York Consortium in Evolutionary Primatology

Humans are odd primates. We have unusually large brains, a diet rich in hard-to-acquire, nutrient dense foods, we practice extensive food sharing, and we can adapt to a broad panorama of environments through cultural practices and social institutions. Whereas other primates may exhibit culture, and produce technologies that assist in foraging, humans are unique in being dependent on cultural practices for survival. But how far back in time does this dependency on culture go? What was the adaptive significance of early stone technologies? In this talk I will describe research on two million year old archeological sites on the Homa Peninsula, Kenya. This research sheds light on early hominin foraging ecology at the dawn of the genus Homo.