Last weekend, Desiree Schell and I taped a segment of "Everything You Know Is (Sort of) Wrong" (apologies)for Skeptically Speaking, a radio talk show and podcast that Desiree hosts. The topic was the concept of humans as predators, or hunters, or really, eaters of meat, and I was discussing the many ways in which people misconceived this notion. One of the misconceptions that came up is the idea that human ancestors went through an evolutionary stage called "scavenging" during which time we were not capable hunters, but we were good enough to scavenge, so we did that for a while until we improved our lot and became the top predator.
This pointy-headed idea came from three places, and all three were in part reactions to the prevailing "Man the Hunter" (or "Killer Ape") popularizations of human evolution (we also discussed those fallacies for the show). The first was Lewis Binford...
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