Euclid O. Smith

The Early Hominid Plant-Food Niche: Insights From an Analysis of Plant Exploitation by Homo, Pan, and Papio in Eastern and Southern Africa [and Comments and Reply]

African plant-food genera exploited by Homo, Pan, and Papio have been catalogued and analyzed to provide an estimation of the size and composition of the fundamental plant-food niche of the early hominids. Results to date include recognition of more than 100 widely distributed African plant genera which are the best known candidates for plant-food exploitation by the Plio/Pleistocene hominids of eastern and southern Africa. An analysis of staples reveals that fruits would be the most common type of plant part contributing to the early hominid plant-food diet. Six plant genera (four providing edible fruits) are the first genera to be identified as members of the most probable early-hominid fundamental plant-food niche. Potential interspecies competition for plant-food staples has also been estimated. It is highly significant and must be considered in models predicting the realized niche of these primates and the early hominids.

The Crab-Eating Macaques (Macaca fascicularis) of Angaur Island, Palau, Micronesia (Part 1 of 2)

Crab-eating macaques on Angaur are an exotic fauna introduced to the island in the early 1900’s. The present population of 480-600 animals reportedly are descendents of a pair of monkeys brought

A further description of the control role in pigtail macaques,Macaca nemestrina

The control role of a dominant male in a captive group of pigtail macaques is described in this paper, with a particular emphasis on broadening this concept. A number of behavioral categories are shown to be highly correlated with the control role, making the concept of control role more useful in the study of non-human primate sociality.

Household Economics and Hominid Origins [and Comments and Reply]

Between 4 and 6 million years ago forces were gathering which transformed a group of quadrupedal individual foraging protohominids into one or more species of bipedal food-sharing hominids. Recently, several scientific subfields have contributed new insights and new pieces of information which, when fitted together by different scholars, present us with a confusing picture of how the transformation might have taken place. This paper examines some of the different ways the pieces have been reconstructed, notes some underlying assumptions, examines some aspects of the exchange logic they imply, emphasizes the importance of culture in defining the distinctive hominid econiche, and argues for the importance of the family household as a unit basic to understanding the origin of the hominids and the subsequent course of human evolution. Use of the family household as a unit of paleoanthropological analysis raises questions which call for collaboration among primatologists and biological and cultural anthropologists.