Speaker: 

Briana Pobiner

Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History, Human Origins Program, Department of Anthropology

Questions about the timing, frequency, resource yield, and behavioral and biological implications of early hominins acquiring food from the carcasses of large animals have been a part of the “hunting-scavenging debate” in the paleoanthropological scholarly literature for decades. This talk will provide a brief summary of this debate and review the zooarchaeological and modern ecological evidence for a possible scavenging niche among the earliest animal tissue-consuming hominins.