"IN SEARCH OF HUMAN ORIGINS" 

PART II: SURVIVING IN AFRICA

This video in the series focuses on the issue of toolmaking and suggests different ideas about what hominids were doing with tools and how they survived.

1. Pay close attention to the environment (including other animals) that early hominids lived in and what this suggests about their survival behavior.

2. What inferences are made about the survival behavior of South African hominids? Australopithecus boisie ("Zinjanthropus")? Homo habilis?

3. What challenges did Lewis Binford pose for traditional interpretations of hominid behavior? How plausible is the "killer ape," or "Man the Hunter," hypothesis?

4. Note how contemporary hunting and gathering societies are used to make inferences about early hominid behavior.

5. What did Johanson and Blumenshein's experiments with stone tools suggest about early hominid food procurement strategies?