Day: October 14, 2008

Ian Kuijt and Guns, Germs & Steel

Ian Kuijt, my colleague here at Notre Dame, is an archaeologist who has specialized in the origins of agriculture, food storage, and the emergence of social inequality. He appeared in the PBS series Guns, Germs and Steel, based on the best-selling book by Jared Diamond. So it is my pleasure to present that particular clip from the PBS documentary , where Ian discusses the emergence of food storage, agricultural practices, and changes in social complexity.

The clip with Ian Kuijt is prefaced by segments one and two on You Tube. You can click here for all the clips (1-18) from the series. Ian also has a lot of good online material about the Dhra site itself.

In the documentary, Diamond argues for an ecological approach to human history, where local ecology, microbes and geography make a large difference in which societies demonstrate “progress” or “civilization.” There is a Wikipedia site on Guns, Germs and Steel, where both Diamond’s basic argument and some relevant criticisms are presented.

If you want something directly from the horse’s mouth, here is a short interview with Diamond. He also has a longer, but still accessible, essay over at Edge. And finally Diamond discusses why agriculture isn’t all that great for human health in this essay entitled The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.

Chimpanzees: Too Close for Comfort

Back in 1992, David Attenborough narrated the film Too Close for Comfort, a documentary on chimpanzee life and behavior in the Tai Forest. The Tai Forest is a national park in Cote d’Ivoire in West Africa. The film centers on the work of Christophe Boesch and Hedwige Boesch-Achermann, who have been working in the Ivory Coast for years. Together the two wrote the book The Chimpanzees of the Tai Forest: Behavioral Ecology and Evolution.

I use this film in my Introduction to Anthropology class, it just has some extraordinary footage. Mike Richards, the cameraman, spent two years on this project! Here is one clip, where the chimps are filmed cooperatively hunting colobus monkeys. Wow.

There are four other clips available:

Closest links to man – the intro to the movie and the Tai chimps

Hard nuts to crack – the chimps cracking nuts with tools

Fall of Brutus – the confrontation between two dominant males that takes place over a bonanza of nuts

Eat them before they eat you – where chimps use tools to eat safari ants and a leaf sponge to drink water

Christophe Boesch has his extensive publications available for download at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. One recent publication is: Is Culture a Golden Barrier between Chimpanzees and Humans? where he argues that chimpanzees display a broad cultural repertoire, similar to humans. He wrote a 2001 piece for Scientific American on The Cultures of Chimpanzees. And if you want to know more about cooperative hunting, here’s a 2002 Human Nature paper on that.

Update: I have posted another spectacular video of chimpanzee hunting, including infrared views of their group tactics from the air as they hunt a pack of colobus monkeys.