During the past fifteen years, human palaeontology has been revitalized by a series of discoveries whose interpretation has produced a new excitement in the search for man’s ancestry. New paths of human evolution are replacing those that have become rutted through decades of repetition of the same data and the same theories. The current vigour recalls the new spirit of just a century ago when, during the 1850s and early 1860s, the discoveries of the ‘cave men’ revolutionized the concept of man’s past and created for him a previously unbelievable antiquity. Like those discoveries, the finds of our generation, culminating in the evidence from Olduvai Gorge, have led to a re-examination of the bases of human behaviour and its development. Hallowell’s own stimulating examinations of the nature of the human achievement, of human nature itself, have been instrumental in that redefinition of man’s uniqueness that underlies the contemporary search for the human threshold in the evolutionary past. And with the reawakening of studies of human evolution both physically and behaviourally, it is perhaps of some interest to examine those events of an earlier period, in an earlier state of the science, that provided the foundations of both data and concept upon which our present knowledge and interests have been built. During the past fifteen years, human palaeontology has been revitalized by a series of discoveries whose interpretation has produced a new excitement in the search for man’s ancestry. New paths of human evolution are replacing those that have become rutted through decades of repetition of the same data and the same theories. The current vigour recalls the new spirit of just a century ago when, during the 1850s and early 1860s, the discoveries of the ‘cave men’ revolutionized the concept of man’s past and created for him a previously unbelievable antiquity. Like those discoveries, the finds of our generation, culminating in the evidence from Olduvai Gorge, have led to a re-examination of the bases of human behaviour and its development.
Preliminary small mammal taphonomy of FLK NW level 20 (Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania)
