Word: washburns
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...first symmetrical weapons were the antecedents of technology. By domesticating the dog for the chase, the hunter may have opened his eyes to the possibility of domesticating the prey. "Grinding and boiling may have been the necessary preconditions to the discovery of agriculture," write Anthropologists Sherwood L. Washburn and C. S. Lancaster of the University of California's Berkeley campus. "One can easily imagine that people who were grinding seeds would see repeated examples of seeds sprouting or being planted by accident...
...obvious way to learn about these predispositions is to study the behavior of man's nearest neighbors, the monkeys and great apes-and to study them not just in the zoo or laboratory but in their natural habitat. In studying the baboon, for example, Berkeley Anthropologist Sherwood L. Washburn and his Harvard disciple, Irven DeVore, are concerned mainly with what this primate can reveal about man. The baboon's hierarchical society, commanded by dominant males, suggests the fundamental pattern to which man's ancestors may have subscribed, long before marriage was invented. So far no primate study...
...early man been naturally monogamous, evolution might not have favored intelligence and the dramatic expansion of the brain. "If every male had been allowed the opportunity to contribute equally to the gene pool," writes Fox, "then we might have been forever stuck as Homo stupidus." He and others, notably Washburn and British Ethologist Michael Chance, have devised theories for explaining how the banished, peripheral males might eventually win their spurs...
Animal studies can also be used to criticize existing social institutions. In all the lower primates, the education process is informal. Washburn has shown, for instance, that primate curiosity-which in man would be called basic research-comes into play when the animal is well-fed and secure; only then is he in the mood to gratify this intellectual need. Similarly, the juvenile ape, observing grownup behavior, mimes it in his games. For this pleasurable educational system, modern man has substituted the discipline of the classroom and the material rewards of grades, both of which, in Washburn's view...
This is partly because the human animal straddles the past and the present. "It is not only our bodies that are primitive, but also our customs," Washburn writes. "They are not adapted to the crowded, technical world, dominated by a fantastic acceleration of scientific knowledge. There is a fundamental difficulty in the fact that contemporary human groups are led by primates whose evolutionary history dictates a strong desire to dominate. Attempts to build personal or international relations on the wishful basis that people will not be aggressive is as futile as it would be to try to build the institution...