My bone to pick isn't with the scholarship on the particulars of human hunting patterns. It's with the conclusions related to the evolution of intelligence.
There's a tendency to think that human intelligence arose because of a series of serendipitous adaptations that permitted intelligence to blossom--eating marrow, eating meat, having opposable thumbs, bipedalism, complex vocalizations, etc. But every time a researcher tries to differentiate humans along an axis, we later discover that these adaptations are actually quite pervasive.
Tool use, communication, calorie sources, etc... whatever early humans did we eventually find to actually be quite pervasive in the sense of independently arising. Which suggests that none of these alone is any sort of bottleneck to intelligence. And if such adaptations are incrementally available then why is it human intelligence exploded so? What's the bottleneck? The only response, again, is some sort of cosmic serendipity along the whole chain, but that's conclusory without any evidence (i.e. showing the bottleneck that prevents all these other species from continuing down the same path and, most importantly, why humans are uniquely capable of squeezing through these bottlenecks time and again).
The scholarship in the article is interesting and useful, but as it regards intelligence it doesn't even begin to answer the critical questions.
There's a tendency to think that human intelligence arose because of a series of serendipitous adaptations that permitted intelligence to blossom--eating marrow, eating meat, having opposable thumbs, bipedalism, complex vocalizations, etc. But every time a researcher tries to differentiate humans along an axis, we later discover that these adaptations are actually quite pervasive.
Tool use, communication, calorie sources, etc... whatever early humans did we eventually find to actually be quite pervasive in the sense of independently arising. Which suggests that none of these alone is any sort of bottleneck to intelligence. And if such adaptations are incrementally available then why is it human intelligence exploded so? What's the bottleneck? The only response, again, is some sort of cosmic serendipity along the whole chain, but that's conclusory without any evidence (i.e. showing the bottleneck that prevents all these other species from continuing down the same path and, most importantly, why humans are uniquely capable of squeezing through these bottlenecks time and again).
The scholarship in the article is interesting and useful, but as it regards intelligence it doesn't even begin to answer the critical questions.