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Was There No Place Like Home?: A New Perspective on Early Hominid Archaeological Sites From the Mapping of Chimpanzee Nests [and Comments and Reply]

Early archaeological sites in East Africa have traditionally been interpreted as home bases, suggesting that by two million years ago hominids had developed ranging behavior more similar to the subsistence patterns of modern human hunter-gatherers than to the individualistic foraging characteristic of other primates. This interpretation rests on assumptions about contrasts in the debris-producing behavior of primates and humans that have never been tested ethnoarchaeologically. To explore alternative behavioral processes that could have contributed to the formation of early archaeological sites, field research was undertaken on the ranging patterns of a small population of wild chimpanzees living along the Ishasha River in Zaire's Virunga National Park. This riparian habitat is comparable to the paleoenvironmental contexts of many early archaeological sites in East Africa. Maps of the distribution of the nesting and feeding debris produced by these chimpanzees formed patterns spatially analogous to concentrations of artifacts found at the early sites. These data raise questions about how the ecological structure and resource configuration of this habitat conditioned the spatial redundancy of the chimpanzees' debris patterns and the extent to which analogous processes may have helped to pattern the Plio/Pleistocene archaeological record.