Do we owe our intelligence to a predatory past?

Abstract

As I am not a neuroscientist, it is an unexpected pleasure for me to contribute a lecture to the James Arthur series on the Evolution of the Human Brain. By contrast, I am an African naturalist, and what I have to say will be very much from the perspective of African cave taphonomy, a recent and rather macabre discipline that uses fossils in an attempt to reconstruct the circumstances of death of the animals involved, as well as to gain insights into their behavior and the paleoecology of the time. The lecture's focus will be on predation, to which I am largely indebted to Professor Raymond Dart, who provoked me into devoting many years of my life developing the principles of cave taphonomy and interpreting the bone accumulations in southern African caves where hominid fossils have been found.