Robert W. Sussman, Ph.D., professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences, has been awarded the 2006 W.W. Howells Book Prize from the American Anthropological Association for best book in biological anthropology written for a wide audience.
The prize for Man the Hunted: Primates, Predators and Human Evolution, published in 2005, is shared by co-author Donna L. Hart, Ph.D., a faculty member of the Pierre Laclede Honors College and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
The pair will receive the award at the association’s Nov. 16 meeting in San Jose, Calif.
“We are thrilled to receive this honor,” Sussman said. “It’s wonderful that the book has garnered such recognition.”
The W.W. Howells prize was inaugurated in 1993 in honor of Professor Emeritus William White Howells of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University.
The association’s criteria for the award are works that represent the highest standard of scholarship and readability, inform a wider audience of the significance of physical/biological anthropology in the social and biological sciences and demonstrate a biocultural perspective.
In Man the Hunted, Sussman and Hart challenge the prevailing view and argue that primates, including early humans, evolved not as hunters, but rather as prey of many predators, including wild dogs and cats, hyenas, eagles and crocodiles. Despite popular theories posed in research papers and popular literature, early man was not an aggressive killer, they contend.
The book poses a new theory, based on the fossil record and living primate species, that primates have been prey for millions of years, something that greatly influenced the evolution of early man.
Our intelligence, cooperation and many other features we have as modern humans developed from our attempts to outsmart the predator, Sussman said.
Since the 1924 discovery of the first early humans, australopithecines, who lived from seven million years ago to two million years ago, many scientists theorized that those early human ancestors were hunters and possessed a killer instinct. Through research and writing, Sussman has worked to debunk that theory.
An expert in the ecology and social structure of primates, Sussman does extensive fieldwork in primate behavior and ecology in Costa Rica, Guyana, Madagascar and Mauritius.
He is author and editor of several books, including The Origins and Nature of Sociality, Primate Ecology and Social Structure; The Biological Basis of Human Behavior: A Critical Review; and Ringtailed Lemur Biology: Lemur catta in Madagascar, published this year.
Sussman recently was appointed to a four-year term as secretary of Section H (Anthropology) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a five-year term as editor of the Yearbook of Physical Anthropology published by the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.