Are Stone Age Hunter-Gatherers Evolving or Devolving?
03/11/2005 Anthropologists typically view stone age tribes as stuck in an eddy from primitive beginnings, never advancing into civilization. Yet some tribes of hunter-gatherers in Thailand and Laos appear to have been farmers in their past, reports Science Now with apparent surprise: Traditionally, anthropologists thought that modern hunter-gatherer tribes like the Mlabri descended through the ages unchanged. But an analysis of the tribe led by Mark Stoneking of the Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, indicates that these communities are more complex than previously imagined. (Emphasis added in all quotes.) Genetic comparisons with other agricultural tribes, as well as studies of tribal myths, indicate that these people reverted to hunting and gathering after years of experience in agriculture. Stoneking can t stay away from the E word, even though the evidence is against it: hunter-gatherers have changed and evolved, particularly in response to inter
