Nationality American Thesis year 1979 | Alma mater Harvard University Discipline Anthropologist | |
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Awards Médaille d'Honneur of the City of Toulouse, Doctor of Letters honoris causae, and Oscar and Shoshana Trachtenberg Prize for Faculty Scholarship Website anthropology.columbian.gwu.edu/alison-s-brooks | ||
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Alison S. Brooks is an American paleoanthropologist and Paleolithic archaeologist. Her work is mainly in Africa and Northern China, dealing with the question of the origin of Homo sapiens.
Contents
Carta the evolution of human nutrition alison s brooks and margaret schoeninger neanderthal diets
Biography
Alison Brooks is a paleoanthropologist and Paleolithic archaeologist. She works in Africa and northern China. One of her many fields of study is the Middle Stone Age; with sites in the Middle Awash Valley, Ethiopia and the Olorgesailie Basin, Southern Kenya Rift.
She is one of the most prominent figures in the debate over where Homo sapiens evolved and when. In 1979, she got her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Harvard University. She has been a professor at George Washington University since 1988.
Along with being a professor and an archaeologist, she is also a Research Associate in Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Brooks is also involved in the development and implication of new heritage policies in Africa. Her work has taken her all over the world, including projects in: Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Sweden, France, China, Botswana, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, and Kenya.
Research
Because she is such a big member of the human evolution debate, a lot of her research centers around human evolution and modern human behavior. Modern human behavior is generally thought of as beginning in Europe with the end of the Last Glacial Maximum, but Brooks thinks differently. She and Sally McBrearty feel that there is a fatal flaw with this direction of thinking. By thinking that modern human behavior evolved anywhere other than in Africa totally erases a fundamental part of African history from the archaeological record and also from the history of every human alive today. All the categories to divide time up have come from Europeans, but these frameworks often leave out key events in African history that cannot be fit into these categories. The first Europeans were Africans after the second Out of Africa movement. Homo sapiens are present in Africa 130,000 years ago (190,000 pending investigation). Homo sapiens do not appear in Europe or Asia until 40,000 years ago (the absolute earliest in the Levant may be 80-120,000 years ago) and not until 62,000 years ago were then found in Australia. The area of inhabitable land in Africa that could have fostered human evolution is much larger than that of Europe or Asia. Brooks and McBrearty explain what it means to have modern human behavior, and they review the evidence found in Africa dating back to the Middle Stone Age. They argue that the evolution of humans was not a European revolution that suddenly overtook the world and replaced everything else, but rather a gradual shift from Africa and out.
Anatomically modern Homo sapiens were widespread by 50,000 years ago, though Neanderthals were still pretty dominant in the colder climates of Europe, Asia, and Siberia until 35,000 years ago. This period from the Middle to Upper Paleolithic is a time marked with the emergence of new technology; technologies like specialized bone tools and blade cores, more prominent art, larger social networks, and more advanced economic strategies. She has recently found evidence of tools being used in Africa long before they were being made in Europe, which feeds into the modern human behavior argument in favor of Africa. At the Upper Semliki Valley of the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, she and her team have found evidence of more complexed technologies that date to the Middle Stone Age. They found formal bone technology-some points being barbed and some were not. These tools are typically found in Upper Paleolithic sites in Europe in a site that was dated to the Middle Stone Age in Africa. These sites show that complex bone technology was in use by about 90,000 years ago, much earlier than anywhere in Europe.
Another key point in the modern human behavior debate is the early fishing evidence that Brooks and colleagues found on the lakeshore of Ishango in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Ishango has bone harpoon technology and evidence of fishing that dates back to 90,000 years ago. Fishing is considered to be part of the Upper Paleolithic/Later Stone Age and part of modern human behavior. The fishing industry in central, northern, and eastern Africa are all based on bone harpoons found at sites. Fishing rapidly spread throughout the continent as a result of the wetter conditions that developed in Africa at this time. Fishing technologies spread as far north as Naqada, Egypt, and as far west as Aouker massif, Mauritania. Brooks's work in the DRC shows that the people of Ishango and eastern Africa were able to develop fishing technologies before the end of the Pleistocene, long before they did in Europe.
Influence on others
Alison Brooks's writings have been used many times by other scholars as a baseline of knowledge or to help them make their point. Her article with Sally McBrearty "The Revolution That Wasn't: A New Interpretation of the Origin of Modern Human Behavior" from 2000 has been cited nearly 2000 times (as of December 2016). Stanley Ambrose uses their revolutionary article as baseline of information for his paper in Science, "Paleolithic Technology and Human Evolution". He uses their information on the development of tools in Africa for his argument about human evolution and the origins of modern human behavior.