Re: chimps on the savanna? Nooooo.....

Alex Duncan (aduncan@mail.utexas.edu)
26 Oct 1995 01:27:18 GMT

I asked Hubey:

>>Are you suggesting that I should use a general purpose reference instead
>>of the primary literature? Or, do you bring this up as an excuse for
>>your ignorance? ("Well, the only book I've ever read on the subject
>>says...")

Hubey responded:

>I'm suggesting that you don't even know what shows
>up in an encyclopedia of human evolution, and certainly
>there are going to be no surprises there.
>
>Naturally people who write in it will be middle-of-the-road
>authors writing already well-established ideas.
>
>What you are doing is what you've been doing from the beginning.
>YOu cite references as if there's some kind of an unassailable
>proof whereas all most of them have are some raw measurements,
>photos, pictures, and lots of conclusions which are debatable.

This was all part of the discussion about chimps on the savanna. I
provided documentation that some populations of chimps do live in
territory that we could call "savanna". This was in response to Hubey's
authoritative statement that chimps don't go onto the savanna. Hubey
questioned my citation, because apparently the information doesn't show
up in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution, which is, I suspect,
the only thing on the subject Hubey has ever read.

Well, Hubey: I provided a citation from a group of respected
primatologists who actually went to Africa and actually observed chimps
living in the habitat in question. If the CEHE doesn't provide this
info., then I am sorry. Your suggestion that I should rely on a general
reference work rather than real data collected by real researchers is
moronic. The fact that the researchers in question have seen and
documented chimps on the savanna is, as far as I'm concerned,
"unassailable proof" that chimps do in fact go there. Deal with it. You
made an assinine statement based your near total ignorance, and you were
proven wrong (yet again).

Alex Duncan
Dept. of Anthropology
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX 78712-1086
512-471-4206
aduncan@mail.utexas.edu