Siamak Naficy, Department of Anthropology, University of California at Los Angeles, PO Box 951553, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1553, USA

Three behavioral adaptations are attributed to modern human groups: presence of a central place or home base, frequent sharing of food, and division of labor. Although no extant primate shares these adaptations, the wolf (Canis lupus), has been shown to have all three. In this paper, it is argued that central-place foraging (i.e., bringing food back to a secured location), was the behavioral response of both Canis lupus and Homo erectus to the high cost of rearing altricial young (Stanley, 1992) while competing for animal tissue in semi-open to open habitats with high predator densities (Potts, 1982, 1988). Food sharing could have been a secondary outcome of this pattern of increasingly centralized foraging, delayed food consumption, and short-term food surpluses. Kin selection (hamilton, 1964; Feinman, 1979) in small groups and the "tolerated theft" model (Blurton Jones, 1987) are both used to explain the frequency of food sharing among modern humans and wolves.

It is argued that the need to care for altricial young and to meet the environmental exigencies of a hunting lifestyle forced both human foraging bands and wolf packs to adopt complex, albeit flexible, divisions of labor. Homo erectus, if not earlier species of Homo, may have engaged in central-place foraging, and thus perhaps employed a dual-unit foraging strategy, similar to wolves and other social canids.