Between 4 and 6 million years ago forces were gathering which transformed a group of quadrupedal individual foraging protohominids into one or more species of bipedal food-sharing hominids. Recently, several scientific subfields have contributed new insights and new pieces of information which, when fitted together by different scholars, present us with a confusing picture of how the transformation might have taken place. This paper examines some of the different ways the pieces have been reconstructed, notes some underlying assumptions, examines some aspects of the exchange logic they imply, emphasizes the importance of culture in defining the distinctive hominid econiche, and argues for the importance of the family household as a unit basic to understanding the origin of the hominids and the subsequent course of human evolution. Use of the family household as a unit of paleoanthropological analysis raises questions which call for collaboration among primatologists and biological and cultural anthropologists.
