Shaping the Science of Scavenging and Survival: Celebrating Dr. Martha Tappen

For the past 30 years at the Twin Cities campus of the University of Minnesota, thousands of students in Dr. Martha Tappen’s anthropology classes have learned that human biology and many aspects of human behavior have been shaped by the same evolutionary forces that have operated on every other living organism on the planet. They have learned — and this is surprising to many — that humans are still undergoing evolution, even though it might seem that through technology, we have conquered most natural processes on earth. 

A Picnic of Purpose

Throughout her teaching career, Dr. Tappen, a biological anthropologist and zooarchaeologist who retired this past May, has made it her mission to reveal to students that humans are part of the natural world. Although shopping for food at a store and turning up the thermostat when it’s cold are actions that no one thinks twice about, Tappen, who lived among foragers in the Ituri forest in central Africa for six months while conducting PhD research, stresses that our lifestyles today are an extremely recent phenomenon in the course of human evolution. Not only have humans’ means of obtaining food, warmth, and shelter radically changed since the Industrial Revolution, even our cultures and societal structures have changed with the advent of modern technology. 

How to convey these abstract concepts to undergraduates effectively? In her trademark fearless fashion, Tappen employed a hands-on approach. She decided to teach students where one of our most important sources of nutrition — meat — comes from, by having them butcher dead animals with stone tools! Therefore, shortly after she was hired as an assistant professor in 1997, Tappen created an anthropology department tradition: the Paleo-Picnic. This annual event, elements of which Tappen imported from the anthropology department at her PhD institution, Harvard University, was enthusiastically adopted by Tappen’s colleagues and graduate students in Minnesota. 

“Attempting to collectively butcher an elk, ostrich, or half of a bison using stone tools creates bonds unrivaled by other experiences… “

Tappen recalls one weekend in the early 2000s when she hosted two back-to-back Paleo-Picnics at her house, after a colleague brought her a deer they had obtained by bow-hunting, and an acquaintance brought her one that had been hit by a car. A small army of grad students, undergraduates, and faculty descended on her house near the St. Paul campus and butchered the animals using stone tools; they brought home different cuts of meat and returned the next day to share, in true hunter-gatherer fashion, the dishes they had made with the bounties of the picnic, such as venison chili, venison goulash, and venison hot dish!

The annual Paleo-Picnic fostered strong relationships within the department — attempting to collectively butcher an elk, ostrich, or half of a bison using stone tools creates bonds unrivaled by other experiences — and left a lasting impression on students. Tappen’s Paleo-Picnic was not merely a teaching tool or a potluck, however. In keeping with the modus operandi of a research institution such as the U, the Paleo-Picnic simultaneously fulfilled a handful of Tappen’s teaching as well as research objectives. 

14,000 Bones: Building a World-Class Collection

As a zooarchaeologist, Tappen studies animal remains (i.e., bones) in the archaeological record to reconstruct past human diets. The accurate taxonomic identification of broken animal bones in an archaeological site requires comparative collections, i.e., animal bones from known species. When Tappen was first hired, the faunal reference collection at the U was minimal. Tappen made it one of her missions, therefore, to create a decent teaching collection. 

Today, the Tappen zooarchaeology reference collection is more than decent, it is extraordinary in scope and variety, containing over 14,000 bones. They represent wild species common to Minnesota, such as white-tailed deer, moose, bear, and otter, domesticated animals such as horse, donkey, bison, goat, sheep, and pig, and exotic animals such as llama, tiger, and mongoose. These bones were acquired through Paleo-Picnics, purchases, and donations, such as from a former professor of veterinary medicine and, not uncommonly, roadkill! The resulting collection has provided unparalleled learning opportunities for Tappen’s students, including how to prepare fresh bones for a reference collection through hours of tedious boiling and cleaning. Many of Tappen’s students now use the valuable taxonomic skills they learned in her classes while working as professional archaeologists in Minnesota and beyond.

Scavengers or Hunters? Decoding the Fossil Record

Tappen therefore used the Paleo-Picnic as a means of creating a reference collection as well as illustrating to students how humans, for most of our existence, have acquired meat. The Paleo-Picnic, however, also served a role in Tappen’s experimental research. The process of butchering an animal with stone tools leaves tell-tale marks on the bones that can inform the zooarchaeologist about how meat was acquired. This observation is at the heart of Dr. Tappen’s research, which has focused on clarifying when, during human evolution, humans began to hunt regularly, as opposed to obtaining small scraps of meat through scavenging. 

The idea of “Man the Hunter,” which had dominated paleoanthropology during the 1950s and ’60s, began to be challenged in the 1970s by archaeologists who suggested that assemblages of bones in archaeological sites could have been accumulated by agents other than humans, such as hyenas and other carnivores, or natural processes such as water transport. In graduate school at Harvard University in the late 1980s, Tappen focused her doctorate research on documenting these processes within the context of the emerging field of taphonomy, the study of what happens to animal remains from their death until their recovery by archaeologists. 

She spent two seasons with the Semliki Research Expedition in Parc National des Virunga, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), in 1986 and 1988, documenting the frequency of scavenging opportunities that are available in a savanna, an environment believed to be similar to the one in which early Homo evolved almost 2 million years ago. She also spent six months in 1986 and 1990-91 living among Efe pygmy hunter-gatherers and Lese horticulturalists, also in Zaire, studying how foragers hunt and butcher animals. This research led her to identify important markers distinguishing natural bone accumulations from those resulting from human butchery. Her publications represent major contributions to taphonomy and the hunting versus scavenging debate.

Unearthing Early Humans at Dmanisi

In addition to contributing foundational experimental, actualistic, and ethnoarchaeological data to the field of taphonomy, Tappen has also devoted a major part of her career to the study of the bone assemblages at the site of Dmanisi in the Republic of Georgia. Dmanisi is known as the oldest site containing human remains outside of Africa. Dated to nearly 2 million years ago, the earliest members of our genus Homo outside of Africa are found at Dmanisi, along with thousands of broken faunal remains of other animals. 

Tappen has made key contributions to the analysis of these assemblages, helping to decipher how they accumulated and the extent to which humans at this site were predators or prey (both, at one time or another, it seems!). Her research has been funded by numerous grants, including four from the National Science Foundation on which she has served as PI or co-PI. Her results have been published in prestigious publications such as the Journal of Human Evolution, Current Anthropology, and Science. 

Teaching Thousands and Shaping the Department

As a researcher on the evolution of Homo, Tappen made it a priority to develop an undergraduate course in human evolution. ANTH 1001 Human Evolution is still the largest course in the history of the anthropology department. Taken by approximately 500 students from across the University each year, it is one of the few courses in CLA to fulfill the Biological Sciences Liberal Education core requirement. Tappen taught the course nearly every year for 20 years, teaching over 4,000 students. 

She also helped develop the archaeological sciences at the University of Minnesota. In 1998, she and a former colleague in the department obtained a grant from the National Science Foundation to build two new archaeology labs. Later, Tappen was instrumental in developing the biological anthropology subfield in the department, helping hire several faculty members and laying the foundation for a robust research program that today includes three biological anthropology labs and four archaeology labs, each of which has been supported, throughout the years, by major external grants.

“To me, this scene is the quintessence of her as an academic — completely invested in what she is doing while maintaining a touch of whimsy.”

— Dr. Sabrina Curran (PhD ’09)

Tappen’s legacy also extends to the numerous PhD students (eleven) for whom she served as major advisor and co-advisor, and an astonishing 31 PhD committees! A beloved advisor, mentor, and teacher, Tappen is praised by her former graduate students, many of whom have faculty positions in the U.S. and abroad. Dr. Sabrina Curran (PhD 2009), associate professor at Ohio University, sums up a consensus: “When I think of Martha, the first thing that comes to mind is a day I entered the bones lab to find her softly singing a song to herself about the bone she was studying. To me, this scene is the quintessence of her as an academic — completely invested in what she is doing while maintaining a touch of whimsy.”

As professor emerita, Tappen plans to continue co-advising her last two remaining students, finish a project, and learn to play the electric guitar. As someone who’s attended thirteen Paul McCartney concerts, we are pretty sure that Tappen will sing for many more years!