I have been unable to get a copy of this from the archives, but I have been kindly sent a copy. It's actually worth a read, his theories seem most sound. So much so that I've stick a link to here from the Savannah theory pager, too.
As far as I know, I quote it verbatim and in it's entirety. Any errors are due to it being typed in from hardcopy in order to sent it to me: I apologise for them. HTML control codes have been inserted for paragraph breaks. No other edits have been made.
Apologies to anyone if they feel I have infringed copyright by including this, but I unfortunately cannot link to a copy on the S.A.P. archive site, since it is not available. I will, of course, immediately remove it if Tobias, or a representative, asks me.
I delivered the Daryll Forde Memorial Lecture at University College London (Dept. Anthropology) on 4th Nov 1995. The lecture was devoted to "Little Foot" and the bearing of recent South African researches on the status of Australopothecus Africanus.
Most of the lecture dealt with the discovery of Little Foot and what Ron Clarke and I have made of its interesting mosaic of morphology (as well as a summary of other important finds from South Africa in recent decades, which had been neglected internationally over the last 20 years.)
Towards the end of the talk I concluded that the foot bones from Sterkfontein member 2 show that it is highly likely that there was an arboreal element in the life of australopithecines represented by the foot bones. I added: "It is all very well to infer that there was an arboreal element in their life, but were there trees big enough to hold the body mass of the australopithecines?"
Up till recently, a major prevailing paradigm for the evolution of bipedalism has been the savanna hypothesis. I once wrote a paper called "The Conquest of the Savanna" and Elisabeth Vrba once desribed the hominids (hominins) as "the founding fathers of the savanna". If the savanna hypothesis were correct, the relatively scrubby trees on the African sub-Saharan savanna would certainly not have provided sufficiently strong branches for australopthecines to climb, or on which they could escape from lions, and even sleep at night.
I then drew attention to new findings of fossil animals, fossil plants, and fossil pollen from Sterkfontein, Makapansgat, and Gladysvale. Three important ape-man sites in the Transvaal, as well as at Aramis, Tim White's new hominin site in southern Ethiopia, all of which pointed to the small-brained, bipedal australopithecines of 4.4 to 2.5 million years ago having lived in a woodland or forest niche, not a savanna terrain. I gave details of this new information, much previously unpublished,
I then went on to say "This fits with the physiological and biochemical evidence, gathered by Marc Verhaegen and Elaine Morgan".
Here, let me interpolate that we owe a debt of gratitude to Morgan and Verhaegen for the comprehensive and rigorous way in which they have gathered together and sifted an anormous body of evidence based, not only on Verhaegen's own researches, but on those of a number of human biologists such as McFarlane, Montagna, McFarland, Schmidt-Nielsen. A number of these writings, I cannot resist adding, have been published in peer-reviewewd periodicals, especially those of Verhaegen and of the other investigators he cites.
To return to the Daryll Forde lecture, I detailed many of the researches on subcutaneous fat, sweat glands, water and sodiom loss, powres of concentration of urine, capacity to drink, ending this section by stating; if this complex of histological, biochemical, and physiological features was the mark of the earliest hominins, .."we should have been hopeless as savanna-dwellers. All of the former savanna supporters (including myself) must swallow our earlier words in the light of the new results from the early hominin deposits. So Little Foot had big trees available. And the savanna hypothesis is washed out..."
Thus the change of paradigm to which I referred was from the notion that bipedalism emerged in a savanna terrain, to the new notion that the ape-men must have lived in a well-wooded, even well-forested and well-watered ecology. Note that I made no direct reference to the Aquatic Ape hypothesis. I did say that a change of paradigm is a wonderful thing: I was referring here to this particular change of paradigm. I did not address the issue of any alternative hypothesis for the evolution of bipedalism, whether it be according to the AAT or any other hypothesis. But I was concerned to wipe out and expunge, once and for all, the savanna theory of the emergence of hominid bipedalism.
Indeed I rejoiced at the change of paradigm: and these were my closing words in the Daryll Forde lecture: "Max Planck once wrote on the subject of the replacement of an outworn paradigm: 'A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it"
"That must be one of the masterpeices of cynicism on the scientific process. I for one cannot accept it, albeit I am in the evening of my career. Paradigm changes, I like to think, flow overwhelmingly from new evidence and, where the evidence is sound and even irresistible, they should be embraced just as lief by the old as by the young.
A change of paradigm shakes us up; it rejuvenates us; and this above all, it prevents mental fossilisation - and that is good for all of us."
So my work in the paleo field, and that of my colleagues like Ron Clarke, Lee Berger, Marion Bamford, Dick Rayner and Tim White, have I believe provided strong evidence against the idea of bipedalism having emerged under savanna conditions.
Of course, if savanna is eliminated as a primary cause, or selective advantage, of bipedalism, then we are back to square one and have to try to find consensus on some other primary cause. There are other theories, including AAT, but my rejection of the savanna hypothesis did not mean that I was automatically espousing the AAT (pace Holloway). The unseating of the savanna hypothesis is one issue; its replacement by some other hypothesis to "explain" bipedalism and uprightness is a separate issue.
That's it, in a potted summary.