The main point of the conference was that given that hunting was humanity's original source of livelihood, any theory of society and the nature of Man would require a deep knowledge of how hunters live.
The symposium was held at the Center for Continuing Education, University of Chicago, from April 6 to the 9th, 1966 and was attended by several of the most influential figures in then contemporary anthropology.
In addition to Lee and DeVore, the symposium was attended by Marshall Sahlins, Aram Yengoyan, George Peter Murdock, Colin Turnbull, Lewis Binford, and Julian Steward.
While conference attendees had stressed their studies of hunters and gatherers as a link to a Pleistocene past, historical particularists like Edwin Wilmsen and James Denbow critiqued this approach in what became known as the Kalahari Debate.
[5] However, an attempted verification of this study found "that multiple methodological failures all bias their results in the same direction...their analysis does not contradict the wide body of empirical evidence for gendered divisions of labor in foraging societies".