The death of the "Savannah Hypothesis"?

There are many competing ideas about what caused our lineage to diverge from that leading to our closest relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos, but the savannah hypothesis is perhaps still the best-known. It was proposed for the first time in 1925, when Raymond Dart wrote that:

"For the production of man a different apprenticeship was needed to sharpen the wits and quicken the higher manifestations of intellect - a more open veldt country where competition was keener between swiftness and stealth, and where adroitness of thinking and movement played a preponderating role in the preservation of the species."

At the time, the first australopithecine (a member of Australopithecus africanus), had just been discovered in South Africa but almost no other record of human evolution existed; Dart's ideas about the environments associated with the emergence of humans were some of the first to be articulated. Since then, although the savannah hypothesis has not disappeared from palaeoanthropology, it has been challenged by a variety of other ideas. These new ideas increasingly emphasise the importance of increased environmental variability, rather than simple shifts in external conditions like a change from wooded to savannah environments.

In addition, recent discoveries of the earliest hominins have suggested that savannah environments were not important to our evolution after all. Ardipithecus ramidus, for example, the most complete early hominin known to science (and one of the biggest news stories of 2009 when it was published in a special edition of Science) is fairly conclusively associated with woodland and forest patches. Sahelanthropus tchadensis, in contrast, is found in gallery forest near - but not inside - an area of savannah, but whether this environment represented the habitat in which Sahelanthropus lived or just that in which it died is not clear.

In light of these recent finds and changing theoretical perspectives, the savannah hypothesis seems to be persisting primarily through disciplinary inertia. So, I would like to know: does the savannah model still, implicitly or otherwise, inspire palaeoanthropological research, or do we retain the hypothesis in our papers as a mark of respect for the ideas of past masters?

References:

Dart, R. 1925. Australopithecus africanus: the man-ape of South Africa. Nature volume 115, pages 195-199.

White, T. D., Asfaw, B., Beyene, Y., Haile-Selassie, Y., Lovejoy, C. O., Suwa, G. & WoldeGabriel, G. 2009. Ardipithecus ramidus and the paleobiology of early hominids. Science, volume 326, pages 64-86.

Vignaud, P., Duringer, P., Mackaye, H. T., Likius, A., Blondel, C., Boisserie, J.-R., de Bonis, L., Eisenmann, V., Etienne, M.-E., Geraads, D., Guy, F., Lehmann, T., Lihoreau, F., Lopez-Martinez, N., Mourer-Chauvire, C., Otero, O., Rage, J.-C., Schuster, M., Viriot, L., Zazzo, A. & Brunet, M. 2002. Geology and palaeontology of the Upper Miocene Toros-Menalla hominid locality, Chad. Nature, volume 418, pages 152-155.