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  1. Gathering Is Not Only for Girls.Guillermo Zorrilla-Revilla, Jesús Rodríguez & Ana Mateos - 2021 - Human Nature 32 (3):582-602.
    In some small-scale societies, a sexual division of labor is common. For subadult hunter-gatherers, the onset of this division dates to middle childhood and the start of puberty; however, there is apparently no physiological explanation for this timing. The present study uses an experimental approach to evaluate possible energetic differences by sex in gathering-related activities. The energetic cost of gathering-related activities was measured in a sample of 42 subjects of both sexes aged between 8 and 14 years. Body mass and (...)
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  • Social roles, prestige, and health risk.Lawrence Scott Sugiyama & Michelle Scalise Sugiyama - 2003 - Human Nature 14 (2):165-190.
    Selection pressure from health risk is hypothesized to have shaped adaptations motivating individuals to attempt to become valued by other individuals by generously and recurrently providing beneficial goods and/or services to them because this strategy encouraged beneficiaries to provide costly health care to their benefactors when the latter were sick or injured. Additionally, adaptations are hypothesized to have co-evolved that motivate individuals to attend to and value those who recurrently provide them with important benefits so they are willing in turn (...)
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  • No Association between 2D:4D Ratio and Hunting Success among Hadza Hunters.Duncan N. E. Stibbard-Hawkes - 2020 - Human Nature 31 (1):22-42.
    The ratio of index- and ring-finger lengths is thought to be related to prenatal androgen exposure, and in many, though not all, populations, men have a lower average digit ratio than do women. In many studies an inverse relationship has been observed, among both men and women, between 2D:4D ratio and measures of athletic ability. It has been further suggested that, in hunter-gatherer populations, 2D:4D ratio might also be negatively correlated with hunting ability, itself assumed to be contingent on athleticism. (...)
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  • Changes in Juvenile Foraging Behavior among the Hadza of Tanzania during Early Transition to a Mixed-Subsistence Economy.Trevor R. Pollom, Kristen N. Herlosky, Ibrahim A. Mabulla & Alyssa N. Crittenden - 2020 - Human Nature 31 (2):123-140.
    The Hadza foragers of Tanzania are currently experiencing a nutritional shift that includes the intensification of domesticated cultigens in the diet. Despite these changes, no study, to date, has examined the possible effects of this transition on the food collection behavior of young foragers. Here we present a cross-sectional study on foraging behavior taken from two time points, 2005 and 2017. We compare the number of days foraged and the type and amount of food collected for young foragers, aged 5–14 (...)
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  • Let’s Play at Digging.Ana Mateos, Guillermo Zorrilla-Revilla & Jesús Rodríguez - 2022 - Human Nature 33 (2):172-195.
    Extractive foraging tasks, such as digging, are broadly practiced among hunter-gatherer populations in different ecological conditions. Despite tuber-gathering tasks being widely practiced by children and adolescents, little research has focused on the physical traits associated with digging ability. Here, we assess how age and energetic expenditure affect the performance of this extractive task. Using an experimental approach, the energetic cost of digging to extract simulated tubers is evaluated in a sample of 40 urban children and adolescents of both sexes to (...)
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  • Cross-cultural Comparison of Learning in Human Hunting.Katharine MacDonald - 2007 - Human Nature 18 (4):386-402.
    This paper is a cross-cultural examination of the development of hunting skills and the implications for the debate on the role of learning in the evolution of human life history patterns. While life history theory has proven to be a powerful tool for understanding the evolution of the human life course, other schools, such as cultural transmission and social learning theory, also provide theoretical insights. These disparate theories are reviewed, and alternative and exclusive predictions are identified. This study of cross-cultural (...)
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  • Paying attention: the neurocognition of archery, Middle Stone Age bow hunting, and the shaping of the sapient mind.Marlize Lombard - forthcoming - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.
    With this contribution I explore the relationship between attention development in modern archers and attention as a cognitive requirement for ancient bow hunting – a techno-behaviour that may have originated sometime between 80 and 60 thousand years ago in sub-Saharan Africa. Material Engagement Theory serves as a framework for the inextricable interrelatedness between brain, body and mind, and how practicing to use bimanual technologies shapes aspects of our cognition, including our ability to pay attention. In a cross-disciplinary approach, I use (...)
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  • How Do Hunter-Gatherer Children Learn Subsistence Skills?Sheina Lew-Levy, Rachel Reckin, Noa Lavi, Jurgi Cristóbal-Azkarate & Kate Ellis-Davies - 2017 - Human Nature 28 (4):367-394.
    Hunting and gathering is, evolutionarily, the defining subsistence strategy of our species. Studying how children learn foraging skills can, therefore, provide us with key data to test theories about the evolution of human life history, cognition, and social behavior. Modern foragers, with their vast cultural and environmental diversity, have mostly been studied individually. However, cross-cultural studies allow us to extrapolate forager-wide trends in how, when, and from whom hunter-gatherer children learn their subsistence skills. We perform a meta-ethnography, which allows us (...)
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  • Evidence for the Adaptive Learning Function of Work and Work-Themed Play among Aka Forager and Ngandu Farmer Children from the Congo Basin.Sheina Lew-Levy & Adam H. Boyette - 2018 - Human Nature 29 (2):157-185.
    Work-themed play may allow children to learn complex skills, and ethno-typical and gender-typical behaviors. Thus, play may have made important contributions to the evolution of childhood through the development of embodied capital. Using data from Aka foragers and Ngandu farmer children from the Central African Republic, we ask whether children perform ethno- and gender-typical play and work activities, and whether play prepares children for complex work. Focal follows of 50 Aka and 48 Ngandu children were conducted with the aim of (...)
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  • The Foundation of Kinship.Donna L. Leonetti & Benjamin Chabot-Hanowell - 2011 - Human Nature 22 (1-2):16-40.
    Men’s hunting has dominated the discourse on energy capture and flow in the past decade or so. We turn to women’s roles as critical to household formation, pair-bonding, and intergenerational bonds. Their pivotal contributions in food processing and distribution likely promoted kinship, both genetic and affinal, and appear to be the foundation from which households evolved. With conscious recognition of household social units, variable cultural constructions of human kinship systems that were sensitive to environmental and technological conditions could emerge. Kinship (...)
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  • Variation in juvenile dependence.Karen L. Kramer - 2002 - Human Nature 13 (2):299-325.
    Notable in cross-cultural comparisons is the variable span of time between when children become economically self-sufficient and when they initiate their own reproductive careers. That variation is of interest because it shapes the age range of children reliant on others for support and the age range of children available to help out, which in turn affects the competing demands on parents to support multiple dependents of different ages. The age at positive net production is used as a proxy to estimate (...)
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  • Juvenile Subsistence Effort, Activity Levels, and Growth Patterns.Karen L. Kramer & Russell D. Greaves - 2011 - Human Nature 22 (3):303-326.
    Attention has been given to cross-cultural differences in adolescent growth, but far less is known about developmental variability during juvenility (ages 3–10). Previous research among the Pumé, a group of South American foragers, found that girls achieve a greater proportion of their adult stature during juvenility compared with normative growth expectations. To explain rapid juvenile growth, in this paper we consider girls’ activity levels and energy expended in subsistence effort. Results show that Pumé girls spend far less time in subsistence (...)
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  • Childhood Teaching and Learning among Savanna Pumé Hunter-Gatherers.Karen L. Kramer - 2021 - Human Nature 32 (1):87-114.
    Research in nonindustrial small-scale societies challenges the common perception that human childhood is universally characterized by a long period of intensive adult investment and dedicated instruction. Using return rate and time allocation data for the Savanna Pumé, a group of South American hunter-gatherers, age patterns in how children learn to become productive foragers and from whom they learn are observed across the transition from childhood to adolescence. Results show that Savanna Pumé children care for their siblings, are important economic contributors, (...)
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  • Variation in juvenile dependence.Karen L. Kramer - 2002 - Human Nature 13 (2):299-325.
    Notable in cross-cultural comparisons is the variable span of time between when children become economically self-sufficient and when they initiate their own reproductive careers. That variation is of interest because it shapes the age range of children reliant on others for support and the age range of children available to help out, which in turn affects the competing demands on parents to support multiple dependents of different ages. The age at positive net production is used as a proxy to estimate (...)
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  • Trade-offs in skillacquisition and time allocation among juvenile chacma baboons.Sara E. Johnson & John Bock - 2004 - Human Nature 15 (1):45-62.
    We hypothesize that juvenile baboons are less efficient foragers than adult baboons owing to their small size, lower level of knowledge and skill, and/or lesser ability to maintain access to resources. We predict that as resources are more difficult to extract, juvenile baboons will demonstrate lower efficiency than adults will because of their lower levels of experience. In addition, we hypothesize that juvenile baboons will be more likely to allocate foraging time to easier-to-extract resources owing to their greater efficiency in (...)
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  • Determinants of time allocation across the lifespan.Michael Gurven & Hillard Kaplan - 2006 - Human Nature 17 (1):1-49.
    This paper lays the groundwork for a theory of time allocation across the life course, based on the idea that strength and skill vary as a function of age, and that return rates for different activities vary as a function of the combination of strength and skills involved in performing those tasks. We apply the model to traditional human subsistence patterns. The model predicts that young children engage most heavily in low-strength/low-skill activities, middle-aged adults in high-strength/high-skill activities, and older adults (...)
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  • No Association between 2D:4D Ratio and Hunting Success among Hadza Hunters.Duncan N. E. Stibbard-Hawkes - 2020 - Human Nature 31 (1):22-42.
    The ratio of index- and ring-finger lengths is thought to be related to prenatal androgen exposure, and in many, though not all, populations, men have a lower average digit ratio than do women. In many studies an inverse relationship has been observed, among both men and women, between 2D:4D ratio and measures of athletic ability. It has been further suggested that, in hunter-gatherer populations, 2D:4D ratio might also be negatively correlated with hunting ability, itself assumed to be contingent on athleticism. (...)
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  • Grandmothers, hunters and human life history.Catherine Driscoll - 2009 - Biology and Philosophy 24 (5):665-686.
    This paper critiques the competing “Grandmother Hypothesis” and “Embodied Capital Theory” as evolutionary explanations of the peculiarities of human life history traits. Instead, I argue that the correct explanation for human life history probably involves elements of both hypotheses: long male developmental periods and lives probably evolved due to group selection for male hunting via increased female fertility, and female long lives due to the differential contribution women’s complex foraging skills made to their children and grandchildren’s nutritional status within groups (...)
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  • Introduction: New evolutionary perspectives on play. [REVIEW]John Bock - 2004 - Human Nature 15 (1):1-3.
    Children’s play is widely believed by educators and social scientists to have a training function that contributes to psychosocial development as well as the acquisition of skills related to adult competency in task performance. In this paper we examine these assumptions from the perspective of life-history theory using behavioral observation and household economic data collected among children in a community in the Okavango Delta of Botswana where people engage in mixed subsistence regimes of dry farming, foraging, and herding. We hypothesize (...)
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  • Constraints of knowing or constraints of growing?Rebecca Bliege Bird & Douglas W. Bird - 2002 - Human Nature 13 (2):239-267.
    Recent theoretical models suggest that the difference between human and nonhuman primate life-history patterns may be due to a reliance on complex foraging strategies requiring extensive learning. These models predict that children should reach adult levels of efficiency faster when foraging is cognitively simple. We test this prediction with data on Meriam fishing, spearfishing, and shellfishing efficiency. For fishing and spearfishing, which are cognitively difficult, we can find no significant amount of variability in return rates because of experiential factors correlated (...)
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  • Children on the reef.Douglas W. Bird & Rebecca Bliege Bird - 2002 - Human Nature 13 (2):269-297.
    Meriam children are active reef-flat collectors. We demonstrate that while foraging on the reef, children are significantly less selective than adults. This difference and the precise nature of children’s selectivity while reef-flat collecting are consistent with a hypothesis that both children and adults attempt to maximize their rate of return while foraging, but in so doing they face different constraints relative to differences in walking speeds while searching. Implications of these results for general arguments about factors that shape differences between (...)
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