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  1. 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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  • Learning, life history, and productivity.John Bock - 2002 - Human Nature 13 (2):161-197.
    This article introduces a new model of the relationship between growth and learning and tests a set of hypotheses related to the development of adult competency using time allocation, anthropometric, and experimental task performance data collected between 1992 and 1997 in a multiethnic community in the Okavango Delta, Botswana. Building on seminal work in life history theory by Hawkes, Blurton Jones and associates, and Kaplan and associates, the punctuated development model presented here incorporates the effects of both growth and learning (...)
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  • Selection for delayed maturity.Nicholas Blurton Jones & Frank W. Marlowe - 2002 - Human Nature 13 (2):199-238.
    Humans have a much longer juvenile period (weaning to first reproduction, 14 or more years) than their closest relatives (chimpanzees, 8 years). Three explanations are prominent in the literature. (a) Humans need the extra time to learn their complex subsistence techniques. (b) Among mammals, since length of the juvenile period bears a constant relationship to adult lifespan, the human juvenile period is just as expected. We therefore only need to explain the elongated adult lifespan, which can be explained by the (...)
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  • Does play matter? Functional and evolutionary aspects of animal and human play.Peter K. Smith - 1982 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 5 (1):139-155.
    In this paper I suggest that play is a distinctive behavioural category whose adaptive significance calls for explanation. Play primarily affords juveniles practice toward the exercise of later skills. Its benefits exceed its costs when sufficient practice would otherwise be unlikely or unsafe, as is particularly true with physical skills and socially competitive ones. Manipulative play with objects is a byproduct of increased intelligence, specifically selected for only in a few advanced primates, notably the chimpanzee.The adaptiveness of play in pongid (...)
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  • The ontogeny and phylogeny of children’s object and fantasy play.A. D. Pellegrini & David F. Bjorklund - 2004 - Human Nature 15 (1):23-43.
    We examine the ontogeny and phylogeny of object and fantasy play from a functional perspective. Each form of play is described from an evolutionary perspective in terms of its place in the total time and energy budgets of human and nonhuman juveniles. As part of discussion of functions of play, we examine sex differences, particularly as they relate to life in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness and economic activities of human and nonhuman primates. Object play may relate to foraging activities. (...)
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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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  • Does observed fertility maximize fitness among New Mexican men?Hillard S. Kaplan, Jane B. Lancaster, Sara E. Johnson & John A. Bock - 1995 - Human Nature 6 (4):325-360.
    Our objective is to test an optimality model of human fertility that specifies the behavioral requirements for fitness maximization in order (a) to determine whether current behavior does maximize fitness and, if not, (b) to use the specific nature of the behavioral deviations from fitness maximization towards the development of models of evolved proximate mechanisms that may have maximized fitness in the past but lead to deviations under present conditions. To test the model we use data from a representative sample (...)
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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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  • Childhood and the evolution of the human life course.John Bock & Daniel W. Sellen - 2002 - Human Nature 13 (2):153-159.
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