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 (...) to systematically extract, summarize, and compare both quantitative and qualitative literature. We found 58 publications focusing on learning subsistence skills. Learning begins early in infancy, when parents take children on foraging expeditions and give them toy versions of tools. In early and middle childhood, children transition into the multi-age playgroup, where they learn skills through play, observation, and participation. By the end of middle childhood, most children are proficient food collectors. However, it is not until adolescence that adults (not necessarily parents) begin directly teaching children complex skills such as hunting and complex tool manufacture. Adolescents seek to learn innovations from adults, but they themselves do not innovate. These findings support predictive models that find social learning should occur before individual learning. Furthermore, these results show that teaching does indeed exist in hunter-gatherer societies. And, finally, though children are competent foragers by late childhood, learning to extract more complex resources, such as hunting large game, takes a lifetime. (shrink)

Many accounts of ethnic phenomena imply that processes such as stereotyping, essentialism, ethnocentrism, and intergroup hostility stem from a unitary adaptation for reasoning about groups. This is partly justified by the phenomena’s co-occurrence in correlational studies. Here we argue that these behaviors are better modeled as functionally independent adaptations that arose in response to different selection pressures throughout human evolution. As such, different mechanisms may be triggered by different group boundaries within a single society. We illustrate this functionalist framework using (...) ethnographic work from the Quechua-Aymara language boundary in the Peruvian Altiplano. We show that different group boundaries motivate different ethnic phenomena. For example, people have strong stereotypes about socioeconomic categories, which are not cooperative units, whereas they hold fewer stereotypes about communities, which are the primary focus of cooperative activity. We also show that, despite the cross-cultural importance of ethnolinguistic boundaries, the Quechua-Aymara linguistic distinction does not strongly motivate any of these intergroup processes. (shrink)