More Lessons from the Hadza about Men’s Work Hawkes, Kristen; O’Connell, James F.; Blurton Jones, Nicholas G.
Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.),
12/2014, Letnik:
25, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Unlike other primate males, men invest substantial effort in producing food that is consumed by others. The Hunting Hypothesis proposes this pattern evolved in early
Homo
when ancestral mothers began ...relying on their mates’ hunting to provision dependent offspring. Evidence for this idea comes from hunter-gatherer ethnography, but data we collected in the 1980s among East African Hadza do not support it. There, men targeted big game to the near exclusion of other prey even though they were rarely successful and most of the meat went to others, at significant opportunity cost to their own families. Based on Hadza data collected more recently, Wood and Marlowe contest our position, affirming the standard view of men’s foraging as family provisioning. Here we compare the two studies, identify similarities, and show that emphasis on big game results in collective benefits that would not be supplied if men foraged mainly to provision their own households. Male status competition remains a likely explanation for Hadza focus on big game, with implications for hypotheses about the deeper past.
Archaeological evidence of shellfish exploitation along the coast of Sahul (Pleistocene Australia-New Guinea) points to an apparent paradox. While the continental record as a whole suggests that ...human populations were very low from initial colonization through early Holocene, coastal and peri-coastal sites dating to that time are dominated by small, low-ranked, littoral taxa to the near-complete exclusion of large, higher ranked, sub-littoral species, precisely the opposite of theory-based expectations, if human populations and predation rates were indeed as low as other data suggest. We present a model of shellfish exploitation combining information on species utility, transport considerations, and prey life-history that might account for this apparent mismatch, and then assess it with ethnographic and archaeological data. Findings suggest either that high-ranked taxa were uncommon along the Pleistocene coastlines of Sahul, or that abundant and commonly taken high-ranked prey are under-represented in middens relative to their role in human diets largely as a function of human processing and transport practices. If the latter reading is correct, archaeological evidence of early shellfishing may be mainly the product of subsistence activities by children and their mothers.
To promote a dialogue between competing but potentially compatible approaches in American archaeology, Schiffer (1996) examined the relationships between two distinct research programs: "behavioral" ...archaeology and evolutionary archaeology. An approach grounded in evolutionary ecology was not included in that analysis. In this paper, we reply to Schiffer's call for dialogue by outlining the relationships, as we see them, between evolutionary ecology, selectionist archaeology, and behavioral archaeology. We conclude that evolutionary ecology holds the greatest promise as a scientific approach for the investigation of important problems in human behavioral evolution.
This is a report on the demography of the Hadza, a population of East African hunter-gatherers. In it, we describe the results of a census, and our estimation of age structure, survivorship, mean age ...of women at childbearing, number of live children, total population size and density, and rate of change since 1967. We show that relevant measures fit closely the stable population model North 6 chosen by Dyson to represent Hadza demography in the 1960s. We compare aspects of Hadza demography with surrounding non-Hadza and with the !Kung. Among other things, we find that the Hadza have a higher population density, higher fertility, and a faster population growth rate than do the !Kung. These demographic differences are consistent with our expectations, which were based on differences in the costs and benefits of foraging in the two regions. We also show that Hadza demographic parameters display remarkable consistency over the past 20 years. Since neighboring populations have been encroaching on the area used by the Hadza, and Hadza foragers have been subject to interludes of externally imposed settlement, this consistency is surprising. We discuss some of the implications.
Christopher Raven 1943–1994 O Connell, James F
American antiquity,
01/1996, Letnik:
61, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Christopher Raven, an important contributor to western North American archaeology for nearly 30 years, died Mar 12, 1994 at the age of 50. Raven is profiled, and his career is discussed.
The determinants of food choices made by hunter-gatherers have long been a topic of speculation and controversy. In this paper, we analyze the foraging behavior of the Aché of eastern Paraguay and ...conclude that it is consistent with predictions derived from optimal foraging models. We infer that these very general models will continue to prove useful in explaining variation in hunter-gatherer subsistence patterns throughout time and space. Aché, hunter-gatherers, optimal foraging theory, South America, tropical forest
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