Assignment of relationship terms in Binumarien

Journal ArticleKinship systems have a perennial fascination. From Morgan's day to the present, a long succession of authors have produced their diagrams and algebraic explanations . . . Kinship terminology and its diagramatic arrangements provide, ready made, a delightful series of mathematical abstractions and it is all too easy to develop their analysis into a 'system' having little relation to sociological facts. This paper considers four propositions about the meaning of kinship terms in relation to a pertinent set of sociological facts about the actual assignment of relationship terms in a community. Its purpose is to shed quantitative empirical light on what has been largely a theoretical debate

Hunting and the evolution of egalitarian societies: lessons from the Hadza

Journal ArticlePolitical hierarchies are common in human societies but absent among many mobile hunter-gatherers. So egalitarian social organizations have been attributed to limits that foraging imposes on wealth accumulation. But male-dominance hierarchies characterize all the great apes, our nearest relatives. The absence of wealth is not enough to explain the absence of hierarchy

Grandmothers and their consequences

pre-printBoth what we share and don't share with our primate cousins make us human. Easy enough to start a list. At least since Darwin, most would rate moral sentiments as distinctively human. But our modern selves didn't emerge from ancestral apes in one step. When did populations along the way become human? Before our big modern brains, before language, and before pair bonds, our longer lives, later maturity, and earlier weaning could have evolved in an already smart and gregarious ancestor due to rearing help from grandmothers. Although cooperative hunting and lethal between-group aggression are often nominated as evolutionary foundations for human prosociality, neither distinguishes us from chimpanzees. Grandmothering does. Our grandmothering life history intensified selection on infant appetites and capacities for social engagement, the foundation of our moral faculties

Why hunter-gatherers work: An ancient version of the problem of public goods

Journal ArticleFrom the abstract: People who hunt and gather for a living share some resources more widely than others. A favored hypothesis to explain the differential sharing is that giving up portions of large, unpredictable resources obligates others to return shares of them later, reducing everyone's variance in consumption. I show that this insurance argument is not empirically supported for !Kung, Ache, and Hadza foragers. An alternative hypothesis is that the cost of _not_ sharing these resources is too high to pay

Life history theory and human evolution : a chronicle of ideas and findings

pre-printFertility ends at similar ages in women and female chimpanzees, but humans usually live longer and mature later. We also differ from our closest living relatives in weaning infants before they can feed themselves. The comparisons pose questions about when and why the distinctively human life history traits evolved in our lineage. Here I outline the basic framework of the field of life history evolution and, against that background, chronicle past inquiries into each of these distinctively human traits. The chronicle covers discovery and description, guided sometimes by hypotheses about underlying developmental mechanisms and sometimes by hypotheses about adaptive effects. Following the review, I discuss the continuing importance of distinguishing between questions about mechanisms and adaptive effects in light of accumulating fossil evidence and progress in genomics. I conclude with a brief reference to the most influential adaptive hypothesis to date, the Hunting hypothesis, and some of the accumulating empirical challenges to it, setting the stage for current debates addressed in subsequent chapters

Food sharing among Ache hunter-gatherers of Eastern Paraguay

Journal ArticleEmpirical research on food sharing among hunter-gatherers should provide critical data for evaluating both the possible role of food sharing in hominid evolution and the question of how such behavior could be selected

Binumarien color categories

Journal ArticleThis paper has two aims. The first is to describe an ethnographically new system of color classification, Binumarien, a non-Austronesian or Papuan language of the Eastern Central Highlands of New Guinea2. In this connection we are particularly interested in relating our data to the Berlin and Kay (1969) theory of the universality of basic color terms. If one takes seriously the criticisms of possible English bilingual interference in the experimental studies, and questionable rules of inference in the interpretation of the nonexperimental studies (Hickerson 1971), then the theory is clearly in need of more and better data

On Human fertility: Individual or group benefit?

pre-printCaldwell et al. (CA 28:25-43) have pointed to the pervasive influence of Carr-Saunders's (1922) concept of population regulation throughout two-thirds of a century of anthropology and demography

Human life histories: primate trade-offs, grandmothering socioecology, and the fossil record

Journal ArticleHuman life histories differ from those of other animals in several striking ways. Recently Smith and Tompkins (1995, p. 258) highlighted the combination of "slow" and "fast" features of human lives. Our period of juvenile dependency is unusually long, our age at first reproduction is late, and we have the maximum life span of the terrestrial animals. Yet we wean babies relatively early, and we space births closely. We also have (midlife) menopause. Smith and Tompkins predicted that the evolution of our life cycles would be explained by a combination of developments in life history theory with increasingly sophisticated techniques for extracting information from the fossil record. Their prudent guess was that "no new sunburst theory-in which all human characteristics are drawn from one adaptive shift is - likely" to emerge (1995, p. 274)

Some current ideas about the evolution of the human life history

Journal ArticleHuman life history is characterised by a long juvenile period (weaning to reproductive maturity), and a long post-reproductive lifespan in females. How do we explain the differences between our nearest relatives, the great apes, and ourselves? This chapter summarises some recent attempts to use life history models on data from contemporary hunter-gatherers, and other noncontracepting populations with little access to modern medicine