A necessary unity: The articulation of ecological and social explanations of behaviour

This article is concerned with the way that ecological and social factors interact to influence behaviour, and takes issue with those who ascribe causal priority to one or the other set of factors. Ecological relationships are identified as those that affect the material outcome that can be expected from an action; social relationships are identified as those that affect the use an actor could make of that outcome. This distinction maps onto that between production and consumption, between the simultaneous acquisition and utilization of resources which is entailed in all action. Both classes of relationship constrain the value of an action and thus affect the probability of its reproduction; they should be understood as mutually constitutive systems, articulated through the actor. Explanations which emphasize ecological constraints on behaviour, and explanations which emphasize social constraints, are shown to trace different paths through the same field of relationships between persons and environments

A collection of large core tools from lowland Papua, Western Province, Papua New Guinea

Ten large tools found at or near Gwaimasi village are described. The four waisted blades in the collection were generally somewhat shorter than the unwaisted tools, but no other attributes consistently distinguished these categories. Local people identified all these tools, irrespective of shape, as nut-opening hammers but this interpretation is doubtful. -Autho

Ecology and community dynamics of Kubo people in the tropical lowlands of Papua New Guinea

Kubo producer-units (families and independent bachelors) could have been self-sufficient in the production of bananas but chose not to be. Nor did they seek self-sufficiency in the production of any combination of staple carbohydrate foods (bananas, tubers, sago flour) or, in the long term, strive for balance in the exchange of food with other producer-units. Despite the fact that bananas, which provided 50% of people's energy needs, were a delayed-return crop Kubo communities were very unstable. This instability and the failure to choose the option of self-sufficiency were connected and were mediated through intense intracommunity sharing that, ultimately, served to negotiate a concern with sorcery. The people grew bananas in the way they did, not out of environmental necessity, but to accommodate the crop to the needs of sharing and, thereby, facilitate community living

Fire, flood, fish and the uncertainty paradox

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Wild dogs and village dogs in New Guinea: were they different?

Recent accounts of wild-living dogs in New Guinea argue that these animals qualify as an ‘evolutionarily significant unit’ that is distinct from village dogs, have been and remain genetically isolated from village dogs and merit taxonomic recognition at, at least, subspecific level. These accounts have paid little attention to reports concerning village dogs. This paper reviews some of those reports, summarises observations from the interior lowlands of Western Province and concludes that: (1) at the time of European colonisation, wild-living dogs and most, if not all, village dogs of New Guinea comprised a single though heterogeneous gene pool; (2) eventual resolution of the phylogenetic relationships of New Guinean wild-living dogs will apply equally to all or most of the earliest New Guinean village-based dogs; and (3) there remain places where the local village-based population of domestic dogs continues to be dominated by individuals whose genetic inheritance can be traced to precolonisation canid forebears. At this time, there is no firm basis from which to assign a unique Linnaean name to dogs that live as wild animals at high altitudes of New Guinea