Hunter-gatherers and human evolution

2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 54-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank W. Marlowe
Keyword(s):  
Human Evolution ◽  
Hunter Gatherers

The evolved developmental niche and children’s developing morality

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela M. Kurth ◽  
Darcia Narvaez
Keyword(s):  
Young Child ◽  
Human Evolution ◽  
Self Regulation ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Human History ◽  
Hunter Gatherers ◽  
Supportive Environment ◽  
Developmental Niche ◽  
Small Band ◽  
Prosocial Behaviours

Like every animal, human offspring evolved to fit into their communities, but social fittedness for mammals requires a supportive early nest that fosters socio-emotional intelligence, self-regulation, and sympathy. Within a supportive environment, children naturally develop orientations that facilitate prosocial behaviours within the community. We use the evolved developmental niche (EDN), apparent in 95% of human history as small-band hunter-gatherers, for a baseline representative of human evolution. In these societies, children grow into cooperative, agile moral actors. We compare the EDN with five modern approaches to young child group care and make suggestions to early caregivers on how to provide, in the modern world, what children evolved to need.

The Original Partnership Societies

2019 ◽  
pp. 154-180
Author(s):  
Riane Eisler
Keyword(s):  
Human Evolution ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
The Other ◽  
Careful Study ◽  
Hunter Gatherers ◽  
Agricultural Revolution ◽  
Cooperative Behaviors ◽  
The Many ◽  
Ancient States

Mobile foragers—also called nomadic hunter-gatherers—constitute the oldest form of human social organization, predating by far the agricultural revolution of about 10,000 years ago as well as the rise of pastoralists, tribal horticulturalists, chiefdoms, kingdoms, and ancient states. In the debates about the nature of human nature—whether we are more inclined toward war or peace, selfishness or altruism—nomadic forager societies are regularly evoked to draw inferences about human existence “in a state of nature” before the development of civilization. Studies of nomadic forager band societies suggest that humanity’s ancient orientation actually was toward partnership and peace rather than domination and war over the many millennia of human evolution. The main take-home lesson from a careful study of nomadic forager partnership societies—re-enforced by archeological studies, the recent Nordic experience, and other evidence—is that humans are capable of living in egalitarian social systems where neither sex dominates the other, where violence is minimized, and where prosocial cooperation and caring typify social life. This image is not a utopian fantasy but rather a set of potentials, if not inclinations, stemming from our evolutionary heritage. Since partnership behaviors have been essential to survival for the millions of years that humans and their ancestors foraged for a living, the study of archaeology and nomadic forager societies raises an intriguing possibility. Given the long-standing evolutionary legacy of partnership, human minds and dispositions may be especially inclined toward the empathic, caring, egalitarian, prosocial, cooperative behaviors.

scholarly journals Bonobos voluntarily hand food to others but not toys or tools

2018 ◽  
Vol 285 (1886) ◽  
pp. 20181536 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Krupenye ◽  
Jingzhi Tan ◽  
Brian Hare
Keyword(s):  
Human Evolution ◽  
Brain Size ◽  
Active Form ◽  
Great Apes ◽  
The Other ◽  
Controlled Experiments ◽  
Hunter Gatherers ◽  
Food Transfer ◽  
Common Descent ◽  
Food Items

A key feature of human prosociality is direct transfers , the most active form of sharing in which donors voluntarily hand over resources in their possession . Direct transfers buffer hunter-gatherers against foraging shortfalls. The emergence and elaboration of this behaviour thus likely played a key role in human evolution by promoting cooperative interdependence and ensuring that humans' growing energetic needs (e.g. for increasing brain size) were more reliably met. According to the strong prosociality hypothesis , among great apes only humans exhibit sufficiently strong prosocial motivations to directly transfer food. The versatile prosociality hypothesis suggests instead that while other apes may make transfers in constrained settings, only humans share flexibly across food and non-food contexts. In controlled experiments, chimpanzees typically transfer objects but not food, supporting both hypotheses. In this paper, we show in two experiments that bonobos directly transfer food but not non-food items. These findings show that, in some contexts, bonobos exhibit a human-like motivation for direct food transfer. However, humans share across a far wider range of contexts, lending support to the versatile prosociality hypothesis. Our species' unusual prosocial flexibility is likely built on a prosocial foundation we share through common descent with the other apes.

scholarly journals Violence in the prehistoric period of Japan: the spatio-temporal pattern of skeletal evidence for violence in the Jomon period

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 20160028 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hisashi Nakao ◽  
Kohei Tamura ◽  
Yui Arimatsu ◽  
Tomomi Nakagawa ◽  
Naoko Matsumoto ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Evolution ◽  
Temporal Pattern ◽  
Selective Pressure ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
Hunter Gatherers ◽  
Lethal Violence ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
Spatio Temporal

Whether man is predisposed to lethal violence, ranging from homicide to warfare, and how that may have impacted human evolution, are among the most controversial topics of debate on human evolution. Although recent studies on the evolution of warfare have been based on various archaeological and ethnographic data, they have reported mixed results: it is unclear whether or not warfare among prehistoric hunter–gatherers was common enough to be a component of human nature and a selective pressure for the evolution of human behaviour. This paper reports the mortality attributable to violence, and the spatio-temporal pattern of violence thus shown among ancient hunter–gatherers using skeletal evidence in prehistoric Japan (the Jomon period: 13 000 cal BC–800 cal BC). Our results suggest that the mortality due to violence was low and spatio-temporally highly restricted in the Jomon period, which implies that violence including warfare in prehistoric Japan was not common.

scholarly journals The empirical case against the ‘demographic turn’ in Palaeolithic archaeology

2016 ◽  
Vol 371 (1698) ◽  
pp. 20150242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Collard ◽  
Krist Vaesen ◽  
Richard Cosgrove ◽  
Wil Roebroeks
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Factors ◽  
Population Size ◽  
Human Evolution ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Cultural Complexity ◽  
Hunter Gatherers ◽  
Major Transitions ◽  
Archaeological Data ◽  
Competing Hypotheses ◽  
Palaeolithic Archaeology

Recently, it has become commonplace to interpret major transitions and other patterns in the Palaeolithic archaeological record in terms of population size. Increases in cultural complexity are claimed to result from increases in population size; decreases in cultural complexity are suggested to be due to decreases in population size; and periods of no change are attributed to low numbers or frequent extirpation. In this paper, we argue that this approach is not defensible. We show that the available empirical evidence does not support the idea that cultural complexity in hunter–gatherers is governed by population size. Instead, ethnographic and archaeological data suggest that hunter–gatherer cultural complexity is most strongly influenced by environmental factors. Because all hominins were hunter–gatherers until the Holocene, this means using population size to interpret patterns in the Palaeolithic archaeological record is problematic. In future, the population size hypothesis should be viewed as one of several competing hypotheses and its predictions formally tested alongside those of its competitors. This article is part of the themed issue ‘Major transitions in human evolution’.

Waist-to-hip ratios of Jomon figurines

Antiquity ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 81 (314) ◽  
pp. 961-971 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark J. Hudson ◽  
Mami Aoyama
Keyword(s):  
Human Evolution ◽  
Hunter Gatherers

The authors show that the Jomon clay figurines made by hunter-gatherers use imagery that emphasises a narrow waist and full hips, showing that a female construct was part of the symbolism of these possibly shamanistic objects. In creating these figurines, prehistoric people were no doubt turning a recognition of health and fertility into more cultural icons. Admirers of the female form will be interested to learn that preference for the fuller, curvaceous ‘hourglass’ shape ‘has probably been the norm over much of human evolution’.

scholarly journals The Centrality of Ancestral Grandmothering in Human Evolution

2020 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 765-781 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristen Hawkes
Keyword(s):  
Human Evolution ◽  
Life History Theory ◽  
Large Fraction ◽  
Great Apes ◽  
Cultural Learning ◽  
Hunter Gatherers ◽  
Shared Intentionality ◽  
Grandmother Hypothesis ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Human Brains

Abstract When Fisher, Williams, and Hamilton laid the foundations of evolutionary life history theory, they recognized elements of what became a grandmother hypothesis to explain the evolution of human postmenopausal longevity. Subsequent study of modern hunter-gatherers, great apes, and the wider mammalian radiation has revealed strong regularities in development and behavior that show additional unexpected consequences that ancestral grandmothering likely had on human evolution, challenging the hypothesis that ancestral males propelled the evolution of our radiation by hunting to provision mates and offspring. Ancestral grandmothering has become a serious contender to explain not only the large fraction of post-fertile years women live and children’s prolonged maturation yet early weaning; it also promises to help account for the pair bonding that distinguishes humans from our closest living evolutionary cousins, the great apes (and most other mammals), the evolution of our big human brains, and our distinctive preoccupation with reputations, shared intentionality and persistent cultural learning that begins in infancy.

scholarly journals Polygyny without wealth: popularity in gift games predicts polygyny in BaYaka Pygmies

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (5) ◽  
pp. 150054 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikhil Chaudhary ◽  
Gul Deniz Salali ◽  
James Thompson ◽  
Mark Dyble ◽  
Abigail Page ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
Human Evolution ◽  
Resource Availability ◽  
Evolutionary History ◽  
Wealth Accumulation ◽  
Hunter Gatherers ◽  
Marriage Patterns ◽  
Phenotypic Quality ◽  
Wealth Inequalities ◽  
Polygynous Marriage

The occurrence of polygynous marriage in hunter–gatherer societies, which do not accumulate wealth, remains largely unexplored since resource availability is dependent on male hunting capacity and limited by the lack of storage. Hunter–gatherer societies offer the greatest insight in to human evolution since they represent the majority of our species' evolutionary history. In order to elucidate the evolution of hunter–gatherer polygyny, we study marriage patterns of BaYaka Pygmies. We investigate (i) rates of polygyny among BaYaka hunter–gatherers; (ii) whether polygyny confers a fitness benefit to BaYaka men; (iii) in the absence of wealth inequalities, what are the alternative explanations for polygyny among the BaYaka. To understand the latter, we explore differences in phenotypic quality (height and strength), and social capital (popularity in gift games). We find polygynous men have increased reproductive fitness; and that social capital and popularity but not phenotypic quality might have been important mechanisms by which some male hunter–gatherers sustained polygynous marriages before the onset of agriculture and wealth accumulation.

Hunter-Gatherers and Human Evolution: New Light on Old Debates

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 513-531 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard B. Lee
Keyword(s):  
Human Evolution ◽  
Land Tenure ◽  
Cooperative Breeding ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Relative Weight ◽  
Child Rearing ◽  
Archaeological Research ◽  
Hunter Gatherers ◽  
Convincing Case ◽  
Hunting And Gathering

One of the most persistent debates in anthropology and related disciplines has been over the relative weight of aggression and competition versus nonaggression and cooperation as drivers of human behavioral evolution. The literature on hunting and gathering societies—past and present—has played a prominent role in these debates. This review compares recent literature from both sides of the argument and evaluates how accurately various authors use or misuse the ethnographic and archaeological research on hunters and gatherers. Whereas some theories provide a very poor fit with the hunter-gatherer evidence, others build their arguments around a much fuller range of the available data. The latter make a convincing case for models of human evolution that place at their center cooperative breeding and child-rearing, as well as management of conflict, flexible land tenure, and balanced gender relations.

The behavioral ecology of modern hunter-gatherers, and human evolution

1997 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristen Hawkes ◽  
James F. O'Connell ◽  
Lisa Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Human Evolution ◽  
Behavioral Ecology ◽  
Hunter Gatherers
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