Food Sharing Among Ache Foragers: Tests of Explanatory Hypotheses [and Comments and Reply]

Kaplan, Hillard; Hill, Kim; Cadeliña, Rowe V.; Hayden, Brian; Hyndman, David; Preston, Richard J.; Smith, Eric Alden; Stuart, David E.; Yesner, David R.

doi:10.1086/203251

Cited by 536 publications

(361 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…47 This would mean that the meat is not like a public good after all, but instead that consumers are, in some undetermined way, paying every hunter for each share. While this would not conform to the nutritional variability reduction models of sharing, 27,95,96 it would conform to Trivers' 86 model. Although the search for the currency in which to find repayments continues, both theoretical and empirical work has increasingly stimulated researchers from many fields to consider other explanatory pathways to the evolution of cooperation, sharing, and the provisioning of public goods.…”

Section: Box 1 Reciprocity In the Sharing Of Display Gamementioning

confidence: 93%

“…50 The families of better hunters end up with no more meat than other families. 27 Hill and Hurtado's 43 demographic data show little difference in survival risk for the children of better hunters. But men rated as better hunters had much higher fertility.…”

Section: The Hunter's Incentivesmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Ethnographers have long noted that people in small face-to-face communities share food readily. 26,27 Anthropologists from diverse theoretical traditions have favored explanations for this sharing that focus on reducing the nutritional income variability of unpredictable resources (see Box 1). This explanation has been especially favored for meat sharing.…”

Section: Hunting As Displaymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Wide sharing is especially well documented in this case. 49,27 While the Ache are on forest treks, any hunter's prey is distributed to all. The hunter himself has no hand in this distribution, and so does not direct shares preferentially to particular recipients.…”

Section: The Hunter's Incentivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Showing off, handicap signaling, and the evolution of men's work

Hawkes

Bird

2002

Evolutionary Anthropology

428

277

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Zahavi's1,2 handicap principle makes “waste” a common outcome of signal selection because the cost of a signal guarantees its honesty. The capacity to bear the cost reveals the show‐off's hidden qualities. While displays take many forms, some also provide fitness‐related benefits to the audience in addition to information about the show‐off. Zahavi3 has used the handicap principle to explain both merely wasteful displays and altruistic behavior. Here we focus on the distinction between these two kinds of display and the importance of benefits other than information in show‐off explanations of a particular puzzle in human evolution: men's work. Males of other primate species do not contribute any significant fraction of the food consumed by females and juveniles. Our own species is different. When people live on wild foods, hunting is usually a specialty of men, and meat is commonly a substantial component of everyone's diet. Here we explore the hypothesis that this unique male subsistence contribution may have evolved as hunting large animals became a focus of competitive display.

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Section: Box 1 Reciprocity In the Sharing Of Display Gamementioning

confidence: 93%

Section: The Hunter's Incentivesmentioning

confidence: 97%

Section: Hunting As Displaymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Hunter's Incentivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Showing off, handicap signaling, and the evolution of men's work

Hawkes

Bird

2002

Evolutionary Anthropology

428

277

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…The strategies that an individual may adopt reflect patterns of sharing, aggrandizement, and collective discipline found in ethnographic studies of hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists (32)(33)(34)(35)(36). Similar to the dove in the hawk-dove game, the first behavioral type, the sharer, concedes half of the product to the other, or the whole product if the other claims it.…”

Section: Modeling the Coevolution Of Technology And Institutionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Coevolution of farming and private property during the early Holocene

Bowles

Choi

2013

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

171

125

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The advent of farming around 12 millennia ago was a cultural as well as technological revolution, requiring a new system of property rights. Among mobile hunter-gatherers during the late Pleistocene, food was almost certainly widely shared as it was acquired. If a harvested crop or the meat of a domesticated animal were to have been distributed to other group members, a late Pleistocene would-be farmer would have had little incentive to engage in the required investments in clearing, cultivation, animal tending, and storage. However, the new property rights that farming required-secure individual claims to the products of one's labor-were infeasible because most of the mobile and dispersed resources of a forager economy could not cost-effectively be delimited and defended. The resulting chicken-and-egg puzzle might be resolved if farming had been much more productive than foraging, but initially it was not. Our model and simulations explain how, despite being an unlikely event, farming and a new system of farming-friendly property rights nonetheless jointly emerged when they did. This Holocene revolution was not sparked by a superior technology. It occurred because possession of the wealth of farmers-crops, dwellings, and animals-could be unambiguously demarcated and defended. This facilitated the spread of new property rights that were advantageous to the groups adopting them. Our results thus challenge unicausal models of historical dynamics driven by advances in technology, population pressure, or other exogenous changes. Our approach may be applied to other technological and institutional revolutions such as the 18th-and 19th-century industrial revolution and the information revolution today.agent-based simulation | evolutionary game theory | technical change | institutional change | big history A mong the outstanding puzzles in human social dynamics is the simultaneous emergence and diffusion of novel economic institutions and new technologies. An important example is the appearance of private storage (1-4) and other indicators of individual property (5, 6) along with the advent of farming (7,8), one of the greatest technological-institutional revolutions ever experienced by our species.Economists, archaeologists, and historians often consider advances in technology to be an exogenous driver of innovations in property rights, wealth inheritance practices, or other institutions. Well-studied examples include the social and cultural impacts of the introduction of the horse on the US Great Plains in the 17th century or the sweet potato in the New Guinea Highlands a century later (9, 10). However, the technological and institutional innovations of the early Holocene are difficult to reconcile with this view because, as a number of archaeologists have pointed out (11-13), farming was probably not economically advantageous in many places where it was first introduced. Indeed, recent estimates suggest that the productivity of the first farmers (calories per hour of labor including processing and storage) was proba...

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A theory of fertility and parental investment in traditional and modern human societies

Kaplan

1996

Am. J. Phys. Anthropol.

Self Cite

406

375

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This paper has two interrelated goals. The first is to offer a general theory of fertility and parental investment across a broad spectrum of human societies. The second is t o provide a perspective that unifies traditionally separate domains of anthropology. The basic foundation for the analysis is life history theory and evolutionary biological models of optimal fertility regulation. This tradition is combined with human capital theory in economics to produce a more general theory of investments in embodied capital within and between generations. This synthesis results in a series of optimality models to examine the decision processes underlying fertility and parental investment upon which natural selection is expected to act. Those models are then applied to the hunting and gathering lifeway. This analysis focuses both on problems that all hunting and gathering peoples face and on the production of variable responses in relation to variable ecologies. Next, this consideration of optimal parental investment and fertility behavior in hunter-gatherers is united with existing models of the proximate determinants of human fertility. The analysis of proximate mechanisms is based on the idea that natural selection acts on the final phenotypic outcome of a coordinated system of physiological, psychological and cultural processes. The important conditions affecting parental investment and fertility in modern socioeconomic contexts are then discussed. An explanation of modern fertility and parental investment behavior in terms of the interaction of those conditions with the physiological and psychological mechanisms that evolved during our hunting and gathering history is proposed. The proposal is that skills-based competitive labor markets increase the value of parental investment in children and motivate better-educated, higher income parents to invest more per child than their less-educated, lower-earning counterparts. It is also suggested that the deviation from fitness maximization associated with low modern fertility is due to excess expenditures on both parental and offspring consumption, indicating that our evolved psychology is responding to cues in the modern environment that are not directly related to the fitness impacts of consumption. 0 1996 Wiley-Liss, Inc.The principal strength of anthropology is its scope. The field encompasses both the evolution of the hominid line and the variation among and within cultures through time. A principal weakness of the discipline is the lack of an overarching theory that unifies the field. There is one especially critical point of disjunction. It is the relationship between biological processes of evolution and behavior. Instead of treating that relationship as a fundamental theoretical problem to be solved, the field has been content, 0 1996 WILEY-LISS, INC.

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Food Sharing Among Ache Foragers: Tests of Explanatory Hypotheses [and Comments and Reply]

Cited by 536 publications

References 8 publications

Showing off, handicap signaling, and the evolution of men's work

Showing off, handicap signaling, and the evolution of men's work

Coevolution of farming and private property during the early Holocene

A theory of fertility and parental investment in traditional and modern human societies

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