Foraging complexity and the evolution of childhood

Abstract

Our species’ long childhood is hypothesized to have evolved as a period for learning complex foraging skills. Researchers studying the development of foraging proficiency have focused on assessing this hypothesis, yet studies present inconsistent conclusions regarding the connection between foraging skill development and niche complexity. Here, we leverage published records of child and adolescent foragers from 28 societies to (i) quantify how skill-intensive different resources are and (ii) assess whether children’s proficiency increases more slowly for more skill-intensive resources. We find that foraging returns increase slowly for more skill-intensive, difficult-to-extract resources (tubers and game), consistent with peak productivity attained in adulthood. Foraging returns for easier-to-extract resources (fruit and fish/shellfish) increase rapidly during childhood, with adult levels of productivity reached by adolescence. Our findings support the view that long childhoods evolved as an extended period for learning to extract complex resources characteristic of the human foraging niche.

Girls in early childhood increase food returns of nursing women during subsistence activities of the BaYaka in the Republic of Congo

“…It is unlikely, however, that young girls collected food items as efficiently as adult women. We observed that BaYaka children often practiced digging wild yams or cracking nuts, but the amount that they collected would hardly match that of the women enough to offset the foraging cost of nursing women, as gathering requires a high level of skill and strength [ 38 – 40 ]. Instead, girls may reduce the burden of childcare for nursing women by holding, monitoring and playing with nursing children while their mothers work, as they were observed to do in camp ([ 6 , 13 , 21 , 26 , 32 , 33 ]; but see [ 14 ]).…”

Foraging and the importance of knowledge in Pemba, Tanzania: implications for childhood evolution

“…We built on existing literature (e.g. [16,20]) to develop a Compared with previous studies, we improve the statistical methodology by not only including a principled treatment of missing data, but also by analysing children's ecological knowledge using IRT, whereby we can maximize the information yielded from different tasks (questions) across a protocol that is necessarily quite difficult to construct. We also provide a structural equation model approach to estimating impacts on productive activity on both individual-and trip-level traits, which can contribute to better controlled investigations into individual-level effects in the future.…”

“…non-zero returns) and (ii) the amount of returns (e.g. grams or calories collected) for a certain trip [14,16,20,35]. In the case of the present study, however, the two types of foraging are analysed with just one of the two parts of a hurdle model.…”

“…[19]) may be specific to easy tasks. Indeed, Pretelli et al [20] found that, across cultures, more complex resources require more skill and longer acquisition times.…”

School of Rocks: A Transmission Time Investment Model for Pleistocene Lithic Technology

“…Several lines of evidence point to delayed maturation of H. erectus individuals, producing a longer juvenile period that is intermediate between earlier hominins and modern humans(Parker, 2000;Antón and Leigh, 2003;Nowell and White, 2010), although this is actively debated(Dean and Smith, 2009). As studies of hunter-gatherer cultural transmission show, childhood is when most teaching and learning occurs(Gurven et al, 2006;Hewlett, 2016;Boyette and Hewlett, 2017), and that long childhoods allow for the learning of ever-more-complex foraging tasks(Pretelli et al 2022). Children can learn through play and devote time to practice before they are expected to contribute signi cantly to foraging tasks.…”